A BIT OF SELF-EXAMINATION

We all have faults as human beings. I believe even Jesus of Nazareth was not infallible. There were a lot of things he apparently didn’t know, so could not incorporate that knowledge into decisions he made. My primary fault is that basically I’m a lazy person. I haven’t had gainful employment in fifteen years. I don’t research things enough and don’t cite references and quotations in my blogs. Unlike George “Washington’s blog, I don’t read like a newspaper with a flood of facts and statistics. Thus it can be argued that I tend to over simplify things. At times I over generalize and over extrapolate based on a scarcity of actual knowledge. At other times I under-generalize to my own detriment. I want to continue to acquire “facts” about situations and issues when companions around me have long since chosen up sides. The alcoholic’s prayer is “Lord give me the courage to change the things I can change, and the tranquility to accept the things I can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference”. Some have modified that to go “Lord, give me the meth to change the things I can, the Vallium to accept the things that can’t be changed, and the pot to know the difference. Also alcoholic anonymous says “I should accept God as I understand him to be”. Jesus of KFI takes issue with that going on some theological correctness trip, which would have me respond “You mean we should accept God as we DON”T understand Him?” In 1977 God appeared to John Denver as an old man wearing a fishing cap because he knew that’s an image that his character could relate to”. There is a church hymn that goes “Too us he’ll condescend” –in a good sense. That means “God is willing to cone down to our level”. I don’t like people who are dogmatic claiming to know things they don’t know what the hell they are talking about, but they are cock sure of themselves, but even so they won’t tell you even what they think they know because they see you as “not worthy”. It’s not a bad idea to “state the obvious” at times because a lot of times we routinely ignore the obvious. It’s obvious we have to raise the national debt ceiling before time runs out. I think my moral outrage on the previous posting is more than justified. I mean “chaos is not an option” as I see it. Donald Trump says “I have investigated and found Obama’s birth certificate is computer generated”. That is not news, but this show is a rerun. Emotional and/or political bias makes otherwise balanced people ignore the obvious. I think psycho-tropic medication inhibits the brain’s ability to “put the pieces together” and cause one to do more poorly as both “Wheel of Fortune” and also video games. They call them “reflexes” because if you had to judicially weigh out every decision you made throughout an entire day, you would be living your life forever in slow motion and would be useless, for instance, as an employee.

I think it’s important occasionally to see where you have been, what steps you have trod, and what you have accomplished, and possible mistakes that you’ve made. Also it helps to clarify something for your readers at a later date if you think you weren’t clear or perhaps misleading. I came across the claim that the Federation knows the future to exactitude provided you don’t go beyond the fourth dimension. This morning a representative amended to that to say “in theory we know the future to exactitude, but that isn’t to say everyone in the Federation knows this by any means”. That could be code-speak for “few or none know it”. Yesterday a Federation spokesman, I’m uncertain whether it was the same individual said “You know that idea for a cloaking device you have seems like a real loser to me. If that principle were valid, don’t you think we at the Federation would have found a way to do it by now, with vast resources far in excess of yours?” OK, he made his point. That whole idea for cloaking matter was entirely my idea and I never clamed it came from anywhere else. This morning I was looking for all the reference to the Jesus “dog biting an important person” example I could find. The original file was “Realprog” and it was August 14^th 1995. I reprint the relivent portions and apparently quite a bit else from the period in “Escape from Egypt” in March of 2007. Also in Karn-evil I mention it again and that segment is also reprinted in a December 2009 blog posting. I spent a lot of time tracking those down. Also one theological gem of paramount importance is the September 2006 entry in “Cosmic Tides” called “The Inevitability of it all”, which is a reprint of September 2004 commentary. I also came across “six mental hurdles to becoming a Christian” somewhere. Also in summer of 2008 there is a lot of Bosc house stuff from late 1981 and the first seven months of 1982. I hit a few items covered in this again in recent postings.

Sometimes Randy Rhodes over-reaches. Some liberals say there is a massive right wing conspiracy to not teach progressive history in the schools, that is, the history of social and labor reform in this country. I think it was an under-stressed topic even when I was in school. Some would say "well they would never put Republican women in berkas because if you tried to pick one of them up you wouldn't know what you were getting. She went on to talk about requiring cosmetic surgery for women to make them "presentable" in case they ever want to be some executive's whore. (Shades of Clowie Lane) Also there is seemingly a rise in endentured servitude, which you thought went out in the 18th century. In this case some corporate over-lord has immigrents working for $3.50 an hour and they pay for the privelege because they don't get to keep their money but "owe their souls to the company store". They have to pay for their green cards and probably charged exorbenate fees for these. You might even accuse these people of kidnapping natives from another country and shipping them here, but Randy didn't go that far. Clearly right wingers like George Will love our lax immigration laws.

This is July 4, 2011. I had Stephanie Miller on but that was a rerun. I was on computer before breakfast and ran late getting down and had to get Rice Krispies from the kitchen. We had the usual orange juice, coffee, toast with butter and jelly, and a fried egg. I turned down Andrew’s orange juice because I was still worried about diaria. Oscar gave me a bigger capsule for disria than the usual small white ones, which others had complained was ineffective. I never had a problem with the white ones. I made coffee this morning but did not drink it all, and didn’t give any away either. Last night I sold nearly sixteen ounces of coffee to Janet for a quarter and she complained I was trying to short change her. I gave her the rest of the pot, which filled the cup almost all the way up. Dana’s cups were sixteen ounces. I think the bakery ones, which she had, might be twenty. Sixty Minutes had something about the murder in the South by a KKK member and the guilty man is still walking free in Liberty, Mississippi. Then they had a thing about the Vatican library. I believe they had scripture from about 200 AD. I don’t dispute that date. There is a lot of difference between 200 AD and, say 50 AD. For forty years I’ve been hearing “They are within a hundred years of getting back to the original gospel documents”. Yeah but those last hundred years are a real bear!”

In my many searches I came across the reference to the demon “Osmodeus”, which in fact was a reference to Stewart Sutcliffe. He claims that as one of his aliases. Also I talked about ‘Never having met the third Zachery, as if there were three”. The question is “How do I know there WAS a third Zachery. This is one of those classic cases of "over-extrapulation" I was talking about. Walk-ins so far as I know are rare. Usually when there IS some "personality change" it is explainable to environment, or age, or the medication the individual is taking. I ought to know that being in here. As for myself I never even thought there were Two Zacherys. That was Mal Evans' idea. He's convinced there was a "change" in late 1977 but nobody else has claimed that. So in keeping with that "theory" of his - I have inferred that if the 2^nd Zachery abode in the body of Valerie Shoffner at least for a time. Walk-ins exhibit an amazing indifference to experiances of their own past, as if they had happened to some other person, and I observed a little of this. This would be the one known as the "fake" Brian Jones. But we're all not Raphael Hernandez. Unless you (or I) can come up with major evidence it's best just to drop it. And what I was trying to say in that one file is that Stewart said they (Valerie vs Zachery) were different people based on his own experience.

