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U. S. President is Trump or Pence-Koch?

Tuesday, July 25th, 2017

We had an interesting breakfast – one of many, but this one stood out given the current political climate so I am sending you this blog with a bit of a summary.  The talk was mostly about untangling the politics currently on view.  Things are never what they seem on the surface so what is percolating in the background!!??

A couple people agreed with Trump about the press.  Not for the same reasons, nor did they call it or even consider the current reporting “Fake News”.  They called it “Fall in Line behind the Leader News.”  Basically, their impression of the press was that many reporters follow the lead of what is currently being reported by a few strong people and to go out on their own, especially if that differs from the current headlines,  is not what many are able to do.

That’s a shame because that kind of independence is what is needed of a journalist and they should be ready to put down their jobs if they can’t report what they find – or if it is because of a lazy mind, they need another profession.  None require the kind of sharpness of mind; independence of spirit; insatiable curiosity; need to find the truth- that is required of the press.  It is a vocation rather than a job. At least those are my thoughts about it.

The rest of the conversation was around the question as to why with all that is coming out about the Trump Administration there is almost no talk about Pence.  He is carefully being guarded in the background so he can come out as new, untainted, etc.?

What one person wanted to know was if the President of the United States – not the one with the title, but the one calling the shots – was actually Trump or Pence?  This group felt it was Pence who was channeling the wishes of the Koch Brothers and Trump, until now was falling into line and following those wishes also.  Although they saw signs of his beginning to wake up to understand the game.  The game that was about Pence for Vice President because he would never be elected president and then for Pence to move into the presidency after Trump was destroyed and pushed out.

I hadn’t heard that before and it was a bit hard to understand, but as the history came out with the claim that Pence actually was the one who brought Trump to the Koch brothers (or maybe it was the Koch brothers who brought Pence to Trump with the promise of money and their backing) things began to make a bit of sense.

What also clicked for me was the discussion about the upheaval in this current administration.  Starting almost from the beginning the question was asked if the Koch brothers and their minions were active in causing all of this current upheaval so their man could get in early and start working for them in earnest?  A wild conspiracy theory, but a theory nevertheless which had some truth sounds in it for me.  And the next questions – did Trump pick up on this early on, saw how he was deceived and how he had been cuckolded and developed enormous anger at having been so deceived?  After all, that kind of thing was usually what Trump did to others, not what others did to Trump.  Nothing of this has even been hinted at by the media I am reading and listening to and maybe they should take a look.

Needless to say, it was lively with lots of laughter and conjectures that were over the top.  Hope we have another group like this for breakfast soon.  It certainly starts the adrenaline rushing around.  I got more done the rest of that day then I’ve gotten done in weeks.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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AMERICA: your ethics are showing

Thursday, June 29th, 2017

From slavery – to Jim Crow – to the immense Black Civil Rights movement – to the painful Feminist movement – to the Peace Movement – to Americans for Respect of the Globe and the Universe – to Donald Trump?

The election and ‘service’ of Donald Trump has exposed the United States’ underbelly the way nothing else has and it is very difficult for all of us to see.  Much better to continue to engage in denials.

Breakfast conversations in a Bettina Home are always inclusive of something about what Trump is doing; what he needs to do; how to stop him; what is Russia’s involvement; how are we going to continue with such a man as president; what happened – did we really elect Trump or did Russia do it.  Are we missing something?

Among the forces in this country which have come together to elect Trump as president we have to include those forces which elected this Congress.  Among those forces we also have to include the years spent before this election of gerrymandering to help make this election possible – all in the name of denying one person one vote, denying one person’s voice replacing it with the manipulators’ need for power.  They also have to include our refusal to become a democracy by doing the work to eliminate the Electoral College.  They also have to include our refusal to get rid of ‘White Privilege’ – the sick need many have to be better than even in a democratic/republic.

We have only ourselves to blame for Trump and we have only ourselves to correct this massive error by correcting the ills in this country which brought this about.

From where we stand and from what we have heard, Trump was elected with a solid base of the organized bigots, the mafia, many of those at the top of our corporate structures coming together in one of those perfect storms.  And, what we need to acknowledge here is that those groups have always worked together  – and – as per usual – we and they blamed the “Middle Class”, the “Working Class” for what others have wrought.

Corporations are very far from being a democracy.  They are also not republics.  They are dictatorships accustomed to doing things their own way, as ordered from the top, and accustomed to brutally moving obstacles out of their paths, greasing everything with lots of money and little bits of power.  The same is true for the other groups whose reason for being is to spread bigotry, hatred, white supremacy.  They are skilled at the lying, cheating, stealing, and all the other sins we can now see them committing as they come out from under their traditional cover.

What is clearer today than it has ever been is the collusion between Corporate America and the mafia.  That is something we don’t like to admit, but Trump has forced the issue and the admission.  For example, there is no way anyone who voted for Trump can today say they did not know of his mafia connections.

Trump’s ties to the mafia go back to at least his high school days when he met and was friends with John Gotti’s son.  The son of the teflon don puts his schoolyard friend in the path to be taught to become the teflon president.

Things became much more intense and involved from that point on.

Enter Roy Cohn – which brings in another group tied into Trump’s base – gay men in the closet who enjoy a camraderie with the corporate, the political, the well-heeled sprinkling gold dust over those mixing and shifting relationships and hiding that collusion from the rest of society (as best they can).

The consensus from many breakfasts is that Trump’s hidden secret, which makes him subject to Russian demands is not about sexual orgies, golden streams, etc.,  it is about having found places in and around Russia to let out that gay side where he thought it wouldn’t reach the light of day.  Many of our breakfast folks thought that such a place would be important to Trump who they saw as not only gay, but homophobic – so coming out of the closet would not be an option.  And, so some breakfast conversations went into comments such as; coming out of the closet would not mean a solid, steady relationship based on love, but it would mean coming out of hidden orgies with whoever/wherever making the sexual needs not necessarily “gay” or same sex, but outrageous, out of control sex, orgy addicted, kinky to an extreme. Coming out of the closet would lessen his power with his close compatriots who helped him get where he is today.  The closest he came to coming out of the closet – so these folks discuss – was accidental and through his relationship with Roy Cohn, which supposedly had a sexual closeness that many picked up on, but few publicized.  That kind of sexual orientation and lifestyle was more prevalent during the days of Trump’s young adulthood, but still exists in small pockets in several places today.

That can lead, when such a person engages in moments of sober reflection, to an extreme insecurity and self-hatred, if one still has any shred of moral values left.  Is that what we are seeing in Trump’s projection of all of his insecurities onto minorities of every color, class, sex, sexual orientation, etc?  His projections have certainly been vicious enough to tear this country apart and begin the process of putting it back together in his own image.

Trump has also given us a clear and unusually open look at mafia culture through his lifestyle, mannerisms, speech, dress and expectations of obeisance from others to him and from him to (only a very small number) of others.

We are living in an America that will never be the same again.  All of the gains we have made – moving away from and rejecting slavery; watching the gains of the Black Civil Rights Movement being stripped away daily with one or two Blacks being held up by Trump as the objects to disprove the rule of extreme racism in his administration as the new normal; from organizations becoming respected and respectable who had been fought and relegated to the back rooms of illegality; from the gains of the Feminist Movement also being stripped away as women are once again being portrayed as objects whose ‘pussy’ can be grabbed by anyone; with sexual abusers at top corporate levels being front and center and their corporations held in high esteem with the individuals so caught in such illegal activities given comfort and succor by the President of the United States?

How low are we going to sink, America?  How many sins are we going to commit before this all comes to an end? Will there be absolution for those sins in the end of this nightmare or will the vestiges hang on to scare our children, our grandchildren and all of the next generations?  Evil is far harder to eradicate than good.  Evil is far simpler to incorporate into the structure of our country than good.

We were able to justify slavery – stealing millions of lives because some of us were too lazy to do our own work, but wanted the benefits from the work of others for free.  We were able to justify maintaining racism against Africans because we needed to continue to deny what we did to them during slavery.  We attempted to justify that by showing the movie on how Africans moved from sub-human to more cultured due to their association with us so now we can move forward incorporating them as more equal in our society, our schools, our neighborhoods.  We were able to justify maintaining sexism against Women because we needed and still need them to do our dirty work and to support us in whatever we decide to do without recognition, agreement, compensation, and more.  We are still able to justify maintaining all of the complicated bigotry against other human beings because it satisfies our need for macho power, money and the creature comforts all of that brings not the least of which is not having to do the hard work of creating an identity when white privilege gives us a strong foundational identity for which we don’t have to work – isn’t all of that what the Supreme Court has facilitated in a low keyed way with their recent decision?  Isn’t that almost a parallel to their Plessy decision?  And now we can move on to their 1954 decision after those involved have had a bit of time to appreciate the less than equal decision that will follow.  It will feel like a breath of fresh air even if some of the less than restrictions are left in place?  How to move backwards a little by moving backwards a lot.

Give him enough rope – he will hang himself, but in the meantime he will make sure that his contribution is to the continuation of White Northern European Privilege and Ascendancy over all others.  Put him in jail to insure that much or our guilt is expiated, but the damage done will not be totally rectified.  Make him a very negative example and make fun of him, call him crazy, hold him up as ‘not like the rest of us’, but underneath it all is that gratitude that comes from those who need the security of being ‘better than’ so they can continue to live ‘free’ after having called for that bowl of soap, water and a towel and used it to insure our eternal detriment, degradation and damnation.  Eternal isn’t the issue – immediate is and isn’t that what our increasing technology is doing for us?

Take a look at where we were before Trump!

The Venture Capitalists planned our future with brash, uncouth, out of control, disrespectful young white men of Northern European descent being held up with multi-millions. Made to think they built huge empires when they and their brashness were actually used to front for what has developed and is developing around the multi-billions dollars companies that have sprung up overnight to put the older companies out of business and to move power into the hands of a small group who make Trump look like a joke.

The political ‘king’ makers, who are responsible for the rise of Trump and who have put the supporting structures in place which are needed to change this country and stop its movement towards a democracy where all are equal and where compassion and love reign supreme are today rejoicing in what they see as their success.  It took years before the advent of Trump to put in place the structures which elected him.  How much went into gerrymandering?  How much went into the development of Breitbart- the NRA – the KKK – the White Nationalists – the neo-Nazi’s – bringing them all to the fore and pushing back on everything else.

“Make America Great Again” did not start with Trump.  It is a slogan he stole from others who used it before he came along, when he was playing around with Roy Cohn and his boys. Bringing America into the circle of Russia, Northern Korean, Syria, and other such countries couldn’t have been done by Trump.  It had to be a long developing power surge.  Take credit, guys,  for what you have done.

And now what?  More of the same? Moving to a very different form of government – one which will never again be bothered having to fend off an African American president – or beat back a woman president who was advocating for the opposite to what we now have in power – never have to face the horror of the son or daughter of a refugee taking over as president?

It is up to you America.

From every Bettina breakfast or breakfast seminar there is no sign of anyone wanting more of what we have today – so how is this going to end?  All of us shot dead when we step out of line and shine a light onto what’s wrong here?  Jailing increasing when you protest with all of your assets taken away as they can now do in Arizona if you dare to be a part of the ‘wrong’ protest movement or demonstrations? Fear running through the streets as security guards from other countries are allowed to mutilate and harm Americans even in front of the cameras and without negative comments or protests from our leaders – a tacit show that it should continue and grow stronger.

Where is all this going America?  Is your insecurity going to continue and make America White Again? Or are you going to find your guts and make America a wonderful, humane, democracy whose doors are actually and really opened fulfilling what is written on the Statue of Liberty.  She is certainly in trouble today.  I can see the stone masons chipping off those words and replacing them with “Enter at your own risk – leaving your need for equality, freedom, justice behind.”

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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Corporate vs Democratic Structures

Monday, May 29th, 2017

“It is great to have a business man as president”.  “Maybe now things will get done in a corporate way.”  etc. etc.

Do you really want the United States of America to be a Corporate entity – like USA Corp.?  Or the General Motors of America?  Or even Google – scratch that – Alphabet, inc.?

What does it mean to have a business person as president?  Wasn’t that the real issue in this last campaign?  Hillary Clinton – who has been in public life her entire life as opposed to Donald Trump who has been in business his entire life?

So what’s the difference?

I should say in the beginning that I am biased.  Having worked for major corporations, I would not want these United States to be run like a corporation by a businessman or woman.  What is the difference?  All of our talk about changing the United States governmental structure into a fascist dictatorship is roughly equivalent to saying change the United States into a government which makes shoes led by a business person within the structure of Corporate America.

Corporations are not democratic institutions.  They are dictatorships.  The person at the top dictates just about everything.  When a new person takes over at the top even the personality and character of the people under him or her changes.  The corporate hiring and promotion begins to be of people like the corporate leader.

Corporations don’t take decisions from the bottom up and only on matters that don’t count would a vote be taken in anything.  And when corporations do vote at their annual meetings where voting occurs – the results are fixed.  Not by someone who goes about ‘manipulating’ the results for a certain outcome, but because shares in most corporations are held by a few large people or corporations with the results known before the papers about voting even go out.  The few times someone has tried to change that they were pushed out unceremoniously and life went on at though they had never existed.

Democracies are far less efficient, but far more humane and concerned about making sure those who are among the ‘have nots’ are taken care of – not totally, but some basics are fought over to make sure the ‘have nots’ have a chance.  The defense of those who are a part of the democracy is important and monies spent to make sure we are all ‘safe’.

In the United States, we are currently fighting over universal health care.  Other countries already have such, but we have some kind of horror that we might be giving away health care to those who don’t deserve it.  That is a very corporate mentality – since in most corporations – those that have get and those that don’t have stay at the bottom until they are fired for others who don’t have and who can be paid to do the same job for less money.

Corporations define the elements that go into reporting a ‘profit’.  Very seldom does the profit of corporations actually equal out to what is used to add, subtract, divide to get to the bottom line.  For example – corporations use much in this world for which they don’t pay.  The democracy or other governmental entity in which they live pays for a lot that corporations use which does not get subtracted from their gross to get to their bottom line profit.

They contribute to pollution, but don’t pay to clean up their mess.  They contribute to climate change, but don’t pay to reverse the negatives they create.  No one disputes that and no one – well very few people – would fight to get that changed.  Occasionally corporate profits are disputed and something is added which was not there before and that then makes up the corporate bottom line.  What happened to cause that change? Normally government stepped in to demand the corporation make amends; change its policies; be more responsive; and that government entity will demand the corporate product or service be surveyed and kept ‘honest’.

In democracies, the people who make up that democracy determine what is done, how, when, by who and much concern and money is put into defense, social services, education, and more.  There is a responsibility which each person in a democracy has in its continuance, growth and upkeep. There is a limit to the responsibility each person has in a corporate setting and your level of responsibility depends upon your job description, salary, etc.

Where a corporation can cause a problem which affects everybody – it is the governmental entity which generally has to address, change and make better whatever happened.  The corporation can and some do, walk away from that kind of responsibility and the world will not stop spinning.  The governmental entity cannot – especially the democratic governmental entity.  It must step up to the plate and make a change.

In corporations, the CEO, CFO, Executive Committee are generally the people who set policy, and run the corporation.  The underlings carry out the dictates of the upperlings. That is not true in a democracy.

I think you get my drift.

It is time for us to clearly outline and understand the difference between a corporation structure and what life is like under such an entity and a democracy knowing what life is like under that entity also.

The United States is a democracy/republic and those of us who are citizens of that democracy are also responsible for its good or ill.  Voting is a heavy responsibility – we pay taxes to provide the services we have determined should go to others – we pay taxes to provide for the defense of all of us from negative outside forces – we pay taxes for…………..oh god, do we pay taxes!

In a corporation we do not have that responsibility and we do not pay taxes.  We earn an income for doing what our job description says we were hired to do and we can be fired by the corporation, sometimes for no reason.  We do not have the level of responsibility in a corporation that we have in a democracy.

A war between the corporate structure and the democratic/republic structure has been predicted for quite a long time – and it has now, with Clinton/Trump, arrived on our door step demanding attention.

The Trump/Clinton presidential campaigns reflected that difference more than most in the past few years.  Their mind sets – what they are about are all very different and instead of outlining that difference and calling it what it is, we see evil and good – me included – because clearly a corporate structure for these United States would defeat everything we have worked for over a few hundred years.  Our constitution is not a corporate document, but one that brought a democratic/republic into being.  We have a Supreme Court and all the other trappings to try to keep us on that democratic path.  What is going on in this country today is a strong move to drop the democracy and take on the corporate structure.

Most of the people pushing for such have no idea what they are asking.  They are simply repeating what they’ve heard and someplace inside they seem to think this would be great – we all have those moments of running home to Mama to be taken care of, but adulthood is much more fulfilling, productive and humane.  They talk about how more efficient that corporate structure would be, etc. etc.  when efficiency is not the issue in a government.  That would be a disaster and would result in our aligning ourselves with Russia and all the other dictatorships of the world where the individual counts for nothing and survives out of the largesse of the oligarchs and dictator – giving up everything in return including equality, freedom, justice, etc..

Maybe if we bring up in our minds these two opposing structures, which were developed for very different reasons we might be able to come to some accommodation.  The United States of America was not founded to make shoes, after all.  It was founded to bring about things like equality, justice etc. etc. etc. for all of us.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to bettina-network@comcast.net

 

We Are Being Played! Trumped!

Thursday, April 27th, 2017

The “roll out” of Donald J. Trump’s tax program was amazing.  It is the (1%) one percenters dream.  If it goes through it create a country without responsibility to anyone except its top ten percent – the bottom nine percent of this top ten percent will be the recipients of this country’s “welfare”.  It is the way to acquire unlimited wealth and pass it on to your children.

Every country has suffered from having no ‘death tax’ because the wealth of their top group grows to extremes and the poverty of its bottom group becomes beyond desperate.

My dream has been to be able to pass on what I have worked so hard for all of my life to my children and grandchildren.  It isn’t a huge estate, but enough for me to rest in peace knowing they would have some backup as life delivers one body blow after another.  But, every time I think those thoughts I think of all of those others – children and grandchildren of people who have not been able to accumulate an estate of any kind and generally leave their children in debt.

