OBAMA VERSES CHANEY

Many people may have yesterday's tit for tat exchange. Obama's speech was carried on C-Span 3 and I caught almost all of this rather lengthly speech. President Obama outlined five kinds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. First are the ones whom either the courts or the former Bush adminestration have already had released. Next are the ones whose cases are most suited to a standard US Court trial. The third are the ones who will be tried by a military tribunal, one that is more equatable than the Bush ones. For instance, heresay testimony will be much more scrutenized. A fourth group will be sent to other countries. And for the benefit of the nattering nabobs of negativism out there a fifth group will be kept as prisoners, probably at Guantanamo indefinitely because the evidence in their cases is tainted so they cannot be tried. But they won't be released either, because the government considers them dangerous. On the other hand Dick Chaney says that America is less safe today with Obama as president, and that waterboarding insured the safety of America because it fingered important terrorists. You know my response to that one. People are worried that these terrorists may escape, but escapes from maximum security federal prisons is virtually non existant. The shoe bomber, for instance, is in a regular Federal prison. There are very austere prisons here if you want them, such as Pellican Bay prison here in California, which in the past has engaged in torture of prisoners. This is for extremely dangerous security risks among the prison population, "The meanest father rapers of them all", to paraphraise Arlo Guthrie. The truth is much simpler. Conservatives just don't like the idea that "all persons" as it says in the Constitution, are entitled to American standards of justice. As to those who insist upon waterboarding in the "Jack Bower" tradition of disarming a ticking time bomb - - well a lot of the prisoners who were waterboarded suffered this fate over a hundred and fifty times. So the "ticking time bomb" would long since have gone off. And these people should be aware that America HAS been attacked since 9 - 11. Dick Chaney believes if he can say 9 - 11 enough times it will put his subjects into some kind of trance of conservative bliss. But the fact is that the Anthrax attacks were after 9 - 11 and there is clear evidence that these attacks were intended to subvert the political process, by making congressmen vote for the patriot act, who were formerly not inclined to do so. Think about that one.

This whole idea of Christian hate is an alarming one. While Islam may be the most reactionary and "retrograde" religion on the face of the earth, some branches of Christianity are giving it fierce competetion. There are all these little kids in the Congo who some bozo pastor has accused of witchcraft and have to undergo bizzare exercisums, for a stiff fee in light of the parents' very limited income, which their pastor is more than happy to pilfer. But Hate is nothing new to Christianity. There used to be a web site comparing statements of Martin Luther and Adalph Hitler side by side, when it comes to how to regard the Jews. There is a man named Marcion, who, by what "good men" have said about him, you must think him the most evil, reched man to walk the face of the earth. Tertulian in one of his many treaties about Marcion spares no supurlative disparaging adjitive and invective to address the issue of Marcion. I'm tempted to say to Turtulian "Yeah, but how do you Really feel about him". And the same people who say children are "evil" and robbing parents of their incomes, will preach against any form of birth control from the pulpet. What do you think about that, my friend?

Gasoline prices are on the rise again. This is a bad thing, obviously. But it shows that this economy, unlike almost any other recession, will have automatic brakes applied to it, if there are ever really are signs of a recovery. It's as though the human body, rather than work to keep you well in the face of disease, will work to make you sick, should you show any signs of actually beating the disease. In applied psychology they call this self sabotage thinking, and scientology calls it "the reactive mind". If there is anything that needs an exercism in this country it's reactive thinking. This is what blinded our collective eyes after World War I. We all wanted to close our eyes and wish it was a bad dream. Sometimes people go through a bad experiance but rather than learn what they need to learn from it, repress the entire thing from their minds. If we try to do that with this recession, reality will slap us down hard. We need to continue the steps which began the recovery, once it gets going.

