President Obama Makes Case for Going to War

President Obama tonight at West point gave the sort of stock speech that "should" be appealing to the right wing. Unfortunately the right wing in the form of Rush Limbaugh has already weighed in on this speech hours before it was even delivered. Rush Limbaugh claimed that Obama would enphasize the temporary nature of the current "surge 2010" effort, and how Obama doesn't want to be trapped into a ten year long protracted war. Rush said that Obama would attack Bush and Chaney and Rmusfeld in their handeling of this war. But what did Obama really say? He talked about how the Talliban somehow "appeared out of nowhere and took over" after Afghanistan expelled the Soviets. The truth is that the US were supporters of the Talliban back then. Obama omitted this little factoid. Also omitted was the fact that the 9 - 11 attacks were not even planned in Afghanistan but in Germany and other far removed nation and that fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Also omitted was how close President Bush was with Talliban officials. Also, the President failed to mention that General Mc Crystal was the same general who was "kicked upstairs for incompetence" after covering up the Pat Tilman "friendly fire" affair. We are told that the Afghani people support the actions of the United States and that the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan under Karzai are more trustworthy than they used to be. This is another mis-assumption. The plain fact of the matter is that the US is expanding wholesale into two Mideast wars at the same time and taxing our service men unduly. Of course people will compare Obama to President Bush, who never attended a single funeral of a fallen soldier. Unfortunately President Obama's speech will please no one. The President is living in a mythical world where spending money on War is perfectly OK, even while he is professing concern about the national deficit. One sure outcome of this decision to send more troops is greater recruiting appeal of the Talliban. You can't go to war with an idea in a nation that arguably has no organized leadership at all but is made up of a disperate collection of tribes that often war with each other. The American people won't buy this speech, or the idea of a massive escalation of hostilities. I don't think President Obama realizes the utter impossibility of this task. We are reminded that Afghanistan is only slightly larger than Iraq in area, the "theater of battle" is much more vast and wide spread, as the population is much more evenly spread out over the land. Next, we are told that this "surge" will enable the US to "train the Afghan army in eighteen months". We've had eight years to "train the Afghan army" assuming there even IS one that will do our bidding, what makes us think can accomplish this task now? Rush Limbaugh believes that Bin Laden is dead, and I'm inclined to believe that. That right there should pop our whole motivational balloon. I'm inclined to view these terrorist acts as more criminal in nature rather than cause for a generalized military action.

That Dyre positive confession guy has cancer now. People are wondering about whether is is going to alter his message because of his new circumstance. Not to be sarcastic or anything but this new "development" as it were "provides a new oppertunity to put his theories to the test". It's like a guy carrying a rain coat and an umbrella everywhere and one day it actually rains and he has the opportunity to use his implements. People put their lives on the line for their country, but some people will put their lives on the line for their belief system, saying that their Beliefs must be guarded and protected "at any price". (Selah) There is a "Meme" that compells them to do so. Last Saturday I said almost absent mindedly that I was thankful that I was no longer in debt. Then I received a phone call that evening claiming that I had short changed the phone company by four dollars. My response to this is that "If I had to have all my Christian prayers reflect reality I'd be screwed before I began". Christianity has never been about reality. Clearly I had definite money problems last Saturday. In Christianity it's fashionable to deny the obvious as a means of appearing "spiritual". It's an entrenched force of habbit. The Devil brings occasion in my life to expose basic flaws in my Christian belief. One might think that if others are "blessed" with the exposition of flaws in their own belief, them just might try changing their belief systems so they more closely reflect reality.

Many people say that they would like to get back to the Religion of our Founders, like Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. These men were all Deists of course, and many people like Thom Hartman don't even seem to know what that is. It is not "animism" as suggester. Neither is it pantheistic. If you're going to attack Deism, at least know what belief it is that you are attacking. Deism is the belief in a god that designed this universe from outside of this universe, but after having done so- - does no further action but only leaves us to the Natural Laws. These consist of the laws of Science and also the Inailable Human Rights that we all cherish. Some would say that to "Deny Christ" is really to hide from God because of your own sin that you are somehow deathly afraid might be brought to light if you really "Came to God". I resent this assertion to the core. It's an insult to Atheists and Deists everywhere and in Spencer Tracy's words, "A denial of the one thing that elevates man above the beasts, and that is his Intelligence". I don't mind people having beliefs they can't prove. But I do resent the fact that part and parcel of their "evangelization" of their beliefs is that they belittle other people's intelligence and consider it a badge of homor to disrespect the intelligence of others.