I went eight days without doing a blog from August 24^th through September 1^st of 2006. I wouldn’t have believed it but I found a direct reference in a word file from the period on the September first entry. I kept looking for more than one August 2006 link and didn’t find it. I was looking for some story I wrote about Howard and Pete that had aliases and I think was pretty fictionalized. I just wanted to check it over. But I never found it. There was stuff about Howard in early September of 2006 taken from the “Yorkshire” file from August 2004, and another paragraph or two from the “Standings” file and I don’t know when I wrote that and didn’t check. I wanted to add those two songs to the “Best of John Lennon” compilation that I had been meaning to do for a long time and from a week after I wrote it I debated whether I should have included them but finally have, when it dawned on me [after someone from the Federation visited to me yesterday] they should be the last two songs. That is in "The Last Hours of Ancient Religion" from January of 2010. I haven’t changed the Mc Cartney one yet. There is more stuff about my musical endeavors in August 1967. Also the compilation of songs in general in the “Kill Kill Kill” posting from Wheels of Vengeance from August of 2006, which seems to be the only listing for August 2006. I took some acedophelis, two little capsules, because I thought it would help my diaria. I’ve had two bouts of it today and had two yesterday, but none of them were really bad, like sitting on the toilet for twenty minutes at a stretch or anything. I consumed a lot of time and that itself made me agitated. I just need to chill out and turn my mind off for a while and learn how to relax. We had roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy and mixed vegetables for dinner with lemon pudding for desert. Phyllis Green said that the fish we had was tainted and that was on Friday night, just before my problems began. Even Friday evening was “agitated” and over-reacted to stressful events, and I had chalked it up to too much sugar and caffeine, but that may not have been it at all. Janet confirmed she could have coffee tonight, and I just said I hoped I would even be up to fixing coffee tonight. I have this fear I might be boring in my blogs. Sometimes I read my own stuff and find it boring because it “states the obvious”, but that’s because I was already aware of them and have worked through them in my mind. But for others who haven’t worked through these problems, it could be fresh insight.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jim Morrison, which I remember being on Thursday July 8^th 1971. I guess he died in Paris in the bathtub in cold water with all his clothes on. That’s the story I always heard.

Now they have developed a camera with “after the fact” focus readjustment. If something near is focused but the background is blurry, just click on it, and it will instantly come into focus, just as if you had taken it that way to begin with. Some hope this innovation will revise the sale of the specific point and shoot camera.

Some argue that elections for US congress are skewed heavily in favor of incumbents because of the vast franking privileges that sitting congressmen have for sending propaganda through the mail any time they wish. The Supreme Court has now taken exception to certain "matching funds" election laws where the government will kick in funds to a new guy, if he's shown he is capable or raising SOME funds on his own. This is one of those areas that calls for wisdom and discernment before any legal decisions are cast in concrete.

AUGUST SECOND IS A DONE DEAL ALREADY

Well a woman on Jeopardy is afraid of butterflies. I think she saw one twoo many vampire movies as a kid. Of course some things we should be afraid of, like what will happen if we don’t raise the debt ceiling. Clearly everything the Republicans would happen if the President got his will will be the things that WILL be that happen if we default on our debts. Interest rates will skyrocket worse than any deficit could cause and the money markets will panic in a chain reaction as the economy is plunged into chaos and foreign investors pull their funds. But to the people on the Mc Laughlin report except for Eleanor Clift, they all think the President should exceed to every one of John Boehner’s demands, and approve every last budget cut and nave NONE of the tax hikes and loophole closures and corporate subsidy cuts that the President wants. They even mocked the idea saying “Now hoe expensive can a corporate jet be?” They accused the President of taking a cheap shot at the rich by bringing up something so obvious to the American people as a waste. They even went so far as to say that the salaries of a few dozen luxury yacht makers might be impacted if we close tax loopholes. Clearly as Maurie Head sang long ago “My mind is clearer; at last I see where we all soon will be”. The President will cold like a house of cards as he does on virtually every issue eventually, but John Boehner won’t acknowledge this and continue to cast the President as the villain as the economy slides into the toilet. The senate is democratic but that won’t matter. The democratic rule’s days are numbered there also, so they won’t think it matters. Things don’t look for the Senate saying democratic next year, and then they will pass a flag burning amendment, which just might be approved by three-fourths the states. Of course the approved method of disposing of the flag in official flag etiquette is - - burning the flag. What are they going to do then? Of course if government closes down how many prisons and mental institutions will have their doors flung open to let the loonies run free and become the bag ladies pushing shopping carts on the street pan-handling when they aren’t talking to themselves or buying food for their fifty cats. Of course the loonies were already set free in the election of 2010 and they took over Washington in the guise of Mitch Mc Conell and John Boehner. Clearly the President has no balls and will not fight for any of his principles. So therefore he will wait till the last possible minute and sign whatever bill John Boehner shoves in front of him. He’s too much like Mr. Data on Star Trek. In one episode Data was bullied by a despot and Data was a slave to his moral scruples and couldn’t fight back the way he wanted to. When a person with no moral scruples confronts a person with scruples, the latter is at a marked disadvantage. They spoke of these mafia moles going along with murders that they didn’t try and stop. Suppose there was a suicide bomber scheduled to set off a bomb at Times Square or Union Station? Would you blow your cover to prevent it, or you pull a Bo Brady and say “I don’t think we have enough evidence yet; we should wait”. There comes a point, like if someone is going to set off an atomic bomb in downtown Detroit that you say “You know, I think saving the lives takes precedence”. John Boehner is a terrorist with an atomic bomb because the economic repercussions are highly unpredictable because such a thing has never been done before. The President has no choice, really but to go along with the Mc Laughlin group, John Boehner and the dictates of the Tea Party’s check list of things to do. And having done so he will have lost every bit of courage and credibility among his own party, but he’ll do it anyhow, because that’s the sort of guy he is. He’s like Ned Flanders who from the back of a long line says “Hey, if we just turn around and look the other way we’ll be in front of the line”. His idea of decisive swiftness if to run faster than anybody else among the forces running in retreat. And at this point the President should at least say “A gun was held to my head and I am not responsible for what happens next”. But he won’t do that either. Instead the tea party will be emboldened making fresh demands the nature of we can’t now even fathom, just like the demands today would have been unthinkable twenty or even ten years ago. This is our current state of political reality.