It is a conflict for most of us, but the ‘death tax’ usually wins, if we have a shred of caring for those who can’t care for themselves and if we care about trying to lift up those who were born so downtrodden they won’t make it otherwise.

However, that is not the case with many who have accumulated a substantial estate.  It seems those who have created the largest estates are the greediest and want to see everything move down the generations of  their own families.  They generally wind up passing negative moral judgments on those who have not been able to create the same.  They become those who are ‘better than’ on so many levels and those in front of  whom the rest of us become subservient because we want a little of their wealth to rub off into our families.

Trump’s reduction in the tax rate – elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax and all of his other proposals will bankrupt the United States Treasury and the deficit will zoom.  He knows that – he is not new to this game – his own estate has shown him the ins and outs of taxes and those he chose to work with him and on this tax problem, among others, are very much in tune with Trump’s way of life and way of thinking.  The poor, the sick, those who have many problems which have kept them from amassing large amounts of money are parasitic interlopers into their “hard work” and “success.”

The longer I live the clearer it becomes that those who have succeeded awesomely have done so at the expense of the poor, the sick, the indigent, the minority, the women in this society.  They have used the life, the work, the dreams of others to make it in big ways.  They have stripped those others of everything and have no conscience about their deeds.

Right before this tax cut was rolled out, the ‘Trumpster’ started playing us all.  As many buttons as he could push to distract from this tax business he pushed.  Talking heads in the media took the bait; civil rights activists took the bait; those working for economic justice took the bait and Trump cleared a wide path for his people to walk down the road, make their announcement of things to come and the response was muted because we were all looking at where Trump’s finger was pointing instead of at the moon.

We are being played.  We have been played since Trump started his run for office.  The very large choice Trump made in how he would make his money was via casinos, after all.  (It always amazes me how “evangelicals’ ran so hard after and for a hard core gambler).

His research is to find the ‘hot buttons’ in this society and choose which ones to push before he does something he wants to slip through as unnoticed as possible and he is very good at that.  It is called manipulation and Trump is the Great Manipulator.  He has done a magnificent job.  He got votes from the middle class because he convinced them that his racism, sexism, general all around bigotry, anti-immigrant stance was just what they needed to recover whatever they lost.  The fact that under Trump they would lose even more was totally hidden and many still haven’t seen the game.  The money support he has received has been awesome and none of that middle class has asked -‘where did we get that kind of money to support you – we sent small dollars because it was all we had – so now what are you going to do for those who tossed so many dollars into your ‘honey pots’ because what they want is anathema to us.’

And – by the way – is Amazon.com still a large Trump supporter?  The story of their bottom to middle employees needs to be told truthfully to understand why amazon.com’s support of Trump follows its path!

Let the games continue!  Let those who have Trump Dust in their eyes get clear and see so they can begin to win some of these games.  No one is going to do it for you!  And to the rest of us – Reagan was the opening parenthesis; Trump is the closing – what does that mean!!  What preceded Reagan and what was between the opening and closing parentheses?  It is the pattern of our world, repeated over and over and over again.

This country has had too many times of the majority fighting for equality and justice and those few at the top planning and bringing about the defeat of that equality and justice which peeps through each spring before it gets mowed down, covered with all those chemicals, comes back looking bedraggled, tired and straggly while that top group, regroups and finds a new-different-and better way to rip off the rest of us.  Certainly the technology group has found ways to become extraordinarily wealthier than any that preceded them.  Their progeny lives to fight another day, wealthy beyond imaginings and walking in their ancestors paths – until this next group comes along to knock them off.  They grow smaller in numbers but greater in strength and their look is characterized as how the rest of the culture should look.  There are very few women in that group, but have you noticed their shoes?  The highest heels – the thickest platforms – the latest style – and never under four figures.  That is how you know them from the wives of the tech people.

And the progeny of those fighters for love, peace, equality, justice and all that’s related start once again thinking that this time they will succeed where their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents failed and this world will be beautiful and good for all of its inhabitants because of their work – they will get it right.  The extremes of that group have been called a cults.  The extreme of the other group have been called the real heroes of the world and it is their history that goes down the generations.  The others are characterized like John the Baptist and pictured as we think he looked in his day. Their adaptation of ‘their historical culture’ always makes up the look of what we label the ‘counter culture.’

Think on these things so you can begin to take over your life.  It is difficult.  It is stressful.  You don’t always win.  But, you become stronger as you fight each battle whether you win or lose and at some point if you continue standing on your own two feet you begin to win more than you lose.  But the real reward is the inner peace that comes and the love that glows from your very body.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to bettina-network@comcast.net

 

 

 

Creating a Totalitarian State

Friday, April 7th, 2017

What does it take to turn a democracy/republic into a fascist totalitarian state?

We saw some of that happen during Germany’s change to the Third Reich.  We are looking at another example with the United States.

What struck me was the Executive Order of Donald Trump’s making all of the information on the internet – personal and otherwise – available to whoever will pay for it – or can code programs to collect, inspect and categorize it.  Every keystroke you take will be shipped off someplace into the ether.  Maybe to a marketing organization with a contract paying millions for that information, but it actually could be to any other organization wanting or needing that information. Another step in eliminating privacy of United States citizens, and at the same time, privacy of many around the world.  So it isn’t just happening in the United States.

One requirement of a totalitarian state is lack of privacy and the ability of government or other institutions privately owned or otherwise, to access anything about any individual.  In this day of instantaneous response, it is especially great to have that information in an instance and that is what is happening with the help of Mr. Trump and his Executive Orders.  Each Executive Order and each related change has a little bit of the history of what the United States was and what Donald Trump and his co-workers are attempting to turn it into.

One thing that I don’t think even Mr. Trump has considered. – He is very expendable.

Do you think for a moment that whoever is in back of this change – and it is clearly not Mr. Trump – is going to let a loose cannon like Donald Trump continue in charge of the United States once that change has been made?  I don’t think so.  The first time most citizens of the United States will realize they are now completely a manipulable totalitarian state under a rulers control – assisted by a rulers’ family and friends, who are not named nor related to Trump – will be with the demise of Donald Trump.  He is the ‘pathological liar’ who will have made such a change, but he will not enjoy the fruits of his labor.  One can’t afford to allow such an unstable and unpredictable person to remain in charge or those fighting him will eventually gain the upper hand and begin to turn the United States back into the democratic nation and into the republic that it once was – with modern-day improvements.  Trump, however,  is too unpredictable and – let’s be truthful – a little bit flaky – and oh my, even too narcissistic and ‘child in revolt and not controllable’.

Wonder how many of you have thought of this?  I may be a bit paranoid, although no one has ever called me such.  Instead, they call me a ‘seer’.  Et tu!

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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Comey/Head of FBI/QuidProQuo?

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017

Listening to the hearings on Monday was quite emotional.  Getting feedback from many – it was amazing to hear that most of us agreed on the same thing.  That is highly unusual.  We tend to be a disagreeable lot!

Most striking about those hearings was to know and remember that James Comey came out with this announcement claiming that Hillary was under FBI investigation just before the Presidential election in November, 2016 telling the world  they had discovered many more emails.  At that time, Comey said nothing about either Trump or the Trump Campaign or Trump Campaign operatives being under a counterintelligence investigation – and they were – and that is far worse.

Since that time, we have seen several Trump Campaign operatives being fired and/or being seriously investigated for these kind of violations.  Some fired or not appointed because they could not get the requisite security clearance.

So far, that cannot be said of anyone in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  She was under investigation for using an email server that was not considered secure enough, even though other Secretaries of State had done the same thing and many of the emails being talked about were not classified until after the fact.

Trump was under investigation  for what amounts to treason – for colluding with the Russians to have the results of this past Presidential election be the result wanted by Putin and his boys.  Comey had the evidence of Trump having asked for the negative plank in the Republican National Convention about Ukraine be removed plus a few other such things that Putin wanted – much more serious violations than those for which Hillary was being scalded.

As time passed Comey backed down and said the emails, which caused the investigation against Hillary to be reopened did not come from Hillary Clinton’s computer and those emails were duplicates of ones already in the FBI’s possession and they had been determined to be harmless and of very little relevance.

The media and others were more interested in dealing with the content of Hillary’s emails than in the circumstances around all of this which screamed to be dealt with.  Who said what to who from Podesta’s emails was petty bickering compared to this environment of the Trump Presidential campaign going back and forth with the operatives of a country which was very adversarial to the United States.  This was not England, Canada or France – this was Russia and Putin.  And what that means is clearly born out by the number of Russian oriented people now working in the U. S. Government at a very high level having been appointed to their jobs by Donald J. Trump.

And then on Monday came the revelation, during the hearings, with Comey and others under heavy pressure to reveal possible ongoing investigations into folks.  The FBI and Comey, its head, did not and would not reveal if anyone was under investigation – he/they said that kind of disclosure violated FBI policy.  That was verified time after time after time as questions came up and Comey repeated constantly that he could not reveal if anyone was under FBI investigation.

Apparently, during the presidential election, Comey made an exception and broke that rule so he could announce that Hillary was under investigation to make sure Donald Trump would be elected and he – Comey – would have his job by being reappointed as head of the FBI under Donald Trump.  Quid Pro Quo?  And was there anything else involved in this that would benefit Comey besides what looks like a definite quid pro quo about which we will never know all of the details?

After Comeys announcement, right before the election, destroying Hillary’s chances of winning the presidency –  this announcement made by Comey followed weeks of the Trump campaign promising that there would be a big announcement, close to the end of the campaign, that would turn the election in Trump’s favor.  In spite of this one sided announcement with Comey mentioning only Hillary Clinton – we heard during Mondays hearings that Donald Trump and his campaign were under criminal investigation from at least July, 2016 and probably from as early as March, 2016, throughout the rest of the campaign year and throughout the election.  Comey, at the time of his announcement about Hillary Clinton,  said nothing about that investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign operatives.  That clearly was a move to strengthen Trump’s chances of winning and to destroy Hillary Clinton’s.  No one in Comey’s position is naive about politics and what would result from such an act

The way Trump and his campaign operatives dumped all over Hillary and hit very hard on how awful that was and the criminality involved and the country put in serious jeopardy because of Hillary being under FBI investigation, it was clear they knew they would not have to eat crow before the election – which means they knew the announcement that Trump was under a much more serious investigation would not be made before the November votes were cast.

That needs to be clearly stated.  When Comey was reappointed as head of the FBI shortly after Trump won the presidential election our question is – Quid Pro Quo?  YES!  An FBI director knows he must avoid even the appearance of evil – so Comey knew clearly that he was not doing that.  He announced a Hillary Clinton investigation and was quiet about the Donald Trump investigation which would have produced a very different result.  Donald Trump would not now be President of these United States – wrecking havoc in world affairs, totally out of control.

Mr. Comey needs to be questioned under oath as to his role in all of this and what, if anything, did he receive for the part he played in getting Donald Trump elected.  It cannot be denied that he played a very crucial role.  Hillary Clinton’s numbers showed a landslide victory until that announcement came from Mr. Comey.  I am sure that landslide victory possibility was a serious concern for Mr. Putin and we think he would have been willing to pull out all the stops to prevent that from happening.

Comey was showing the world whose camp he was in and it wasn’t even close to Hillary Clinton’s, nor was it a neutral camp.  That was also reflected during the hearing in little places here and there that apparently went unnoticed.  When Congressman Turner asked a question during the Monday hearing in which he claimed unequivocally with no if ands maybes, etc. that the Washington Post and the New York Times reported lies – Comey not only let that pass, but quietly agreed with him.  I won’t go through all of those kind of moments, but there are clearly several in the record.

Trump and his campaign hit Hillary hard about the Constitutional Crisis that would happen if Hillary were elected President and how immediately thereafter she would be swamped with this criminal FBI investigation and on and on they went and there was no announcement from Comey about Trump and his campaign being under a very serious investigation which involved Putin, Russia and the possibility that Trump and his campaign people were colluding with the Russians to interfere with this election and to make sure that Trump won and Hillary lost.

We can’t emphasize enough that Hillary was the subject of an investigation because of her emails, and using an email server that wasn’t considered private enough.  That is like kindergarten kids playing in a play ground compared to what Trump, Putin and their boys were doing and does not begin to reach the heights of an investigation which is looking at Trump and his campaign for what would amount to treason – opening the door to the American voting process being manipulated and controlled by a foreign government.

James Comey needs to be investigated.  He clearly had something to gain – keeping his job, for starters, and he showed he was willing to take serious risks for Trump in the way he talked about Hillary being under investigation and keeping quiet about the fact that Trump was also under investigation for much more serious transgressions than was Hillary.

So where are we today?  Trump is making threats to Republican politicoes that if they don’t listen to him and do his bidding he will take his rallies to their districts and turn voters their against them.  That is a very potent threat.  How much more of this ugly and vicious control by a man who is a pathological liar are we going to take as we watch Trump and his close supporters working very hard to turn these United States into a fascist Nazi-style dictatorship which will finally be put under Putin, if Trump has his way.  Just about everyone at the top of this current government is involved in Russia, bigotry personified and/or mafia.  Trump, Tillerson, and on and on and on.

We have always thought that the closeness  between Trump and his daughter was because she is one of the few people who know about him and his purported business dealings with the Eastern European mafia.  She was with him at some crucial moments during their time together doing business.  It is time for this to be investigated and exposed – especially now that she is in the West Wing of the White House.

Trump’s rallies are dwindling and he will probably have to go back to the way his rallies got started – with people being hired to act as though they are simply attendees and Trump supporters when in reality they are hired actors and others to swell the ranks and get people to respond the way Trump would like them to respond.

And finally, Trump claimed all during his campaign that he had a secret very potent way to defeat ISIS and we would all see that happen when he was elected.  Well people, he has been elected and his secret, potent way to defeat ISIS is to continue the program and the way Obama set down for this to happen.

This Trump presidency is a house of cards and it is time to collapse that house.

For us – Trump, Pence and all of their appointees need to resign enmass and get out of the way so we can get on with the business of living under a democratic republic without lies, thievery, treason, viciousness, stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy, destruction of arts and other programs which took generations to build, moving away from health care for all – even though that was one of Trump’s promises and more.

Enough is enough!  It is time for a recall – or at the very least an Independent Prosecutor so Trump can be investigated outside of a Republican controlled Congress.

That Republican controlled Congress was totally uninterested in an independent and unbiased investigation.  Their questions during the hearing were questions which tried to make Trump and his boys look good and to get him clear of all the ugly he has done instead of questions pointed to what needs to be answered honestly, forthrightly and clear.  Trump is appealing to that side of those White Northern European Republican men that is a little like him – give them a piece of cake with the promise of the entire sweet and their ethics begin to crumble.  That is what is beginning to happen and to stop that needs to be done TODAY!

It took Hitler less than  a year to turn Germany into something they paid spent decades repenting and paying for.  Trump is moving much faster and we are watching United States ethical base falling pretty rapidly.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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The United States President = Pathological Liar

Monday, March 6th, 2017

It is amazing to see “Mr. President” referred to every day as a Pathological Liar.  I have lived through many presidents and not everyone has been happy with the current president, but all of them – except maybe Richard Nixon – have been respected even when one could not agree with some of their policies or beliefs, until now.  And even Richard Nixon – who was given some choice names – pathological liar was not one.

To every United States voter who used their vote to help elect Donald J. Trump – you are unequivocally a bigot.  Everyone is being nice and dancing around this, but it is time to say it very clearly.  You voted for Donald Trump because you thought he was going to bring America back to the racist/bigoted nation it was before the election of Barack Obama – quietly, unobtrusively with plausible deniability as to the bigotry being re-enforced, re-established with examples to make sure the youth of the U. S. are thoroughly re-indoctrinated into the evil that has been a part of the structure of America for hundreds of years.

Two things come to mind when one says the name – Barack Obama:  one – he is half African;  two – his name brings up Muslim connotations. Isn’t that why Trump is on this anti-Muslim ban? His bigotry as he and his followers are determined to wipe everything off the face of the earth that this half-Black with Muslim ancestors has achieved, turning it all into extreme negatives to fit the negative stereotype that has existed in the U. S. since it was needed to justify slavery.  You cannot have this ex-president destroying the negative stereotypes you and your ancestors have spent generations putting in place.

Please understand, I know very well Barack Obama is not Muslim, but his name legitimizes Muslims as first class citizens as much as he legitimizes African Americans as full citizens of this country – totally eliminating the second class citizenry of both.  To the bigots in this country that is unforgivable.

To each and every Donald Trump supporter, you can hide behind other reasons that you spurt, but that is the real reason you voted for a man who showed himself to be a pathological liar both before and during his campaign for President; a purveyor of vicious and ugly stories that are lies; who was involved in soft-porn; owner and operator of casinos with rumors of mafia connections; who filed bankruptcy six times cheating many people in the process – without any explanation, without any disclosure of his tax returns, without any substantiating that he didn’t get money from Russia and others of that ilk; who was an adulterer many times over and who paraded it around for all to see and to brag about; who talked about and treated women as though they were sex objects existing for only one reason – who was vile in his comments about women.  And for your side bonus, he also called Mexicans and others ugly names to insure that the world knows that in America they are not considered equal to White Americans – or Russians. – You, Trump supporters, didn’t care, because you simply wanted someone who would wipe out everything about Obama and his presidency, creating a lie that it wasn’t right or good and someone to do everything possible to make that seem to be a vile, ugly, horrible time in these United States.  If Trump had to lie to achieve that goal – you were right there with him, helping to spread what you knew were lies.  If he had to attempt to destroy a woman who spent her entire adult life working so that our lives could be better – so much the better.  You got a ‘twofer’ in Donald Trump.  He not only lied about, misrepresented, slandered the sitting president of the United States, but Trump worked to destroy an “uppity” woman at the same time.  Wow! You really worked hard to make him your president.  Who knows when another such opportunity would come, for you to rise up and make your filth, that was poorly hidden all these generations,  known to the rest of the world.