People see God as a rock, something that always existed, a guiding light in a sea of darkness. In other words they appear to "need God" and they project their own sense of need on to others. So they coin statements such as "A food hath said in his heart that there is no God. First of all, people have cosmology all wrong if they assume that before the Creation of the World as we know it, that the Universe was one unending sea of blackness that existed forever and went on forever. Not only are time and space "human constructs" but even "existance" itself is a human mental abstraction. We humans are bound into thinking that something "has to" either Exist, or Not Exist. But why can't there be entities whose existence or lack of the same, has not been determined. We see existance as some inherent property of everything we describe. Some may point to their TV set and turn on station 4.0 and say "You see? Black screen and no sound- - that's non existence". But try to stop thinking digitally for a moment and start thinking analog. If you turn on an old analog TV these days you'll get - not a blank screen and silence, but rather a gray salt and pepper pattern and roaring "pink noise". I believe I spoke of how when this or any Universe is created it "reformats" space that existed before, or whatever existed before, like formatting a floppy disk. In the same way that our brains are "formatted" by our environment. If you are a Deist, as I am, you believe in a god that created time and space. Some may say "But what about the intelligent design of this Universe and the creation of life on this planet" and will argue that with four billion years there simply "is not enough time for life to have evolved". Mathematics is a stern task master - - and given a large enough sample - - certain events will occur with exacting regularity. You've certainly heard the saying, "You got away with it This Time- - - " But if you believe in the axiom "anything that Can happen Will happen" then you believe time as well as space-time occurs on all directions and not just "forward". There may be a hypothetical Universe where time flows backwards and effects precede causes. We have a saying "things will all happen the way God intended them to happen". That's from the perception of our own little cubby hole we'll call "God". One traveler from another dimension might accuse us of "cherry picking what we call reality". There may be countess Universes of this sort. People say there used to be eleven dimensions and they "collapsed" down to four. We know our own dimensions because we relate in this "formatted space" but if you are captive to other dimensions- - where time travels, shall we say, obliquely, (at an angle) this time-space reality is so totally divorced from our own we can't conceive of it. It isn't a question of it being "far away". Think of Select or On TV, which used to be pay TV stations. You get a picture that is in negative, with a white frame line running down it- - and no sound at all. It's the same signal - - that paying subscribers to these TV stations also receive and they have no viewing problems. So how do we know that the same "primordial explosion" doesn't have entirely different manifestations depending how the view's space is time-space formatted? It's a case of "You can't get there from here". What we call "our space" may in another "time space format" house a different reality even though it's occupying the same space as we do. My point is that chance has "all those other universes to examine" and count into the probability equation. It isn't just our universe but all of the countless others, too.

The one thing that is a wild card in even all of this, the more than obvious thing we haven't talked about is that nobody has even SEEN the human soul. We use our bodies as vehicles of perception, but we aren't our bodies; we merely use them, the way a soldier uses his gun. The whole "battle ground" of decision making lies elsewhere. Capish? Some of you readers may say "Are you going to go into all that hyper-space crap again?" Could it be that hyper-space is as much a part of our Universe as the physical part we see? Allow me the one example of an atom. There is a nucleus - - that is surrounded with electrons. The electrons exist in the realm of rapid travel in spherical shells. If you have the nucleus or "the solid part" what comes with it are the electrons. Nobody would suggest that one is less important than the other. But in the hyper-space world they don't relate in terms of space and shapes, any more than hyperbolic trig is about space and shapes. There is no time - backwards, forwards, or sideways. There is no space as we know it. Just as the nucleus and electrons don't mix, so hyper-space and ordenary space don't mix.