BETWEEN HERE AND THERE

Well we finally got our rain early this morning. This is the first major rainstorm in the month of September I can remember since September of 1985. Summer is over. This file contains stuff from my personal files and you might run into a "summer rerun" here or there. But there is still a lot of stuff you haven't read before in this blog, at least from me.

Dan Rather has filed a lawsuit against CBS for seventy million or something. He says if he wins he’s going to donate the money to up and coming journalists. Rather appeared on the Larry King program last night. He says all his facts about George Bush’s military carrier were genuine and that there were no phoney documents, despite the factual type-set evidence. They didn’t have type like that back then. He says he’s firing was a massive Washington conspiracy to intimidate investigative reports, of which Rather is one of the last dying breed. I hope he prevails in court.

The Web amendment came up for a vote yesterday in congress. They failed to get the sixty votes needed for the bill. This bill would have merely required troops sent to Iraq on a tour to get as much time off between tours of duty as they do in actual service in Iraq. The practical effect would be to cut the military presence in Iraq by forced reduction. There can be little doubt the Republicans are controlling the agenda.

But they did have time to pass that resolution about the “Move-on.org” add in the New York Times referring to the general as “General Betray Us”. That’s merely a statement of fact. But the congressmen must be desperate to prove that they’re really patriotic these days. We’re sliding into another Joe Mc Carthy era if you ask me.

Yesterday Thom Hartman expressed his views on mega churches. I disagree with his views because until September 11^th. 2001 churches were not political. Maybe you had some of it in the Clinton administration on moral grounds but consistently I’ve heard pastors say you have to make up your own mind between you and God on election day. Some mega churches are actually liberal. Others are off the beaten path. For Hartman to say a church has to be small to be “spiritual” worries me. I’ve watched “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home”. I know what goes on in these so called “small” communities. What keeps the Calvary Chapels a “cultic” threat is not that they are now large, but that small pieces, like so much shrapnel, keep breaking off from the unit, and it’s these where you see “spiritual devolution”. They get more wigged out and more theologically and otherwise ignorant. Since few people know as much about the way Christianity as a religion really as I do, I don’t really blame Thom Hartman for his ignorance. It’s just that his concerns about complicity with corporate America are entirely misdirected.

Superman was not on last week for the second week in a row. They must have moved the time or something because I can’t imagine a “To Be Continued” episode just being cut off like that. KCET had a thing on “California at War”. California led the drum beat on things like internment of the Japanese and building planes and bombs and putting out propaganda. It must have been a really trippy time to have lived in.

Apparently there will be no decision in the Phil Specter murder trial this week, and that will make two weeks the jury has been deliberating. That has got to be approaching some kind of a record. I myself were I judge have accepted a mistrial merely because most of the jury, 9 our of 12, say they are deadlocked.

Randy Rhodes was talking about Blackwater Security in Iraq. I really haven’t been following that case but apparently there have been a lot of abuses with too many “cowboys” among the guard, and suspicious incidents have occurred.

I heard that tree where those nuces were hung to intimidate those Black students, the tree was cut down. Here’s an idea for a movie where earth first people team up with racist groups to form a “save the tree” campaign. What an idea for a TV movie!

NEWYEARS 2006

Yesterday afternoon I put on the “Phantom Menace” VCR tape that was in wide screen format, with the borders. I might have played a lot more of it had Judy not come by. If they had been making a documentary on the ZAC in 1999 that actor kid would have been a good choice to cast as Zachery. He has that certain quality to him.

I haven’t criticized “God” lately. We can’t really know who or what “God” is so how can we intelligently criticize him. We can’t. Perhaps the “life force” that is in every cell is programmed or itself programs the evolution the cell will take. There are those who say that plants have conscious awareness, and there are those that say that individual cells have conscious awareness. Those who say, “Either a supreme Being made the Universe and Life (of exact theological specifications) or else the Creation made itself. To me this is a bad case of either / or thinking. We weren’t there so we don’t know what physical forces were in play at the time, or for that matter are in play now. I have in the past “taken it on Faith” that all of Chuck Smith’s predicted mathematical odds are correct and deducted from them that life as we know it could not have evolved. But to say that life could not have evolved is kind of like saying that it isn’t here. After all all of those mathematical odds, if we are to believe them and Chuck, would lead to one inescapable conclusion. We can’t exist. Of course there are Bhudists who say that life is an illusion, and the Federation talks about the Fifth Dimension. Such people existentially think they are real but as viewed from the real world they aren’t because nothing about other areas of the fifth dimension can be measured. In the same way Christians offer themselves an “out” you could drive a Mack truck through by saying such things as “You can’t put God in a test tube” and “God can’t be measured”. We also have the saying “If you look at something differently; it changes in its very nature”. If we believe that we kind of have to throw five thousand years of science out the window. The problem with a “Christian” view is they regard thinking rationally as a lapse in Faith. When Chuck Smith decries the intellectual evils of existentialism, I am the first to agree with him. If he follows his own logic, therefore he will use objective criteria for proof of God, and not such terms as “I believe”, “I feel”, and “I decided”. I don’t see why we can’t talk about both evolution and creationism as theories. Science is a realm of theories. Back prior to the Greeks the mystics and “wise men” who probed scientific mysteries said “take what we say on Faith”. This is in large part I suspect because they (perhaps correctly) regarded the common people as too stupid to understand them even if they explained it. Were I writing scripture I’d say “Woe be to the man who tries to hide what he doesn’t know to begin with”. Chuck “knows” God the same say that Marlena “knows” Alex North. He knows because he’s been conditioned like a rat with operant conditioning to know. (Selah) If the forgoing be blasphemy against God then I’ll account for it on Judgement day. If what George Bush says about man yearning to be Free is true, then certainly a bit part of that freedom is intellectually freeing his own mind to discover the Truth, whatever it is.