You claimed you were voting for him because he was going to bring JOBS back to the United States.  Right! A man whose own company and the company of his daughter and family members had outsourced jobs for their businesses to other countries – China, Bangladesh, etc. – has credibility with you to bring jobs back to these United States?  He is still crying the same story. You still claim to believe him when none of his companies or his family’s companies including Ivanka’s has made any move to bring their company’s jobs back to these United States.  Trump makes an announcement about some corporation bringing jobs back to the United States and he takes credit for that move when he had nothing to do with a decision made long before he became president and no one even asks when Trump is going to bring his jobs back onto these shores.

Ivanka Trump just moved her company’s jobs from China – to where?  Back to the United States?  NO! To Bangladesh or some other country where the wages are almost slave wages and where people work in sweat shop conditions just to survive.  This is no secret.  We all are aware of this.  Paying sub-human wages to their workers to increase their own profits so they can live a more elaborate lifestyle leaving those working for them beyond destitute!  That is the reason most U. S. Corporations move their jobs overseas.  Trump and family were just going along with the crowd.  And at the same time hitting at others for doing the same thing.  It is hypocrisy at its worse.  This family’s ethics are in the dumpster and still you cheer.  That is the definition of a bigot.

Why do I call you Trump supporters bigots?  You elected a man who spent over eight years attempting to trash the sitting president of the United States.  He used blatant lies that every one of you knew to be lies, but you voted him in as president, anyway.  Not just little lies, but blatant ones that you knew were lies and that you supported in your zeal to be free of equality and  justice.  You were and are ready to trade a democracy for a dictatorship to maintain your White Privilege – and you are doing it with great gusto.

You knew before you cast your vote that you were voting for a pathological liar.  You knew you were voting for a man who had the ethics of a gutter snake.  A man who would do and say anything to get his point across and to gain his end goal.  In this case, you were casting your vote for such a person to be President of these United States.

You voters for Donald J. Trump as president knew when you cast your ballot that his campaign was a lie from beginning to end.  You knew he put together the KKK, the White Nationalists, Breitbart, the neo-Nazi’s and others on that same level with the same philosophy and beliefs to gain the presidency.  You knew when you cast your ballot for Donald Trump you were voting for the worse kind of bigot.  Yet you voted for him.  Why?  Because you are like him – bigots together trying to bring the United States back to a pre-1950’s place complete with raising again Jim Crow, complete with your claimed superiority over everyone not like you.

You knew with Donald Trump as president you would not have to swallow your own bigotry.  You could come out calling people the -N- word.  You knew you could be abusive to minorities.  You knew you could let out all of the ugliness you had to swallow during the years of Obama’s presidency and today you are doing just that and enjoying every moment.  We are all seeing just how ugly, shallow, violent, rude, vile you can be – that is all on parade for the world to see also.

At some point, it must have dawned on you that your children – born shortly before, during and in the process of the Obama presidency – would not share your hatred for those not like you.  You must have realized that children born to the rest of the world would also see a Black man as president of these United States and that changed, modified, mitigated, eliminated much of the racism that you and your forbears spent your lives creating and projecting.  The negative stereotypes you projected – from deep within your soul – onto minorities was fast disappearing.  You had to do something or face who you really are as a human being, just equal to, without the ‘glow’ of White Privilege covering all of your shortcomings, giving you an identity you did not deserve nor work for, giving you privileges over others which the ‘American Dream’ guaranteed to you, above all others.

America, having created ‘White Privilege’ as its camouflage to maintain slavery and to meld Europeans and others into a ‘race’ of superior beings called White, was changing.  It was threatening to you to see your beloved ‘White Privilege’ evaporating into the equality and justice now coming into being in these United States.  Late, but better than not at all.  This was something you would not tolerate.

Since we have been accustomed to lying to ourselves and saying one thing which was really code for something else, you saw right away through Donald Trump’s code words – Make America Great Again – to what those words really meant – Make America White Again.  We are also beginning to realize your dumping on the media means the “Liberal Media”, which means what you consider the “Jewish Media.”  We saw the need for you to eliminate the “Liberal Media” you could not control, but your actions are showing ever more of where you are coming from and where you are going.

The media conspired with its 24/7 coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign to the elimination of all but 5%  of its coverage given to others running for President of these United States.

So what now Donald J. Trump supporters?  You are faced with supporting Russia – since that is apparently who had to help you elect Mr. Trump.  There are not enough of you to constitute the overwhelming majority that Mr. Trump needed to become president.  Most Americans reject your beliefs and the bigotry by which you justify your existence.  Are you going to move into that place of being enemies of your own country because that is what the continuation of your attempts to re-establish a bigoted nation requires?

I can imagine how fulfilling it is to look at Russia and see only White Northern European faces – even if it does mean pushing the definition of Northern European a bit to fill this role.  You are doing that quite admirably.  Not even many women – a few here and there, but not so many they are equal to those White men we constantly see pictured from Russia.  And certainly, Vladimir Putin’s sexism is very satisfying to you, I am sure, as you see that he is just as much a womanizer as Mr. Trump.  Warms the heart to see those old values still in ascendancy with the hope that you can leave the world in tact for your children coming along, who won’t have to live under equality; won’t have to worry about justice being ‘blind’; won’t have to be truthful in their dealings with others – they will be able to lie to gain the goal of maintaining this bigotry because they will have been taught and have been given a role model who does just that.

So what now all of you Donald J. Trump supporters.  Some of you are hiding.  You supported and support him, but you don’t want your friends and co-workers to know because you know it is your bigotry leading your brain and you know it is wrong to give your support to such a person.

You and your young  children had as a role model – Barack Obama.  A man who was principled in his dealings with you and the rest of the world.  Whose family is down to earth and accepting of all of us – including you and your family.  You have now been instrumental in giving your young children a role model – Donald J. Trump – of a pathological liar and of a man who has cheated, lied and stolen from others without any remorse and who continues to do just that.  This is the role model your children now have and what a follow-up to Barack Obama.

Don’t be surprised when the crime rate sky rockets – don’t be surprised when the murder rate increases exponentially – don’t be surprised when corporate America takes away from you whatever they want in the name of major profits – don’t be surprised when you see the worst of humanity in your leaders because gradually that is what is happening and you know that.  You may be bigoted, but you are not stupid.  Because your current ‘leaders’ are expensively dressed, that indicates their wealth not their character.

Don’t be surprised when your children catch on and start giving you denials to their missteps; when they start justifying going on drugs to escape reality; when they start mistreating you as well as their friends; when they start taking whatever they want from whoever they want to take it and feel justified in the doing.

When you give your children a role model such as Donald J. Trump, they follow it just as they started to follow the role model of Barack Obama.  Who do you want your children to follow – to want to be like? Because rest assured that the ethics of this country – its character – is gradually being changed to follow the character of its leader.  That is the human condition.

When your children have business relationships will they follow the six bankruptcies of Donald Trump?  Will they justify their bigotry – which is assuredly going to grow – by claiming that Barack Obama, as President of the United States was fooling the people and was really not born in these United States – by claiming that Obama was lying to the American people and was really born in Africa?  In other words, Trump was trying to set up the argument that the United States has never had a legitimate Black president.  Isn’t that behind the lies Trump told constantly about Obama?  With the unspoken knife twist implying Obama’s lack of ethics to be able to do such a thing?

Will you delight in seeing your children, as some of you did, portraying the president of the United States and his wife as apes in the jungle, dressed in animal skins and acting as though they were totally stupid, violent, terrorists? Because that is the example you have given them as a good example by your vote for Donald Trump as president.  I could go on for pages, but you know the history and you know what you have done.

And now you have the ‘surprise’ of Donald J. Trump claiming Barack Obama had his phones “tapped” in Trump Tower as some kind of attempt to gain the presidency for Hillary Clinton.  How many more of these pathological lies are we going to sit still and absorb?  For this country they are like body blows.  And we can’t sustain too many of those.  The surprise to me is that having listened to Donald J. Trump lie about Barack Obama for over eight years as he was campaigning for president and his years as a sitting president, when Trump claimed that Obama was not born in the U. S. we are now taking this additional lie of Donald Trump’s seriously.  It is horrendous and should result in his removal as president, in spite of the support and delight of his bigoted followers rejoicing in ‘their President’s’ still being the horrendous liar that he has always been to them and very willing to promote the horribleness that finds its way onto the pages of Breitbart and other such publications.

You, Donald J. Trump voters, have violated your responsibility as citizens of this country because you valued your White Privilege above everything else.  You sold out your country so you could feel better than many others – who are probably better than you, at least ethically and as patriots.  Your patriotism was for sale to whoever assured you that they would make it possible for you continue to feel better than, covered in White Privilege and they would make sure that the law and government would keep you on top because they would “Drain the Swamp” of those swimming in the waters of equality and justice and working to bring about the equality and justice that the voters for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to give to all of us.  You let Donald Trump turn the metaphor of Amos’ – let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream into Trump’s “Drain the Swamp”.

All you wanted, all of you Donald J. Trump supporters,  was to put that White Woman in jail because she dared to think she was good enough and equal enoughto run for president of these United States and everybody knows women have a place and it is not equal to men.  All of you knew that could not happen if you were to maintain your feeling of superiority and your White Privilege in the face of its being torn down by people like Hillary Clinton and her followers.  You attempted to turn a God-fearing, hard working woman into a murderer and worse.  Well, you have your murderer as president; you have succeeded in electing your pathological liar as president, you have your mafia tinged president who many claim sold all of us out to Russia and whoever else would pay him the big money, and now you have to live with the result.  You could very well have voted in the end of this Republic and the beginning of a Russian style dictatorship.

Your actions will assuredly send you to the hottest corner of hell.  And what now are you going to do to rectify this situation?  Live in the muck you have created?  Or do something to get Russia out of the United States government and work with all of us to move this country into the greatness promised by its founders?  Into a country where justice, equality and more of the same are really the American way! It is not an easy way because we constantly annoy and disappoint each other, but it winds up to be a pretty good place especially if it is without all of you bigots creating a swamp you then don’t have a clue as to how to move across into the beautiful, clear flowing waters.

And no, I am not a Democrat.

Get those white sheets and pointy hats and that Nazi symbol out of here!~

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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Makeup? – Never

Saturday, February 11th, 2017

I love best those ‘girlie’ breakfast conversations where everything is laid bare.  Free of all the things one does in the mornings to become the person you want to be – a reflection of all those make-up ads which show you women who are unreachable because their pictures have been blown, photo-shopped, with bumps and lumps removed and skin retouched.

Amazingly, this conversation included a stray male.  What he was doing in the middle of this conversation is unfathomable, but there he was, quite excited to be included in what he thought was going to be women revealing their innermost secrets – and to him.  Normally, he would be expected to smile politely and leave as soon as he could get away without being rude.  This guy loved every minute.

Color took center stage.

I thought I understood what part color played in this makeup business, but this breakfast ‘seminar’ changed that understanding completely.

Even though they were staying at a Bettina Network Hedge School, which is notorious for organic everything – no chemicals in the mix – no artificiality in anything – every woman at the table had on makeup.  All store bought and kept in a makeup case carried wherever they travelled.

What they wanted was re-enforcement that their makeup – as they applied it – looked natural and they did not look “made-up.  For me, that was astounding.  Raised in a family where the last thing in the world you wanted to do was apply make-up to your face and wind up looking like Godzilla’s wife full of pasty stuff on top of even more pasty looking stuff and a face where one could not smile without that makeup breaking into lines and cracking, we were very far apart.  I don’t think I have worn lipstick more than two or three times in life and I am now quite old.  So, there we were with stereotypes, but at two ends of the spectrum, very far apart.  As it turns out I was into as much make-up as everyone else at the table, only a different kind and applied at different times.

If you notice these things – as you age, your skin changes.  If you have light brown skin your face becomes a rather dull looking white with eyebrows that turn white, no matter their natural color when you were young, and that whitish dull skin does you no good.  I was very proud of my light brown skin.  I felt I looked healthier than most because of it.  I certainly didn’t have that so-called “white” skin which dried out and became very wrinkly as one aged, nor did I have that darker brown skin which sagged from maintaining its natural oils even as one grew older.  And here I was, about to reveal that my beautiful light brown skin, with its touch of a pinkish/red/orange color was not entirely natural, no matter how it looked.

When you are young, your face is blotchy with break-outs all over and what you long for is that beautiful even-toned unachievable skin that is advertised in almost every cosmetic ad from the beginning of creation.

The women brought their make-up to the table and we examined it all very closely.  Amazingly, even the expensive stuff looked pretty similar to the stuff that came from CVS, Walgreens, and other such places.  Even more amazing was the ingredients – we could not pronounce any of them when ingredients were on the labels.  We could only conjecture what was in those bottles and jars which did not reveal their ingredients.  We didn’t find any ingredients we knew and when we did they were in minuscule amounts.

When these different ingredients were put on your face, we couldn’t detect differences between the stuff that cost a fortune and the stuff that came from the pharmacy stores.  Thy all seemed to give the same look.  The difference in the make-up on the table was the amount of disposable income different women at the table had to be able to spend on cosmetics.  One spent a couple hundred dollars a month and we gasped, in awe.

My ‘cosmetics’ that morning were Grapeseed Oil, AloeVera Gel and Beta Carotene tablets in oil in a capsule – all organic.  I had a lot more, but I wasn’t going to reveal all in one morning and I certainly was not going to reveal anything bringing me close to a couple hundred dollars spent in one month.  If I spent that kind of money on my face I would be super-thin, because I wouldn’t have money left to spend on food.

The first thing that left the table was the stuff used to take make-up off at night.  With all it was supposed to do, my grape seed oil did better.  The next thing out were the ‘astringents’.  My Aloe Vera Gel was better suited, did not have chemicals or preservatives of any kind, although it did need to be kept in the refrigerator and used quickly.  Not only was it a good astringent, but it also tightened into a mask.

The Bettina Beauty treatment for the face is a Bettina Blog written some time long past, but it is still among the Bettina Network Blogs so I won’t go over it here, but it is necessary to do on a two to three times a week basis to keep your face from sagging, crinkling, becoming pasty white and wrinkly and more. This mornings beauty regimen helps, but does need to be supplemented with other organic treatments.

That Bettina Network Beauty regimen makes all the rest possible.

After we put on the Aloe Vera Gel, we had a few minutes conversation about what it does, allowing it to tighten into a mask.  We then rinsed it off with the requisite ten splashes of water and moved on to the Beta Carotene tablets.

I clipped one to put on my face after it was rinsed of its Aloe Vera Gel and there were gasps all around.  I looked like something out of a cowboy and Indian movie and I was clearly the Indian – very red of skin and  oily of face with the Beta Carotene oil going into my hairline – deliberately.

I should say here that my hairline was showing the grey line around my face where the rest of my hair was beautifully colored, but the hairline was growing in and it was a mixed grey and black, but mostly grey.  My eyebrows were also a mixed grey and black, giving me a rather older look, so they took received an extra rubbing into them of the Beta Carotene capsule.

The women couldn’t wait to get to their bathrooms to put on their department store makeup to go out for the day.  I cleared the dining room and was left with my red face, dirty dishes and the one male person at the table.  He helped me with the dishes, but not before he used the beta carotene on his face.  Looking at him, I saw just how ridiculous I looked, but he was confident this was going to solve his problem.  He wanted instructions for the day on how to handle this, but I had none.  I just go about my day.  Rinse my face with ten splashed each rinse whenever I use the bathroom for other purposes.  So he left declaring he would do the same.

The next morning we all appeared at breakfast.  The women without makeup and their makeup on the table, as we agreed to the morning before.  Me and the one male with no makeup bottles or jars in front of us because we didn’t have any to put there.  And who do you think looked stunning?  The two of us did.  By then, the red had been absorbed into the skin and the constant rinses after having gone to the bathroom several times helped remove the excess Beta Carotene color.  Our skin glowed.

No grey around the face from hair growing out and our eye brows were a beautiful mixed color of dark, medium and lighter brownish red.  And you know, the most delicate and dangerous thing you can do when having your hair dyed or dying it yourself, is trying to match your eyebrow color.  That dye will put your eyes out if it goes to the wrong place and will probably also fool with your ability to see even if it is only absorbed a bit through the skin – which has to be absorbed through a bit of your eyelid to make the eyebrows look great.

I looked 20 years younger – with a face that looked slightly flushed, like younger skin looks when you are excited and the rest a beautiful even color.  The whitish grey look was gone and in its place a bronze look which almost approximated a day in the sun.  I looked very sun-tanned and almost as if I was blushing.  He looked the same.

Our one male person had been concerned about his eyebrows and mustache turning grey, but didn’t know what to do about it – and this was a middle to upper level business executive who felt he needed to keep a fairly young appearance to keep his job.

The women were flabbergasted because the only thing we did that morning was to rinse our faces with the ten splashes of warm water.  I followed my splashes of warm water with ten splashes of cold water just to look a bit more flushed – only that didn’t last.  The Beta Carotene created color lasts about two to three days.  On some people it will last a week through many splashed of water.  No soap, however.  We never use soap, ever, at all.

The women left their make-up on the table and used the beta-carotene capsules on their faces.  I don’t know how they faced the day because it takes, generally, putting it on overnight and letting it absorb with a morning rinse before starting out for the day – or – putting it on in the morning and leaving it on all day with several splashes of water rinses throughout the day for the color to become ideal.  It will then last two or three days before you need to reapply the beta carotene, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.  They thought the results were good enough to make due and get together a new lifestyle routine to accommodate this new make-up regimen.  I would like to have followed their red faces around with a camera as they went about their day, but the dirty dishes were calling.

Whatever they did, the next morning they were all beautiful and ecstatic.  One mentioned the difference in cost between what she used and one capsule of beta-carotene, but I had to remind her that the cost added up to more than that because she did need to do constant upkeep with products like organic Aloe Vera gel, all of the oils we talked about and the Bettina Beauty regimen with Vitamin C, D, etc.  That didn’t matter to her.  Those oils last a couple months and so does the rest of what is needed so she was off to the organic store to supply her make-up case with everything new.

