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.