Cuba and Trump

Posted on June 17, 2017 by Trish and Rob

In 2014, Obama signed an executive order that loosened travel for Americans to Cuba. In February of this year, we took advantage of that policy.  The tickets from Fort Lauderdale to Havana cost, on Jet  Blue,  $150 apiece, round trip, with an additional $50 apiece for the visa. The flight took a total of 33 minutes. We booked our lodging online, through airbnb, and had a four-bedroom, four-bath apartment that costs us $40 a night apiece. In all, the trip probably cost each of us about $600 for a ticket, lodging, food etc. The island is fantastic, the people are wonderful, and the entire trip was one of the highlights of my life.

Today in Miami’s Little Havana, Trump rolled back Obama’s executive order with one of his own that tightens those travel restrictions so that Americans will no longer be able to travel as freely as we did in February. In fact, you will probably have to go with an educational group, which means you can’t travel on your own around the island and, of course, the price is going to be well beyond what we paid.

street in Habana Vieja

Lunch en route to the interior

A cigar maker at a tobacco plantation

Trump, playing to a tiny core of his supposed base in Little Havana, said, “…we must ensure that U.S. funds are not channeled to a regime that has failed to meet the most basic requirements of a free and just society.”

Really? What about the Phililpines? Egypt? What about Saudi Arabia, where the “most basic human requirements of a free and just society” are denied to nearly everyone except the royal family, and are denied in particular to women? Trump doesn’t have any problem with countries like this.

This part of his edict is especially heinous. It’s from The Huffington Post:

“The Trump administration is stepping up requirements on those sorts of trips, requiring a full-time schedule of activities that “enhance contact with the Cuban people, support civil society in Cuba, or promote the Cuban people’s independence from Cuban authorities, and that the travel must result in a meaningful interaction between the traveler” and Cubans, according to the draft. Travelers to Cuba will have to keep detailed records of all their financial transactions in the country for five years to make available to the Treasury Department if requested.

“The president is also directing the Treasury secretary to regularly audit Cuba travel to make sure U.S. travelers are following the rules on avoiding GAESA-linked transactions. Anyone who travels to Cuba, however, might be able to stay at an Airbnb or eat at an independent restaurant, although that interpretation is not clearly spelled out in the draft order. But those who go to the island under a U.S. license will need to keep strict notes proving they’re complying with the new executive order – or face fines.”

Our 4 days in Cuba were all about interacting with the Cuban people and culture and we didn’t need a U.S. govennment authorized educational group government to do it. This edict of trump’s is as brainless as everything else he has done since January 20. Sure, impose the American embargo again and watch as  the Chinese and Russians move in and do business there.

Trump can’t be gone too soon for me and my hope is that his entire administration is thrown out with him. Every single one of them is corrupt to the core and every Republican who falls into line with him and fails to speak up should be voted out in 2018.

Art that represents the Cuban spirit!

Cuba, si!!

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Beyond Strange

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Strange things sometimes happen to ordinary people as they go about their everyday lives.

Two men are stalked across a golf course by a seemingly sentient bank of fog.

A veterinarian comes face-to-face with strange interdimensional creatures.

A young couple walk into the past.

A former police officer travels out of body to a vast mansion in another reality.

Alien abductions, hauntings, psychokinetic powers, and more populate the pages of Beyond Strange. The stories we’ve picked—sent to us over the years—are astonishing by any reckoning and address a fundamental issue: the existence of a more expansive reality beyond the one we ordinarily experience.

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This book is a varied collection of the most unusual and bizarre incidents we’ve researched over the years. Right now, it’s an ebook, but a print book is coming soon!

 

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OUFOs – a video

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Trish and Rob

What’s an OUFO, you wonder? Not a typo, it stands for organic unidentified flying objects. This 12-minute video from the Puerto Rican corner of the Bermuda Triangle is fascinating. The documentary is serious and well done. The objects are unusual in appearance and move extremely fast. They don’t look like any known aircraft, including drones, or typical saucer or triangular-shaped UFOs.

What’s interesting to me (Rob) from a synchronicity perspective is that the same day a UFO researcher sent me this video on Facebook messenger I did a Skype interview with a producer in Los Angeles, who is involved in the planning stages of a Bermuda Triangle TV series. I wrote about this earlier this year, because of the oddity that two production companies came up with the same idea and both contacted me within a couple days of each other. I guess if your name is on the cover of a book about the Bermuda Triangle, you’re considered an expert.