We all wondered how she would get through airport security.  They are accustomed to women’s make-up cases, but not those with oils and organic ingredients which are normally thought of as food. We imagined her being put into detention for days while airport security checked and re-checked her ‘new’ makeup for some new kind of terrorist plot.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to:

bettina-network@comcast.net

Weight Control and Good Health for a Lifetime!

Wednesday, February 1st, 2017

Look around – take a walk – go shopping – to the theatre – symphony – sports event and you will see many, many overweight people.

How on earth did this happen!  My mother’s generation didn’t share this overweightness.  Many in my generation have gaining weight and battling that weight gain as a constant.  In my children’s generation they are taller and heavier except those who border on bulimia or some other eating disorder.  What has happened to all of us? Something radical on this earth and in our environment has changed.

Have you noticed that diet food – diet drinks – exercise and body control programs – an entire industry has grown up and is thriving on your willingness to work hard and sweat even harder while that industry earns substantial amounts of money for either the foods they want to sell you to control your weight or their weight control ideas or body manipulations to feed your dream of  looking as though you are 15 years old again!

It is all a smoke screen!  A way to keep you from realizing the pit you have fallen into and can’t get out. The truth that you need to set you free is obscured and in your very distant past generations, mostly obscured from you by the need to maintain and increase the profit of this new “Health and Fitness Industry”.  That may be what it is called by many, but its goals are anything but.

Most of what you need is not in that Health and Fitness Industry, but in the secrets your past generations took to the grave.  The marketing, with which you were raised,  blinded you so thoroughly you didn’t want to hear what your ancestors had to say nor did you want to carry forward their lifestyles.  You particularly looked down on the knowledge and experience they gained from their lifestyles because you found more relevant the marketing and advertising dreamed up by those probably even younger than you are who were/are busy pumping out pipe dreams to maintain their jobs.

They were trained by experts at creating a new culture and a new lifestyle based on your giving them your money and potential possessions and they giving you the way to a miserable life – whether it be long or short – but profitable to their companies.   Is this what you bought and live by today?

Now, however, everyone around you seems to be calling you back to this glorious past where you will find redemption, salvation, a better life than we have today and at the same time those same people, industries and their marketing/advertising is creating a trap for you so you don’t even know what past you are being called to learn from and buy into.  A mythical, glorious past which actually never existed except in the movies and a scattering of novels.  What used to be sold on the ‘silver screen’ is now being sold as a distorted, pumped up on drugs, reality show which you are being told was the great, glorious past to reach back to, recreate and nirvana will arrive.

They hold out the promise of satisfaction, satiety,  for this something inside that is roiling your gut and telling you something is off and very damaged.  They hold out what looks like the cure to this wrong road you’ve taken.  Their message is full of  pretty pictures or accompanying videos so words alone no longer satisfy and those pretty pictures are characterized as the road to Oz.  But the curtain is seldom let down so you can’t see the wizard behind the screen doing all of this manipulating.

Let me lift the curtain for you – just a little.  To strip the curtain away entirely is something you are going to have to do for yourselves.  Unfortunately, it has been turned into a lifelong search and you are very devoid of the mentors who could shorten the search and reward your efforts when you hit a success spot.

Over the past couple generations we have put in place a modern lifestyle which started with our need to work constantly to be able to afford more, even though we were using so many new inventions that cut our work load in half.   We haven’t been able to get off that rodent’s wheel long enough to see if it really was generating the ‘more/better’ it promised.  Most of us are afraid to stop because the bleak future pictured by doing that is something we can’t stand to allow ourselves to imagine.

So let’s take this one thing at a time:

starting with – Our food supply and food habits.  That alone has taken books, videos and endless self-help sessions to describe and to either mislead us or to help us understand what is and what has happened.  The story that starts with once upon a time ends with corporate farms using chemicals and other substances which destroy our bodies a tiny little bit at a time so we can’t identify or point to that as one of the reasons for our current dilemma. The marketing and advertising has us in a constant ongoing argument with each other which both sides lose, because in this great information sharing age, the crucial information is kept locked up and very seldom shared.

Just a couple for instances:

Flour – that which was the staff of life for our forbears and was in many breads and other dishes is something we are warned against today and which has developed around it and trying to take its place – a new industry – gluten free – because so many are now allergic to what sustained life in their past generations.  And gluten-free is a much more lucrative end result of processing than is flour, which is now depicted as the enemy of health in so many characterizations and advertisements.  One little dirty secret = it is substantially more profitable.

How could that be?  Who did this thing?  The one substance which you could practically live off of alone is now claimed as our bodies enemy.  If you are not allergic to it, then certainly you know it makes you fat!

Flour as a profit center is what happened and the machinery went into high gear to figure out how to make ever more money giving even less to the general populations:   Farmers were encouraged to put all kind of chemicals on their wheat and to experiment with new kinds of wheat developed because, thereby,  much more could be grown on a small plot of land and even beyond that – large corporate farms popped up, quietly destroying the farmer.   The substantially increased profit to be made on land growing this ever new kind of wheat was too much for some to pass over and certainly was not to be shared with the non-corporate types.  And so ‘crush them’ was the mantra of the day and it was successful.

Greed called those susceptible, into the flour business, to press as much money out of it as possible giving to the populace whatever smokescreen and story board was necessary to hide the real reasons for that substantial profit increase from something as basic as wheat.  And along came the hiding  and holding back and creating myths for the populace (us).  The wizard was very busy with all of this going on behind the screen.

The best place to start to tell this part of the story is at the end of the processing line – the point at which flour has been robbed of everything that gave us life and all of that replaced with that which takes life and good health away from us.  The large silos in which the “finished” flour was put to be held until it could be packaged harbor many ugly secrets.  Predictably, those silos were infested with bugs and our new kind of logic said bugs needed to be killed with pesticides and that happened.  None of the silos escaped.

There was no way to get the dead bugs out of the silos so let the flour stay until the bugs deteriorated.  No one would ever ask what those black specks were in the bags of flour, if the bags and the marketing were such as to make the flour more convenient to buy and prettier to look at with the mythical story about how much ‘cheaper’ it was.  And the bonus – something light brown or a dark ivory was made very white!  The background color of this ‘revolution’.

There was no way to get the pesticides out of the flour because it just became one with the ground grain.  So the department, in the United States, which kept the public’s food supply safe just issued a proclamation which said there was not enough pesticide in the flour so it wasn’t worth demanding that the pesticides be removed – that would be too costly – nor was there enough to warrant a note on the packaged flour letting the consumer know the product they were buying was tainted.

And so, the flour moved off the shelves into our homes where it wrecked havoc with our health without most of us knowing why we were developing these low levels of something that made us feel not quite up to par;  some of us becoming quite ill with allergies; some of us succumbing to viruses and various bacteria much easier and more frequently than in the past.

….And so another industry sprung up to address that and to take us further down the rabbit hole and those addressing that issue further up the profit margin generator.

Milk – Another one of those ‘basic for life’ foods that we all eat or drink that has added to this horrendous lifestyle we are living.  We have become so accustomed to the problems with milk and other foods, we have simply adjusted and move on.  It is becoming unpatriotic to question.

Many of us are horrified if we have to drink “Whole Milk” – as though this would poison our system.  We have come to believe most assuredly that would put more weight on us and probably fool with our fat/cholesterol count and from that would come hardening of the arteries or high blood pressure or something equally awful.  Some science I remember from a small child doesn’t exist in the public mind anymore – “drink your milk, you need milk fat and milk protein in your system at the same time. ” And that is Whole Milk.  The other kinds of milk simply lowers your health and increases the corporate profit.

But, what if ‘whole’ milk was not the culprit, but the growth hormones fed to the cows producing the milk was at fault.  The growth hormones which apparently move from cow to human and cause our bodies to react by being tricked into believing the one ounce of food we just ate was really four ounces so where we want our cows to become fatter on less so our profits would be more, what really doesn’t matter to those so trapped in that profit center is the fact that they are passing that little tricked-out and chemicalized out food to the rest of us as we get just as fat as the cows and for the same reason.  Doesn’t matter if it is ‘whole’ milk or the other kind with the fat taken out.

What if problems occur because, while the cow needs to be heavier with more pounds per cow on less food per cow to increase profits, humans need to be lighter with fewer pounds per human to be healthier.  So – what to do —

Develop,  to address this problem –  a very large health industry to compensate for the health and wellness problems caused humans by this and other such food developments.  And so it should be and so it is.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

You should get the message by now so do your research and you will be appalled at what you find.  Some have already discovered much of this and adjusted their lifestyle and diets accordingly, but not even close to a majority of us.

Food has been turned into a political topic to maintain its outlandish growth into the nether regions, those where you can legitimately ask if this is really food when it is mostly chemicals and instead of working together for the health of all we are arguing pro and con totally ignoring reality and facts in our arguments – especially the most popular ones.  Listening to the arguments one would think some of us are not human, but our bodies have some other kind of existence.

The real culprit comes into play in our everyday lives and how we have incorporated meals into this growingly outlandish lifestyle.  Out of the food industry has come the processed food industry and the fast food industry – all detrimental to our health.

Once upon a time, meals were a family community event.  Well, that’s gone by the board.  Meals are now a catch when you can thing and mostly made up of the fast foods and/or the processed foods found everywhere.

And in-between those very unsatisfying fast food meals are the fast food and sugar or salt loaded snacks.  Today, however, it is increasingly salt and sugar in the same food product because it was recently found that combining the two makes for a quicker and more substantial addiction.  Hungry between meals?  There are thousands of snacks you can pick up to get from one “meal” to the next – competing for the title of “I can damage this body quicker than you can”.

I could go into other food groups in addition to milk and flour, but you have to do something!  So I will leave that to those interested.

Alternatives?  What did our ancestors do!

Soup:  Was a ‘go to’ dish.  Not the soup one makes with individual ingredients like pumpkin soup or butternut squash soup or, etc.  But the soup, kept on the back of the stove, constantly hot so if anyone was hungry between meals you went for a bowl of soup.  You simply found a soup bowl, ladled out as much as you felt you wanted to eat and enjoyed a very filling, satisfying and nutrient rich ‘snack’ that kept you satiated between meals and did not add extra pounds or lower your immune system making you susceptible to whatever came along.  A side benefit from this ‘family soup pot’ was the fact that if company dropped by unexpectedly you had something very lovely and elegant to serve them and in an instant.  Set the table, ladle out the soup and enjoy your visitors.

Everything was put into that soup.  Vegetables left over – instead of letting them spoil they were cut up and put into the soup.  Meat-turkey-chicken-venison, whatever,  left over from some dish or other or was not being used as quickly in another dish as expected because time to use it had run out – that was added to the soup.  It was constantly adjusted with different spices to make it something really special, very filling and incredibly nutritious to keep you in good health.

Custards and puddings were constantly being made.  Left over rice went to make rice pudding as did bread that was beginning to go stale.  As was ——etc.

Breads were used even when stale.  All one had to do was to pass the bread under the faucet to wet it a bit and then put it in the oven to heat.  The result was bread that tasted as though it was freshly baked and just out of the oven.  Today, we throw away stale bread and rice and other grains instead of reusing them and keeping them in the refrigerator for their next use – that is, those of us who still eat such things.  Or we keep them in the refrigerator, expecting to use them, but once we finally remember them when going through the refrigerator, we find them full of mold.

Cakes were baked from scratch.  They can be baked today and just as quickly as those from the box – tasting far better and with more nutrition.  The boxed cakes give you nothing.  The freshly baked cakes are a dream.  For a recipe – try the 1-2-3-4 cake.  Easy recipe to remember.  With a mixer it takes less than 15 minutes to put together ready for baking.  Make enough for more than one cake – use the stale left overs to make custards more interesting.

So many recipes are available for quick and nutritious foods – made from scratch.  But even our cookbooks have been compromised.  When I see one which says take a can of…… out it goes in the trash.

Looking for the old cookbooks is difficult because they have been so cast aside.  I find mostly the file boxes in which someone has filed recipes they had from grandparents, aunts, uncles, old friends who brought food stuff for the sick and shut in, including the recipe they used to create the dish they brought.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore – can’t when you’ve stopped at a quick food store to pick up something on the fly.

We could go into the cosmetics industry, the environment, and more – but the clouds start to form and those with vested interests become interested in us and we like to travel under the radar.

Life can be really simple because that even goes to how you clean your house and the substances you use with which you clean.  Our mantra is simple – don’t use anything to clean with that you would not eat.  Well, not as a snack, but you get the message.  And don’t put anything on your skin you would not put in your stomach.  It winds up in your bloodstream in seconds.

All of that marketing and advertising on which we have been raised is hard to undo and get out of our minds.  We have given top priority and attention to what which is put out for the purposes of selling a product – the mythical world – rather than anything factual about that product.  And far too often, that which our family and older friends have tried to teach us gets thrown out with the dirty wash water.

Our conditioning is almost complete – except for the cracks in the wall that a few have been trying to widen to let back in the flood of information that has to be kept out if our current – modern – lifestyle is to be kept and built upon.  That lifestyle is a building built on sand.  What you need for yourselves and your family is a building with a strong foundation.  The story of the three pigs comes to mind.  Each built a house on something different and the storms came or was it the fox who huffed and puffed and blew all of the pigs houses down except the one who built on that solid foundation.

The same goes for all of us as we build our lives and try to pass along the lessons we’ve learned to our children.  Hopefully, something happens which gets them to listen.  I’ve given up on that and have written many notes for them to read after I die.  That isn’t a sure thing either – because most of your belongings are given away or thrown away after death so some other way has to be found.  Libraries were one way, but the internet has sounded their death knell – so the search goes on.

In the meantime, I realize this topic needs a book not an article so let me stop here and leave the rest of this up to you.  Hopefully, you will walk the path that puts you in good health and those around you in a wonderfully supportive environment.

The one great discovery I’ve had is that walking that path gets rid of simple things like a cold.  We haven’t had colds in over five years.  They are not normal, as we have come to accept, but an indication that something in your life and in the lives of your family members who come down with colds and other such temporary illnesses has a cause that can be eradicated if you change your lifestyle.

All of these such illnesses were unheard of two generations ago.  The movement to build a huge and lucrative health industry, which depends upon regular outbreaks of bad health, has grown very quickly.  Such outbreaks are necessary for that industry  to grow, expand, and constantly see increased profits. New viruses and other infectious agents have to multiply and get stronger for the health industry to continue on its upward path and we have not disappointed.

It is not an industry that is working to put itself out of business by helping the populace in its move towards better health.  When we notice that hospitals have become profit centers with stock holders and all the other trappings which require regular profits and substantial increases in profit each quarter and year over year, we realize our health is being preyed on directly as is our food supply indirectly.

Your feedback and/or new information is always appreciated.

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Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

TRUMP – An Even Newer Post

Saturday, December 17th, 2016

by: Marceline Donaldson, December, 2016

There are some things that people are afraid to say about Trump.  Because of the way Trump is moving fast towards his goal of heading a racist, sexist, totally compliant society, we need to be aware of what is in his environment:

It is clear that some people believe Trump is a part of the mafia.  If you look around, that is beginning to leak out. The tweets which talk about his purchases from the Genovese family for his businesses and more say to me – who buys from a crime family?  Do they have to belong?  Are the prices cheaper?  The quality better? Or is this patronizing family?  Trump tweets with regularity, but have you seen Kurt Eichenwald’s tweets?

“Kurt Eichenwald ✔@kurteichenwald
67. Trump opted out of using steel on many buildings, instead purchasing concrete from businesses controlled by Genovese crime family.
4:27 PM – 7 Nov 2016”

There have been conjectures about Trump being “the Don” Trump, but the media has totally ignored that.  There have also been conjectures that Trump’s real mission is to organize a world-wide mafia into a loose organization with all groups represented – the Italian Mafia, the Russian Mafia, the Eastern European Mafia, etc.  That could have been researched by some enterprising media person, but it was left totally alone.  The question about the possible Mafia background of someone running for President of these United States is an important question which needs to be answered soonest.

Eichenwalds tweets are from his research into Trump’s businesses.  He has been tweeting for quite some time, have we been listening?  To see this story unfold is amazing.  This is who we elected President?

In addiiton, only now is it coming to the fore in ways that America is beginning to see and take seriously, Trump’s involvement with Russia and Russian involvement with the American Presidential election trying to get Trump elected and Hillary pushed to the side.  It is clear that was a very important and effective dynamic in this past election and will have repercussions into the future.

In addition, we have not only elected someone who appealed to Putin to hack his opponents emails and other requests, we have also elected someone commonly called a bully.

To see the bullying side of Trump – look at his “Thank You” rallies.  I’ve seen threats before, but this is a huge threat to the Electoral College.  If you don’t vote Trump in – he is ready to send his people on a rampage and his rallies are making sure he is in a position, at the time of the vote, to do just that.  And let us not blame Trump.  Standing next to him and participating as an equal in all of this is his Vice President-elect Pence.

In addition, we have elected a man who is sexually abusive and has several women accusing him of serious sexual abuse.  Our response? Disbelief.  Our sexism does not allow us to take that seriously as being any kind of character flaw which will negatively affect these United States for generations to come.

The people Donald Trump has called to Trump Tower – people who were against him and said horrible things about him and called on others to not support him – Trump is now parading in front of the press so the American people can see the two faces of their politicians and their leaders.  He has humiliated Mitt Romney – Silicon Valley supporters of Hillary Clinton using Peter Thiel to organize that “show and eat-humble-pie meeting”. Thiel is and has been a Trump supporter almost from the beginning.  What is also amazing about that is the rumor that Peter Thiel is gay – isn’t one of Trump’s planks one against such people and against the LGBT Community as being less than?  So is this how Peter Thiel works out his own self-hatred? It is an American Tragedy.

We have an American President-elect who is skilled at bringing out the worst in people as he moves along with his divide and conquer way of life.  Satan is strolling across America having one incredible party after another and look who is being invited.

One recent rally called on people in attendance to applaud for the African Americans who didn’t vote.  That was a show and tell lesson on how he is going to turn America against its own and increase the level of racism without being upfront about it.  He led that group of people into a not so subtle hate rally without their even realizing they were participants in such a time.  After that rally he was able to call for that bowl of water and wash his hands claiming innocence – he wasn’t being racist, he was being supportive of Blacks.  He didn’t do it, they did it to themselves.

