Thirst - "The Uses of Sorrow" - Mary Oliver

What's The Point of Life for a Politician?

The general populous believes the dynamic behind, 'living to make a better day for the people who follow behind us,' is our creed as human beings. As a believer in God, you live for Him. As a non-believer, to find meaning in this life may seem difficult at the initial introduction of the question, but the most agreeable answer is, "to make a better tomorrow." Only the most selfish of us have truly convinced ourselves that the accumulation of money is our purpose. 

While watching a movie about the black empowerment movement in the late 1960s and early 70s, with one of the closing lines of the movie summed up the three stages of the movement, along with the many tactics with one simple purpose behind them all: to make a better life for their children. And with those words, it immediately struck me in the present time, those things still apply, but are still hindered by the same things. The government's skewed agenda, full of people who have forgotten their purpose. 

Government is full of two types of people; those who have come from unjust circumstances looking to make a change, and those coming from money looking to change things for financial benefits. And at the end of the day, none of which stand for anything more than their own personal gain. But could you imagine if Congress was constantly trying to setup America for a better tomorrow rather than a better NOW. When, and how did we become so selfish? The very people put in charge, care no more about the preservation of America than our "enemies."

Chances w/ Wolves

These cats are legitimately cool, and i can over-stand all their sentiments towards their affections of music. When listening to your future favorite song, or a new genre of music you haven't experienced before, and the feelings that are grown out of that... it can't be explained, it can only be felt by someone who loves MUSIC. S/o to Chance with Wolves ㋡

Philip Wang Presents: Strangers, again

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Elie Wiesel's: DAWN

"Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving, and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.”

Charlie Chapman - The Great Dictator (1940)

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor, that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate;
has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in:
machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical,
our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little:
More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.

Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say "Do not despair".

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish. . .

Soldiers: don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate, only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. 
Soldiers: don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written:
"The kingdom of God is within man"
Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men; in you, the people.

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let's use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite! ㋡

Aldous Huxley - Quote

“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."

GQ: The Craziest Jeans in the World Video

 

Brandon Svarc (founder and CEO of Naked & Famous denim) does a video w/ GQ, and breaks down 5 of Naked & Famous' new unique designs. From glow-in-the-dark denim to the heaviest jeans ever created, the passionate Svarc personally delves into each piece’s distinctive elements exploring the unique construction quality and build. ㋡

How To Make It In America Mixtape Vol. 2

The Mixtape: Volume 2 by HowToMakeItInAmerica

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"Self Sacrifice" - Oswald Chambers

"We will never know the JOY of self-sacrifice until we surrender in every detail of our lives. Yet self-surrender is the most difficult thing for us to do. We make it conditional by saying, “I’ll surrender if . . . !” Or we approach it by saying, “I suppose I have to devote my life to God.” We will never find the joy of self-sacrifice in either of these ways.
But as soon as we do totally surrender, abandoning ourselves to Jesus, the Holy Spirit gives us a taste of His JOY. The ultimate goal of self-sacrifice is to lay down our lives for our Friend (43.15.13-14). When the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, our greatest desire is to lay down our lives for Jesus. Yet the thought of self-sacrifice never even crosses our minds, because sacrifice is the Holy Spirit’s ultimate expression of love.
Our Lord is our example of a life of self-sacrifice, and He perfectly exemplified, “I delight to do Your will, O my God . . . .” He endured tremendous personal sacrifice, yet with overflowing joy. Have I ever yielded myself in absolute submission to Jesus Christ? If He is not the One to whom I am looking for direction and guidance, then there is no benefit in my sacrifice. But when my sacrifice is made with my eyes focused on Him, slowly but surely His molding influence becomes evident in my life.
Beware of letting your natural desires hinder your walk in love before God. One of the cruelest ways to kill natural love is through the rejection that results from having built the love on natural desires. But the one true desire of a saint is the Lord Jesus.
Love for God is not something sentimental or emotional— for a saint to love as God loves is the most practical thing imaginable.
“I have called you friends. . . .” Our friendship with Jesus is based on the new life He created in us, which has no resemblance or attraction to our old life but only to the life of God. It is a life that is completely humble, pure, and devoted to God."

OSWALD CHAMBERS ㋡

Tokyo Rising (Ft/ Pharrell Williams)

Keith Olbermann's: The Four Great Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal

"Our government has now given up the concept of right and wrong.
We have, in this deal, declared that we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all political incumbents are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Re-nomination, re-election, and the pursuit of hypocrisy.
We have, in this deal, gone from the Four Freedoms to the Four Great Hypocrisies.
We have superseded Congress to facilitate 750 billion dollars in domestic cuts including Medicare in order to end an artificially-induced political hostage crisis over debt, originating from the bills run up by a Republican president who funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial complex by unfunded, unnecessary, and unproductive wars, enabled in doing so by the very same Republican leaders who now cry for balanced budgets - and we have called it compromise. And those who defend it have called it a credit to a pragmatic president who wins some sort of political "points" because, having stood for almost nothing here, he gave away almost nothing for which he stood.
It would be comical if it were not tragic.
Either way, it is a signal moment in our history, in which both parties have agreed and codified that the political structure of this nation shall now based entirely on hypocrisy and political self-perpetuation.
Let us start with the first of the Great Hypocrisies: The Committee. The Republican dogs can run back to their corporate masters and say they have forced one-and-one-half trillion dollars in cuts and palmed off the responsibility for them on this nonsensical "Super Congress" committee.
For two-and-a-half brutal years we have listened to these Tea Party mountebanks screech about the Constitution of the United States as if it were the revealed word and not the product of other - albeit far better - politicians. They demand the repeal of Amendments they don't like, and the strict interpretation of the ones they do, and the specific citation of authorization within the Constitution for every proposed act or expenditure or legislation.
Except this one.
Where does it say in the Constitution that the two houses of Congress can, in effect, create a third house to do its dirty work for it; to sacrifice a few Congressmen and Senators so the vast majority of incumbents can tell the voters they had nothing to do with this?
This leads to the second of the Great Hypocrisies: how, in the same breath, the Republicans can create an extra-Constitutional "Super Congress" and yet also demand a Constitutional Amendment to force the economic stupidity that would be a mandated balanced budget. Firstly: pick a side! Ignore the Constitution or adhere to it.
Firstly, pick a side, ignore the constitution or adhere to it.
And of what value would this Mandated Balanced Budget be? Our own history proves that at a time of economic crisis, if the businesses aren't spending, and the consumers aren't spending, the government must. Our ancestors were the lab rats in the horrible experiments of the Hoover Administration that brought on the Great Depression, in which the government curled up into a ball while it simultaneously insisted the economy should heal itself, when, in times of crisis - then and now - the economy turns out to be comprised entirely of a bunch of rich people who will sit on their money no matter if the country starves.
Forgotten in the Republican Voodoo dance, dressed in the skins of the mythical Balanced Budget, triumphant over the severed head of short-term retrenchment that they can hold up to their moronic followers, are the long-term implications of the mandated Balanced Budget.
What happens if there's ever another… war?
Or another… terrorist attack?
Or another… natural disaster?
Or any other emergency that requires A government to spend a dollar morethan it has? A Constitutional Amendment denying us the right to run a deficit, is madness, and it will be tested by catastrophe sooner than any of its authors with their under-developed imaginations that can count only contributions and votes, can contemplate.
And the third of the Great Hypocrisies is hidden inside the shell game that is the Super Congress. TheSuper Congress is supposed to cut evenly from domestic and defense spending, but if it cannot agree on those cuts, or Congress will not endorse them, there will be a "trigger" that automatically cuts a trillion-two or more - but those cuts will not necessarily come evenly from the Pentagon. We are presented with an agreement that seems to guarantee the gutting of every local sacred cow from the Defense Department. Except if the Congressmen and Senators to whom the cows are sacred, disagree, and overrule, or sabotage the Super Congress, or, except if for some reason a 12-member Committee split evenly along party lines can't manage to avoid finishing every damned vote 6-to-6.
We're cutting Defense. Unless we're not.
The fourth of the Great Hypocrisies is the evident agreement to not add any revenues to the process of cutting. Not only is the impetus to make human budget sacrifices out of the poor and dependent formalized… but the rich and the corporations are thus indemnified, again, and given more money not merely to spend on themselves and their own luxuries, but more vitally, they are given more money to spend on buying politicians, and legislatures, and courts, buying entire states, all of which can be directed like so many weapons, in the service of one cause and one cause alone: making by statute and ruling, the further protection of the wealthy at the expense of everybody else, untouchable, inviolable - permanent.
The White House today boasted of loopholes to be closed and tax breaks to be rescinded -- later.
By a committee.
A committee that has yet to be formed.
There are no new taxes. Except the stealth ones, enacted on 99 out of 100 Americans by this evil transaction. Every dollar cut from the Safety Net is another dollar added to the citizen's cost for education, for security, for health, for life itself. It is another dollar he can't spend on making a better life for himself, or at least his children. It is another dollar he must spend instead on simply keeping himself alive.
Where is the outrage over these Great Hypocrisies? Do you expect it to come from a corrupt and corrupted media, for whom access is of greater importance than criticizing the failure of a political party or defending those who don't buy newspapers or can't leap website paywalls or could not afford cable tv?
Do you expect it to come from a cynical and manipulative political structure? Do you expect it from those elected officials who no longer know anything of government or governance, but only perceive how to get elected, or how to pose in front of a camera and pretend to be leaders? Do you expect it from politicians themselves, who will merely calculate whether or not it's right based on whether or not it will get them more contributions?
Do you expect it will come from the great middle ground of this country, with a population obsessed with entertainment, video games, social media, sports, and trivia?
Where is the outrage to come from?
From you!
It will do no good to wait for the politicians to suddenly atone for their sins. They are too busy trying to keep their jobs, to do their jobs.
It will do no good to wait for the media to suddenly remember its origins as the 'free press,' the watchdog of democracy envisioned by Jefferson. They are too busy trying to get exclusive details about exactly how the bank robbers emptied the public's pockets, to give a damn about telling anybody what they looked like, or which way they went.
It will do no good to wait for the apolitical public to get a clue. They can't hear the clue through all the chatter and scandal and diversion and delusion and illusion.
The betrayal of what this nation is supposed to be about did not begin with this deal and it surely will not end with this deal. There is a tide pushing back the rights of each of us, and it has been artificially induced by union-bashing and the sowing ofhatreds and fears, and now this ever-more-institutionalized economic battering of the average American. It will continue, and it will crush us, because those who created it are organized and unified and hell-bent.
And the only response is to be organized and unified and hell-bent in return. We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960's and early 1970's and we must protest this deal and all the God damn deals to come, in the streets. We must arise, non-violently but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation take-overs - but modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified, by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication.
It is from an old and almost clichéd motion picture that the wisdom comes: First, you've got to get mad.
I cannot say to you, meet there or there at this hour or that one, and we will peacefully break the back of government that now exists merely to get its functionaries re-elected. But I can say that the time is coming when the window for us to restore the control of our government to our selves will close, and we had damn well better act before then.
Because this deal is more than a tipping point in which the government goes from defending the safety net to gutting it. This is wrong, and while our government has now declared that it has given up the concept of right-and-wrong, you and I… have not, and will not, do so.
Good night, and good luck."

