MARCUS ARELIUS - NOT BORN YESTERDAY

BUT THAT'S WHEN MOST OF THIS WAS TYPED

This is Monday morning. Many might suggest that I confine my topics to things that you can see, smell and touch - - - like newly minted money. Herman Kane knows all about that. The trouble is that Cain presently ranks fifth among Republicans in campaign funding behind Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Michelle Bachman, in that order. I will say that Cain has better credentials as an American black man than does Barock Obama, who is about as "American" as Sean Lennon. While Cain had roots among actual black people here in American, Barock Obama let a highly elitist life as a child traveling to various private schools all over the world, not to mention, scarcely knowing his father. So he earns "points" with me as far as having genuine Black credentials. However Cain should be willing to "give back" a little to the country wherein he was able to prosper. In the Bible, in 2nd Samuel, I believe, there is the story of Nabal, whose vice was being a tight wad, and like all Bible stories, he paid the price for that. He's the guy who got married to Jennifer Horton's daughter. Basically, in terms of having a steady source of campaign revenue, Mitt Romney appears to be the man. I would like at this time just like to mention that sometimes "unexplainable" events occur to people that seem to be the result of some sovreign invisable force. You will remember after I had that dream where I declared "I'm in Hell" - - I was walking around in a blue funk for a while. Was "God" sending me a message? Can parts of the brain "rescue" other parts of the brain? I don't know. The human brain is complex and when it is diseased- - sometimes the patient exhibits actions which appear, for lack of a better term - - Demonic.

In terms of Afghanistan the news is that we will be far from having withdrawn all of our troops there by 2014 when the President says. This weekend is the tenth anniversary of the commencement of that war. Now we have around a hundred thousand there and nearly two thousand have died, and of course the death rate curve is accelerating. All to kill only a few thousand soldiers on the other side. Pakistan is this war’s “Cambodia” providing a safe haven for their troops, a luxury our side doesn’t have. At one time in the piece they said there may be less than fifty hard core Al Qaeda in the whole country. Another way in which our country is firing off a cannon to kill a fly is this whole bit with an aledged Iranian assenation of some Saudi ambassador and setting off a bomb. Pat Buchannon thinks the whole theory is bogus reasoning that Iran would not want to risk outright war with the US on such a small trigger issue. They say that Iranian assasins don’t make these sort of mistakes but know what they are doing. We of course have these “emergency measures” like the Patriot Act that are still in force. Many Republicans are also against our plans to clear out of Iraq altogether. People look at our foreign policy and they see war madness and spending money as though we were not running a 35% annual deficit each year. So on the news every day is Vetterans Day. The physical and psychological cost to those troops returning is ignored. And rather than all this allaying our national fears, these only seem to increase every day. I think we need a Presidential Candidate with a different world view. Republicans seem to have declared war not only on the 47% who pay no income taxes, but on virtually every other first world nation in the world, saying whatever opinions they have of us they are wrong, and we should scorn whatever input they offer us. The only government they seem to warm up to is China.