People make assanine statements. Like "No socialized medicine but take your hands off of my medi-care". Or how about this one, "I'm all for religion and God, it's just all this supernatural stuff I can't stomach". Or "Marriage is a wonderful thing. It's just dating that's evil because it is a "gateway activity" that could lead to sin". The phrase "We all have to live within our means" seems to imply some ceiling on "personal growth". People talk about "printing press money" as though you could walk down to any bank and exchange it for gold right now and you don't want to lose this right. Homer Simpson was once told that the Wickipedia proved him wrong on something, so Homer says "We'll just change it when we get home. We'll change a lot of things". (that remark used to be funny) How about this exchange? A husband comes in and says to a counselor "My wife used to be so full of life and vigor and enthusiasum she brought to everything. But now after ten years of marriage she's down and discouraged and apathetic". The counselor responds, "Well, you' just told me what being married to you did to her". And the guy says "Oh, I know a friend who became a Born Again Christian and the same thing happened with him. Could there be an application of your words there?" "Well, you said it". Or you hear an evangelist say "You know you're gambling with eternity?" And someone yells out "No, I DON'T want to gamble you may be someone I can't trust and screw up my life". Or this: "I know that deficets are bad because I made a bad investment on my home a few years ago and can't pay for it now, and don't want the same thing to happen with the government". Or "Government investment in the ecconomy chokes out private investment". And of course there is always "I don't believe in getting married and I'm going to raise all my kids the same way". That one actually used to be funny. How about a preacher saying something like "He who steals my time is a thief". Or "If you go to church you're a thief if you don't put something in the basket to pay for the lights and air conditioning". Or "God is such an important person that if he feels you slighted him he feels entitled to respond with the ultimate vengence". And there is always "It's OK to talk to God, but if he ever talks to you they'll lock you up". And of course Christians are always saying you should "Keep on doing the same thing that's failed every time you've tried it, over and over again". Or "If I fall down on the job and fail to look after my flock, well it's not me, it must be the will of God". Here is a wise saying "The world is full of surprises". Often the person saying it himself doesn't know how prophetic his remarks are

"LET'S CRASH THE UNITED STATES ECONOMY!"

According to a source, the Republicans are running a pilot program experiment in Minnisota because they have a situation now where a democratic governor will be blamed for Minisota defaulting on its debts. Obviously Republicans love this, because it will insure that the democrat is not reelected. Of course in California here July first i a new fiscal year. You can no longer drive in the diamond land with your hybred car if you're alone. Other changes taking place in California today are the lowering of drivers license fees and the cutting of the state sales tax a full percentage point from eight & a quarter to seven & a quarter. This is the lowest it's been in some time. That may help even me out just a little and maybe it will spur business. Also all those corporate taxes will be cut in accordence with the measure passed by the voters last November, and I believe other taxes are being cut. With all this you'd think we are awash in money but we aren't. They are closing down all sorts of State Parks just in time for them not to be available for the Fourth of July weekend. How unpatriotic! There are continuing drastic cuts to the needy and the disabeled. You get used to one cut and they lay another one on you this week. Now I'm told that there will be a fifteen dollar cut in my state SSI payments. The state budget is being balanced on the backs of the elverly, the infirm, and the poor, including children. So in reality Jerry Brown has morphed into Meg Whitman whom he defeated in an open popular vote last November. Suddenly the machinations of "The Governator" don't seem all that draconian. Now we come to the United States government. The Republicans obviously want to crash that if they can before next years election. Remember it's the overt sentaments of people like Mitch McConell and Rush Limbaugh toi see to it that this President's policies fail. Never before to my reconing has an opposing political party been that candid about their intents. I wish the American people would "wake up" as to what's going on. But instead of waking up and smelling the coffee, the people seem to continue to slide to the political right, as if by inertia or something. Some say that the President needs to be more macho in asserting himself and taking the offensive. A big "Amen" to that.

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has cancer and is being treated for it in a hospital in Cuba. Of course people like Pat Robertson wanted to "take our Hugo Chavez" in 2008, and I don't mean for a night on the town. He wanted to eliminate him, CIA or Mafia style. Of course as you know the Federation tends to be a little partial to left wingers like Chavez and Quadafi. As to the Libyan leadeer, I was told by you know who over a month ago that the Mc Laughlin group was wrong when they said Quadafi would be gone by July 4th. It turns out that source was right, and now we are worried about every being able to get rid of Quadafi. I think the practical reality is that we underestamated Quadafi's popularity with the Libya people. You've seen all those green flag demonstrators on TV. I think on certain matters the us may be guilty of being "excessively proactive" and trying to micro manage all of the political systems of the world. This is an issue on which we need to strike a balance, both logistical and ethical.

Nine more people were killed in protests in Syria today. There are ten thousand protesters in various areas of the country. All that stuff we said in a previous posting still holds. I believe Syria is the country to watch and be wary of, more so than Libya. The US won't win in any brownie points if we obsess on a place like Libya and ignore the genocide in Darfore and other places all around the world. They say the situation in Sudan is improving. I'm thinking that if the Islamists who are the agressors in this situation really believed their own writings they would admit that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet and therefore has a word or two to say for our time such as "love thy neighbor" and turn the other cheek. You have the abortion trade in Asia which right wingers in Texas approve of, and you have "blood diamonds" in South Africa. I think the United States needs to lay out a clear foreign policy. It was John Kennedy who said we should give aid to those who need it "not because the Communists were doing it, or because we seek their votes or otherwise expediant, but because it is Right". When is the last time the United States conducted foreign policy so as to do what was right?

We are about to celebrate the Fourth of July once again. The weather around here is heating up just as they predicted one week ago. They are getting much more accurate in their weather prognostications. Of course this is a time for reflection and the hard won liberties we all enjoy today, and perhaps put in that Rusty Warren record. We need to meditate on the words, "therefore we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor", and realize a lot of the signers of the Declaration of Independance did in deed pay a high price. Of course Thomas Jefferson's words were edited in some places. The original draft has it "We hold these Truths to be Sacred and Undeniable, that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inailable rights and that are among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Note it doesn't say these are our ONLY rights, but AMONG the rights we are born with. The term "sacred and undeniable" were changed to "self evident". Supposedly Jefferson put in a line about King George imposing the institution of slavery on our land, but others made him take it out. We need also to remember that the founding fathers came here to ESCAPE religious tyrany, and not to Establish it. (Selah)

The following axioms were originally

presented in November of 2009

but now they are re-stated

with additional expository commentary

Circles are posessive things; violate them at your Peril
- - - - -Apparently we're going to stay in purple. Circles both trap things and limit things but also exclude things outside of it. Circles go on forever but are still finite. Einstein sees the Universe as a giant sphere that can never be transversed. In my model of the universe I see absolutely no problem. However in my own model what you do is to "back out" of the circle, however you still get out. But with Einstein, were one to substitute "God" for the speed of light, not only is god unreachable by anybody, but a person with a thousand times the "achievement of good deeds" is no better than one who hasn't. The speed of light is still JUST as IMPOSSIBLE to reach for a guy whose 99.99% already there as it is for you or me.

Sometimes, things are exactly as they appear to Be - even First Impressions
- - - -We have this one in another place, but it's true. Sometimes there is "love at first sight" and it works. Sometimes you immediately know you "don't like something" or "feel uncomfortable" and are not sure why, so you try to rationalize and talk your way out of it, only to discover that your first impression was the correct one. The biggest lie James Dobson ever tells is NOT to listen to your own feelings. But he's OK with my listening to HIS feelings. Logically however if we are both flawed human beings I shouldn't trust either his or mine. But at least with my OWN feelings there are more personal facts I know to be true to justify them.

