THE EVER PRESENT THREAT OF ASSASSINATION

As you know, today is December 7th and the 68th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. It was earlier in 1941 that Franklin Roosevelt delivered his Four Freedoms speech. In this speech he said people of the world are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But the question is whether freedom from fear is a realized value to a lot of citizens of the world subject as they are to oppressive dictatorships and the other horrors described in the previous posting. Tomorrow is the 29th anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon. Number 29 in the I Ching was something I did commentary on back in October of 1997. Number 29 with a nine at the top symbolizes a wooden raft sailing over the abysmal waters, safe to the harbor on the other side, presumably. John Lennon wrote a song shortly before he died called "Living on borrowed time". You've probably heard it. In this song he expresses the joy he now has in life "without a thought for tomorrow". The song is eerily prophetic. And yet in many people's minds, people become expendable. I've often marveled as the way Christians are able to "blow off" people in lost relationships as though they were yesterday's baggage. The day before John Lennon was shot, Chuck Smith gave a message where he talked about the deaths of his father and his brother in a plane crash. You wonder what sort of loss this would engender in the survivors. But there is a thing called the Pete Richards sidrone where these losses are just considered as "part of God's plan" and who can argue with that? As John Lennon said again prophetically in another recent song "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". In the mind of Mark David Chapman, John became the source of all his problems and hang-ups and by killing John Lennon as the "embodyment" of all his "issues" then the problem could be relieved. The voice in his head were screaming "Do it". Time and again Champan would relent as the forces of sanity in his life tried to regain a foothold, but in the end, the forcess of madness ruled, and we are all the poorer for it. We don't know what sort of political or pshchological force in the world that John Lennon would have been under Ronald Reagan. We all know that God has alotted a certain amount of time for all of us on this planet, and that we cannot worry about it "add one cubit to our alotted span of time". (Selah)

I’ve been watching the Senate debate on the Health Care bill this morning and have come to certain conclusions. You should hear John Kerry’s speech going on right now that the Republicans are offering the Craid amendment to scare Republicans into the false belief that the main bill will somehow misappropriate payroll taxes away from Medicare. This is a falsehood and a rhetorical guimic to insure that positive changes made in this bill are not realized for good. First I watched the democratic senator from North Dekoda and he said that that it was the democrats who want to cut Medi-Care costs by 370 Billion dollars or whatever- - so that fraud and waste is eliminated and that the Bush administration proposed an even larger medi-care cut proposal of over 400 billion dollars, so that you can’t say the republicans don’t want to cut medicare. However it’s come to my attention now that if it involved padding insurance company profits, the Republicans are in favor of it. Anything that might tend to diminish insurance company profits the republicans are against. This Craig amendment will prevent any savings in medi-care from being used for the new health bill. The Republicans use the term of “assumptions have to be made” for this Democratic savings to be realized. Well, life in general is making “assumptions” and yes, the democrats are saying “yes, with the provisions of our bill enacted into law- - these savings will be realized”. But Republicans say “Well you know old people are never going to allow one dime of medi-care funding to be withheld”. To hear these Republicans talk you’d think they invented medi-care in the first place, instead of violently opposing the original bill back in 1965. These Republicans are so in the back pocked of insurance companies that they will do or say anything to keep up their little sweetheart arrangement with them.

Yesterday in the news there was a horrible story about a young boy about 11 or 12 who had to undergo the removal of his remaining eye from cancer. They removed one eye at birth saying they’d have to remove the other eye at some later date. The boy is in amazing spirits for someone about to have his life stripped away from him. His desire was to meet the USC football team and watch practice, and even “post op” he has demonstrated enthusiasm about their games.

There were a number of good movies reviewed in “At the Movies”. The one about the two marine brothers and the awful statement of the Dad wishing that the surviving brother had died, was akin to that Johnny Cash movie. What do you do with a cold bastard father like that? And the brother thought dead in the marines was really alive after all but he comes back all embittered. There was another movie about a Dad visiting all of his adult children in various parts of the country because all of them refused to come to a family reunion he had scheduled.

