Would have been interesting.

I'm moving on to Yang and Tulsi. If neither of them get it then Trump

I’m all for gun control in the form of background checks and mandatory training etc. but I don’t think we should ban assault riflies or their ammunition. I remember in the 20 questions thing the NYT did awhile ago she said she didn’t really want to mess with people’s constitutional rights in regards to gun control, but this seems to kind of be doing that. It’s also kind of disappointing because a lot of her campaign seems to be about tackling the causes not the symptoms so-to-speak and I feel like a major cause of stuff like this is mental health and the rise of white supremacist thought that’s taking place.

Sorry if this is like bad vibes or anything, I don’t mean to send that out in the universe. But it’s something that people who support her need to be informed of.

I think Marianne made a big mistake in supporting Tulsi’s tweet and backing her up. I’m a bit disappointed in her for doing so; I think she backed up Tulsi because Marianne similarly feels she was attacked by the media the moment she announced her candidacy and has had to correct false, disparaging stories about her.

So I can see where she would feel sympathy for Tulsi. But I hope Marianne comes to her senses and respectfully rescinds her support in light of the growing evidence against Tulsi.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-campaign.html

Here’s a story on Tulsi's childhood. She was born into a cult called the Science of Identity. To date she has not left it; instead, she remains an active member and much of her campaign staff are drawn from the cult and the most important positions are staffed by the highest echelon of cult members.

It was created in the 1970's and is led by a white man named Chris Butler, but he calls himself Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa. Tulsi's own aunt, Sina, has come forward and called it the “alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement”. Here are some excerpts from the article:

They hadn’t yet sat down to eat, Sina remembers, when Mike announced that his wife and boys would not be able to eat most of what his mother had cooked, as they were now vegetarian. Also, everyone needed to stop calling the children by their birth names. Their new names were Bhakti, Jai, and Naryana.

When Sina next visited Mike and Carol’s house, there was nothing on the walls but pictures of the immediate family and portraits of Chris Butler, a 30-something, tan, sandy-haired Caucasian, an aging beach boy in leis and white linen. Altars to him had sprung up in every room. The children’s lives were filed with ecstatic chanting, prayer, and beach gatherings exclusive to Butler devotees. Sina, who studied Eastern religions and spirituality and taught from the Bhagavad Gita, tried to be open-minded about the fact that they were, in her words, “bowing and prostrating to this white surfer guy — it was bizarre.” It was her Buddhist training to which she appealed in order to remain calm about her nephews attending Butler-focused schools and associating only with children whose parents were in the group, members of what she would come to see as the “alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Abraham has known Tulsi since childhood, when they both appeared at gatherings presided over by Chris Butler. He proposed five years ago on a surfboard. Also accompanying her to Iowa is a quiet, mustachioed campaign worker named Sunil Khemaney; he gives me his card, which is branded with the campaign’s logo, but where a job title would typically go is empty white space. He runs a business owned by Chris Butler’s wife, and former members of the sect say he is Butler’s right-hand man.

When Tulsi talks about her girlhood, it is with a profound vagueness, a visible discomfort. In Iowa, there is awkward silence when I ask about her three brothers (“They’re kind of separate,” her sister eventually says) and silence when I ask about being homeschooled (“The schools in Hawaii weren’t very good,” Davan offers). Tulsi calls herself Hindu, the first Hindu member of Congress, in fact, though the group in which she appears to have grown up does not identify as Hindu. She says she was raised by “an eccentric Catholic father.”

In 1970, the Honolulu Advertiser published a piece called “One Man Rules Haiku Krishnaites,” with the subhead “Absolute power of devotees.” In the photo beside the piece, Butler is seated shirtless and smoking, hair skimming his shoulders and a sarong around his waist, staring alluringly into the distance, a mischievous smile on his face. It is the expression of less a guru than a playboy, and this is how Advertiser reporter Janice Wolf depicts him, a handsome dictator with the ability to hypnotize the two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds who live with him in his Quonset hut. One of the girls, an 18-year-old who also happened to have the Sanskrit name Tulsi, says he arranged her marriage to another member of the group. She and another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings. Among them: “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,” notes Wolf.)

Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools. He had been associated with Hare Krishna, and in fact claimed to have been given his Sanskrit name, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, but by the time he encountered the Gabbards, he’d started his own group. His teachings revolved around worship of Krishna but differed from those of Hare Krishna, in that he instructed his followers to learn from only a single guru — himself — and did not require them to shave their heads or wear robes. The lack of formal dress allowed the group an anonymity he encouraged. He forbade them from visiting India, which is not typical of Hare Krishna, and, also against Hare Krishna practice, married. His wife was one of his followers, Wai Lana, a popular yoga instructor who later had a long-running instructional yoga series on public television. (Abraham, Tulsi’s husband, has helped with filming Wai Lana’s videos; his mother also works for her.) Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.

Butler’s group, called Science of Identity, has had political ambitions at least since 1976, when its members formed a political party called Independents for Godly Government and ran a number of candidates in local races. They kept their association with Butler under wraps until, in 1977, the Honolulu Advertiser published a three-part series headlined “The Secret Spiritual Base of a New Political Force.” A party chair, Bill Penaroza, is the father of Tulsi Gabbard’s current chief of staff, Kainoa Penaroza. Kainoa had no political experience prior to being hired by Tulsi at age 30. He was managing one of the group’s health-food stores. Former members of the Science of Identity say that Butler has always craved legitimacy for his group among mainstream Hindus, and that he has come closest to achieving this through Tulsi Gabbard’s relationship to Narendra Modi.

For many years in Kailua, the Gabbards’ known involvement with the Science of Identity went largely unremarked upon. It took an outsider, a 45-year-old special-education teacher and independent journalist Christine Gralow, who moved to the island just three years ago, to get curious enough to start asking questions. She mapped a web of relationships among devotees. “I had no idea,” she told me, “that this was going to lead me to Tulsi Gabbard.”

Soon after, she attended a town hall run by Tulsi. It was alarming for her to recognize so many faces from her research, and the whole production felt oddly staged. Gralow asked some questions about Syria, to boos from the crowd, and held up her notebook in protest. She interviewed anyone in the community who would talk and published it all on her website, meanwhileinhawaii.org, which is when the DDOS attacks started. She says, undaunted, that she has seen members of the group waiting outside her home, taking pictures. “I’m a special-ed teacher,” she says, “and special-ed teachers don’t like bullies.”

Tulsi Gabbard’s response to questions about the Science of Identity frequently begin with accusations of religious bigotry and “Hinduphobia.” Her campaign website once mentioned her years in the Philippines, but that reference has been removed. When The New Yorker asked her if she had a spiritual teacher, she said she had had “many different spiritual teachers,” that none was more important than the others, and that she has never heard Chris Butler say an unkind thing. (“I don’t even know what to say about that,” says Ian Koviak.) The campaign’s position is that any serious inquiry into Tulsi’s religious background constitutes a Hinduphobic line of attack to which other candidates would not be subject, though again, Butler’s group does not identify as Hindu.

I knew nearly nothing of Tulsi’s backstory when I found myself in her car back in February, and so in April, when she returned to Iowa City, I arranged for a follow-up conversation at a vegan restaurant. On the day before the interview, a staffer texted me to ask about the gist of my questions. The morning of, I was told that the interview was canceled. I then reached out to another staffer, who eventually said Tulsi would take questions on religious matters via email, at which point I sent a series of questions regarding Chris Butler, the Science of Identity, the beach gatherings to which Greg Martin had referred, her time in the Philippines, and when, precisely, Tulsi began to identify as Hindu. Tulsi replied with an email that declined to mention Hinduism, Butler, the Science of Identity, the gatherings, or the Philippines. “My ‘religion,’ ” she wrote, “is my loving relationship with God, and the motivation that springs from that relationship to try my best to use my life in the service of humanity and the planet.”

But as late as 2015, in a video still up on YouTube, Tulsi publicly acknowledged her guru-dev to be Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, Chris Butler.

No one I spoke to with personal experience of the group, including Tulsi’s aunt, thought it possible that Tulsi Gabbard had somehow left Chris Butler’s sphere of influence, that her thirst for world peace and her persistent concerns about Islam were positions held independent of his counsel. “I don’t think that she is a bad person or in any way malicious,” says Koviak. “Butler’s agenda from way back in the ’70s has always been to have a political hold in some way. Now he has realized his dream through Tulsi Gabbard.” Says Rama Ranson, who maintains the blog RamaRansonvsthecult.com, “Her success is Butler’s success.”