One of the questions the producer asked me was whether I knew of any recent UFO stories related to the Bermuda Triangle. I told him I didn’t think so, but actually this video was already in my Messenger in-box. I’d glanced at it briefly, but hadn’t  opened it because I had the Skype appointment coming up.

But I’m glad I got around to it. It’s worth watching.

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The Giver

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Trish and Rob

This is an older post from 2014, updated.  It seems even more relevant now. An interesting fact: the book has 9,500 reviews on Amazon and still has a four and a half star rating.

If  you haven’t read Lois Lowry’s book The Giver, then do yourself a favor. Download it for a few bucks. Buy the hard copy. You won’t regret it. This book, published in 1993, is one of those dystopian novels where the world is laid out through the eyes of a single character – a young boy named Jonas.

His world is fairly bleak. He lives with his parents- non-genetic parents, parents who were chosen for him when he was an infant – and a sister, who was chosen the same way. His father is a Nurturer, who tends to the Newborns in the community, and his mother is a judge who keeps track of the various infractions committed by community residents. The power mongers are on the council and their decisions are binding, iron-clad.

With each birthday, children in the community receive certain gifts- Nines receive a bike. Twelves receive their “assignment” for life. Everything in this community is monitored for the degree of sameness the residents exhibit. Jonas, at his twelfth birthday, is assigned the position of Receiver, an important and enigmatic position that places him in the internship of The Giver, the man who holds the community memories.

Our daughter recently read this book for the first time and called when she finished it. “Oh my God. I cried at the end of this. We have to go see the movie the next time I come home. I’m blown away by this book.”

The movie? This was the first I’d heard of it. “Who’s in it?”

“Jeff Bridges plays the Giver and Meryll Streep is the elder on the council.”

I Googled it. The reviews weren’t great. But anything with Bridges or Streep  is good enough for me. So when Megan came home for the weekend before her 25th birthday, she, Rob and I went to see The Giver.

For more than 90 minutes, I sat in this darkened theater completely enthralled. I had re-read the book before Megan came home, so it would be fresh in my mind. I realized that what had satisfied me twenty years ago when I’d read it had left me wanting this time, dissatisfied with the ending. But in the movie, that dissatisfaction vanished.

Movies provide various viewpoints and some of the most poignant scenes are those between Bridges as the Giver and Jonas as the Receiver. We come to realize that after whatever cataclysmic event changed things, the status quo (Council of elders) chose sameness over diversity. Through an unexplained technology and genetic engineering, they somehow erased the collective memories of the very emotions that make us human – love, passion, sensuality, sexuality, pain, sadness, grief, triumph, the tragedy of wars and their horrors.

Bridges is terrific as The Giver. His own daughter was selected as a Receiver a decade ago but as she was given the memories, she couldn’t stand it and asked to be “released.” And this word, released, has a precise meaning in this society of precise vocabulary.

In the movie, in the moment when Jonas actually understands and sees – through video – what this word actually means, is a powerful turning point. Jonas watches his dad – the nurturer- insert a syringe into the head of an identical twin whose weight isn’t up to snuff. His father doesn’t seem to understand that he is killing the twin.

In so many ways, the ending of the movie surpasses the book’s ending. This may be due to the fact that we see the moment when Jonas reaches the boundary of memories – and moves beyond it. Once he’s beyond it, the people of the community experience the return of memories of love and hate, war and peace, all the emotions that make us human.

Lois Lowry, as a writer, a novelist, set these ideas into motion. But Hollywood ran with them and made them real in a dynamic, visceral sense, And I haven’t even mentioned the character who is pivotal to the second plot point in the story, an infant named Gabriel…

You’re in for a treat with this one.

 

 

 

 

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Stuff that mysteriously disappears

Posted on June 9, 2017 by Trish and Rob

During our 17 years in our house, objects have mysteriously disappeared – a $100 bill, a treasured momento, a piece of jewelry, a favorite book. I’m not sure that disappearing books count since we have so many books, but there have been a lot of things that were visible and present one day, and gone the next. We wrote about this back in 2011, but then it concerned the spirit connected to a Tibetan singing bowl.

I think these disappearances are all along the same idea as socks that mysteriously vanish in the clothes dryer.

The most recent object is a t-shirt, the one in the above image. I bought it back in February for our Cuba trip. Lightweight cotton, white, perfect for tropical weather in Cuba or South Florida. The only time I wore it in Cuba was on the day we returned from our trip. Into the washer it went with a big load of laundry on February 28, the day we got back.