It makes sense to have “been around the block a few times”. If I were to visit myself from the past before I became a Christian I would say something like “It’s worse and more corrupt than you can imagine”. Herman Cain is deluding himself that there are “build in tax costs to everything we buy at the store”. But if we learned one thing from Proposition 13 in 1978 it’s that corporations don’t give back profits to their renters out of the goodness of their hearts because their taxes are lower. Price is determined by market forces. Rick Perry’s wife thinks that being fired from a job is the same as quitting a job. Everybody whose been fired knows that’s not true. There is this boxer who was wrongly convicted of killing a 92 year old lady in Buffalo or something. He was in prison for over twenty years, when the police had in their files the confessions of the guilty subjects, but they suppressed the evidence. Under Christian reasoning we are expected all to embrace, it doesn’t matter WHO pays for a crime, just as long as SOMEBODY does. I advise everybody to read my “Sermon on the Mount” from January of 2011 in the Psychic Balance bllog. There are a lot of anti Christian analogies. There is the barbershop analogy. There is the fighting Viet Nam GI analogy. Neither story was original with me and the fighting GI is an analogy of talk show host Michael Jackson. The Wizzard of Oz could be interperated to be an anti Christian analogy, about a cowardly “Lion” and a scare crow, who is smart but has a boring job. Of course we all know about the drug use referenced, even playing drugs off against each other. And most Christians would probably flunk the famous “auto race” test. The stipulations are this: You have to travel a sixty mile course in less than an hour to win and get a prize or whatever. The question is that if you traveled thirty miles of the course and discovered your GPS said you had averaged thirty miles an hour so far, how fast would you have to travel to make up the distance the rest of the race? Most Christians would say “ninety”, but the right answer is “You couldn’t; the race is over.” Jesus’ suffering had an eighteen hour expiration date all totaled. POW’s suffer for years. Teenage girls raped by their fathers endure it for years. That boxer witnessed his father beat his mother to death and then witnessed his brother being killed in a fight. The answer of Christians to all this is one of two falsehoods. They will either say, “It’s in the past. It’s irrelevant; forget it happened”. In this line of reasoning all the lessons of life "that you learned in the flesh" don't count for anything. Only what your pastor tells you can be trusted". Or - - the other extreme of “Yes, it’s significant. In fact it’s left you so emotionally shattered you are now no longer qualified to be a Christians. You are damaged goods.” People talk about Faith. Picture two little boys. One of them says, “Did you know that I have a two headed lizard in my back yard?” and the other little boy says, “Fine. Let’s go over to your place and you can show it to me”. The second little boy would be accused by Christian teachers as “Making a statement lacking in faith”. Were the first little boy to accuse the 2^nd little boy of “Not believing him” it would be a distraction of the conversation to the main question of the day. You know the Niagara falls analogy where the question is posed “Do you believe I can wheel someone across on a rope in a wheel barrel?” The stipulation is that he did it once with an equal weight of bricks. If someone says “Yes I believe you can do it”. But CAN isn’t certainty. Maybe the changes are seventy or even eighty percent chance of success. Would you get on a jet liner that you knew there were odds of one in five that the plane would crash and kill every passenger aboard? Of course you wouldn’t. Neil Savedra teaches that if you want to “do just enough to get by” you are being a tightwad and a tempter of fate and a lot of other things against God.” So after Herman Kane’s tax plan goes into effect you will owe 24.2% in federal taxes counting FICA. You have your eight percent sales tax on top of that. Now it’s close to 33%. Now slap on that another ten percent of the gross, and come up with about 43% of your money gone before you have spent a dime. So the answer to Michelle Bachman’s question is that you get to keep 57% of your pay. What Christians forget is that people are human beings and not sheep to be fleeced. You don’t “own” the souls of other people. There is an Ozzie and Harriet episode where Ozzie tells Ricky, “Now take what you would call a good strong front line football stance”. Ozzie wanted to demonstrate this whole “center of gravity” theory about how easy it is to knock someone over based on their distribution of weight. This is another anti Christian analogy. Because even in the Bible we are told in one place “Just stand”. Neil advises his people to anticipate where the devil will attack from and take a stand accordingly. Christians are always guilty of “fighting the last war” and spend their whole lives in a time warp.

