FINAL SPACE SHUTTLE FLIGHT TAKES OFF

This morning at Cape Canaveral the final space shuttle was launched into space. They had been worried about stormy weather that plagues the south Florida area this time of year with heavy thunder and lightning strikes, such that many feared it could be many days before they got off a successful launch. Today's launch is the final space shuttle launch capping a thirty year shuttle program, based on technology that came about in the 'seventies. As far as I know the launch was not broadcast live on any commercial television station. In contrast the launch of the Columbia back in April of 1981 was heavily hyped and broadcast live, and everyone was excited. Rush did at least two songs about this launch, and were live in attendance. Today the maximum attendance for a launch of 45,000 was reached and they had to turn people away. Even the Challenger explosion in late January of 1986 was seen by many people, including myself live. But somewhere along the way we lost interest. Spending on space programs has slowed to such a trickle you wonder just how much technological inovations have come about in the last thirty years. Apparently not enough to keep the program going. Now they say the proposed moon launch in 2020 will be scrapped due to this disease we are in of "chronic constriction of the wallet".

The Unemployment rate has continued its march in the wrong direction rising to 9.2%. Because of this the republicans have "stiffened in their resolve" to not give in on any tax hikes, anywhere. Maybe Thom Hartman is viagara for the brain but he's wrong. It apparently does lead to stiff thinking. Just yesterday we were promised some "break-through" with rosey news that the President and John Boehner were forming a working relationship, and that Boehner had agreed to some revenue enhancement in that he would agree to 200 Billion in closing of corporate tax loopholes is the President would agree that the rest of the four Trillion would be in government program cuts, mainly to the poor. Apparently the President agreed to put Medicare and Social Securety payments up for debate even though Social Security hasn't contributed a penny to the debt because it's an independent program. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote a letter to the President asking him not to cut Social Security or Medicare. The American people in poll after poll have told polsters that the deficet isn't that important if it means sacrificing these two programs, neither of which to the American people want cut in any way. We had been led to believe that "if the President continued to make progress in the talks with Boehner" that there would be some kind of a budget deal announced Sunday or Monday. But as I said nearly a week ago and nothing has occurred to change my mind, the President is going to do a complete cave-in on this issue with not even a semblence of Pride left. Only 18,000 jobs were added last month, which is way below expectations. But government has lost 500,000 jobs to a large extent because state governments have been slashing budgets. There is some question in my mind how much of this deficet is George Bush and how much as the current President. Thom Hartman states that Bush doubled the national debt from five to ten trillion, but now it is over fourteen trillion. I have no choice but to believe that President Obama is responsible for the final four trillion, meaning that this President has run up the deficet almost as much in a year and a half as George Bush did in eight years. Most republicans say that the current national debt is slated to double again in the next five or six years. As far as corporate taxes are concerned Hartman is now revising his figures. Formerly he had said that business is responsible for between seven and nine percent of the overall tax burden nationally. Now Hartman is saying corporations only pay six percent of all U S tax revenues, and are in fact second from the bottom among the world's developed nations. I'd be happier about tax cuts if I thought that THIS would make the republicans happy. But the truth is NO MATTER WHAT this President does, the republicans will complain and say the President didn't cut enough. At some point you have to realize these people are whackos. Now you know they have added a balanced budget constitutional amendment to their list of demands. As you know these bills take a long time to get ratified so if that is the way to make them happy, we're going to be waiting for a budget for a long time.

Rupert Murdoch is at it again. FOX news owns a tabloid newspaper in England called "News of the World" or something. Now this newspaper is in trouble for tapping people's phones and recording their conversations and using these to sell newspapers. But they tap not only the perpetrators of crimes but the victims of these crimes, as well as the relatives of fallen dead troopers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Of course we know FOX fired Glen Beck for being too whacked out even for their news. I don't normally watch FOX news because I don't have cable TV. But perhaps I really should start, because Randy and those who do say it is really "out to lunch" in terms of what sort of items it represents as facts. I just watch Sunday mornings and I haven't heard anything there that was "over the line". But I know various apologists for the tea party will quote unnamed sources with absolute certitude to back up their fanciful claims about what to them is some "tax and spend" economic reality, as well as saying things like "We have high gasoline prices because Obama had banned oil drilling". They don't stop to think it just might be because we are running out of oil, and I mean world wide. We hit peak oil - - world wide- - in 2006.