After that, I never saw it again. I thought it might have gotten mixed in with Rob’s clothes, but he went through his drawers and didn’t find it. I searched my closet, thinking I might have hung it in with my slacks. Nope. I knew I’d worn it back to the U.S., into our house, that it had gone into the laundry. Had it ended up with cleaning rags? In a bag for Good Will? Nope, nope, nope. In April, I gave up looking for it and found the same shirt discounted on Chico’s website. I bought it.

Then, tonight, June 4, I returned from Orlando and found it on top of a wicker laundry basket in the cabana bathroom. I sometimes leave gym shorts on top of the basket to toss into the wash, but in the past 4 months, I’ve never seen this shirt there. Now here it was.

I hurried to our bedroom. I had been unpacking my suitcase to do laundry and the second Chic Happens t-shirt was there. I ran back to the cabana bathroom to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. Nope. Two identical t-shirts.

I figure there are several possible explanations – dementia, a slip into another dimension of reality,  or a trickster. If the latter, it’s a spirit trickster, perhaps the spirit of the monk who owned that singing bowl I bought for Rob as a Christmas present six years ago. If it’s the result of a slippage or bleed through from a different reality, then how does that work, exactly?

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Happy B-Day, Trish

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Our artistic friend, Dwane Elmore, has a way with birthday cards. And a good sense of humor. This year, he combined both of ours together, even though they are in adjacent astrological signs. Love the rating he applies to Beyond Strange.

 

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A Case for Universal Health Care

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Trish and Rob

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, our daughter Megan texted us a picture of her foot. She was in Cocoa Beach with friends and had injured her foot while skim boarding. A risky sport. Not something I would try, but hey, Megan is a lot younger.

Given the pain she was experiencing and the swelling, she felt her foot was broken. I told her I would be in Orlando the next day and we would get her to a clinic. Sunday morning a friend drove her to a walk-in clinic where, for $299, they took X-rays and put her foot in a splint and advised her to see an orthopedic specialist as soon as possible. Up until last year, she had health insurance. It lapsed in January and she didn’t renew it because she figured trump would annihilate the Affordable Care Act that was enacted during the Obama administration.

By the time I arrived, Megan had sent the X rays to several friends in the medical field. The consensus? A cast for 4 weeks, a boot for another 4 weeks. Here’s where it gets synchronistic. Her roommate, Alex, sells metal plates, bolts and nuts, and joint replacements to orthopedic docs. His brother is a medical resident specializing in foot and ankle injuries. One of her friends is an ER doc. Another friend, Evan, is a physical therapist who showed the X-ray to a doc he works with.

We drove over to an emergency room and were told they didn’t do casts. She had to see an orthopedic. Since it was a long weekend, we had to wait until Tuesday, when we went to an orthopedic walk-in clinic.  Big mistake. These clinics are in the surgery business. For $250, they took X rays and saw a PA – physician’s assistant – who was one of the rudest and most condescending individuals I’ve ever met.

Nope, this injury requires surgery, gotta have it done, otherwise she’s going to have arthritis in that foot at the age of 40. That’s it? we asked. Arthritis? Hey, she doesn’t have insurance. And suddenly, his attitude was like, Hey, you don’t question me. I’m the authority here. She needs surgery. He scheduled her for an appointment the next day with the orthopedic surgeon upstairs.

We left the place in a state of near shock. This kind of surgery costs between 30-40 grand without insurance.

The next day, we saw the orthopedic surgeon for another $250. I liked the man. He was forthright, honest. Usually, we treat this injury with surgery. But in the days before metal plate and nuts and bolts, he added, we treated it with a cast. What’s the worst case scenario if we opt for the cast? we asked.

Well, she won’t lose her leg or anything. Arthritis in the ankle later in life, maybe a loss of flexibility in that ankle, but maybe none of that.   He recommended she return in a week, on June 7, after the swelling had gone down, for a cast. He added that the surgery is very expensive, but there are payment plans and we should talk to his clerk. So we did.

She said the surgical center was the most expensive part if Megan opted for surgery – they asked for everything up front. She promised to call Megan by Friday with a breakdown of costs.

No one called.

She’s going for the cast.

Megan is self-employed. Three part-time jobs. Dog walker (tough to do if your foot is broken), art teacher (have to teach with your broken foot resting on a knee scooter) and artist.

So far, this journey has cost nearly $800. By the time the cast is put on, we’re looking at $1000. For a broken fibia.