Wolframalpha.com treats people in their "plots" section to some mind bending exercise. You have to take a leap in logic here because when you say to "plot x", the "y" is implied though left out of the equation. But wolframalpha.com mixes their metaphores and sometimes includes the y dimension on their planes. The software is excellent for slice and dice geometry and will allow you to use the "and" word to slices pieces off geometric formations. But it's when they go three dimensional they intrigue me. Because here there is an implied "z" dimension. They may show a curved x plane that is also curved along tye y axis also giving the thing a saddle shape. In many ways these three dimensional warped grid patterns are akin to those green grids you often see to illustrate how gravity warps space. Of course this metaphore of gravity and warping space is best understood by golfers. According to Thom Hartman, aspects of Einstinian math are now out of date. I presume he's referring to black holes. While black holes fit nicely into the green grid metaphore, Einstein won't allow for them. It isn't only Einstein but Jesus Christ's but on the line here. (KFI radio) Perhaps he and Thom Hartman should have a debate in higher math. I wonder who would win.

A WHOLESALE SURRENDER TO FEAR

Fear is dominating our politics today and nowhere is this more apparent than the vote of the US Senate today to deny funding to close Guantanamo Bay prison. That would have cost 80 Million. The vote wasn't even close; it was 90 to 6. That's a lot of people ruled by fear. They say this is a setback for President Obama. But some like "George Washington's Blog" say that there is still torturing of prisoners going on at Guantanamo. I wonder if this could figure in the reasoning not to close it. Obama wanted the prison closed by January of 2910. They say that nobody in the US wants to take any of the 240 prisoners there. Some point to the fact that George Bush freed so many of the prisoners held at Guantanamo and many of these have turned back to terrorism. Many fear that that no prison in the US could hold them securely. Yet Montana has a prison that's almost empty and they've got the welcome mat out for the prisoners. Many fear that they will infiltrate the prison population and radacalize the inmates and teach them to be terrorists. Some say the prisoners should be sent to a terrorist re-education camp in Sandi Arabia. But Thom Hartman says the methodology this camp uses is to bomb the prisoners with love and cultural acceptance, but it doesn't work. Many turn back to terrorism. When all is said and done this is just another Obama campaign promise to go by the wayside.

Fear reigned supreme in the California special election yesterday as all but one of the ballod initiatives sponsored by the Governor to keep government in California afloat, was voted down. The people are just conditioned like rats not to vote for anything that smacks of raising taxes and people like John and Ken on KFI are only too willing to fan the flames. I don't know what is going to happen but you know that the poor and our educational system will suffer, and that isn't a good thing.

A byproduct of the credit card reform bill is that now people in the National Parks will be packing heat. It's OK to carry a loaded weapon in a National Park now and presumably, to use it, either on a two legged predator or a four legged predator. One can almost see the screaming Headlines of a rash of Dick Chaney style hunting accidents. National Parks are supposed to be a place of refuge and sanctuary, not gun-play.

Some times fear can take strange forms. These parents who don't want their child to be cured of cancer by conventional medical means are ruled by fear. Sometimes Faith in God or whatever, can be a form of fear. If the parents are to be held accountable for the death of their offspring from withholding needed medical care, should now we using chain of command logic, hold God also liable at the Last Judgement for his failure to keep his word. There are many cases in the Old Testiment where the "iniquity" of the gods is laid bare, and to be seen by all. It's an interesting fact that this has never happened because deep down, the ardent in Faith see themselves as God, and when push comes to shove it's their own ego, and not God's in the balance.

Iran has tested another missile, and this one has the power to make it to Israel. If Obana had taken my advice by now the US and Iran might have struck up an alliance against Al Qaeda, and we wouldn't be having this problem. My fear is that if we pursue this Afghan-Pakistani war idea, that the US just might find itself isolated in time and surrounded by its enemies with nowhere to turn. I would do anything to keep that from happening. Harry Truman in the movie "Truman" suggested that Ike and Castro ought to strike up an alliance. Ike should have told Fidel that the US would be the must trusted source for you to turn to with your needs. But we didn't do that and have five decades of hostilities to show for it.

"CONFOUNDED - PHYSICS!"