Divide and Conquer is still serving Trump very well.  When he finishes, the world and practically everyone in it will be at odds with each other and in the chaos, Trump will win and walk calmly into a huge increase of wealth and power.

His greatest achievement has been to have some 37% of the Republican Party preferring Putin to Obama.  They see him as a benevolent ruler who they admire. They are blinded to the extreme racism of that preference.  The one the world calls a “butcher” – and who shares the blame for what is happening in Aleppo, 37% of the Republican Party calls a great ruler.

Having recently left the Republican Party to stand with the Independents,  it has been quite a time for me to see this.  Some things do come together.  When I left, projected out of the Party, finally, by Donald Trump’s nomination, there was no one left in the Republican Party who I knew as a young person just beginning to vote – to get involved – following a family tradition.  A racial tradition also because years ago most Blacks were Republicans.  Lincoln freed the slave and Blacks are nothing if not loyal.  That has changed and all of those who were very much a part of that Grand Ole Party have run screaming out of the Republican Party as they witnessed more and more of its current members putting on their white sheets and looking in the mirror to make sure their tall white pointy hats were sitting at just the right angle.

I couldn’t believe the Party I knew – through the Rockefeller Republican years and more – was not going to move back to its roots.  But it has moved so far. those roots have been killed off and can’t even be used to fertilize the ground around it anymore.  How time changes all of us.

At the end, everyone I met in this new Republican Party had come, fairly recently, from the Democratic Party, which has been throwing out and alienating its more conservative members for at least a generation.

When I signed up as a Republican, the Democrats were the racists.  If you were a Democrat and Black and tried to vote you were in serious trouble.  When the Democratic Conventions were held it was – no Blacks allowed – especially none with a seat at the Conventions.  Fannie Lou Hamer and others changed that and the Democratic Party has been changing ever since.  It was the Party of Movements moved from recruiting its members from the KKK movement and the White Nationalist Movement to recruiting its members from the Black Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Groups and now those convened about the environment and more.

What an amazing life I have lived.  What spectacular events God has allowed me to witness.  With that comes a wisdom I had no idea would accrue.

In all of this I feel most pain and sympathy for the many friends and acquaintances I have met, worked and played with over the years who lived a very circumspect life.  They made decisions taking care that they carefully preserved themselves from getting out there – from taking stands for that which they believed, if that was not sanctioned by their peers and society – from supporting the less fortunate if they were not those currently on the “in” list – from ever being there for those oppressed, because that kept them and theirs in power.  They would get involved if society showed how to do that in an ‘acceptable’ way.  That ‘acceptable way’ was always one which would give one a chance to ‘show boat’, but preserve one from making basic change.  I didn’t and still don’t understand why.

I used to wonder what was wrong with me that I didn’t do the same?  Why did I jeopardize a career to take a stand for minorities and women who were being discriminated against at the Pillsbury Company when the only women in management were White and were either over the kitchen or secretarial pool?  Why did I take on the role of organizing  – as a member of NOW and with the National Urban League – a boycott against General Mills because of the way they advertised and sold all of their products to women and minorities but had none above a management level in their company – as a member of the NOW National Board, why did I run for President on a platform which was incredibly unpopular holding up a mirror and asking why the organization was so determined to be so White relegating Black Women to support roles and claim to be fighting for equality.

Even as a young child – 9 years old, why did I go from door to door in my New Orleans neighborhood asking my neighbors to call the telephone company and disconnect their telephones because young Black Women could not be hired as telephone operators.  Why did I cause my grandfather grief when I demanded that he lead a charge opening membership in his beloved Prince Hall Masons to everyone and get rid of the women’s group, which was clearly an appendage to the main male group making that membership equal to all, especially when membership in that group gave a positive push to one’s vocational movements?  I could go on, but it gets worse.

Today, as I look at Donald Trump and what he is about – I see someone who is the personification of a human being who has spent his life chasing the economic/ financial/power in a society.  He seems to think achieving all of that is the ultimate and he has spent his life engaged in that kind of struggle.  His ethics, character, – his life has been formed out of that struggle for all things temporal.  All things that die horrible deaths.

He has reached the ultimate spot in this country.  The honey-pot of power from which he can extract money, power, position beyond his wildest dreams.  But he is such a pathetic figure.  He has learned to manipulate, to twist, to humiliate his detractors, to squeeze everything he can squeeze from those struggling around and beneath him.  He has used women and other minorities to puff himself up and get whatever good feelings he could get from creating an identity as the ultimate White Male Power Hungry Potentate.  And he is the most humiliated, despised, friendless person I have ever seen.   You look at him and it is painful to see the emotions he is experiencing in the middle of what could have been his finest hour.

His ancestors – those who have brought him to this place and this time – are all gathered around him to bask in his glory – hoping and praying to share a bit of warmth from his life.  They, who helped to create him, are surrounded by storm clouds, and hurricanes, and freezing ice falling all around – and they have no warmth anyplace.  They have no protection from the horribleness of their environment – from where they live for an eternity, yet they are doing their best to support Donald Trump because their need and hope is that his life will bring some warmth to their afterlives.  Given the frigid cold in which Trump lives and has chosen,   I don’t think I have ever seen anything so sorrowful.

You can manipulate, humiliate, destroy, and all the rest for a lifetime.  But if you have not lived life to accumulate love, wisdom, friends, ancestors in warm wonderful places, what has your life been about?  You pay for your sins and you receive for your goodness – there is no way for us to change that.

Given all that I have seen in life, for some of us the best is yet to come.  For the Donald Trump’s of the world, the excruciating future and eternity is also yet to come and from the way it looks, I am content.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

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37,456 PEOPLE

Thursday, December 1st, 2016

The Number of People

who read Bettina Network’s Blog

in November, 2016

was 37,456.

Starting this month you are able to sign up to have Bettina Network’s Blog delivered to your email box whenever a new Blog is posted.

Up until now. you had to go to the Blog to read the newest one and you didn’t always know when a new blog was posted.

Just sign up using the green form which comes up on the page about 9 seconds after you start reading.  When the page becomes green, that is your sign to join a truly great group of people who are reading what Bettina Network’s Lifestyle Community has to say.

If you are a member of that community you are able to have your blogs posted.  Just send what you want to say to bettinanetwork@comcast.net and we will post your blog – maybe editing a bit, if that is necessary – and maybe having a bit of conversation with you before posting. if that is necessary.  You can send pictures, drawings, whatever, to include with your blog.

The topic is up to you.  ACADEMIC PAPERS – because we have a very large academic readership; FUN QUOTES; with the advent of Donald Trump the interest in politics has zoomed up so feel free to send us POLITICAL ARTICLES, COMMENTS< and you can even tell us how to vote – not that we will take your advice, but its worth a try.

While we are using the blog structure, this is really becoming a newsletter and on its way to becoming a newspaper – written by people in the community who want what they have to say circulated to others.  If you have a response to anything, please feel free to send that via email.  We do not have the comments section of the blog open to anyone who want to comment so you will have to email your response as an article.  This is a CURATED BLOG.

COMMENTARY on whatever; RECIPE’s for your favorite foods; “MEMU’s you have experienced which sent you to heaven; CONSPIRACY THEORIES; ART – CRAFTS – MUSIC Videos that you have created; In other words – no end to the possibilities.

And we hope the end result is of interest to all of our readers.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

TRUMP: An Analysis

Monday, November 14th, 2016

11/14/2016

We have all had quite a week.  We put out two petitions asking you to sign them.  The blog before this one has the URL which you can copy and put into your address line to get the petitions.  We also put out a petition through Groundswell.  These petitions ask that a Special Prosecutor be appointed to investigate this Presidential election.  Something that is as big a shock to the entire country as the result of this presidential election, by definition, is flawed.

All of these folks can’t have been wrong in their expectations.  We also received several communications with information which the sender asked we give to the Special Prosecutor.  We would like to receive that information, but we also strongly suggest you send any information you have to President Obama and U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  I doubt that either one is interested in naming a Special Prosecutor, but given the involvement of the FBI and its head Comey in moving this election in Trump’s direction with Comey or one of his underlings, apparently having given a heads-up to the Trump Campaign that information hurtful to Clinton and helpful to Trump was going to be released shortly before the election so the Clinton Campaign would not have time to react, this says such a Special Prosecutor needs to be named and soonest.  It is going to take a lot of pressure put on both Obama and Lynch to name such a Special Prosecutor.

We were asked to give an analysis of what we think happened.  We have our own resident seer who refuses, so after many conversations, this is a group effort as we try to fathom what happened.

What seems to be clear to us is that Donald Trump played the entire country.  We are not a country accustomed to the kind of lying, cheating and stealing that happened during this campaign.  How did he do it?  By divide and conquer.  A method of management which is as old as scripture. As old as the Scriptures held sacred by all religions.  What Trump did is what Scripture from many religions seems to have been written to prevent and/or warn its adherents against falling into this particular trap of Satan.  It is a way of control and conquer as old as humanity itself.  Power, greed, jealousy are some of the fuel which powers this management method.

To carry out a divide and conquer strategy on the scale it was carried out by Donald Trump and his campaign, to us, is the essence of evil.  It is one thing to engage in hypocrisy and to bend the truth for some small gains.  It is quite another to carry out this kind of grand scheme which is always attributed to whoever the evil one is in different religious bodies.

The race haters were called up and given a kind of acknowledgment, exposure and acceptance that they have never experienced before.  They reveled in all of the attention and the possibility that their way of life would become the American way of life.  At last, they would have their moment in the sun.

The civil rights fighters and those who have spent their lives trying to work within the system to bring America closer to achieving the dream of equality as they tried for generations to make real the promise written in the statue of liberty – ‘bring me your tired,………  They were also played by Trump and his campaign.

Besides the divide and conquer, we believe Trump worked through – or rather Vladimir Putin worked through Trump and his forces to help bring about the downfall of America – or at least to mitigate its power.  Both Trump and Putin were quite successful. Let’s not forget China as we bring together the foreign powers that helped the Trump victory become real.  When Trump talked to the president of China as he called to congratulate Trump, the President of China was talking to a man who promised the American public he would bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States.  True Trump made a few negative comments about China during his campaign, but what China saw was a Trump who bought his  steel from them in great quantities and whose daughter, Ivanka, has her clothes line made in the sweat shops of China.

That was easy to discover.  What is not so easy to discover is why the race haters and those who were wishful about bringing back a Colonial past were so easily manipulated by Trump and his group into thinking that a man, who gave his business to China and other countries, when that was his choice, would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.  This defies all logic.   A man who refused to give his tax returns to the American Public so they could see what was his involvements.  Where did that trust come from which convinced them that this man could be trusted when he said he was going to bring back to America jobs that had been outsourced to China and other countries?  What was it about this man that allowed the Evangelicals and other supposedly strong Christian to suspend their faith and belief to put it all in Trump.  This was a man who totally fit the description of those Jesus threw out of the Temple, whose money tables were overturned, and in the end when the sheep and the goats were line up on their way to eternity – his eternity set-up was called hell for an eternity.

With the United States being on the cusp of those considered ‘Minority” now becoming the “Majority”, all of those middle to upper middle-class folks (male and female), whose identity is fixed in the way this country is and the way it uses racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, anti-semitism, anti-everything else except Northern European, to maintain their unearned identity, the fear of that event seems to be what motivated John and Jane Q Public who don’t want to be equal.  Why be equal when you have been “better than” for generations.

Maintaining their identity as “better than” is something they were born into, accepted, and were as skilled as Alcoholics in denial and finding excuses and pseudo reasons as to why things should not change.  Or better still, why they are changing, but it has to be a very gradual to no movement change.

All of this was sitting out there and Trump wrapped it all up in his campaign.

Lots going on in this election.

Trump played all of those forces and did it beautifully.  He weakened America while preaching the gospel of “Make America Great Again”.  Weakened America to the point of moving into the future with America being a country which would trail Russia and China in strength.  Many in these United States have been so wrapped up in fighting each other, no one was looking at this movement which was actually making the 1% stronger and everyone else weaker and poorer. That includes the race haters and those who have dreams of being on top again – the kind of on top countries were when Colonialism was the currency of the day.  Seeing America as an empire and them moving into the upper-classes is a dream that moved many people into the Trump camp.

What will Trump’s movement produce?  The serious reduction in regulation.  The regulators will be lining up at the unemployment office by the dozens.  The rich can’t get much richer without reducing the Regulation that has been set in place.  Think of what will happen when they cancel Dodd.

Serious reduction in health care to the point of having many millions of people unable to get health care or needing to go back to losing everything they have acquired if they are hit with a serious illness is what lies behind the canceling of Obamacare.  If folks have to struggle with serious illness without hospital or doctor care in their families, they won’t be much interested in what Trump and his colleagues are doing.

Racism, etc. is not an economically viable way to run a country.  One reaches the point the United States is now reaching where super large businesses will take over and governments will be symbolic and do things which are adjuncts to what will be sanctioned by the state religion.  Evangelism turns into State Churches.

White Churches, with a sprinkling of minorities will gradually change until they all have flags in the sanctuaries and they are clearly appendages of the state.  The state officials will become awesomely like priests, ordained by god.

The mastermind behind all of this is Donald Trump.  Only he doesn’t realize that already he is being moved aside.  He isn’t even inaugurated yet and his time of being relevant and necessary has already passed.  He can keep his golden palace for a little while, but eventually even that will be gone.

If he had been a younger man he would not have been entrusted with such a ‘revolution’.  But an old man – with an extremely fragile ego – and something wrong with his sexual functioning that he needs to constantly build his sexual prowess up with his talk and womanizing and more was an ideal foil around which to bring about this major growth of the 1%.

What is most amazing is that those who worked for and voted for Trump to become President with the hope and belief that he would make their condition better are soon going to discover he is making the 1% better, which means – by definition – the rest of us are going down the slide to a much lower economic place, because the 1% needs automaton workers, not those moving on up.

Surrounding himself with men who are in the same place as he is and women who see themselves as only having worth as sex objects, Trump has gathered around him a group that cannot take over and do a great job with the ship of state.  By the time they have paid attention to their fragile egos and to their images, there is nothing else left to do the work of the state.

Moving downscale and marrying women who are steps beneath the last wife – both younger, which means more child like with less experience and less ability to function as an equal with no other redeeming education, experience or anything else not dependent upon Trump and those like him you have the 40% plus who voted for Trump and are going to be worthless except as consumers.  They will be shortly cast aside into the pit with the rest of us, working to maintain the very shallow and artificial lifestyle of the 1% and where is the redemption.

Is this the point at which we realize that we have all been working to set the stage for the Second Coming?

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

 

Madeleines – A Delicately Fabulous Tea Cookie

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

madeleineWe bake Madeleines every day, yet by the end of the day they are gone!

It is one of those light delicacies that won’t let you have just one.  And they stay in memory for long after they have been eaten.

They are the tea cakes which give meaning to the reference to ‘delicacies’.

They draw you back to that lovely plate for more until you simply have to leave the area.

AND, they are super easy and quick to make.

Within one-half hour, from start to taking them out of the oven,  you should have about 36 of these beauties.

They must, however, be made of the finest organic ingredients you can find – which is the secret to their success.

INGREDIENTS    and    PROCESS

Turn on your oven and set the temperature to 350 degrees

In the bowl of an electric mixer put

three eggs

one tablespoon organic vanilla syrup (or organic vanilla)

2/3 cup organic turbinado sugar 

start the mixer and let these ingredients whirl until they are light and fluffy

meanwhile, melt one stick organic butter (salted or unsalted – your choice)

In another bowl put the following

One cup organic whole wheat flour

One tablespoon organic corn starch

One teaspoon baking powder

a touch of himalayan salt

Mix these together with a wire whisk until they are well mixed, light and fluffy

Add the melted butter to the egg mixture and let the electric mixer whirl for a few seconds

Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture – mixing by hand because at this point you have to be careful not to over mix the ingredients and using the mixer might just do that.  Once you have a feel for this mixture you can use the electric mixer, if you so choose.

Have on hand at least two Madeleine tins – no aluminum please!

No “non-stick” pans

simple, traditional, tin,  Madeleine pans buttered properly will not stick

Preferably, using a brush, with a bit of melted butter, brush the Madeleine tins with the melted butter – brushing the areas around the indented parts as well.

Do not stint on the butter as you “butter” your tins – the secret to nonsticking cakes

Put the Madeleine mixture in the tine – we use 1/2 tablespoon for each tin.

That might seem like a very little bit, but these are very little bit cakes.

If the mixture in each indentation does not quite come up to the edge you are in good shape because these cakes will rise and you don’t want them to rise above the edge – that takes away from the look of these beautiful cakes.

Enjoy:  You can add a small dollop of homemade marshmallows to one of the cakes and put two together for a different treat.  Or you can do the same with jelly or preserves or anything else you can think of.  You can add chocolate chips or shredded coconut, etc. to the mix just before spooning out into the Madeleine pans.  But I think you will find these perfect just as they are.  Our only vice is putting two tablespoons of organic syrup into the mix because that intensifies the taste that makes these so special.  It is really a way to mainstream vanilla flavoring.

We keep them on a cake plate on the kitchen counter and they last about three minutes.

Proust isn’t the only one who will go down in history as having sung the praises of these fantastic little cakes.  You will too!

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

The TRUMP TICKET Exposed!

Wednesday, October 5th, 2016

copyright Bettina Network, inc. 2016

The Vice Presidential debates for the 2016 campaign for the Presidency of the United States happened last night.

They laid bare the American soul.

The candidate for president – Donald Trump – has shown himself to be unstable, irresponsible, saying one thing today and another tomorrow and basically someone who looks as though he is on a cocaine high.  He has also shown himself to be a liar.  One who lies to manipulate and win.