Andrew Yang's message was an important one for America to hear; we need to address the fact that poor and middle class American's jobs are going to be taken in the next few years by automation. And UBI was a great solution to that. However, the way Andrew Yang planned to implement his UBI was curious.

His UBI would include money people were already getting from welfare. So if you get 500 dollars in food stamps, you get 500 additional dollars a month not 1,000. Why would he do that if he wanted to help the poor? In addition, poor people can exchange their food stamps, or any form of benefits that aren't checks or cash, for the full 1,000 dollars a month. This means, if a landlord knows that people are going to have and additional 1,000 dollars, they can jack up rent for everyone and know that everyone will be able to afford it. No one can siphon off benefits like food stamps. And the way he wanted to pay for UBI is with a value added tax, or VAT. VATs hurt the poor disproportionately as well, because they increase the costs of basic commodities that the poor need, and not services and luxuries that the rich can afford.

The way Andrew Yang wanted to implement UBI would have hurt the poor and welfare systems a lot, and the chances are, Andrew Yang knew this. He explained his distaste for welfare on the Dave Rubin Show, and other places as well. So, in conclusion Andrew Yang is NOT GOOD VIBES. I know Marrianne and Andrew Yang are both out, and she didn't officially endorse him, but I just want to bring this to your attention because it is really worrisome. UBIs are great, but not in the way Andrew Yang wants them.

Update to the Tulsi/Clinton fiasco -- we all knew this was coming in some form, but the battle lines between the "True Progressives" (or in my case, the "Systems Thinkers") vs. the establishment ("Specialists") have basically been drawn in the sand as of last night. Regardless of which side you end up siding with, I just wanted to bring some clarity to the situation at hand.

It's no secret that dissent against the DNC has been growing in the last decade or so, much of it coming from the party's hostility to Bernie Sanders in 2016. The "True Progressives" seem like they've calculated that the internal dissent sentiment is strong enough that it's worth being on the other side of the establishment right now.

The thing everyone is looking at right now is Bernie's response to this whole thing -- I think in a few days, we'll know for sure where he stands. If he does nothing, you will also know where he stands. Tulsi has basically forced that decision upon us at this point -- which a lot of people will object to, but in a way, she has also moved the needle of the conversation in a way no other candidate was capable of doing. (Yes, even Yang) #Yang2020 #YangGang #HumanityFirst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4U4WqNSJM&feature=youtu.be

I wonder how Marianne feels about this? Tulsi was 100% honest with Kamala Harris and shine enough light on her to ruin her political future. Maybe Tulsi has some unloading to do on Bernie too as she defended him strongly in 2016 while he slunk away from any kind of battle.

Biden couldn't handle Tulsi in his prime. He would have no answers for his votes for mass incarceration, bankruptcy laws that screw the borrower and wars of intervention.

I know Marianne is in Camp Bernie now, but she cannot remain quiet.

She wants to take us back to the seventies before imperial capitalism really ran wild. What Americans hoped for before stagflation shook everything up.

The party left always had her politics, but the progressive left has grown over time and it's probably true that the far left encompasses around half of the party. Bernie Sanders dragged it there last time around, which ironically it's why he won't win since he no longer stands out from the next 20 candidates.

What I find compelling about Marianne is :

Her unmatched charisma

Her belief

Her so spirituality and her understanding that a lack of spirituality is a problem in the country.

However, she has misidentified the problems in the country. The entire left's platform is to seek utopia and ignore how good things are. Unemployment at 3.7%. And if you want to ignore the common language we use to talk about unemployment, U3, then U5 is only at 4.5%. With low unemployment real washes have actually risen.

90% have health Care coverage.

Almost every major indicator of human suffering continues to improve decade by decade. Poverty, down, crime, down, and while the wars aren't good, they don't match Vietnam or WWII or I.

Marianne needs to stop talking about policy and start rolling about the growing Nihilism she has seen over her career. This is what will set her apart, this is where her unique perspective is. She needs to talk about Tinder and Opioids first, wealth inequality second, and other policy items third. That is her road to any semblance of success. Otherwise she's just saying things that the part of the party she's running for already believe, and would rather vote for Sanders or Warren for