Did any of you people in Los Angeles see last night's "Nova" episode on KCET last night? If so you were treated to the proposition that one physical object could be in two places at the same time. There is a physicist who in 1954 came up with the notion of Parellel Universes. This is not at all an unfermiliar concept to either Star Trek fans, or those who have watched the program "Sliders". This physisicist was wrestling with the stramge laws of subatomic particles, which exist in their own set of physical laws. We know that "quirks" pop up from place to place mysteriously without having to travel there. This author in previous postings has suggested that the key to alternate universes or parrellel universes lies in the make-up of subatomic particles we can observe in this universe. But even here the Heisenburg uncertainty principle tells us that we can isolate wither the location of an electron or the places of an electron, but that we cannot observe both occurances together. This physicist on the show worked for three years from 1954 to 1957 on this principle of simotanious location of the same object, but then he gave up his work because it wasn't catching on with Bohr and other physicists who were older than he and presumably knew more. But lately the work has been unearthed from the archives of a university and looked at anew by scientists. This physicist went so far as to state that even a cat could be simotaniously alive and dead at the same time. The idea of a single physical object occupying two universes at once is not alien to we at the Federation. We have stated often that the nature of the subatomic substance determines the sort of space that surrounds it. To put in simpler terms you can understand better: I have a solution to the puzzle that was not touched upon last night but that I have several times spoken of in my blog posting. This is the idea that Time, in addition to a fourtn dimension, also occupies a fifth dimension. If eight lines raying out from a single point is the sign of "Life", how about an infinite number of lines going out from that same dot. This lays down the possibility of parrellel universes, and alternate realities, both for physical objects and for human lives. People can "have more than one fate". Anything that CAN happen WILL happen in one Universe or another. There is an almost Religious aspect to this notion of one physical substance occupying more than one Universe or space-time dimension. Have you considered the Catholic Nicine formula for the Holy Trinity. It says "God is of such a nature so as not to confound the persons nor to divide the substance". Many people have scrated their heads and wondered "How can this be". How can an object have two different actions or consequences to those actions. In the demonstration in the show they locked a cat in a room with some radioactive substance - - and if enough of that substance decays then it sets of some other action that releases other poison that kills the cat.

Many people have mused to themselves "I wish I had more than one lifetime to learn all the things I know my brain has the capacity to learn. Certainly in looking at the statistical analytical stuff that wolframalpha.com performs - one concludes quickly that there is much material yet to learn in the area, for instance, of statistical analysis. I changed one of their sample equations to make it harder, and the program came up with five possible solutions that would "satisfy" the equation on a cartisian x and y graph. One might extrapelate in a "Where's Waldo" quiz, that Waldo may be at several places in different universes simotaniously. Each contingency would still satisfy the "substance" of "x", which is Waldo. These are things to think about.