When all else fails, look at the computer program text
- - - - -This could mean "look at the instruction manual" but it's deeper. It's more the Ross Perot sense of "looking under the hood to see what is going on". The trouble is if you search to examine the relation between you and God it necessarily means Both of you are Examined, and God doesn't like to be examined. Some might say that to examine God is to destroy him.

You have a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon, you're talking about Real Money!
- - - - -People will expend a fantastic ammount of time, heart, and substance into a venture they hope will pay off if they can just "prime the success pump" or something. Where did Blackwater get it's authority to supersede military regulations, and why what authority were they granted their "carte blanch" with seemingly "off budget" funding?

In the long run scheme of things - Adam Smith must be satisfied
----Free market forces are an anazing thing, and arguably, more valid at allocating resources than a massive computer program. The trouble with God is that he never read Adam Smith. He doesn't believe in emotional receprocity. God is a supply side flat-liner and assumes you are the same way. This means whatever you get by way of "supply" from God is limited- - - at any price. It's like salt or gasoline. You'll pay any price for it - - as long as you get it but the trouble is you don't. God assumes we have a flat supply curve too. But we don't. Something a minimal effort on his part, and I'm tempted to use the husband and wife analogy, then there will be a fantastic improvement in the response. But since God doesn't believe this about humans in a self fulfilling prophecy it never happens. Since as we said nobody can attain to God's "speed" it would be logical for either everyone to be saved or nobody to be saved. But God won't have that. So God jerks around his own supply curve for different people violating the scripture "God is no respecter of persons" when in reality whether you get saved at all is completely up the laws of chance. I said I don't believe in chance, but when God shoots dice, it calls it predeterminate wisdom or something- - when in actuality it's as morally valid as rolling dice.

An entity too big to fail is too big to exist. This also holds for true for Religion, as well as Corporations.
God is too big to fail. The Catholic Church is too big to fail. Even Fredich Nietche said that "God may be dead but some still need religion". Failure would cause too much "disruption in society" and thus that which is no longer fruitful has its own Government enforsed Insurance policy against failure.

A God with the power to give you everything you need, has the power to take from you everything you have.
-----This is usually said about Government and people readily accept the premise. But they see no danger in trusting their souls to a "God" whom in my oppinion has proven time and time again he can't be trusted, but will in time only deplete the resources you do have in a fruitless effort to keep Him from "failing".

Experience is the enemy of Ignorance, Superstition, and even Bigotry
-----Experiance is not the friend of religion. We derive most of knowledge itself from learning experiances. But if you listen pastors such as Chuck Smith will decry "experiances". People with experiances are less ignorant, they have the resources now to overcome both their own superstitions and personal bigotries.

A FAILURE TO MEET THE THRESHHOLD

People say that it's insane to do the same things over and over and expect a different result. But if you saw last night's Simpson's episode you noted that Lisa had the idea to try the coat hanger in the bathroom lock to try and rescue Maggie locked in the bathroom, and this time it worked. People ignore threshholds. For instance the thing Republicans say about a balanced budget is that it will drive down interest rates because of vastly reduced government borrowing, thus freeing up more funds for business borrowing at a lower rate. The trouble is if you look at the interest rates business pays now, they are practically giving money away already. A little leftward shift on the intrest curve line will make no difference. However there comes a time when interest is a significant factor and therefore it's advisable not to push the debt too high. We spoke of a human being's inherent inability to EVER satisfy "God" as defined by our Puritan friends on the religious right. The thresshold in this case is a point mankind is incapable of reaching. Now sometimes if you reach the thresshold you get decisive action, like the point at which you get a breeder nuclear chain reaction that keeps on going. Investors get freaked out by events (like a sudden government default on due loans) and since, like the Atomic Bomb once upon a time, it's never happened before we can't say for certain how violent the business chain reaction could be. Businesses reach a thresshold point of success. Some would say that this is unfair that you don't make diddley for five years and in the sixth year your business ignites and takes off, and you get socked by high taxes. But what these people should have been able to do is to agrigate their anual incomes so that they can average in a good year with four bad years and drive tax rates way down as they miss the thresshold of higher brackets. In photography colored slides that are underexposed have richer color because of the color threshhold of the film is reached first by the cominent color (or tint bias) in the image and therefore that color triggers off before the other can. You also have a maximum thresshold where a dominent bright color is washed out by all the surrounding colors that have by now also reached maximum thresshold and the film can't tell the difference. If you start a business it's all "new capital investment" because your old capital was "zero" because you had no business. You may deduct the cost of a room or a car or what have you for the business as an expense, which is deducted against income. If you never show the income on the balance sheet it's never taxed. Oil companies can often depreciate old inventory even if the equity in said product had doubled due to a sharp increase in the market price. I have always marvled at this "no inflation" fiction in accounting practices. Also many oil companies use LIFO instead of the more honist FIFO, for first in - first out. If an oil company compares this quarter's purchassing with last quarter - - - they can say "I paid a higher price" for last quarter's goods, than in fact you did, so should you sell said oil or inventory, the capital gains will be lower because you rigged the accounting. This last in first out slight of hand is what I refer to as the "failure to rotate your stock" method of accounting.

Let’s talk about the theory behind cloaked matter a little more. Some would say that the “static ether” theory of mine interferes with my idea about one approaching space vanishing in the sight of another. They would site me my own “motorboat” example later in this posting. They would say that if one boat travels at half the speed that the water is able to carry the waves away from it, and also with the other boat, that the waves from each ship would still meet ahead of the ships, thus invalidating my theory. However of we go back to the circerama theater at Disneyland analogy (also referred to later on) that suppose if you are in the very center of the theater for the best view. For the benefit of some I need to clarify that the direction you look represents object's light speeds with respect to yours, more than they do direction per se. Also I need to note that your apparent location is counter intuitive and that your "viewing space" actually moves the opposite direction from that in which your vector is pointing. You appear to approach that which is behind you and in fact appear to "be traveling backwards". More details are in previous postings. Your “event horizon” would be the entire theater. The event horizon being the relative speeds matter and light are traveling that are within your visual view. Now to break down the analogy just a little, and say that as you go off center the circular screen changes to an elipse like the shape of an egg, and the images on the screen are distributed spacially in accordence with Kepler's laws of planetary orbits. This means the small point of the egg has even more space allocated to it than you would think with "big orbital segment" allocations, and the far side shrinks away even more. Suppose your location shifts to a point 51% closer to one side of the theater, and the fellow who was standing right next to you moves to 51% closer to the opposite screen. So he sees your end of the theater the way you see his end. Both of you see the same skewed view even though arguably the theater is still a circle. Capish? So it could be argued that your event horizon has now shifted, so that you now see only to 49% twords the opposite wall the other side of center, and his view does likewise. The thing is now the other fellow is at 51% and so is two percent out of range of your circle, as you are in his. This is my justification for cloaked objects. Now the thing is with cloaking matter I likened it to being micro-waved. As you know EHF microwaves agitate molecules and speed them up so that they ocelate faster with E M radiation. Normally longer E M radiation waves pass harmlessly through bodies. The task before us is to somehow “trick” those longer waves into interacting with matter like the shorter waves. You have this in science all the time where substances trick other substances or cell D N A or whatever - - into thinking they are something else. This is something nobody presently knows how to do. It could be that in the whole world with our modern internet someone may come up with part of the idea and half way around the world someone else may come up with another part of the solution, and so forth, so that discovery is made faster. I have ideas but I can’t think of everything.