Sixty Minutes had two full segments on Van Gogh. Van Gogh was a minister’s son, which was part of the problem right there. Vincent wanted at one time to be like his father. Of course he couldn’t. He had this temporal lobe insanity which is related to epilepsy or something. He could “feel the attacks coming on”. Of course mixing religion with insanity is like going around an oil refinery with a lit blow torch or throwing gasoline on smouldering embers. So many religious people are insane and I’d say the vast majority of insane people have some sort of religious quirk. Both categories are people that talk about “Hearing some voice” or mssage, but they are never able to tell you what it is, but only that it is somehow amazing beyond belief and they must base their lives on it. You have the brother shades of “Lost Weekend” who tried to make it better but he, too is helpless. You find him unable to live with roommates. And in the end he didn’t go all the way out to this wheat field he painted to kill himself, but rather the gun wound seemed to be the result or some sort of taunting or horseplay with teenagers, who got the gun from someone in Bill Cody’s wild west show playing in Paris. And you have his utter dysfunctionality with the opposite sex. It never dawns on people like Neil that if you had some “bad experience” with the opposite sex the solution is NOT to either turn gay or else live an a sexual life. Vincent told the police, “Don’t charge anybody else for this shooting”, which is a somewhat odd dying request. Of course now his art is famous even if Time Life has their own “psychotic” label to it.

In the morning I made coffee. I turned on the Jesus Christ show. Today Jesus appeared to relent on this “suffering is good” line he’s been doing and now says that God only makes reasonable requests of you and “Father Knows Best” because he can see into the future and unforeseen consequences of a premature blessing. You all remember that when the Cuban ambassador at the UN in 1962 told Stevenson “you will receive your answer in due course” Stevenson responded, “I’m prepared till Hell freezes over”. It’s kind of silly to say God has no sense of time. God created Time, didn’t he? [I'd like to reference Soren Kirkigard a bit. He said that many times people have a common assumption of things. For instance we assume the existance of Time. We humans believe in Time whether God believes in it or not. Dick Schimell, a Sunday school teacher said, "Mathmeticians assume things- - like the number one exists". Common assumptions enable communacation among human beings. Those who don't share the comon assumptions are at a disadvantage. Certainly Neil Savedra realizes that sometimes "tomorrow" or "bye and bye" have ways of never arriving. There is a line in a Dylan song that goes, "What makes you think he will haunt you? You can go back to him any time you want to" (tomorrow)] But of course chemists can create water in simple reactions in a test tube. But that doesn’t make them experts on skin diving in the Caribbean or what to do when you face a man eating shark. As the adage goes, any two teenagers can “create a baby” in the back seat of the car. But that doesn’t insure their being good parents. So it is with God. One of my adages is from the Queen song, "Take care of those you call your own". So many Christian preachers say "God is not trying to withhold good things from you". I think there are truck loads of evidence that suggest otherwise. Even Michelle Bachman said it, “The devil is in the details”. Or to put it more bluntly "talk is cheap". Or to quote Phil McGraw, "One must learn to anticipate all the possible consequences of an act in advance". Haven't you at times known someone was full of bullshit and that time would prove you right in the end. Like Ross Perot was proven right about NAFTA. But does anybody care? No. Because our collective memories are so short. So at times I wonder whether God has thought out the "conquences" of denying people's prayers. How many times has "God" been full of bullshit and proposed some pipe dream line "9 9 9"? Oh, but haven't you heard? God isn't trying to be a meany by taking poor people's money away from them. Some day in the great bye and bye they'd actually come back and thank Herman Cain for depriving them of their sustenance. This is how Neil Savedra reasoning. After this I switched to the Today show.

We had brain without the raisons for breakfast. We had a fried egg and a waffle. I left the table still kind of hungry. Loretta and I shared someone’s orange juice. Then it was Meet the Press where Herman Cain was on. It’s nauseating to eve4n contemplate what the consequences of his policies would be. Perry’s wife said it best when she said “When I hear 999 I want to dial 911”. Then they had a representative of Romney and a representative of Perry, who debated. Before nine I switched to the Beatles. They had Beatles animals which included bull dogs, blackbirds, piggies, raccoons, kittens, monkeys, octopuses and birds. They didn’t play anything with Jimmy Mc Culloch in it. The closest they came was “Big Barn Bed” from Wings. I mentioned to Bill that they do have the lyrics in the album. The final song was “Let It Down” from All Things Must Pass. They played “We Got Married” and the Anthology demo of “No Reply”. They played “I Want To be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones, and also “You Know My Name”, edited version.