Yesterday - - and the Day Before

This is not an R I A A approved Blog

Spock says that any object with a positive mass when in a positive gravitational field will continue to fall to the surface of the planet. You may remember the song by Jay and the Techniques, “Keep the Ball Rolling”. This is what Obama and the democrats want to keep doing in terms of all of the political hot button issues of today. One issue on the minds of some of us is when the government is going to release all of the secret information they have on the Kennedy and King assenations. Back on March 5, 1967 Tom Green told us the government would release all the secret information after fifty years or something. One would hope that a Presidential administration would not try and block a scheduled release of information. The Church Senate Committee formed various conclusions thirty years ago, where they didn’t rule out conspiracy. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look up the conclusions this committee came to as to both the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. After all, the wheels of progress should bring about total enlightenment. Once the snow ball gets rolling, who knows what the final result might be. But the specter of 1966 looms in the air and Republicans see this congressional election as a continuing beacon of hope. In this year the Republicans won about 46 seats in congress and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, which are two things nobody thought would happen. Liberals look in the abstract and reason that if an idea is basically sound, and people are encouraged to act on this idea, then the momentum for this idea or ideas should continue to accelerate. If you’ve seen rivers in Southern California during and just after a rain storm you know what I am talking about. They become raging rapid rivers and death traps for all who enter. And so it is that Democrats logically would expect Republicanism to be swept away by the liberal tide. For instance as I said above, we have decided to hike fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon, and we have tightened up air standards. To a liberal this is just the natural progression of events. To be fair, this efficiency bill will add $1,500 to the price of every vehicle you buy, but this will be more than compensated by the savings in gasoline. Ironically the auto makers themselves are not the ones who opposed this mileage legislation but only the reactionary republican block in congress. The auto makers are for this bill because it will unify the standards in the whole country and end confusion. People will also be buying an investment in the future. The credit card bill is another badly needed piece of legislation whose provisions should have been enacted into law a long time ago. But sometimes a faulty premise interferes with the natural course of events. Take the plot of “Dial M for Murder”. It was character Mark Halliday who said, “The reason why the jury found Margo guilty is that they didn’t believe her story”. (testimony of the wife) If you knew as a premise that the wife were telling the God’s honist truth, then you’d have to conclude that someone else was lying, somewhere. In like manner the key to Double Indemnity was unlocked when Edger G Robinson came up with the idea that the murder victim “was never on the train”. Sometimes a key premise can straighten out a whole lot of other thinking. In the case of early Christian Church history one big premise was that Marcion was ex-communicated by the Pope as a heretic in 144 AD. Of course this to the, I believe, wrong conclusion that the Church even had a Papacy in 144 AD. Thom Hartman has based in part his opinion on the death penalty on the premise that one and eight prisoners who are eventually executed were wrongly convicted. If I were to buy wholly into this premise, I would be out signing petitions today to ban the death penalty. Hartman points out the arbitrariness of the Death Penalty and how few people who commit capital crimes are actually subjected to the ultimate penalty. Democrats in congress who pride themselves as centrists - - often work from the premise that “The past is the past” and “we shouldn’t go digging it up” or we shouldn’t “obsess over the past” when it comes to crimes of the Bush Administration. A bad premise can gum up the works and put a slamming halt to needed action. There is really no reason why the democrats shouldn’t continue to win and win big in the next congressional election of 2010. There is still a lot of needed work to be done, and the rate of accomplishment is still sluggish. If we allow republicans to raise doubts and introduce negative thinking, progress could grind to a halt altogether.

Thom Hartman led off his radio program this morning with two topics. The US Supreme Court has decreed (ruled) by a five to four decision that you don’t have the power to sue an official of the Federal government. Justice Kennedy, as usual was the swing vote. Justice Brier wrote the strongest dissenting opinion, Hartman says. The case involves an Islamic Pakistani who was thrown into jail and beaten up for several crimes. Most of the crimes he doesn’t contest but he said that John Ashcroft and another guy, Robert Muller III from the FBI personally had it in for him. Brayer’s dissenting opinion offered extensive case law involving being able to sue subordinates for abuse of power. People are disgusted with this supreme court. People like Clarence Thomas apparently are utterly lacking in curiosity and don’t ask any questions, but Thomas rules how his worker subordinates tell him to rule. The other story involves Donald Rumsfeld and his introducing of religious propaganda into the workings of the Defense Department. He would cite epistles of St. Paul used to justify the crusades, and have various pictures of Saddam Hussein with an appropriate scripture, or show a rolling tank and have the caption, “Put on the full armor of God”. Hartman has wondered whether Bush was just a willing idiot-figur-head in this whole affair. Is Rumsfeld the “brains” of the outfit (and I used that term advisedly) just as Chaney was the “brains” of how we treat our military prisoners, or what? From the very first cabinet meeting Bush asked people “Tell me how I can invade Iraq. When are we going to do that?” My hope is that these two stories will get the proper scrutiny by the media, so that the people will realize the issues involved.

. Randi Rhodes on her show today was talking about how no state can pass a law contrary to any federal law. That’s not what the constitution says. The constitution cedes all power “to the states or to the people” all powers that are not specifically spelled out or prohibited to the states. Therefore air standards are none of the Federal government’s business if you’re in San Bernardino choking on our smog, you should have the right to regulate your own air or your own airports, if you don’t think federal laws are up to the task. Likewise today the Supreme Court affirmed this states rights principle in their medical marijuana ruling that I’ve very happy about. The court refused to even consider a case that challenged California’s right to regulate or not regulate marijuana as they choose. If you are a city and don’t want guns in your city, just as you may not want them in your private business, I would say that you have the right to set your own standards. Proposition 2 pertains to the powers of the Federal government only and specifically mentions the states as having rights. In terms of the FICA law, I always regarded the de-facto tax as fourteen percent or so. If I were an employer and told the tax were abolished tomorrow, I would give back the money to the payee.