I have been laboring over how to cover this last story for most of the week. I wanted to say that this bit about "occupying John Lennon's body" is nothing I actually claimed for myself. I'm just saying that some Person X seems to be showing his presence. Whoever it was we don't know if he is still alive, or whether he is writing songs now, or died mysteriously somehow. With the exception of the Hamburg trip in 1960, that is. There has always been one thing "wrong" with trying to make any claims for myself in that unlike other "astro projections" or whatever you call them, there is no visual imigry, and virtually nothing in the way of conversations or specific interractions with people. This has always puzzled me. The Hamberg thing was completely different from the later stuff. But I'll tell you what even prompted the theory to begin with. And that is you can see an "evolution" in Lennon that utterly ended in the spring of 1968. Vocally there is a certain machismo that Lennon developed in his voice dating back as far as when he recorded "Money" on July 18th 1963, if you can trust that date. Apparently "You Really Got a Hold On Me" was recorded the same day. If we believe it was truely some "unknown vocalist" as the letters N U J V would imply, then we have to figure out who it would be from the evidence. It was said that John Lennon wanted to write "a soul song" "something that sounded Black that would appeal to the American markets". The first some to fit this bill was "All I Gotta Do". Here is a song vaguely patterned after a Cherrels some or something, though Lennon claims he wanted it to sound like Smokey Robinson. People on KTLK this morning were going on about "how the Beatles brought Black music to racist white parents, who would never allow their kid to buy a black record". Obviously that's hype over-kill. We see this evolution in Lenon's voice further in songs like "I Call Your Name" and "Slow Down" and "You Can't Do That", "I'll Cry Instead" and "When I Get Home". (Later in 1964 there were "I'm a Loser", "Baby's in Black", "I don't want to spoil the Party" "Mr. Moonlight", and perhaps a couple others prior to 1965) I'd like to take issue with Wickipedia on one thing they said. "I'll Cry Instead" was obviously recorded in February when other songs were that were planned for the HDN movie. John Lennon even said where he wanted the song to be used in the movie. On June 26th 1964 they released the U A Hard Day's Night album and single in the US. The album included "I'll Cry Instead" but then Richard Lester yanked it at the last minute. Wickipedia claims the song wasn't recorded till June. But were this so meeting a June 26th release date in another country would really take some doing. There are other things to say on this topic but first of all here are a couple of intervening paragraphs before we get back to it.

Betty Ford was a couragious woman. She died Friday at age 93. She was known for facing her alcohol and substance abuse problems boldly and publicly, and founded the Betty Ford clinic. She also had a double mastectomy, and made women aware of breast cancer and encouraged them to get a check-up. She also was outspoken for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and also as a champion of abortion rights. She lent a new dignity and boldness to women that they had never had such a role model of before. And for this she will be long remembered.

OK this is a still warm Friday July 8th. We did a blog earlier today with mostly relatively sane stuff. Later we're going to do what I call "Six Songs and Stories" from the vault, mostly written in the 1980's. But after we're done with this opening paragraph, I'd like to tie up a few cosmic loose ends (assuming the wiring in my brain hasn't frayed completely) First according to Blogger this is the 75th posting in this particular blog, and we're aiming to do number 76 perhaps Monday, which will cap things off for a while. In the news you could phone most of this stuff in. It's the same ol' same ol'. Around here Dr. Levy's appearences are getting fewer and fewer and he missed last night, and maybe we'll see him at the end of next week. His "newsletters" have taken on an non existant quality. He's got a nice backlog of my writings if he finds the need to fill space. Relations with family members is sparse, and that seems to be for the best. Sometime I think the only time they want to have anything to do with me is when they see some problem or weakness in me they're able to exploit. I'm not at all optimistic about the election of 2012. People always talking about "not letting Democracy slip away" in this country, but I have the feeling that's just what it's doing. I guess Thom Hartman said today that they did an anthropological study of far flung cultures of the world and concluded that while the build up and development of cultures is usually slow and progressive, that their demise and collapse can often be quite sudden. This ought to give every American pause. I have this fear we are way too technologically dependent on gadgets and such and if we ever had to make it on our own, many of us would fall flat on our face.

