34,00 MORE TROOPS TO BE SENT TO AFTHANISTAN

President Obama apparently believes that the Afghan war is worth pursuing through to the finish, even if it takes some ten years as people say. Stanley Mc Crystal alledgedly originally wanted 80,000 additional troops so that this is a "compromize". Apparently three brigades for the Army will be sent in and one Marine brigade and also NATO will be pressured to add more troops. Of course even were we to withdraw all of our troops the logistics would be difficult even to get out stuff out of the country. President Obama plans to make an official speech in a week. And like George Bush, whom he resembles more and more every day, he will raise no taxes to pay for this escalation. The news is already receiving a hostile reception among Republicans and Democrats alike. Nobody is very happy with much anything the President is doing these days. This whole Health Care Bills saga is a disaster waiting to happen. People on the right and left alike say they will be voting against this health bill the senate is debating, or would be debating if they were even in session this week. It can't be because they are so far ahead in their work they felt they needed some extra time off. New economists are becoming pessimistic about our economic future. As real estate values drop, property taxes go down and revenue for the states goes down thus adding to the crisis. Some have suggested that the way to stimulate job creation is to provide free FICA for new employees for the next year and the government could make up the difference. Other people want stronger tax incentives to take on new employees. There is increasing talk of a double dip recession. As rosy as the stock market is now it's forward is still reserved by historical standards coming out of a recession, and if this were truely a recovery market, all of the indexes would be in new high ground right now, which they aren't. If you saw Sixty Minutes last Sunday you realize what an utter mess our health care system is in this country. It's a system that would never be allowed in Europe. When these over 65 medicare recipients scream "No socialized medicine - but keep your hands off my Medicare" they are hysterical about a system that rewards inefficienty and pouring money down a rat hole. Doctors are encouraged to admit people to germ laden hospitals where they more likely pick up a serious infection than get cured of anything, like my Dad did. They send you to ten or fifteen specialists who run every diagnostic test and procedure in the book treating you for every conceivable disease, when you are destined to die of something obvious like liver failure in two months. But they want to do a bypass and make sure you get a pap smear even if you're in your eighties. It's a regular freeforall of spending.

Back when I was doing the postings of last May I was just a little bit more left leaning in my politics than I am now. Many have wondered where all our energy programs went. Where are all those new green jobs promised? Back last May I still held out some hope for the prosecution of people in the Bush Administration. In so many ways Obama has done a wholesale cave-in to the corporate forces of the Right. As long as Summers and Geitner are running the economy I don't see how this will change. Sometimes just after you write something you think it's brilliant. But six months later you see how hopelessly naeve and out of date it is. A lot of the time if I had a good point I didn't "camp" on it enough, like when I talked about "Sometimes the whole Premise of the argument is faulty". If you have a bad primis or basic assumption to begin with, it's pointless to go further. Often life is asking the right questions to begin with, and then insisting on real Answers and not excuses.

Our next story about Black Holes comes not from fiction but from real life. Scientists are still trying to create the day the Universe was created. Of course this would involve the creation of a Black Hole and Black Holes are by definition not a part of this Universe. In fact if they were to be created they just might be utterly undetectable. So we would have absolutely no way of knowing "what happened" to the matter once the protons were crashed into each other. One of the things I said last May was that perhaps the key to "other dimensions" lies in the nature of subatomic particles. I am no longer so confident of that and if "the math" is as I say it is, certainly no electron microscope of fevered mathematical calculation will "reveal" a hyper-space dimension. In a previous posting in this blog I also alluded to fifth dimensional travel or "travel between parrellel Universes. While the idea is intriguing, I have yet to behold anything scientists have "discovered" that could be proved with sufficient evidence to even make it on to the ten o clock news as a hot news story. As long as scientific research is the realm of "long hairs" piering into microscopes, to quote John Lennon, "You ain't gona make it with anyone anyhow- - !"

I'm not going to do that flashback recounting of my life from late spring of 1985 through early 1987, as I had planned. This would involve a lot of trashing of Christianity, or at least the Christians I was around. I don't want to "go negative" right now. As long as I see things like in the past ten years when I was completely away from the "Bosc house" or fundamentalist Christianity, as long as various family members are more oppressive now than any Christians were during the 'eighties. The Asshole from El Paso was in the nineties- was worse than anything in the 'eighties. Given this state of being - I kind of feel as though any "unprovoked attack on Christianity as this time is unwarranted. My monetary situation is a bit precarious because I have the double whammy of an extra week in this month because the checks don't arrive yet, and also I have to pay for the haircut I got last Friday. I'm hoping to cut down drastically on my smoking. But the thing is when you've got a shot gun aimed at you, you tend to forget about everything else except how to escape the shot gun. You know some people on the radio take a while to "get what they are driving at". They start by talking about the hazzards of football brain injuries, and they certainly are. Some people get their brains bashed in and their guts rearranged for money every Sunday. Others do it and they don't even get paid that much and they call that "A war of choice" and nobody cares about the inherent problem. But then the host migrated on to her real topic of "I don't think we should have National Health Care unless we regulate every aspect of everybody's life, from the number of chips and dips they consume at a football game, to how much giblet gravy they pour on their turkey dressing. You have these cries of "The average American consumes two full tea spoons of salt every day and that's way too much". Like my family these whiners, and you see them in the news all the time - - they start with one demand like separate smoking and non smoking accommodations in restaurants- - but they are never satisfied and keep upping the demands. They get upset now about things they would have been Happy to Achieve just a couple decades ago. I ought to know because I live with a family like this. And frankly this incessant wining of certain so called "liberals" bothers me than the moral carping of the right wing. You can always just have nothing to do with them to escape the gravitational pull of their carping. With the left you can't do that so easily because they're everywhere. They cry "wolf!" so often nobody will listen to them if they ever do have a point about something in the future. Think about it.