Apparently that My Space case where the woman pretended to be a teenage boy to induce a thirteen year old troubled girl to commit suicide isn’t as cut and dried as we all thought. I would have considered this a major felony case. But first of all the girl isn’t even considered the victim; My Space is. Secondly they reduced the charges to a misdemeanor, and the judge is considering throwing out the charges altogether. This would be another in the long list of cases of, “Justice denied”.

ON BEING SELF - AWARE

Thom Hartman said on Friday that the Internet as we know it may be already becoming "self-aware". That is, it's a system that has or will develop an virtual Ego. How can this be? This is when an organization begins to think independently and come up with its own solutions to problems, which wasn't prompted by any human being. The internet may be learning to fill in gaps in its own knowledge and be actually learning how to think better, just as we human beings want to do. We all know about how HAL the computer developed an Ego and became a problem. But I happened to think that one inanimate object I would like to see develop an Ego is the US Constitution. They call it a "Living Document" but it isn't really. But still I would like to seem some generalized awareness that the US Constitution is in grave jeopardy from the various Imperial presidencies we've had over the past forty years. Some have suggested we scrap the thing and call a new Constitutional Convention and re-write the entire document. But in my humble oppinion this is the worst thing we in America could do. Because you know the first things to go will be the civil rights of the individual and increased specified powers of the executive branch, which won't have to be "implied" any more. Some people say that when a message needs to be gotten out, God sees the need and empowers people and even dumb animals to powers of speech they formerly didn't have. In the Bible God caused even a jackass to speak, out of a need to get a message out that wasn't being said. Let us hope that the average American citizen today at least has the self-awareness of a jackass. (Selah)

There are two major improvements in use of computers in the past few days. Google now has a "show options" button by which you can process your search results into a form that may be more relavant to you. They have that wonder wheel, which branches out derivitive topics from your original imput topic to the search engine. Also in the news just this weekend of a public release of "Mathematica" or the search engine now called Wolframalpha.com. This engine can do complex algebraic formulas and graft them with ease. It will give you a full financial profile on a corporation or two corporations, at the drop of a hat. There are various tutorials on the most productive ways to use "Mathematica" people should view. What you realize is that the world of number analysis is more complex than you can imagine.

I would like to address readers who are now only reading the first sentenses of paragraphs in blogs to see if they want to read the rest of it. I congradulate you on your efficiency. But I'd like to not at this time go along with suggestions that I stick to one topic. A lot of times topics are related in tangiential ways that deserve to be connected and related to each other. Were I to separate all my blogs into discrete topics, it would be a probject too massive to handle.

I am alarmed that people like John and Ken and a host of others are suggesting stridently that the people of California vote down all the propositions in this coming election on Tuesday that the government wants past. People who revolt and say "no more taxes" just aren't thinking straight. That's what the Proposition 13 people did over thirty years ago and we are still feeling the adverse effects today. We don't want government gutted. That's what Ronald Reagan did forty years ago and we are still feeling the effects. This economy will not be in a slump forever, and right now we should plan for the future, for a better tomorrow.