The candidate for vice president – Mike Pence – has shown himself to be the sociopath on the ticket.  A cool, calm, collected, elegant liar who is totally unaffected by his lies because a sociopath is who he is at his core.  He can lie and justify the lies of those around him without batting an eye – without his eyelids twitching – without any other physical sign showing that his body can’t stand the lying.  So you know that Mike Pence, the sociopath is an accurate comment.

This election has ‘outed’ all of the problem areas in the American populace; American history; American economics, etc.

Up until now, all of these things were pretty much hidden, with code words used, when it was necessary to talk about some of our problems without really being upfront and truthful.  And so, the problems have continued and grown worse.  We, however, have gotten better at our denials and embroidery and all the others ways we have developed to make a lie look like the truth and to make the denial of a citizens rights look as though that person is hyper-sensitive, complaining unnecessarily, and it is all their fault.  That is certainly some of what we have used to get into and continue slavery for a few hundred years; to maintain Jim Crow for a hundred or more years after that; and to force some of the citizens of the United States to use all of their resources, missed opportunities; and more to fight the racism which is constantly tearing them, their families, their friends apart.  That is how sociopath as a disease runs all through this American society.  That is certainly why we now have a Donald Trump candidacy with a Mike Pence Vice Presidial candidate and almost half the country backing their candidacy.  This election is making a major statement about the American character and it is not pretty.

To listen to the media comment on the debate,  one is struck that as Americans we all have different degrees of sociopath.

Mike Pence responded to questions about what Donald Trump has said in the past by denying everything negative.  He could do that because the media agreed to not fact check this debate.  That was a plus for and promotion of the Donald Trump candidacy.  Excuse it however you want to, that is a fact.  It was clear when the announcement was made that this debate would not be fact checked the media was opening the door for lies, distortions, and more.  And the candidate did not disappoint.

Mostly the talk has been about the cool, composed style of Mike Pence and how Tim Paine lost so many points because he was too aggressive, emotional and more. Tim Paine lost points with the media and many of its followers because he responded to a pack of lies the way most people respond to such.  Certainly not with denial and more lies on top of the lies with which one is confronted.

I am not sure I could have kept my cool if I were debating someone who was lying consistently and nothing was stopping him.  To respond in the cool composed manner the media expected of Tim Kaine would have said Kaine was bordering on the sociopath.  His upset, emotional and sometimes overly aggressive way of responding is normally how someone responds to being faced with a barrage of lies at an important moment with millions of people listening.  That must be an incredibly frustrating time.  To act any other way would be to project an emotional lie.

And why do we have folks complimenting Mike Pence for his “style” and demeanor and to give him excuses for the lies he told such as – he must not listen to the coverage given his running mate; or, he probably has immune himself to Trump’s lies and can deny all that he denied because he hasn’t heard Trump say these things – and on and on and on.

But Mike Pence prepared for this debate and one way of preparing is to go over the issues and your tickets response to the issues.  Given that, his responses to say Trump didn’t say that or to attempt to turn something Trump did say into something else in that cool way he had, these are the actions of a long terms strong sociopath.

If you didn’t recognize that – check yourself.

If you did, then you also recognized that the society in which we live is so wrapped up in its own form of sociopath that it didn’t see anything wrong with Mike Pence’s performance.

To deny the racism in this society is to lie about what you know and what your ancestors knew was true.

To deny the sexism in this society is to lie about what you know and what your ancestors knew was true.

To allow homelessness with human beings sleeping on the streets; having no jobs; no care of any kind; and being treated by many in the most rejecting, demeaning and ugly way and to deny that you know this about yourself and others and that you know this is what your society is about is a form of sociopath.

To work in a corporation and to see how it is destroying human life – the environment – plus other kinds of ugly and evil things and not address this while denying the existence of what you see on a day to day basis is a form of sociopath.

I could go through the entire list, but you get the message.

So, when a Mike Pence comes on television and lies the way he lied on Tuesday evening and to have the media saying he “won” the debate for various reasons says we have a long ways to go to reach some kind of caring humanity.  We are stuck in a lying, self-justifying, sinful place which we then justify, substitute a great style to accept the lying – its ok to lie if you do it elegantly and in an acceptable way, and more.

All corners of this society are being exposed by Donald Trump’s campaign and Tuesday evening showed us the worst.

I want to be around people who are distressed, disturbed, distraught when they are faced with lies and liars – the way Tim Paine was when he was faced with Mike Pence and his lies and denials.

I want to be around people working to make this world a better place for all of us.  Not perfect people because we only seem to reach perfection.  In actual fact we are all flawed, but working on those flaws.  To be around those with the perfect persona projected by Mike Pence on Tuesday hardens us back to the actors and others who have presented perfect images to us during their political campaigns and we bought them hook, line and sinker.  But even in the buying we knew it was a lie, we just engaged in denial to accept and promote the liars and elect them to the important posts in the land.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

WHY VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP!

Saturday, October 1st, 2016

What we all have been trying to understand is why so many people – good, kind, loving, caring people – are supporting and intend to vote for Donald Trump.

They have seen – as we all have – Trump’s negatives.  So why and where does this support come from?  We are past the racism, and sexism which has been used to explain Trump.  We are looking at and talking to the many who are 120% behind Donald Trump and nothing is coming between them and the “Don”.  How come!

His supporters have heard his lies and knew they were lies.  They’ve heard how he treats women and know that to be true.  They’ve heard about his racism and knew that also to be true.  They’ve heard all the hints about his bad temper and thin skin and have seen and heard how he will quickly and viciously insult anyone who he even thinks has insulted him.  They’ve heard the hints at the possibility of his being tied to the mafia – both within the United States and Internationally.  And they have heard and seen how all of the greats and near greats who are greatly respected in the United States are now falling all over themselves to detach themselves from being seen as even passively supporting Donald Trump.

So why are there so many still in his camp?

Much of this support is coming from people who have been lied to – cheated – who have seen their hard earned money stolen from them by those within the system in what has been made to look like ways supported by our laws.  They understand the evils of this system in which we live better than those at the top or near the top who have benefitted from the ugly ways of those who pull the strings for the money to flow from the have nots to a handful of the haves who can then step out into the spotlight looking clean, honest and working for the people.  They have lived through some financial horror stories, which most people can’t or won’t believe and which no one is fixing.  Given that, it is totally possible to overlook Trump’s negatives and hope that their lives will be better because Trump will fix it.

Let me give you a few examples – real life examples in which we have been involved.  Having a Foundation you can use it in one of many ways.  One way is to give money to be able to take a 501(c)3 deduction on your income taxes.  Or, you can give money, take the deduction – which doesn’t mean a lot to you – but you take away what you really need, which is the feeling that you have helped those in need. (But you have not had to rub elbows with those in need the “Foundation” people have been hired to do that – and even the “Foundation” people keep themselves removed from the actual recipients.)  Or, you can get involved, personally with the people your Foundation is working to help and therein lies the path to depression, frustration, disbelief, the death of your idols and the ideology with which you were raised, and for many,  your belief in the religious structures in which you function  and more.

Let me tie into the Wells Fargo mess and give you an actual example.  Put yourself into this one persons’ place and then you will see Donald Trump in a very different light.

A Disclaimer:   We are not advocating that you vote for Trump.  That vote would only make things worse, because all of this pain and suffering we have seen would be brought into the light and done without the cover under which it now functions.  Under a Donald Trump administration the front under which all of this evil operates would be stripped bare and made totally legitimate and we would then have to function seeing evil with nothing shielding us from the seriously infected swamp in which it lives.

Back to WELLS FARGO:

Why fight such a giant?  What have they done?  You’ve heard the Congressional hearings.  You’ve read in the papers how President Stumpf has been forced to give back millions to the company. Lets take a  look at the human cost to John and Jane Q. Public:

Assume you have a mortgage with Wells Fargo.

That opens you up to some incredible financial games, created by greed which has created today’s billionaires.

How?

There are many ways – this is just one.

Given your mortgage, Wells Fargo people are now able to open your finances and look in – and from what we have seen, they do just that. What do they have to gain? If they cause you financial trouble across the street, then at home, you will be subject to fees and penalties because they have set up a situation in which you stumble.  If you fall, so much the better, they have everything.  If you just stumble, that’s not so bad and that’s ok too because their fees are high.  They benefit under either scenario.

One other way you are vulnerable to them is through their Wells Fargo Shareowners Service.  A seemingly small, innocuous bureaucratic division which seemingly is quite straight forward in what it is tasked to do.  A little bureaucratic place in this great giant that you probably don’t realize exists.  A little place that interacts with and can control your assets in larger corporations whom they serve.

They are the agents – handling the stock transactions for several large corporations – like Target Stores.  So, let us assume you have a Wells Fargo mortgage and you own Target stock.  Now, lets assume that stock was purchased through Targets Direct Purchase Plan.  What a benefit.  You can send the company small amounts of money to purchase their stock.  So you establish such an account for your children and over the years accumulate Target stock by sending them just a few dollars each month.

Those few dollars add up to a few thousands of dollars and on and on it goes.

Now comes the time you need to sell that stock.  So you contact the transfer agent and ask them to send you the forms necessary for you to sell the stock.  They refuse.  You call again.  They refuse again.  And so it goes. What does that do to you?  You live your financial life assuming this is an asset you can convert to cash in a matter of days – or at least in a matter of a month at the longest, given the excessive times bureaucracies take to work.

Finally – months later – after much time spent on many telephone calls,  you get the forms.  You fill them out and spend over $20 sending the forms back to them – the original forms – via overnight mail to insure they get where they are going and so you have a record and can trace anything that might go wrong with the mail.  And then you wait – and wait – and wait.  But, nothing happens. They received the correctly filled out forms the very next day.  How do you know the forms are correctly filled out?  Because you took them to a bank and to a stock broker friend and you and the banker and the stock broker filled them out.  The banker executing a couple of the forms, as required by Wells Fargo Shareowner Services.

What happens as you wait for your money to be transferred into the account you indicated on your forms?  NOTHING!

So weeks later, you call – not Target, but Wells Fargo Shareowner Services.  Two large corporate entities tied together via this kind of transaction.  These two corporations are also tied to tens of thousands of people with small amounts of money they have accumulated over years of sending their bits and pieces of money to purchase Target stock. There are other large corporate entities so tied together.  Without knowing this you would not connect something happening to you through Target, inc. with Wells Fargo.

An interesting fact, but nothing that bothers you at the time – checking out Target to decide whether to continue investing in them at a later date you discover there is no way to contact their Executive Offices.  You don’t need to, but it is curious that their CEO is totally enclosed and cut off from any and all people except those close to him.  No telephone, no email, no way for the public to reach them. And this is a publicly owned corporation?  So you put that aside for later review.

What happens with the stock you are trying to sell?  The Wells Fargo Shareowner Services Company knows nothing about you, nor the forms you sent to them, and you have to hold on the telephone for over 45 minutes and insist and prove you sent forms to them while they search for these forms they claim to have “LOST”?

Finally, when you produce your proof of mailing, they find the forms and assure you the stock will be sold and you will be sent the money.

And then?  You get a telephone call from someone else from Wells Fargo Shareowner Services days later to say your forms are being sent back to you because they are not filled out correctly.  You ask why?  The person on the telephone does not know.  You hold on the phone and when someone finally comes back – they don’t know either.

So you get the forms back – and your finances are becoming a mess because you were selling the stock for a reason – you need the money. You have a business to expand.  You have projects you have started that need more funding. You have people you have promised to help who need the help now!

And then the fun begins.  For months nothing happens and you go round and round – sending letters, making telephone calls, getting nothing.  And your money is still tied up in Target stock – which you cannot use as money – it is just, at this point, worthless. You can’t even sell the stock through another stock broker because you don’t have the stock certificates – Wells Fargo Shareowner Services holds those and won’t send them to you either.

An interesting side note – Target, inc. comes from Dayton-Hudson, a Minneapolis based corporation.  Back in the day, Dayton-Hudson was known to be part of an interlocking directorate with influence and no inhibitions on using that influence to manipulate individuals – among other possibilities.

And remember – back a few paragraphs – your mortgage is being held by Wells Fargo.  So, is this accidental with one having nothing to do with the other or is something else operating here!

And then your door bell rings.  It is a Chinese Real Estate Agent who is offering to buy your property, claims she understands that you need the money and she has a client who is willing to pay cash – at half the value of the property, in a hot real estate market, where half leaves you a few million dollars short of the real value of the property, but here is the next step in this evil and greed which strips people of everything financially in the end.  It is nothing you could conceive in a country which touts itself as good and other countries as evil or at best as not so good.

You turn down the real estate agent – and at first you are mystified as to why she comes to your door with such an outlandish offer.  You don’t have financial problems so what is she talking about!  The door is slammed with some anger because it is dawning on you that  there is a connection between this and what is going on with Target, Inc. and Wells Fargo.

This story has throw backs to Pontius Pilate all throughout.  He called for the bowl of water to wash his hands and symbolically wash away his guilt at what will be the unbelievably brutal killing of Jesus.  This story is a modern, institutional adaptation of that old, old story which many in this society are experiencing.  The symbols of the bowl of water with rag and soap have changed to new 21st century symbols of the same thing.

The realtor reappears in a few weeks.  This time, after you have called and written to Wells Fargo Shareowner Services a lot – gotten angry – done lots to get your stock sold so you can move on with your financial life..  None of which was effective, even almost two years later.  The Wells Fargo Shareowner Services door is solidly closed.  Their refusal to sell your stock is clearly a refusal and violates everything on which this society is built.  Wall Street could not function without the guarantee that you could convert your stock into cash within days.  So they are violating the very foundation of our economic system and with impunity.  Even contacting the SEC hasn’t helped.

You do get one foot in the door – so you think.  Wells Fargo has appointed someone to investigate this stock problem.  Who?  Someone from their mortgage department.  And who holds your mortgage?  Wells Fargo!

It doesn’t dawn on you what that means.  Your assumption is that this is the company process and the person appointed is probably someone they have trained and designated to head such investigations.  Dumb dumb – she is with the mortgage department.  What you discover in the process is that she does not have access to the people she needs to talk to, nor the records she needs to access to do an investigation.  So why was she chosen to head this investigation?  You gave her the right to access your records with Wells Fargo Shareowner Services Company in a three way telephone call with someone from Wells Fargo Shareowner Services Department, but months later you are told that was only for that particular telephone conversation.  When the three of you ended that telephone call,  so did that sham of an investigation.  Interestingly, you were not told that during the conversation – a conversation which was the initiation of the investigation.  In fact, you were led to believe the opposite – very specifically, that she would continue the investigation and get back to you with her findings.

After this “investigation” came to an end with no results and the mortgage person told you she was in mortgages and had no access to other departments – and you asked why was she assigned to head this “investigation” given those circumstances and you didn’t get a straight answer you realize you have been played. Played to your detriment and the company’s need to buy time to make sure you were becoming more and more financially destabilized.

And then comes the real estate agent again.  This time with an elderly Chinese gentleman to assure you there is a “buyer” who is willing to pay cash.  And, oh by the way, you are really too old to be saddled with owning such a large house.  And, oh by the way, we are willing to pay you half of what the house is worth.  And oh, by the way, you should be thrilled because that will allow you a very comfortable old age – you won’t have to work anymore. And for reasons that made no sense – her last ‘oh, by the way’ was did you get out for a walk today, you need to do that, you know.  With my mouth hanging open wide enough for bugs to fly in from the shock of this – she went on to say they understand we were having troubles with our mortgage and they came to help.  And where did they get this information – you ask?  And they answered – Wells Fargo!  So you throw them off your porch – because you were astute enough not to let them into your house.  And you thank God you were raised to control your anger and not revert to the most primitive kind of violence because this certainly is the point at which that would have happened if your family had not been so tenacious about raising someone who is -on the surface, at least – non-violent.

So the game continues.

Next up – Herb Chambers Automobile Sales and Honda Financial Services.

Because you have been put into this cash flow problem – you have to move assets around to have enough to make up the short fall from the money you expected from selling stock you legitimately own and have been assured, from all the federal statues, the traditions, the law which set in place the Securities and Exchange Commission,  that you would be able to sell and settle in four business days.  This is now over one and a half years later and even with constant telephone calls, letters, emails, the stock has not been sold.

In the process, your car note falls behind by 52 days because you were foolish enough to continue to expect the stock to be sold so you did not transfer assets needed to get all the things done you planned to do before this mess started.  You pay the car note by wiring money into the bank account of the Honda Financial Services Corporation and go about your business.  You have, after all, transferred the assets you need.  You will be fine for months – although your business will not have the money it needs to grow according to the plans you set for it.  You will have to take a little from here and there to make up for the personal financial problems you would have otherwise.  So you do that.

And  behold, arriving at your door is this huge truck to repossess your car.  Surely they are mistaken.  You owe nothing and the total balance due  on the car note is very miniscule.  Well, therein lies the problem.  If it were a huge car note owing – no problem and no one would bother you.  You would have been charged a $5 late fee, which you would pay happily because you know that was owed, but instead, here comes this truck to take away a car on which you have no monies overdue.

The truck driver is not fazed and does nothing because you have threatened him with theft, criminal trespass, fraud and a whole lot more.  So he steps away and waits for his bosses to tell him what to do.  He is clear that he is not going to risk being arrested.

As all of this happens you reflect back on a couple people you worked with in the past to help them save their cars from such a problem.  The total pictures of what they were going through was lost on you because you still had some trust in the system and how it worked.  The greed had not surfaced for you in all of its brilliant magnificence.  Even as you see this truck trying to take your car, the greed intrinsic in this still has not manifest itself.  This just seems like a bureaucratic mistake.

As this all plays out for you, the realization hits that the people you tried to help and who lost their cars did so because they became too afraid of the car company trying to repossess their cars.  And, they never lost the expectation that there was human decency and some honesty in all of this and no one would do to them what ultimately happened.  They were so wrong.

What all of the people you helped with their car problems had in common was a very small amount owing on their car and they were over 30 days past due on their current payment.  You gave them their note payment, which they made to the company, but they still lost their car even though when they lost it, their car payments were up to date.  How could that be?  It was a mystery then, but your faith in the system didn’t lead you to tear it apart to see what was wrong.  It was all revealed, however, with this experience.  The evil is overwhelming.  You can see it as it dances around the people with whom you are dealing – it is all bright and gold and shining unbelievably.  And you thought only good was bright and shining and full of light.  The society that helped raise you taught you that evil was all dark and suspicious and, well like Africans and here you were looking at evil bright and gold and shining unbelievably.  What a break through moment!