The Disneyland circerama theater analogy

The reverse translucent screen analogy

The comet orbit analogy

The egg shape analogy

The sliced cone analogy

The “light chasing” analogy (illusion of reversed time)

The Mercury – total eclipse analogy (if light never varies in speed

Than Time has to slow down to accommodate that reality)

The mental patient analogy (refuting aspects of special relativity)

The static ether proposition

The stretchable ether (soap bubble) analogy

The limited infinity axiom (railroad tracks tword horizon)

The geometry of endless straight lines in a limited space

(another byproduct of the soap bubble analogy

The golf course analogy (Einstein and many others)

The No Gravity Zone (Gravity can’t travel in hyperspace)

The “What you see is what you get” reality (gravity and light)

The elevator analogy (Einstein) but also supporting an idea of mine

The bendable ether analogy (the Jell-O analogy)

The motorboat analogy (basically the static ether theory)

The racecar tail wind analogy (event horizon priority)

The portable space analogy (tailwind analogy again)

The “lost space” or matter cloaking proposition

The time and space “event horizon” proposition”

(folded space may be different by reason of sheer distance)

The en-gram “splatter” analogy (a way humans can know the remote past

And also future events never having experienced them personally

The electron analogy (Employing

special relativity beliefs to illustrate the same point)

The Ontological Argument (morality is it’s own justification)

Ditto “ “ “ (morality is not subject to being put up for a vote)

The trigonometric analogy (space that isn’t space can have dimensions)

The billiard ball arrangement dimension diagram (the top ball is divided

Into six smaller balls of “higher dimensions”)

The cause and effect analogy (fifth dimensionality may exist but we can

never get there because it would violate God’s physical and moral laws)

Everything that Can happen – Has or Will happen in some dimension

The linear logic analogy or “Why isn’t my dollar worth a dollar any more”

The shirt circuit logic or “crossing logic paths” analogy

The Cosmological Argument (all computer values have to be backed up

by something even if you have to play God to do it)

The “red shift means Retarded” axiom (an argument for liberalism)

The “idle electrons still have energy and hence mass” axion

(we have ionization, batteries, and static electricity, for example)

The one dimensional psychic signal analogy

(TV’s just use a one dimensional medium to transmit images and sound)

The two dimensional psychic warfare proposition

The “Six is the highest number” axiom (there is a geometric argument for this

(And also the notion that along with Time we have seven dimensions in Heaven)

Ontological argument II (is Time an abstraction or a physical phenomenon?)

Teological Argument (Evolution can’t work because there isn’t enough time to

Perfect it before the natural forces of chaos again rule the day)

Moral Argument (what you mete out to others will come back on you)

The Space Argument (the sort of space surrounds an object

is determined by the structure of the material that fills that space)

Cosmological Argument II (God is not allowed to make mistakes without dire

consequences since he had no higher authority to appeal or to beg mercy from)

Nothing Happens by Accident (Basic Forth dimensional deterministic therum

MY SERMON ON THE MOUNT 2011

Hopefully there will be no fists flying in today's religious discussion. I got a little ticked off this morning in Dr. Levy's class where he was showing this DVD that appeared to be selling as some "product" like you'd find on an info-mercial for some nutrition product or kitchen aid. Dr. Levy went on and on about how wonderful Jesus was and how he died for our sins and was going to turn the whole class into Church or something. I kind of resent all these staged promotions that talk about how there is a God or Jesus shaped hole in all of us that can only be filled by Jesus.

Basically what I'd like to do is review the "seven deadly phrases" or whatever, that a Christian should never use because the words are like kryptonite to the Faith. I'll start with the one Dr. Levy used on me this morning. He said one shouldn't engage in "wishful thinking" or "Magical thinking". What they mean is that you should never look to God for anything, despite all the protestations as to how great and forgiving he is. Another term Christians should never use is the term "manipulative" because this is really the pot calling the kettle black. They live and breathe manipulation every day of their lives. Another is to label someone a hypocrite, although Christians have gotten a little smarter about this one now. You know my saying about this is that "The Church does not Contain hypocrites; it IS hypocracy". Another term you may hear used as "false humility". This is usually used in sermons about the early days of King Saul when he had doubts about his worthiness to be chosen. Of course there is nothing "false" about this. False humility is parading it around like a trophy you show off on Sunday mornings from the pulpet. You know what they say "A person who really is humble doesn't like to talk about it". In my case if I say something like "I believe that the innocent should not be made to atone for sins of the guilty" this is called False Humility. For instance suppose there is a corporate crook who is responsable for the deaths of millions of people and some jury (probably not in this country) has the balls to render the Death Penalty, does it make sense for some guy to go out and hire a homeless wino and promise him all the liquor he can consume if he will agree to give up his life". No, that's silly; that isn't justice. Another term is to label someone obsessed with religion or obsessive about it. A variation on this theme is "Using religion as a drug". This comes off as super stupid because it's a well known fact that "religion is the opiate of the people". Some other terms that should be used with extreme caution is "Don't assotiate with the wrong people". OK. But tell that to God. God palled around with Satan in the early chapters of Job in the Bible. We are informed even in exorcisums "Don't enter into a dialog with Satan - only give him direct commands". And yet here God not only dialogs with Satan but takes advice from him on how to do his job. How many of you executives out there would appreciate it if some underling told you how to do your job? You wouldn't have it. I rest my case. Another term that should be used with the greatest caution is "Total depravity". Any kind of depravity is bad. "Depravity" is a strong word. But Total Depravity has to be the worst. That means for instance to use a geographic analogy that if you aim a dart at a target but you're not sure where the target is and told repeatedly "you are wrong" and you go, "is it HERE - - is it over HERE - - and no matter where you point you are informed that you are no closser and no further. In other words even with the best of intentions - - a "totally depraved" person is incapable of helping himself. It goes back to the old addage, "If everything is a sin - - then Nothing is a sin". Think about that one. OK, we are done with part one of this.