Yesterday I watched a video which tied a lot of loose ends up for me as far as this notion of once we had a civilization that was more advanced than anything history suggests. People who look at the pyramids of Egypt will observe that the first three are of much higher quality and workmanship than any pyramid since, even though this is contrary to the old axion of "newer is always better". Some say that the positioning of the three pyramids are the position of the belt of Orion in the heavens, not now, but as of 13,000 AD. Also the Sphinx is said to be incredibly ancient. The erosion on the Sphinx is suggestive of not wind damage but water damage, and lots of it. Which leads me to my point. There was a massive devistation of Planet earth in 13,000 BC during of "The Age of Leo". Gene Scott once suggested that the face on the Sphinx was originally of a woman and not a lion. Astronomers point out that in 13,000 BC we were on the verge of leaving the age of Virgo and entering the Age of Leo. Either one makes sense. So what happened 13,000 years ago? A comet hit. The Mayans have spoken of five major world disasters brought about by "surpents". Comets and asteroids are like surpents. The writings of the Egyptians and Babylonians and Hebrews were all shown to use similar astrological and astronomic imigry. 13,000 years ago a giant asteroid called the resumption of the ice age. First of all what it did was to break up an ice glacure dam in the Great Basin of North America, known then as the great inland sea. There were formations that, like the Sphinx, were wiped out, and the verdict is water erosion, and lots of it, rather than wind erosion. It is believed that Earth was an interesting place then because all of the wolly mammoths were still around. The whackos are right. It was an asteroid that killed them rather than just the ice age. The comet caused a massive redistrubution of the land surfaces and many high civilizations went either water, or under sand. You've heard of the Biminy stones in the Bahamas region. In Southeast Asia there are likewise under-water civilizations that have been inundated with water. The Great Pyramid doesn't have the usual Egyptian hierogliphics on it. The writing this ancient civilization used was different, as I have alluded to about the ruins on Reigel VII. Later on civilization reasserted itself. One of the chief objects of worship in civilizations of the Third Melinium BC was the Bull. Taurus the Bull. The chief god of the Babylonians was called Marduch, the Bull. Another hero of Egypt was the figure of Orion, who is said to be related to Osirus, God of the Underworld. The hunter was seen as the greatest of them all. Then we move on to the age of Aries the Ram, and so the Hebrews are hung up on the worship of the Ram and lambs. The Mayans have stated that there were five major devestations of the world. We know of the asteroid that killed the dinasaurs 65 Million years ago. The devistation of 13,000 BC may be a more major one because man may have been in a state of high civilization at that time. Of course the bottom line is what will happen on December 21st. 2012? This is the date that the Mayans say will usher in a period of judgement much as the advent of Cortez in 1521 ushered in a period of judgement. We too could be powerless to cope should space aliens land here from god knows where. Perhaps we can learn from the Aztechs. They were ruled by fear and allowed chaos to take over. Perhaps if we are more unified as a planet, we will fare better.

Today they played that original version of Revolution I on KRTH. This is the version that John Lennon wanted out as a single. To me it would only be fitting. This version is long and slower and goes on for seven or eight minutes and "morphs" into "Revolution 9". This recording just like "Good-Bye, My Love" "Cosmically Conscious" "One of Nature's Children" and "Sour Milk Sea" are Beatle songs not included on the Anthology but should be. I have no idea why they were omitted. John Lennon refers to the White Album as being the album where the Beatles fell apart. He didn't mention Abbey Road. If you believe our material, the fake John Lennon was back in evidence and wrote most of the "John Lennon" songs on Abbey Road. All of the Beatles have stated in one way or another that keeping the group together was like trying to preserve a corpse. All of the life had gone out of the group, and the public announcement was only a recognition that the group was already dead. You know, John Lennon wrote "There's nothing you can do that can't be done". If we state this another way we get "You can't do anything unless it's actually Possible to do". Joel Olsteen made a good speech talking about how Jesus will raise the dead but it's our job to "Roll Away the Stone". We do what we can do before Jesus does what only he can do. As pleasing as this sounds, in my life it just hasn't worked out that way as far as Christianity has been concerned. It was a wise man who said "Facts are grim things, and you ignore then at your peril". (Selah)

One lesson I've learned in life is that overestimating a person's intelligence on a matter said party has been deemed to have expertise in - is just as much, if not more a reality than underestimating a person's intelligence. Today Tom Hartman came up with a self admitted dubious "explanation" for President Obama's sudden reversal of position on the subject of releasing torture photos at Abu-grave. He said "My hope is that Obama is playing chess while the other person is playing checkers". There is one thing wrong with this assrtion: If everybody watching the game sees only checker pieces on the board it's a fair assumption that "checkers" is the game that's being played, whether you "think" you're playing something else or not. Stated another way, President Obama isn't fooling anybody but himself if he thinks his "roll over and play dead" trick is winning him any intelligence points with his Democratic base on the left. We all see the situation for what it is. Lately, Hartman has come up with the "Make Me" principle. Supposedly FDR was asked about integrating the armed services and he told them "Make me". The idea here is that if there is enough public pressure on a President, if he follows through with said action, and somehow something goes wrong he can point at election time and say, "Public pressure made me do it". So it is that Hartman is banking on the Supreme Court or somebody "Making" President Obama take needed actions. From a puretly "Profiles in Courage" standpoint we learned about in films in school, this thinking doesn't make the grade.