Why should anyone have to make choices like this based solely on economics? Bernie Sanders had it right – single payer health care, Medicare for all. It should be a right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy who can afford the 30 or 40 grand for the surgery. Why are we the only country in the industrialized world without universal health care?

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Dean Radin’s Synchro

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Trish and Rob

We posted this in 2014, then I ran across it again tonight on another website. It remains one of the best synchronicities I’ve heard of. I think it illustrates how focused  intentions and desires create what Radin refers to as a “gravitational pull” that brings people and events together.

 

 

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Black Mirror

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Trish and Rob

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Whenever our daughter comes home, we invariably end up watching TV shows that are edgy, leading edge, and mind-blowing. Netflix’s original series Black Mirror is referred to as an “updated Twilight Zone,” but far exceeds its predecessor. Like Twilight Zone, each episode is a unique story, with different characters and a different storyline. But the overall theme is the dark underbelly of technology.

You can tune in anywhere in this show’s three seasons and not miss anything because each episode is a full story and not dependent on the story that came before it. This evening, we binged and watched three episodes. I’m now convinced that Netflix is changing the landscape of TV programming. Any of the episodes we watched could be developed into movies.

In season 3, episode 4 – San Junipero, we’re treated to a version of the afterlife created by technology. It’s a beach town with eerie parallels to every bad TV movie you’ve ever seen about wild spring breaks in beach towns. But in this episode, set in the late 1980s, a black woman and a white woman fall in love.

We’re initially led to believe that everyone in this town is a time traveler, but come to discover that San Junipero is an afterlife construction created by humans in an evolved future time. People who are dying are permitted to visit the town five hours a week – a visit accomplished through an electrode technology. They then decide whether San Junipero is where they want to live in the afterlife or whether they prefer to move on into whatever lies beyond it.

The world of San Junipero bears striking parallels to the afterlife depicted in What Dreams May Come and in the Seth material, where thoughts are instantly manifested into a physical reality. But what makes this San Junipero radically different is the emotional interaction among the characters.

This series begs the question: are the writers, through their creativity, tuning into a possible version of the afterlife? And, if so, what does that mean for the rest of us? Is our belief about the afterlife what we experience when we die? Or is there some uniformly static version of the afterlife, as in the religious depiction of heaven and hell?

In another episode, Be Right Back, a female artist loses her partner in a car accident. Her sister signs her up for a Beta version of a software program that enables her to communicate with him through an aggregate of traits collected from his online presence. Then she discovers another level to this software program that brings her dead partner back to life through a robotic entity similar to the entities in Westworld. One big problem: his emotional responses are stymied. There are some unusual twists in this episode that address human emotions versus what we put out of ourselves online.

TV series are now a world removed from the shows that have followed me throughout my life. In terms of my interests, we went from One Step Beyond and Twilight Zone to The Medium and X-Files and all this original programming from Netflix and HBO, House of Cards to Game of thrones, Bloodline to Black Mirror, The Fall to Orange Is the New Black. You need a lifetime just to have time to watch and absorb these ideas, another lifetime to read some of the amazing fiction that is being published (another post), and another lifetime just to write.

 

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What the Astrology of Asteroids Tells About Trump

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Several years ago, I came across an article in The Mountain Astrologer by Alex Miller. It was one of the most unusual things I’ve ever read. Alex’s specialty is asteroids. He now has a website  where he discusses politics (he’s no fan of trump) and other headline news. The astrology of asteroids may be one big synchronicity machine!

When I got an email from Alex about his new site, I immediately clicked on and then asked him – so when is Trump going to be gone? His response: “As for Trump, the August eclipse is on his Ascendant, and Pluto stations in September exactly opposed his Nemesis.

So he may not be OUT by then, but he should be well under way!  :^)”

Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor? Pluto opposed to his NEMESIS? There’s really an asteroid with that name?!

But it gets better. In a subsequent email, he wrote:

“It’s funnier than you think!  The day Comey was fired, asteroid Mueller was exactly on Trump’s natal Nemesis!  Natally, Mueller is part if what I call Trump’s “Russian Grand Cross” – Jupiter conjunct Chiron (political wound) opposing asteroids Russia and Mueller, squared to asteroids Sergej and Nemesis on one side, and Lavrov on the other!  Transiting Vladimir, Jupiter and Sergej were conjunct Jupiter/Chiron for the firing, with transiting Rosenstein on Lavrov, and Truth, Lie and Mueller on Sergej/Nemesis.

“Who needs a newspaper?  :^)”

So check out his site. It’s going to be one of my daily stops!

 

 

 

 

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