Then there is the story about the Black guy running that advanced school for Harlem disadvantaged youngsters and the amazing results he was able to achieve. Then also on Sixty Minutes was the referee who bet on his own games. He won 75% of the time and drew the attention of the Gambino family who wanted in on the action to the tune of millions of dollars in profits. The mafia made a whole lot more money on these bets than the rogue referee himself, who was referee in NBA games. The referee let the mob in on his action because he had no choice. There were people out ready to kill his family if he didn't cooperate. It was kind of a new sense of fear he'd never known before. But the FBI concluded to everyone’s surprise that this referee was honist in all of his calls. He made his money because he knew how crooked the system was and how they take vengeance on certain players like Iverson, and favor other ones like Colby Bryant. Also there is a conspiracy to lengthen the playoffs between teams by helping whoever is behind so the series will go longer. To me the referee is more Hero than Devil because he exposed fraud in the N B A. Because of his actions in gambling, the N B A may be actually cleaning up their act now.

The following was originally sent off as an E mail

In the past couple of days the whole mystery of Einstein's theory of special relativity has come into crystal clear focus. I'd like to talk about the effects of light delayed images. When you see a flat image on a delayed basis you see the whole image at once, only later. But when you have a real life or 3 D image, the varying lengths and distances light has to travel to get to you means varying degrees is distortion if you are viewing fast moving "targets". First of all the key to the whole thing is that if you are traveling away from an object, the objects behind you shrink in their front to back distance. And the objects ahead of you are longer (like a high angle setting on Sketch they "recede") - - only in the dimension of travel. It dawned on me that even if Einstein's theory wern't around, when you engaged in really fast space travel - - optically you would see the objects in front of you shrunken in sort of a Christmas tree ornament or fish eye lens type of situation. Objects directly to the side of you would appear to be still in front of you but you would "see around them" so to speak due to a distorted image. Optically you would experiance an increased "depth of focus" phenomon like with a wide angel lens of a camera. Objects behind you would appear like a telephoto lens with a diminished depth of focus meaning you had to be "exact" in your focus. Also in front of you the sides of objects would be enhanced whereas looking behind you - - the sides of objects would be of diminished importance, like looking through a telescope. Now objects headed away from you Shrink, as most people say - in front to back depth. But objects in front of you "recede" away or Stretch distance. Also time moves faster for objects approaching you. (the doppler theory proved this without even using Einstein) So this theory about "we are the only still people" isn't quite true. Our time goes slower than it does for objects approaching us but faster than objects headed away from us. To me this is one aspect of the theory that needs to be made clear to others. If the universe is expanding then most of the mass would assume a spherical bulb shape in the Universe. I had that part right. Here are two more key things to remember. Acceleration moving forward is always diminished and acceleration moving backward is always enhanced. Like if a football player throws a forward pass and he's running forward- - normally that forward motion would ADD to the speed of the ball and if the player were running backward then his throw would be weaker than normal. Einstein's theory Eliminates this discrepency so that forward and backward speeds match. Also with Einstein is that there is a quality of the non simotanious nature of events that appear simotanious to other observers. But what the theory does and says is that yes, if you are approaching something you will see the event SOONER and if you are going away you will see the event LATER. However here is where Alice in Wonderland logic comes in. Because like in Einstein's "train signal" analogy - - viewers on the train see the lights from the engine and the caboose SIMOTANIOUSLY. But if you are stationary you see the Caboose light first and then the Engine light. But Einstein says this is NOT an optical illusion but that as far as you're concerned the caboose light REALLI IS FLASHING first. And so when you figure the speed of light from engine and caboose - - you jerry rig the figures so that the speeds match. Here is the reason why the "beam" to the engine appears not to go faster than the beam to the caboose. That is because the light after going to the engine still has to go from there to your eyes. Because light never varies in speed. OK you can ask me questions about any of this if you want.

OH- - I forgot to talk about "reprocity of measurements". This word "recriprocity" is used the same way as psychologists use the word as in talking about Aspurger sidrone people lacking emotional reprocity. The term isn't used the way you would use it in math meaning "devided into one". For instance if I come up to you and say "You are slower than I am" then you would recriprocate and say "No, Charlie - you are slower than I am". Each sees the other as the other sees him. This is reciprocity. In answer to your question about TIME and SPACE TRAVEL - what this reciprocity doctrine does is pretty much wipe out any time difference if you take a trip to Neptune and I stay here on earth. There is one Small Time Factor however involving General relativity and psudo gravity caused by Acceleration. This phenomonon is NON reciprical. That Small portion of time distortion will remain. But you have to have a LOT of gravity to distort time, like say a neutron star or something. That would cause a lot of distortion. Feel free to ask me about any of this.