A lot of liberals who are smarter than Obama gives them credit for have their own ideas as to what's going on: Obama is being pressured, or worse, blackmailed by wither the CIA or democrats in congress friendly to the CIA. When someone abruptly reverses position on a key issue they formerly held near and dear, any cop would look at the situation and say "blackmail is the first place to look". I just learned from an MSNBC article that Eric Holder himself has been rather soft on torture in the past and in no way can be counted on to "do the right thing" and file appropiate charges. As you may also know, torture photos have been published in the Sydney Morning Herald and they appear in "George Washington's blog" a blog I would highly reccomend. The address is georgewashington2.blogspot.com - and you can paste that if it still isn't a working link.. THAT WON'T WORK: TRY THIS LINK:
Here Are a Few of the Torture Just as American tradition is in George Washington's shadow when it comes to a tradition of humane treatment of prisoners of war, so it is that I see "George Washington's blog" as a superior source to myself to turn to for blog commentary. Thom Hartman says "Perhaps inflaming world oppinion is a good thing now. After all, if we wern't guilty of anything there would be nothing to get inflamed about". Personally I hardly see how Obama's withholding of the torture photographs won't inflame Islamic passions even further. They will say to the new recruits, "Here are some bloody torture photographs inflicted on our people. Oh by the way, there may be worse ones than these except the United States President is afraid to release them". Psychologically we all need to be keen on the "desensitization phenomenon". Psychologists use it to aid in patients getting over phobias. But it also works in that the Nazis knew that "gradualism" is something that people can live with. They needn't accept the whole Nazi Platform at once. All they need do is be a little more exposed than they were yesterday to acclimate themselves to the latest set of government abuses. All of the Republicans are banking on this hope. Plus there's the fact that Republicans flat out lie. They say that Nancy Palosi and other leading democrats were told all about waterboarding and they went along with it. There are two things wrong with this statement. First of all if they were told, they were sworn to secrecy and would be violating a confidence if they made what they knew about torture - - public. And secondly these democrats claim that water-boarding was among the things that they were told were NOT DONE. If you rely on Sean Hannity to get your facts, you're in big trouble right off the bat.

Voltaire said that people who are led unknowingly into believing an absurdity, will be so tainted that they will allow any abuse or torture to support that absurdity which they were told. Voltaire was ahead of his time. The following is an Italian proverb supposedly. "When all is said and done- - - - more is said than done". People have ideas. Democratic liberals have ideas but somehow too little of those lofty words ever translate into actual action. Here is another quote: "We have figured out just about everything - - except how to live". That's by John Paul Satre. I'm not saying I agree with that one I just thought I would throw it out there. Here's one, "Sometimes things are just what they seem". I think Pink Floyd said that.

There is a group of economic pessimists out there who say that "Happy Talk" will not carry the day. It sure didn't further my growth as a Christian, I'll tell you that. The term is one of disparagement. I think it's always best to look on the bright side. If you don't plan on things getting better, how will you deal with "better" when it comes? My only reservation about this economy is that there was a book I read two years ago before any of our current crises - - and that book author said that we as a nation were pretty much economicly screwed even with the statistics which were ALREADY know. The level of our corporate debt - - and I mean a debt we all owe as a nation - - is staggering. Thom Hartman has said "Untill we again start manufacturing our own products here in the US - - we are going to go into one economic bubble after another". That's the cold hard reality, and one that the current adminestration doesn't want to even consider as a viable possibility. I would say to hold on to your gold futures at this point. It certainly isn't time to sell yet.

It turns out that our family did have an ancester on the Mayflower. But he fell overboard on the trip over and drowned. "Allright you people - - Homer - - Barney - - Anybody - - I could use that life preserver about now".

OK you O C D fans, listen up.
(especially you who didn't meet with C I A agents)
What did Margo Wendice and Mark Halliday
Have for dinner on their final date
In the Movie, "Dial M For Murder?"
That's just what I had
for dinner tonight.