I would now like to restate the three ultimate Unanswerable questions about God and Creation. The first of which is Why did God even Create the Universe". We know from Genisis that God himself said he regretted that he had made Man. Theologians tells us that God is and always has been a fully actuallized being. That means he can never learn anything new or every improve himself or increase his sense of "actualization" by creating something. Since the Universe is referred to by Christians as being so Evil some even say Satan is running it now- - - so why did God bother? Some may well balk at this whole line of discussion. But the reason they do so is because they don't really believe the Theologians when they say "God can't get any Gooder". This is because they vicariously see themselves as a part of God's ego and so are personally insulted when their god is insulted. I won't do that. I make God defend himself. The middle part of the question is "Why did God allow man to fall to Satan in the Garden of Eden, and spread evil throughout the race and the planet. You can't use the excuse of Free Will for this. So I invoke the example of the loving father. A father, if he saw his five year old son getting a little too close to a steep cliff, perhaps venturing the guard rail, a father would pull him back and adminish him of the danger- and he wouldn't be worried about the child's loss of "Free Will" because he knows that the Dead don't have ANY free will. A rat in a laboritory has a better chance as Free Will than Man, whose fate was decided "from the foundation of the Earth". That's in Revelation. Keep in mind that God was JUST as aware of the consequences BEFORE man did the act as he was Afterwards. With a rat there might be an 85% chance of expected pattern of behavior. But God knew to a "metaphysical certitude" that Man would fall. And finally, once man fell, why not just wipe out the whole species and start over. It's silly to say "He wanted to give man another chance". But we know "chance" isn't a part of God's play-book. We have already established that God will kill men when he gets ticked off enough at them. Now we are only arguing about how many die. Is it a few tens of thousands of people consigned to eternity in Hell- - or Billions.

I'd just like to close with this. Satan as I define him is really God. God is an all powerful and determinate being who doesn't admit morality (in any form we know it) to come into his decision process. This fact alone will explain everything on this page. Satan as such is "God as he really exists". So when this Satan-god challenges the contrived and romantisized God of the Christians, the latter will always lose, is Satan is of a mind to press the point. And the thing is Satan doesn't even have to lie to do all sorts of damage. He can do that just using the Truth. Why not just give up now because no matter how much evidence against the Faith Satan piles on you, he's probably god a bucket of stuff in reserve just waiting to be used. I hope I haven't ruined your day. It would be nice is things were different, but from where I view things, they aren't. I'm not saying we shouldn't be thankful for the good things we have. We should. But to think we somehow "earned" these things by being super religious or "tight" with God, to me is delusional thinking.

TEA PARTY FORCES RUN THE TABLE

I had a lot of trouble entering this blog. They refused my password several times. Perhaps I had caps lock on. Then they ran me through that type the letters thing. Of course Ronnie Reagan's book about his father if mis-characterized by the tea party set. Just because Ronnie would ask his father "are you all right?" (this was after his attempted assasenation) doesn't mean he thought he was incompetent. This whole issue the right brings up is scarcely a blip on the radar screen, and they are going to trash the whole book over it. The book praises Ronald Reagan and states what a basically nice guy he was and how he never said a mean word about anybody. This is in stark contrast to the tea party set which has vicious words to say about all their imagined enemies. It is quite clear that Ronald Reagan would be very troubled by the actions of the tea party crowd today that has moved in to dominate Washington and the media, and that he would not subscribe to their goals of "shutting government down" or whatever. Clearly President Bush was to the right of Ronald Reagan. We wern't involved in any wars while Reagan was in office. But now even George Bush is probably not far right enough for the tea party set. Ronald Reagan was a man who compromized and worked with the opposition. Also Ronald Reagan raised taxes eleven times according to some. He also granted amnesty to illegal aliens. He pulled our troops out of Lebanon. The tea party set just wants to re-write history and turn President Reagan's memory into some sort of political football.

There has been no lack of specific events on the radio to show that we are living in politically troubled times. Now Bernie Madoff is saying that it’s not entirely his fault that he ripped so many people off because “The banks must have known something was wrong but chose to do nothing about it”. There seems to be a lot of union busting going on in Wisconsin. The state legislature wants to make collective bargaining illegal. Talk about turning the clock back a hundred years. And now there are Union protesters who are fighting to preserve their rights but the Governor has called out the National Guard against them. I can’t believe this store hasn’t had more press. John Boehner has said that there were 250,000 new government jobs created “and if some of these jobs are lost through budget cuts than so be it”. The problem is that in actuality 309,000 government jobs have been CUT in the past year or two. These people on the right are just never satisfied and will make up anything. Because if jobs are created, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t there a lot of work that needs to get done in terms of infra-structure and preserving fire, police, and paramedics and teachers and the like? Another state is trying to abolish or drastically modify child labor laws, many at odds with the federal government, saying that children as young as ten should be allowed to work in factories. Elsewhere another state of trying to pass a measure to legalizing the murder of abortion doctors. The wording is a little tricky. I guess it says that “any one who would harm a fetus has the right to be killed on the spot”. So in general these are toxic times for the overall health of American society. Loretta said that one preacher she knew said “I know Black people have souls and deserve to have salvation, but I would never eat dinner with a Black man”. I happened to think how that’s a step up from what Pastor Bill Halliday has said to me. He doesn’t seem to think that I either have a soul or need salvation but that in any rate am so psychologically messed up I need to “get fixed” by some secular therapist, because Jesus can’t help me. The Republicans have been in control of congress for six weeks and all that time have not offered one bill to create jobs despite their campaign slogan that “Jobs and growth are the most important things”. John Boehner wants to slash a hundred billion from the budget, and it’s all on the wrong things. So we abolish things likeinspection of water treatment plants and eliminates student grants, and deprive people of heating assistance in the winter and eliminate all funds for national endowment of the Arts. Meanwhile there is some defense boondoggle that John Boehner is all for that even the pentagon doesn’t want and Defense Secretary Gates has said to scrap. In short the whole tea party bunch running Washington now are pretty much “Out to Lunch”. If this economy tanks in the next year they will have a really hard time not taking responsibility for the economic downturn. President Obama will have an “out” he didn’t have last year. It would seem as though in many ways this economy is still contracting.

FAIRWELL FRIDAY

Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarek has agreed to step down today, Friday, February 11th. The Vice President made the announcement in what Randy Rhodes calls a 28 second statement. It took thirty years to build the dictatorship and only 28 seconds to dissolve it. Naturally the crowds are elated. But I have a few questions. What is the Army's role in all of this? How come the people instinctively trust the Army so that they are even bold enough to climb on their tanks. Now that power has been handed to the Army what will they do with it? Are they really going to have an election in sixty days like they are talking about? Or is there some other secret agreement between the Army and the protesters that somehow power will be turned over to some yet unknown entity. I'm sure people like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh aren't happy about the power transfar because anything Obama is for, they are against. After all Rush cheered when Chicago lost the Olympics. Some people have said that the Moslem Brotherhood and the Tea Party here at home are similar. Both talk about violence and even espouse it, yet they claim not to actually be guilty of it themselves. Both groups say they want to work within the system. It's funny how in other places in Europe the people will directly picket corporations whom they claim to be exploitive. But we don't do that here. Here we have people like Obama who would rather sell out to them. With friends like that who needs enemies?