COSMIC SECRETS, LOOSE ENDS, AND BLOOPERS

I now know the name of the fourth group of "Cassiopians". The other three are the Crestorians, the "Texas group" and the "Phil Collins" group. The fourth group are called the Taccomans. This is not an alltogether alien name to me. It's just that I had always referred to them as "the west coast Arkturians". It turns out their connection with Arkturas was some misunderstanding of something I was told a long time ago, but they are in fact of the Cassiopian star system. (Cassiopians refer to themselves as a "star system" rather than as an Empire, or Federation, or Republic, or whatever. Why this is significant is that this is the group that took over the Orion Federation communacation ministry back in early 1990 but it became much more pronounced in June of 1991 till they were driven out under "opperation mongoose" about March first 1992. That's one mystery down. As you know today is the 36th anniversary of the death of Richi Vallenz in his Romulan "avatar". This was when he had a heart attack in his swimming pool on a Tuesday afternoon on July 8th 1975. I didn't know such a thing could happen to "one of those people" and asked others who merely said, "It obviously did". The story on this one is that they took his body and dipped it in a vat of hydro-chloric acid on the shore in Ensenada, Mexico a few days later. Richi was never heard from again, at least by me till he resurfaced in early 1995, when he has been around frequently. Sometimes people will "go underground" for a time and resurface. As you may know Stewart Sutcliffe "went underground" about the turn of the year '62-1963 and didn't resurface again till late 1971 and he did so where he had departed from Torranto, and formed a band with the same band mates of all things. (No, I don't mean the Beatles) These included Fernando S. (Vocalist who kind of sounds like Pete Ham) Darren D. - - - Barret R. (who took over on bass) and occasionally Terry L. (backing vocal). He also "went underground" for a shorter period from about the end of 1989 through the early fall of 1993.

That WAS the most whacko paragraph in this posting so you've made it through the worst part. However I would like to talk about this whole dangeling loose end, at least in my mind that "was there some other spirit-fource, psychic energy, ghost, avatar, or what have you- - influencing John Lennon from July 1963 and later till at least early 1968? The one responsible for all those vocal machismo parts on Rubber Soul and the like? Well I've been"interviewing candidates" for the job. One guy Lennon referred to as his "new magic guru" and that was Magic Alex. But he failed to make the grade. Not a musical bone in his body. I checked out at least three others, who are all dead now. The thing wrong with most candidates is that they are "too productive" and have busy schedules joining bands and such. I was looking for kind of a loser - loner, like maybe some Black teenage gang member from Cleveland who died under mysterious circumstances or something. Finally I came accross someone who just might be a suitable candidate. If I ever thought of it before I pushed it out of my mind. This candidate "works" on a whole number of levels. First an foremost John Lennon is one person who can actually stand to be around him and who doesn't regard him as a total asshole. This guy's propensity tword flakeyness knows no bounds. The more you know about him, the more you don't like him. But I'm not naming him here and now. (I have to provide a little suspense) He has credentials as being "black enough" to fill the bill, and also creative enough, and a good enough musician, and actually rather tallented and inovative. We have a bit of a problem when it comes to Abbey Road however. At least most sane people would regard it as a problem. Of course there is a major problem with any "Walk-in" - - what I call the Impostor problem. Or as Johnny Taylor sings it "Who's screwing your life up, while you are busy making a botch-job of someone elses?" You kind of have to deal with this impostor problem with one-way walk-ins. Because logically it could turn into an endless chain of succession where in the end everybody is confused. But right now I'm stopping for today. I can do those Stories tomorrow. But now you've read this.