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Occupy Wall Street

They continue to ask, "What do they want? What do they stand for? What is their catch phrase?" #OCCUPYWALLSTREET stands for all who feel wronged by our government. They are party-less, because they stand for us ALL. So they stand in the gap, in peace, yet people give them a bad name. #OCCUPYWALLSTREET represents the 99%. They are you, and I. Do not be duped by the foolery you see on the news channel you watch to find answers for the questions that concern you on a daily basis. Have peace of mind in knowing that You are a part of the 99% and a revolution has begun. WE are America. The 0.0002% are NOT America. They have not achieved the "American Dream." Those are the people profiting off of our misfortunes. They do not care about us. If they cared anything about us, the gap between us and them would not be so great. Think about it. There are 400 of the most wealthy in the country that own more than the lower 150 MILLION. Ask some of the 400 to come and see what the 150 million are living in... the schools they attend... the jobs... the homes... experience their everyday lives. I would bet everything i have that most of them wouldn't do it. So most of them don't give a damn about you or I,

and those are the people who own this country!

At times I watch Fox News, and i become extremely angered because of the lies the (Right) carelessly spout out so commonly that it appears they believe them. I had a thought, or a 'Day-Dream,' when i heard Herman Cain actually say he believed #OCCUPYWALLSTREET was setup to take attention from Obama's mistakes. I wanted to grab him and shake the truth out of him. I need to know if these Republicans really believe this, and if they don't, why do they say these things? What are they aiming for that would have them lying to millions of people? What will they gain? Why would they use their influence in this way? Why can't they be real and tell us what they truly think, and why? Why aren't they fighting for the things they believe, and if they believe lies, how did they get there and why can't they recognize or acknowledge truths. If they don't like #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, tell me why. If you feel that way, you are completely entitled to your feelings, and THEY MUST BE BACKED BY SOMETHING LEGITAMATE. Tell me what you disagree with. Tell me what you've heard. If you have a position to speak publicly, or some influence on the public,

Tell US The TRUTH. Stop Lying To Us! 

"WE DON'T BELIEVE YOU! YOU NEED MORE PEOPLE!"  

I was watching Bill Maher earlier, and he asked one of his guests about him blaming the president for "using the last year to destroy the economy," and the guest simply said, "Did i say that? Well I'm a Republican haha... and i was wrong. The president doesn't have the power to destroy the economy(.)"

That meant so much to me... to be told the truth from someone with more insight.

Supermodel's Cover Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind"

Jay-Z’s lifestyle blog LIFE + TIMES has just premiered an alternate music video for his esteemed “Empire State of Mind” record, only this time with the help of some models that are rather easy on the eyes. In no particular order, this ode to New York City features Selita Ebanks, Karlie Kloss, Constance Jablonski, Jourdan Dunn, Daphne Groeneveld, Edita Vilkeviciute, Hailey Clauson, Josephine Skriver, Zuzanna Bijoch, Shu Pei, Kristina Salinovic, Martha Streck, Toni Garrn, R’el Dade, Andi Muise, Ataui Deng, Chantal Stafford-Abbot, Kelsey Rogers, Ashton Phillips, Fabiana Mayer, Sabrina Nait, Sydney Edmonds, Claire Collins, Brenda Mutoni, Naoumie Ekiko, Sonia Niekrasz, Paris, Kaitlin, Lina, & Tian. Enjoy. ㋡

"We only have what we remember."