Thom Hartman continues to make it one of the planks in his platform that the US Supreme Court has no legitimate power to declare a law of congress Unconstitutional. He says none of the Federalist Papers spoke of this but rather said that all three branches would be co equal. The US Constitution spells out specific powers of the Supreme Court including it being the ultimate court of last resort. But nowhere in all these enumerated power does it say they have the ability to just throw out laws, rather than interperet what they mean. Of course George Bush believed in a unitary executive and the power to make "signing statements" qualifying how the laws he signed would be enforced. This is wrong, too. According to Hartman, the remedy for a bad law of congress is to vote that congress out and put in a new one. Rotsa Ruck with that with today's corporate money driven campaigns. Of course in theory voting out the legeslature would remedy the problem. All of these Supreme Court justices such as Thomas and Sculia who have friends up to their asses in political involvement, sometimes very specific involvement such as how to overturn Obama's health care plan. Of course you know that Congress has the power to impeach justices. Their life terms thus aren't really life because it says, "during good behavior". And you continue to hear talk jocks saying the tea party is divided. I believe this is a myth and always has been. But now Randy Rhodes said if she were on the radio in April of 2009 she would have praised the tea party for "finally getting it". Roomer has it now some of them are calling Dick Chaney a war criminal. Maybe that was just some bad joke that got circulated. It's kind of a toss up to say which nation has a better shot at liberty now, The USA or Egypt. People have gotten optimistic before. KTLK was doing those ads in 2006 or so, "now our opinion has become main stream". The reactionary forces of repression seem to be getting stronger all over the world. People had high hope for Russia twenty years ago. How's that working out for them now? They say governments in Europe are making a full scale march to the right because of economic considerations. The capitalism of today is far from anything that Adam Smith envisioned. The far right say that Obama really wants to "wreck the economy" so he can institute some totalitarian system. Unfortunately this notion is not so easily disproved as one would suppose at first glance.

PRESIDENT MUBAREK PASSES

AUTHORITYTO V P SULLIMON

At ten o clock this morning Thom Hartman announced that Egyptian President Mubarek would be stepping down within the hour and was about to make an important speech. It has to be pushing ten or eleven o clock at night by the time this speech was made. They only acknowledged the speech had been made after the fact playing a taped translation of it. President Mubarek says he’s surrendering power and turning all of the responsibilities for running the nation over to Vice President Amon Sulliman. This apparently will not satisfy the crowd. Tomorrow they announced a ten million man march on the square right after prayer time. Are Coptic Christians and Moslems still cooperating with each other? Al Qaeda is keeping quiet about all of this still and they have to be wondering how they can gain power but haven’t figured out a way yet. Supposedly Al Qaeda hates the Moslem Brotherhood for going soft. To complicate matters further now all the government workers have gone on strike and joined the ranks of the protesters. In general the crowd is upper middle class younger people who are doctors and lawyers and government workers. There are roomers that Mubarek is ill with cancer or something and will be traveling to Germany for medical care. In the speech Mubarek said the blood of the martyrs was not shed in vain and he wants to work with them to accomplish their goals. Someone in the Army said “Tomorrow the protesters will achieve everything them want”. I don’t know what that means. Of course this whole thing was launched by some guy working for Google that posted an article on Facebook protesting the death of some protester kid. Randy Rhodes said that today was a day of endings but to my point of view it’s still a day of continued standstill. You never know if the Army has been playing possum or something and plans to massacre everybody tomorrow when they are all gathered together. I don’t know. If I were the protesters I wouldn’t push my luck since I have already obtained so many concessions and promises.

President Obama is not only working to re-inflate the corporate economic bubble and bring about an even worse crisis in 2013 or whenever, but now he’s pardoning big money people for their crimes saying he wont prosecute. Some conservatives will always find fault with Obama no matter how many concessions he makes to the right. They of course are saying that Health Care is a giant conspiracy to drive all the private insurance companies out of business despite the fact that they’ll have mandentory new customers. Now Thom Hartman has explained this one mystery plank of the right wing about “encouraging competition and allowing you to get coverage across state lines”. Apparently this is the farthest thing from giving consumers more power. Instead it’s what happened with the credit card companies all deciding to move to North Dakota because they had the laxest credit card regulations in the entire country and now the whole country has to lower themselves to the least common denominator. Randy Rhodes said that the Tea Party is divided and right wing talk radio is losing listeners. I don’t see it that way. I don’t there’s any doubt that the tea party was about anything

This font is nothing if not a mystery. Trying to alter it is gamey indeed. In my personal life stagnation has indeed arrived. The phone and internet bill is over a week late in arriving. The anti fungal nail cream I was using was working great for a while but about a week ago just stopped working and now I think I'm even seeing retrogression. I wish these nails would just grow faster. The fungus infected nails have virtually stopped growing. On top of everything else I have a cold as of today despite all the Vitamin C I've been taking, along with that Silver-biotic stuff. There is a lurking issue with family members I'm not entirely certain is solved. Perhaps I've only been kidding myself. I'm going to try and enlarge this font now

In other news Lindsey Lohan is headed back to prison for three years because of a necklace heist last week. And a congressman is forced to resign because he posted a shirtless photo on Craig's List to attract women. Jim Webb the democrat who squeaked into office in Virginia is now on his way out. This won't help the Democrat's senate chances in 2012. Of course Joe Lieberman last week announced he wasn't running. Maybe he decided that pandering to the far right was just too political for his tastes. In general it's much less likely now when you tune in C-Span that you'll actually see congress in session. I don't know what's going on there. They spend one day extolling Ronald Reagan. I have heard precious little in the way of actual debating of provisions of bills. We can hope the Patriot Act sunsets but that's wishful thinking.

UNEMPLOYMENT IS THE

LOWEST SINCE APRIL 2009

The unemployment rate is now 9.0%. There was a .4% in the rate in just one month, which you rarely see. Were it to continue we'd be back to normal within a year or two, which the experts say won't happen. I'm not sure what the Republican response is to these numbers and 36,000 new jobs added. Somehow they are going to try and put a negative spin on it. Of course Obama is doing a lot of things wrong and among them is ignoring our trade situation, ignoring establishing some kind of quotas for percentage of US made goods in government contracts, and he is also re-inflating the financial bubble so we will soon have an identical situation to what we had in 2007 and 2008. You would think the President would have learned his lesson not to trust people from Wall Street, but apparently he hasn't. He's putting all his eggs in the basket of the 2012 election and all he cares about is getting the numbers up for two years from now.

In terms of the situation in Egypt there is still no definitive news. President Mubarek is still holding on. Apparently a number of ruling party officials were let go but this hasn't helped ease tensions in "Liberation Square". Two days ago those hired thugs on camels with baseball bats were beating up protesters. But now it's safe for news reporters to walk about again. It seems that Egypt has at least some internet back. They are telling us a spirit of harmony has pervaded the protestors as the army is keeping the pro Mubarek thugs away from the rest of the protesters. People from the right wing such as Glen Beck and World Net Daily are predicting the worst. Whatever happened to that sunny optimism Ronald Reagan was noted for. These would be heirs to the Reagan legacy have less and less in common with him with each passing day.