What was the difference between you and the people you tried to help?  You were calling the police to have this repossession guy arrested.  The people you moved to help were too afraid to do that and instead put their faith in the goodness of the company.  So they lost their cars.  And what happened to their cars?  With the balance owing on their car being under $3,000 and they having used the money you gave them to bring their monthly payments up to date and the car company demanding that they pay twice that because since they were behind and a repossession notice had been issued, their cars could not be released until the payment they had already made was made again. The fact that the car company had received their cash and put it in their bank account, but still demanded that the amount due – even though it had been paid – be paid again either by bringing cash to the company or sending cash via Western Union’s “Quick Collect” – those car owners were lost.  They didn’t have the car payment they were behind – we gave them that.  Once that was paid they were too ashamed to come back to us to ask for their car payment twice – they thought we would not understand and would think they were trying to game us.

So, being too ashamed to come back to us to ask for their car payment twice or to tell us what happened – something they didn’t understand and didn’t know how to explain, they just kept quiet and lost their cars.  Apparently, Honda Financial Services depended upon that and knew this was the normal outcome.

Once the car payment was made a second time – according to Honda Financial Services employees, – the cash received by them  would be refunded, their car would be released and everybody would be happy.  Since we had given folks the money to make the car payment, they clearly did not have money to pay it again and were too embarrassed to come back to us for more money so they lost their cars.  That part of the story we didn’t know and didn’t understand until now.

What happened to the cars?  With less than a $3,000 balance due – the cars were sold in the used car lot for over $10,000 and who made out with a substantial profit?  Not the original owner, because title was transferred away from them before the sale was made so they had no right to pay Honda what was due and keep the balance.

So, with no money to buy another car and with the car company having wrecked their credit – the car company experiences yet another dividend.   The people so negatively affected could buy another car from the same company – but they would have to pay very high interest and make two monthly payments – one for the downpayment, and one for the regular payment for the car.  A couple people we tried to help did that and nearly killed themselves in the process.  We lost track of them so we don’t know how that story ended.

But I am getting ahead of myself in this story.

What we experienced from Herb Chambers and Honda Financial Services was a demand for a second payment of the monthly car payment even though there was no payment due.  They tried shame; threats; acknowledged they had received the monies sent to them; that the account was not delinquent on any level; but they still demanded the amount due be paid again and even though they had received the cash which brought the account up to date, we would have to either bring them cash for that exact amount or send them a Western Union “Quick Collect” amount.  After they received that Western Union money or we brought them cash to their company, they would take the cash they had already received out of their account and, in due time, send it to us  as a refund.   They claimed this demand was legal.  It was amazing!  What they were demanding was totally illegal and as of today we have not received a refund nor has the second payment been credited to our account.  WOW!

We wanted an explanation as to why they could not keep the money already in their account – why they wanted us to bring them cash so they then could take the cash previously sent to them and received by them out of their account and send it to us as a refund.  It is the demand which made the people we helped lose their cars.  The expectation was that you would not be able to pay this second amount demanded because you had been late on the first payment.  So they were foaming at the mouth looking at a car that they could sell and make a very substantial profit on,for their company, showing they had done an excellent job.

They became so helpful at this point.  They would see to it that the car was returned as soon as we notified them this second payment had been made and they would do everything possible to make sure we would not have to wait a moment longer than necessary for the return of the car.  When we brought them this second payment they would contact the repossession company and have our car released immediately.  What they didn’t realize was that they didn’t have possession of the car throughout all of this because the car repossession guy had gone home without the car.  He got the message, did not want to be arrested, because he knew what he was doing was illegal.

We sent the second amount via Western Union because we wanted to follow this through to the end.  When we called to verify that the monies had been sent and received by them, according to Western Union, we couldn’t help but notice the disappointment and surprise in the voice of the person from Honda Financial Services with whom we spoke.

When we realized what the people we were helping had gone through and some were still going through,  it was beyond belief. It began to dawn on us the extent of  the fraud involved and how intimidating the people were who were practiced at this.  How many people have so suffered.  Most people have buckled under this kind of thing.  We tend to be mean and angry so we call out the police, the attorneys, the relevant governmental departments and agencies involved and everyone we know, to attack.

What makes this possible and why is it so widespread?  SHAME!  People are ashamed even when they are being ripped off

We have no shame.  We are outraged.  And unfortunately for those trying to rip us off, we were not broke – we simply had a transfer of assets problem and in that situation many are caught unawares that this is what happens to people who are actually in a financial bind.  Everything they have is taken away.  Stripped away with great glee.  It is amazing to see how unprincipled, how greedy, how many lies people will tell to strip another person of their money and assets.

What is even more alarming – the people doing the stripping don’t benefit from what they have ‘stolen’.  The company for which they work benefits.  And in that company, the people at the top of those companies benefit.  Those doing the stripping are simply allowed to keep their jobs and, in the evenings, to sit by the fireplace to watch the flames that will consume them when they die – and they will not even have had the benefits of the ill-gotten gains they made possible for others to enjoy.  A very few others, but others indeed.

This has been an experience we are going to push to the limits because this needs to stop.  We realize we won’t be able to stop it – its like using a small wooden fence to stop a tsunami, but we are not going to sit by and let that tsunami swamp everything without trying to stop it.

This experience did enlighten us as to why so many people are willing to overlook Trump’s negatives and support him.  They are looking for relief from an extremely oppressive system.  If you dig into the past of many Trump supporters you will find a situation much more dire than the one I have described to you because at some point, someone in their family has probably been made destitute by these machinations.

As for us – we are supporting Hillary Clinton.  Our more sane side has won and we realize that what we described will only be made worse by someone like Donald Trump coming into office.  We are sure he has had enough experience to know how to take advantage.  What those supporting the “Don” don’t realize is that he has done some of what I described above.  Not the same particulars, but in his own corporate way he has made many people destitute – many others have lost their businesses because of his greed and on and on and on.  But those who have gone through this kind of thing are looking for a way out and someone to come to their aid and they see that someone as Donald Trump.

Clear your eyes people.  He will only make a bad scene worse.

We don’t know where the solution lies, but we are going to continue to move the needle and do what we can to expose and stop these scams – thefts – destructions – horriblenesses of this system out of control.  It is time for that 1% to get real and do something to level the playing field instead of stealing all the turf and exposing the swamp underneath.

Wasn’t it an emperor of Russia who had a wonderful life until the peasants revolted?  And the king of France? And many others, who were so busy ripping off their citizens that they didn’t realize they had gone too far until the ax fell on their heads wielded by the very citizens whose economic and financial lives they were destroying.

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Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

Ghanaian and Columbian Skin Care

Wednesday, September 21st, 2016

copyright Bettina Network, inc. 2016

We have not had enough time to test this out on several people over a long period of time, however, for a few days on about 3 people it has had stunning results.

A previous blog was about Pineapple Skins for Skin care – an old Ghanaian treatment.  In conversation over breakfast about that blog we had a Columbian guest who made an addition to that recipe.  So, of course, we had to try it and love the results.

In addition to the steam treatment with Pineapple Skins – add Papaya skins to the water before steaming and let the Papaya Skins and the Pineapple Skins simmer together until steam rises.  Follow the same method – put a large towel over your head and your head over the steaming pot of water and skins and let the steam from all of the ingredients get into your skin for several minutes. You can do this however you are most comfortable – either over the stove with the water simmering or move the pot off the stove and put it on a nearby counter.  If you want to continue and the steam dies down -put the pot back on the stove until the steam comes up again and continue.  We chose five minutes because that was all we could handle standing over a steaming pot.  Someone else was able to try 10 minutes.  The results were spectacular.  I would think once or twice a week – depending upon your age and the condition of your skin – would work beautifully.  Once-a-week if you are young and your skin shows no damage from age or the over use of cosmetics.  Twice a week if you are aging and your skin needs work.

Follow this facial steam bath with lots of splashes of cold water on your face and pat dry with a soft towel.

Then – if you are retiring for the night – use nothing.  If you are getting ready for the day out and about, use a capsule of Vitamin A on your skin to add to the results from the Pineapple and Papaya Skin Steam treatment.  Actually, I found it takes four capsules – clipped and used one at a time to cover my face.  I use 25,000 IU’s.  Whatever you use would be up to your judgment.  I use this immediately upon rising in the morning and after at least 20 minutes with the Vitamin A on my face I rinse it again with cold splashes of water, pat dry and I am ready for work.  If I am staying home, I let the Vitamin A stay until I remember to splash the cold water.  Using the Vitamin A, including on my eyelids and under my eyes can cause a bit of a discomfort while it is on.  I ignore it and keep going.  The result seems to be an increase in my ability to see without the use of glasses.  That might be genetic, but everyone before me had glasses by the time they were 55.  I am way past that and only need glasses when I read a lot.  During the day, I can refresh my face with more splashes of cold water when I go to the bathroom for other reasons.  That is such a rejuvenation and a perk-me-up that my face instantly responds and looks as good as it looked with the first splash in the morning.

If you try this, we would appreciate your feedback as to how it worked for you.

We chose the Vitamin A after the facial steam bath because we read the Bettina Network Blog – a long time ago – about the Vitamin A – dry milk – Vitamin E treatment which is also fantastic so we only need to use the steam – probably once a week – maybe not even.

I don’t even use powder on my face anymore.  If I have a grease spot or the weather has caused a particularly greasy face, I simply use powdered milk.  It is super fantastic.

God bless Alicia Keyes.  Hope others will join her in her dedication to no cosmetics.  She simply appears the way God made her and she looks like a fresh flower in the middle of plastic replications.  I hope she is ready for the attacks of jealousy which are definitely coming from this stance.  So many people so very threatened.

Isn’t it great what sharing can do?  The need to be better than has caused us to have to live with cancer, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and all the rest because we can’t give credit to possible cures and improvements that other societies use on a regular basis.  We must be the continuing Colonials whose way is the only and the best way.  I think this collaboration between Ghanaian and Columbian is what it is all about.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

Melania Trump’s Convention Speech

Tuesday, July 19th, 2016

An amazing speech!  It had nothing to do with anything except a hollywood script writer planning a movie of pure fiction.

We watched her come on stage and the greeting by her husband was anything but warm.  It looked like – don’t touch me, I am made up and dressed and don’t want you to mess me up.  The rest of the evening and speech followed that pattern.

What most amazed us were some of the things she said with a somewhat straight face.  For example:  She emphasized the need to “pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and the willingness to work for them.”

We wondered if her life after she left Communist Slovenia and an upbringing which had nothing to do with a democratic election where you supposedly run on your achievements, ability to accomplish, and more, was an example of what we want to pass down to our children as ‘our’ morals and values. Certainly, the way she ‘achieved’ her goals says more about her and the man she married than anything else.  It sets their moral values right up front and center for all to see.

She talked about her mother’s elegance instilling in her a love for fashion, etc.  During the time she was on her own and had to make her own way, this is how she did it – acting out her morals and values and love for ‘fashion’.  That is not how the fashion models we know live their lives and make their money.  She was Donald Trump’s ‘hostess’ on his plane before they married.  We hear it took her all of two years, after leaving Slovenia to become a billionaire’s mistress, girl friend, fiancé.  We don’t know what to call that relationship before their marriage.  It was certainly a time of Donald Trump exploiting a woman’s body and the woman allowing him to do that because her value of herself is on her body.  An example for our daughters’ to follow?

Half naked with a box full of jewels on a plane represents what kind of moral value? Selling one's body?

Half naked with a box full of jewels on a plane represents what kind of moral value? Selling one’s body and showing the results of that sale?

 

Supporting your husband and his need to get support from the NRA?  Passing these values on to our children?  Whatever values her parents gave her – when she had to make it on her own she apparently made it by using her body.  – and was it for sale to the highest bidder?  And once that happened she could become the volunteer, the person giving to others, working for the needy because that supported her husbands goals and put the family in a better light?  Seems to us that those values of her husband have been passed on to his children – especially with a son who, rumor has it, only dated models and in the end married one?  Is that teaching your children to value people because of their work, accomplishments, because they are human? Or is that valuing women for what their bodies can do for you?  Doesn’t bode well for women’s issues.  If her husband is elected president, she would be the first First Lady who earned her kept so blatantly using her body.

 

Supporting her husbands' support for the NRA? Showing how women can give their support to the NRA for their husbands benefit?

Supporting her husbands’ support for the NRA? Showing how women can give their support to the NRA for their husbands benefit?

When a campaign has stolen the theme of a previous campaign and was not able to come up with its own campaign theme - is that how he will be President of the United States? Nothing will be sacred. Whatever Trump needs, he will take from whoever, wherever, for whatever reason he needs to take from others? Like the way his campaign has taken the lives of Blacks by stirring up old prejudices and giving strength to groups who are extreme racists? And extreme religious bigots? Did his daughter marrying an Orthodox Jew account for his spreading such hatred around the country in his campaign speeches and in other ways for Muslims? Is he using divide and conquer to become president? Use the old animosities and pit one group against another. So far he has been able to widen the gap between White and Black; Jew and Muslim; and who knows what groups are next as fodder for his power grab?

When a campaign has stolen the theme of a previous campaign and was not able to come up with its own campaign theme – is that how he will be President of the United States? Nothing will be sacred. Whatever Trump needs, he will take from whoever, wherever, for whatever reason he needs to take from others? Like the way his campaign has taken the lives of Blacks by stirring up old prejudices and giving strength to groups who are extreme racists? And extreme religious bigots? Did his daughter marrying an Orthodox Jew account for his spreading such hatred around the country in his campaign speeches and in other ways for Muslims? Is he using divide and conquer to become president? Use the old animosities and pit one group against another. So far he has been able to widen the gap between White and Black; Jew and Muslim; and who knows what groups are next as fodder for his power grab?

These are the values to pass on to your children? Use your body to get what you want? Melania talked about her interest in fashion. We know several models, none of whom earned their money using their bodies in this way! It did help her get a rich husband, however, who puts no value on women except to satisfy his ego and prurient needs.

These are the values to pass on to your children? Use your body to get what you want? Melania talked about her interest in fashion. We know several models, none of whom earned their money using their bodies in this way! It did help her get a rich husband, however, who puts no value on women except to satisfy his ego and prurient needs.

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The traditional photo of a nude woman on a bear rug is acted out here and destroys everything woman - trying to reach equality in this system based on their brains, accomplishments, etc. instead of the old standard of their body and how they are willing to use their bodies to succeed. These are the lessons Melania Trump brings to young women and young men. This was certainly her way to success and even today, dressed in more clothes which cost a small fortune, her message is - you are an appendage to "your man" and you live your life through him and his life, never on your own standing on your own two feet. Independence is not in the cards.

The traditional photo of a nude woman on a bear rug is acted out here and destroys everything woman – trying to reach equality in this system based on their brains, accomplishments, etc. instead of the old standard of their body and how they are willing to use their bodies to succeed. These are the lessons Melania Trump brings to young women and young men. This was certainly her way to success and even today, dressed in more clothes which cost a small fortune, her message is – you are an appendage to “your man” and you live your life through him and his life, never on your own standing on your own two feet. Independence is not in the cards.

 

I can’t believe the Republican Party has stooped so low.  It certainly gives a different meaning to their fight against abortion and all their other fights against the equality for women.  This will bring the country back pre-1950’s.  This is how women advertise who are looking to earn a living in prostitution.  If they make it big and find that wealthy male to support them – fine.  If not, they will be prostitutes for life.

These photos came from GQ magazine.  We put their entire article on Facebook if you are interested in their narrative which went along with the pictures they published.  We found more, but these, we felt, gets the message across.  Know who you are voting for.  You can excuse anything if you want power badly enough.  But don’t you think a little honesty, morals, looking at the choices a person makes when they are on their own tells more than anything else about their morals?  It certainly says a lot about Donald Trump and what he is interested in from a woman.

I am sure there were none of the Religious Right in the audience at the Republican Convention.  Having seen years of what they are about this would be the ultimate hypocrisy.  An act equivalent to Pontius Pilate’s washing his hands in that bowl.  If there were members of the Religious Right on the floor and out in the country supporting this Trump campaign, they have gone further than Pontius Pilate did because they have not only agreed to turn Hillary Clinton (a devout Christian all of her life – working for justice, equality and for all of us) over to the most scurrilous comments and ugliest campaign in United States history, because they have agreed to help in that effort and are giving their time and money to achieve that goal.  At least Pontius Pilate only washed his hands in that bowl and and then he walked away.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

 

A Solution to Police Violence

Friday, July 8th, 2016

“When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.”  That is truth and a quote from some fount of wisdom.

Back in the 1970’s when I lived in Minneapolis I was on the board of the Minneapolis Urban Coalition.  We worked hard to attempt to establish Civilian Review Boards which would work with the police to oversee their work.  Boards where complaints against the police would be brought and worked through by the Civilian Review Board.

The people who were intransigently against these review boards were none other than the police.

WHY?  Because they had sympathy for one another.  They wanted to be ‘reviewed’ by their peers.  They talked about no one else knowing the problems on the job and what they went through and etc.  In reality, what they were saying is that when they saw a brother cop in trouble because he lost his temper; let his biases dictate his actions; messed up in ways that said his emotions had taken over his job, they understood that and if that happened to them – which, because of the stress and tensions of the job it very well could –  they wanted to be brought before a group of their peers who knew that – there, but for the grace of God – goes I.

The talks, negotiations, pleadings, and more fell on deaf ears because no one wanted civilians poking around where the police had messed up or where they appeared to have messed up.

Would the installation of Civilian Review Boards have prevented these recent killings?  And prevented many of the problems which have surfaced over the decades?  I won’t pretend to read the tea leaves, but common sense, experience, knowledge, sensitivity to the human condition says – yes, the establishment of civilian review boards would have gone a long way to entirely preventing the problems we have experienced and seen or they would have gone a long way to mitigating what happens when human beings whose emotions get out of control when they are in the power seat against other human beings and just needed to reach inches for a gun – a taser – a night stick wouldn’t.

The time has come to put this ‘brotherhood” behind and to open the door, windows, passageways which are now blocked to Civilian Review Boards.  Every city needs to immediately establish such and the Civilian Review Boards so established should have real power.  The power to investigate and also to protect whistle blowers in police departments who are experiencing problems because they have brought something that they feel needs fixing to the management and more.

That will make the police forces around this country more effective, not less.  That will give them credibility and a better and stronger trust level in many communities – especially if community members can approach the Civilian Review Board with their complaints, observations, etc. to attempt to make the police force what it is supposed to be.  Perfection  does not exist.  Moving closer to working together brings an understanding and clarity of vision which does not now exist.

Without the killings in Dallas, we were headed for some real heat during this summer.  Anger, grief, bigotry, and more were being unleashed by police across the country and it was only a question of time before all of that anger, grief, bigotry and more unleashed itself and resulted in the killing of police.  A line has now been crossed and there will be no going back until some basic changes are made.  We are, after all, only human and we reach our limits quickly.

Media talkers in the cat bird seat on television are already beginning to say things like “this just doesn’t feel right”.  And so begins the attempt to blame what happened in Dallas on Middle Eastern terrorists.  Or some other group of terrorists who inserted themselves into this community business.  All we need now, to create an unimaginable horror, are great pronouncements from the Don.  Hopefully, this bloody upheaval is not the beginning of his campaign to get himself elected President.  He has certainly set the stage for this to happen.

There didn’t need to be Middle Eastern terrorists intervening.  I know how I felt all day yesterday.  I could not stop crying.  If I had not had such an upbringing with Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Christ, God and all of God’s angels threatening me if I took a life I could have easily taken knives and cut police into little pieces, throwing the pieces to the flesh eating fish and felt good about it.

Middle Eastern terrorists may have their issues, but African Americans raised in the deep South during Jim Crow have anger issues which run deep.  Creole women have tempers like none you have seen before and all of that unleashed can reek unbelievable havoc. We didn’t need “foreign immigrants” to act on our behalf.

What is amazing about those comments on television that the media were spewing out this morning is that in the middle of talking about a racially charged issue they introduced their own racism.  The print running at the bottom of the screen could have read – Blacks don’t have the guts, the know how, the drive to do what those shooters did in Dallas – so this just doesn’t ‘feel’ right.  There must be some other explanation other than shootings by the protest groups.

It is way past the time to come to our senses and establish panels to air racial grievances, but we need to take three huge steps back and do exactly that.  And not panels staffed with Blacks and other minorities who the prevailing White Male power structure knows will “be nice.”  We need to establish truth panels, where there are no penalties for speaking truth and some kind of recompense for those who experienced the negative side of the truth being spoken.  We need truth panels where people in the community can go to air their past grievances with the police and a panel which seeks to bring justice out of that truth telling.  Justice, not judgment.

It is also crucially important – even more than truth panels – to establish Civilian Review Boards.

Our normal method of operating is back away from the truth.  It isn’t “nice”.  We have to smile and make nice.  We have to pretend that all is well because we don’t want to offend anyone.  When we reach that point we need to ask ourselves –  how can the truth offend?

It is time to offend.  To offend in love.  It is kind and good.   Truth helps us grow into that space where our lives can be full of unconditional love.

I go to a Church, where in some corners of the building, love and sex are equated.  That is not the kind of love I am talking about and I think most of you know the difference.

I was raised to speak truth to power.  It wasn’t until my old age that I began to realize power doesn’t want to hear truth and will destroy you for attempting to speak the truth because power judges harshly and will eliminate you for being anything other than gracious to it, turning a blind eye to its transgressions.  Power will destroy you and blame you for the destruction.

Love doesn’t judge, bur love does live in the light of truth and forces us to live in that same bright, beautiful light.  Would that all of us could sit in unconditional love for just minutes a day.  Our lives would totally change as we became accustomed to something which  answers our insecurities, our racism, our sexism, our classism, all of the needs we have to be better than; to be more powerful than; to be in the spotlight most of the time; to be prettier than; to have more of the material things in life than; to have someone who we can make the scapegoat for all of our missteps and negative things we do; on whom we can dump everything and then force over the cliff.  Love is what a good life is all about.  Not happiness, not joy, not any of the things we normally seek.  With love everything else comes to order.

Let’s get busy.  The work is huge and the time is short. Make those contacts – set up those Civilian Review Boards – get those Truth Panels going, soonest.  Even if you have to be the shadow where you can’t gain access to be an integral part of, – try it.  Even if you have to set up Truth Panels on street corners – do it.

South Africans had great experience with Truth and Reconciliation Panels.  Are we too arrogant to be that humble?  Does our side have to be right and the others wrong?  We are intelligent human beings.  Notice I didn’t write – educated, because formal, institutional education may be a part of the problem.  Intelligent, sensitive to others, needing to reach out, feeling uncomfortable where you are cast as better than.  Get all of that together and get to work.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

Juneteenth

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

We celebrated Juneteenth in several ways this weekend and wanted to share some of that with you.  It was a fun time over breakfast and dinner.  How could such a sharing be called “fun”?  When you share something this serious with friends around a table with food you can talk about much that you might not broach otherwise.  Try a Juneteenth dinner!  Or a Juneteenth breakfast.

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For all the freedom we now enjoy. Keep us safe and keep our freedoms inviolable.

What is Juneteenth?  See a portion of the article that follows written by Zeba Blay for the Huntington Post to find out.

Zeba Blay 
Voices Culture Writer, The Huffington Post

It took two whole years after President Abraham Lincoln declared the abolition of slavery on January 1, 1863, for the end of one of the darkest chapters in American history to take hold.

The Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of the legalized institution of slavery in America, but in the small town of Galveston Island, Texas, black slaves had been carrying on their lives of bondage and subjugation, oblivious to the fact that they were actually free.

On June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger and his band of Union soldiers (who had been traveling throughout the South for two years spreading the word) arrived at Galveston Island to tell the last remaining slaves in the United States that they were finally free.

The day became known as “Juneteenth,” a kind of Independence Day for African-Americans, a day of celebration and remembrance. Juneteenth is a state holiday in Texas, and is officially celebrated in 43 states in America, usually with parades, barbecues and memorial ceremonies.

But Juneteenth isn’t recognized as a federal holiday (though attempts have been made), and for that reason few people get to publicly celebrate it or are even aware of its existence and legacy. And that’s a shame, because Juneteenth is an opportunity for black people to truly celebrate all that they’ve overcome through the power of community.

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The History Behind Loving Day

One aspect of Emancipation, which we included in the Nuneteenth Celebration was the law suit which made intermarriage – marriage between Black and White in the United States – legal.  The Loving Case.  Click on the above and you can read about it from Time.com

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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1211439892199949&set=a.200817423262206.56928.100000018504263&type=3&theater

250 to 700 Blacks murdered in East St. Louis by an angry White mob.  Angry about what?  This happened in 1917 – does this look similar to some of what is happening today?  Only today it is not so egregious – only 50 or so being killed by those who feel their identities as “better than’ threatened, but it happens far more frequently.

Like drugs, which were considered a “ghetto” problem during the last and previous generations, that problem was ignored and wrapped up into the negative Black stereotype.  Not until the drug traffic expanded into the upper-class White ghettoes did it come onto the front pages and get far more attention.  I have yet to hear these killings being called “White on White” shootings, bombings or massacres.  Starting with Oklahoma they most certainly could have.

As long as these shootings and massacres happened in the Black ghetto, they were ignored. And called “Black on Black” crimes.  They are now front page because they are now happening all over.  Nothing will eliminate them until we stop trying to blame one group for what obviously is a false claim against them and work together to bring about a society which does not have as its first need – proving its superiority over another group and parading out its anger, today against its own, when that artificially created superiority is threatened.  Is it an accident that most of the people doing these killings are Young White Males – mostly from the far right?  Not the ISIS far right, but the American far right.  When our response is to obfuscate and cast blame on others, these killings will continue.  What do those Young White Males have in common?  They perceived themselves as being outside the “White Privileged” class and were treated as such by the small group in which they functioned – their school, etc.

Do we want to stop these killings or do we prefer them to continue and escalate because we can use them to increase and hold in sanctity “White Privilege.”  We are now trying to claim these killings are being done by “the other” and are trying to use that to turn this country into another Nazi Germany – and we are beginning to succeed.  When a Donald Trump becomes a presidential candidate – whether he wins or not – clearly the forces of evil are succeeding.  We either step back and let it happen or we take part in promoting the mythology that they are being done by the unwashed masses.  Currently, that group is defined as Muslims.  If that continues the definition of that group will expand to encompass other minorities – one group at a time.

Was it Martin Luther King, Jr. who said – if they come for you in the morning, they will be back for me in the afternoon?

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

 

The ‘Sharing’ Community????

Friday, April 29th, 2016

The first thing we note in that name – which has become attached to several kinds of businesses – is the fact that it is an extreme misnomer.  There is nothing “sharing” about that group of businesses.  Unless you call the lower to middle classes sharing their small assets and ideas in ways to make the upper entrepreneurial class extremely wealthy, a “Sharing Community.”

The business titans of the next generation will all come from this extremely wealthy group.  They take into their rather exclusive club those they have identified as ‘like them’.  And we all know our own.

A more accurate name would be the Greedy/ Grasping/ Exclusive and Excluding/ Racist and Sexist Community!

Wow! That sounds angry!  – It is most definitely not a happy frame of mind.

Let’s take a look.  Is it angry or is it accurate.

The ‘Sharing’ Community is the group of entrepreneurs who have taken a funnel; poured into the top all the assets they could not touch and do not own; taken the lions share of those assets – without buying them or putting upfront any kind of money in exchange for those assets; and have come out with multi-billions of dollars while the people who own the assets being used are given a dream that turns into a nightmare as they look at the fact that only a very few realize that dream.  Those that realize the dream are the few used to disprove the rule.

The ‘Sharing Community’ is bringing in racism and classism like no other corporate structure has been able to create, maintain or enforce.  They do it by painting pictures of this wonderful society – the beloved society – which will bring us all together in a very loving and sharing way.

Most of the folks, who have had this imitation stardust thrown into their eyes and who cannot see what is in front of them, but subscribe to the mythology, are the ones who will be hurt the most.

Take a look at the companies who have been most exposed by the media.  The others won’t be far behind.  Not totally exposed, however, because the media realize that while they must tell – at least part of the truth – their owners have to survive and they do that surviving through the advertising dollars of those new “Sharing Community” groups.  It would be so easy if we all took on the responsibility of thinking – carefully thinking of what is presented to us so beautifully gift wrapped.

Take Amazon.  There have been articles written, exposing the warehouse slavery which happens at Amazon – exposing how they treat their employees – not the ones at the top who are now multi-billionaires; nor the ones in the middle who are multi-millionaires; but the ones at the bottom making all of that possible for those top executives and investors.

Amazon has been talked and written about describing its racism and sexism, but we were too busy dreaming to listen.  They have just recently shown clearly, not only their extreme racism but the very arrogant way they assume it is their right to act it out and expect the larger society to not notice and/or to approve.  They don’t notice their own racism because it is totally ingrained in their structure and their corporate culture.

In Boston, they announced one day delivery to all except those who live in Roxbury.  How is that racist?  Roxbury is where most of the African Americans and other minorities live.

They were preceded almost a generation ago by the first company giving you access to the internet with your own personal account.  If you were African American and/or other minorities deemed less than by this society you could not get such an internet account.  It was set up so that you had to have a credit card to have an internet account and your credit card had to be rated above a certain level.  We worked with many minorities who were denied access to the internet.  Not until everything was running smoothly and the majority society was very skilled at the internet; saw its possibilities; started building companies to take advantage of the internet were those barriers relaxed – and other internet companies started to join in the picture.  And at that point groups took on the job of trying to bring the ‘disadvantaged’ into the fold.  Not as equals, but as those less than who didn’t know enough to join this revolution.  Now, the rest of us would have to do our ‘nobles oblige’ and work to bring them up to speed, because they couldn’t do it themselves.  Not totally up to speed, but just enough to maintain our superiority and show what looks like our compassion.

The story given out was that you had to have this kind of credit card because your monthly fee – which at the time was around $12/month – had to be taken out of your credit card each month.  They had to know the money would be there when they automatically withdrew their fee – and other minor embroideries to attempt to justify this racist exclusion.  One of the exclusions was – if you were divorced – and female – you had to be one year out of your divorce before you could get an internet account. How quickly we forget.

As we worked with people trying to get an internet account – they offered to pay their fees one year in advance to avoid the ‘guideline’ set up which excluded them – they had no credit card, couldn’t get a credit card, and the few that had credit cards did not have a high enough rating in their cards to qualify – our ‘forgetfulness’ also extends to the role of the credit cards in the continuing oppression structured into this society.  That offer of cash or check in advance for one years fees was immediately declined by the company.  So much for what the internet provider considered a necessary policy.

If you look closely at the policies and practices of Amazon you will find them riddled with racism and sexism.  We are too far away from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s to think and parallel and see how grossly minorities are treated – and – we are too busy scrambling for something that we feel is important, to stop and take a serious look at what these companies are doing and how they are structuring into our present a more rigid racism and sexism for our children’s generation than that which we have had to face and fight.

Their control will be complete by the time what they are doing is recognized and addressed.  Didn’t Amazon feel free enough to eliminate Roxbury from their one day delivery without expecting any blow back from such a policy and without even realizing the racism of the policy?  Or did they put the policy in place knowing it would negatively  affect African Americans and other minorities in the neighborhood and that was the reason for the policy in the first place, but it went into place anyway because their goal is to benefit their “own” and to eliminate anything they feel might be a ‘danger’ to the development of their business? And, is that ‘danger’ minorities and women?

A corporate structure reflects the times in which it was created and the people who did the creating of the structure.  The racism and sexism of the original founders would be intricately incorporated into the structure they put into place.  Their fears, their identity, their needs would be very much woven into the structure of what they found.  I meant “found” because most of the ideas about which we are discussing were stolen from others without any need to do otherwise.  That spirit would be all through their creation.  They would take someone else’s idea and add their own racism, sexism, insecurities into what they created and continue to create.

And then there is Airbnb!  Found to have racist policies by Harvard Business School Harvard Gazette Article they are still free to exercise them. HBS Article . By the time the rest of us catch up and understand what they have structured, they will have taken us back to the days when African Americans had their own b and b listing of places they could stay because they were closed out completely from the accommodations others could use.  This time, the close-out will be complete because it will be hidden and not many will take on the deconstruction necessary to lay that bare.

Once upon a time during the Civil Rights Movement, colleges and universities used a discrete kind of racism and sexism.  A way to discriminate without saying we have rejected your application because you are too dark; too non-American; too, etc.

One huge way they put in place to enforce that discrimination was to require a picture with your application.

Those minorities who did not have the tell-tale entries in their application – their name; their address; the schools they went to before applying; etc. would be caught in the net of the picture requirement and the schools could then – and they did – reject the applications based on the recognized basis of racism and sexism rather than allowing the application to go ahead and be considered on its merits.  Some colleges and universities didn’t totally reject all minorities, but they had a quota.  Once that quota was reached, all others were rejected and the picture requirement made that possible.

Airbnb started without a picture requirement unless you had an African American sounding name or your application to use their services was picked up with something being not quite right.  What was that?  A possible minority, you say?

To correct that, they have apparently started to require a picture from almost everyone.  Does that sound familiar?  A policy which does the same thing and allows the same kind of discrimination practiced by colleges and universities a generation ago.

Take a look at other companies which are a part of this ‘sharing community’.  Basically, you are allowed to use assets you struggled to acquire for your family, etc. to ‘share’ with others.  You use them sometimes and you rent them out to others at other times.  What happens through this process?  You generally rent them out at a lower rate than an established business offering the same services.  The fact that the people in these other businesses have struggled for more than one generation to get their reimbursement up to a fairly decent amount and are still struggling for things like health insurance, etc. means nothing to those renting out their similar assets for less.  They are thinking of how rich they are going to become and maybe even be able to buy more than one of the same kind of asset or something similar to expand the services offered and they and their friends are going to walk into the very rich sunset together.

Instead, they find they are increasingly pushed against the wall and deprived of much because the reason the other services cost more begins to push into their lives.  The assets experiences wear and tear; they have expenses which were not included in their initial calculation of how much they were going to profit; they gradually start down that slippery slope and lose even that with which they started.  What is also enmeshed into this corporate revolution is the all out hunt for and stealing of the ideas and businesses of others, who do not have access to the investors in this Sharing Community.  I have met more people whose corporations are viable and struggling who have been swamped and destroyed by the greedy grabbing and stealing of their ideas and their decades of work developing a business which is then stolen and put in place as though it came full blown out of the minds and experiences of those claiming it as a part of the “Sharing Community.”  That kind of theft is no less criminal than the kind against which this society has definite criminal laws.

Who is profiting from the use of their assets – the investors in the overarching business which has set itself up to allow this asset use.  They are multi-billionaires in record time – like a few years, if that long.  Where did all of that money come from?  The backs and lives of those who see what is being offered as some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and the marketing and advertising of the overarching businesses who are very good at painting that picture.

It is time to take a good look at what this society is becoming and how the masses are moving into an indentured servant class while their lives are being taken to make a greedy group wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings.  And they are ‘sharing’ this wealth with who?  Certainly not the people who made it possible.  They are still struggling to just get back to where they were before they took their assets into this conglomeration.

It is time to tell the truth and give correct names to what is around us.  “The Community Indulging in Massive Greed”: “The Community using the assets of the masses in the process of using the Masses to Acquire Billions of dollars without Sharing”.  “The Community of the Greed  which has discovered the way to maintain and grow its outsized Male Ego by insuring the survival of racism and sexism in a virulent form, masked from the society until that society is enmeshed and unable to extricate itself from the tentacles which enslave them and benefit the investors who created what they call “A Sharing Community.”

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc.  It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

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