John Boehner now has a new problem. He has been caught by the National Enquiror having affairs with two different woman both with the initials of L. L. So either he's into Linda Lovelace, or he has some Superman fixation and the L L is Lois Lane. At any rate the most intrusive the Enquirer has ever been was the near CIA tacticts they used to track down John Edward's affairs. They were like a dog with a bone in that case and wouldn't let go. I don't know if any political bias has crept its way into the Enquirer but those Edwards revelations did a lot of damage to the political health of America. I hope they're happy. Why don't they investigate George Bush? It's hard to say how revealed sexual pecadillos will play with the hard right. They say they back Christian morality but I suspect it's more of a come on phrase than actual reality, used to attract people to the tea party movement who otherwise would never join it if they knew what it was really all about and how it's leaders are mere tools of Wall Street.

Back in June of 2006 I made certain statements saying I didn't believe in predestination and I didn't believe in the Big Bang. So have I changed? Even back then the way I phrased it was "I believe it's mentally unhealthy to believe in predestination, even if it turns out to be true". As to the matter of the big bang it's based on the assumption we really do have an expanding universe, because without that the whole theory collapses, if you know what I mean. We are assuming that light encounters no "drag" factor caused by ether viscosity or anything else. Yet the Astronomy Cafe people say that "empty space is not really empty". It's one of their major points. I also said then and still believe that the idea of "the theory of evolution is impossible" becomes a whole lot harder to assert if you really do have an infinite ammount of matter, an infinite ammount of space, and an infinite ammount of time. I spoke then of people's desire to see a "beginning" and an "end" of something. But I also said that as a kid in grammar school I more or less assumed that all these things were infinite. Now they are discovering all these new planets. This rocks one of their most tightly held "religious" assertions that We on Earth are the Only Life in the Universe. If we turn out not to be then Christianity becomes a whole lot more complicated.

DO YOU KNOW HOW

TO SPOT A PHONY?

I'm like to give President Obama kind of a mid term evaluation at this time. People who voted for Obama wanted someone who would cut the huge deficets piled up by the Bush Administration. Many wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay. Many others wanted the secretive activities of the Bush administration investigated and military abuses like renditions investigated. Many others hoped for single payer health care. This President would not do a sell out to insurance companies and give them compulsary free business the way a Republican might do. Many others developed the idea that the President had strongly held religious convictions and a sense of loyalty to his friends. Yet at first oppertunity he threw Reverand Jeremiah Wright under the bus. He disowned him along with twenty years of church attendance. Any traditional Christian would say "He did the cowardly thing, and for the worst motives". Others might conclude "Well if Obama says he's a Christian this incident only proves that Christians are phoneys". Others voted for him because he favored election laws and favored matching funds and not "opting out". Others voted for him because they thought he would work for a more open congress posting legeslation on line without these "Christmas tree" bills that are unamendable. Certainly few voted for him because he would praise Ronald Reagan and bringing about the Reagan revolution. Others voted for him because they though he would faze out the use of dangerous energy sources such as coal, or nuclear power. Others voted for him because they thought he would bring about a more open society and would not try and have whistle blowers such as wikkileaks arrested. Some voted for him because they thought "The Audacity of Hope" meant aiming high in your goals, and not compromizing your asperations. Others hoped the President would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in general end this state of "perpetual war" the country has been in the past ten years. But of course there were others in the race in 2008. Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson and that it was Johnson who in the end, who was more instrumental in getting things done than was Martin Luther King. She pointed to the virtues of political experiance in working with the opposition and not letting them derail your agenda. OK, after all this, how is our President doing? Not very well, is he? In April of 2008 I had already heard enough about Obama to conclude he was a phony and not worthy of my vote. I went on to predict that Obama would lose the nomination and that in the fall I would vote for Mc Cain because at least Mc Cain unlike Obama was an honorable man. Of course by November- - voting for Mc Cain became unthinkable because of his VP pick. Any chance of my voting republican went out the window the day he picked Sarah Palin for his Vice President. And Mc Cain further lost my respect when it became more than apparent that she and not he was setting the tone for the entire campaign. Even if you should disagree with a candidate you could still respect their ability to stick to an agenda. But this President from day one let his enemies define him in ways which Johnson or Kennedy would never have allowed. I mean if a conservative says that liberals are every bit as culpable at creating a climate of hate in this country, than this President, in one of his endless attempts to placate the insatiable right- will just say "OK both are equally guilty of formenting hate." Parenthetically if the tea party really right really believed the left was equally guilty with themselves, they wouldn't be saying "But I'm better than you". Only in Neil Savedra's world is the line "everybody is doing it" acceptable. The President in that speech fell into the trap of "false equivelency". In this way the President showed an apalling lack of leadership which reveled what his enemies were saying all along, that this man did not have enough experiance to be President.

You know I believe in judging a man or a woman for their character, their integrety, and their ability to relate to others in a caring, relivent manner. Are they fair in dealing with others? When they open their mouth do they know what they are talking about? Unfortunately there are others will size up a man on the basis of whether he has made the strictly arbitrary decision to "turn their life over to Jesus". If they haven't done this- - some would say they are not entitled to the human respect to which otherwise they'd be entitled. Neil Savedra says basically all you have to do is say the words, "Jesus is Lord" to assure a ticket to imortality. But unlike what Spencer Tracy says in "Inheret the Wind" you can't just agree with them and "they will be your friends and everything will be fine". Christians are far too xenophobic for that. I'm not saying they can read your minds (But if God can read minds HE knows if you are just "faking it") but Christians have this paranoia about they they confuse with "the gift of dissernment of spirits". Why not just tell people you're an atheist if that's what you are. Why not just "come out", like gay people are doing? Randy Rhodes was going of on atheists. She said they were all arrogant and I was offended at that. Randy said that atheists don’t give any more thought to their beliefs than your typical Joe Blow on the street. She was put off at the idea that an atheist said to her, “You’re too smart to believe in Christianity”. OK. Well, if an atheist said that to me I might just think, “maybe the guy is right. I am too smart to believe in this religious hocus pocus.” By way of object example, if a person said, "I have looked carefully into the matter of the existrence of UFO's and concluded that they don't exist", could you not respect a man for having this belief. Now, what is easier to prove the existance of- - a UFO that people have actually seen, or a God who remains for the most part undefined? I guess in a way "belief" has become the new Sex. It's not something you air in public. They say never talk about religion or politics in bars. Because the worst thing that could happen as you might prove yourself to be more knowledgable than others in the room and that would be unthinkable! Keep in mind often a school teacher will say to a student that hands in a sloppy piece of work, “You’re too smart to be doing inferior work like this”. Should the student be offended and walk off in a huff and say to himself “Well I’ll show her. I’ll do even worse work in the future”. If a boss is hired by a CEO to get a particularly inefficient branch of the office in line, does the new supervisor say “Well, I’m going to put this office’ laziness up to a vote”. Certainly not. He’s going to be taking names and kicking ass. To equate God with Love is the oldest phalocy in the book. Love like infrared or ultra violet rays they talked, is a demonsterable commodity. But you can exhaust yourself looking for evidence of God and you may never find it. I myself am a deist simply because I don’t believe the Universe got here by accident; it’s too intelligently constructed. But the idea of a “fundamentalist atheist” is one of those words, which if he had any legitimacy as a word- - would have been around for centuries and not the creation of Thom Hartman only a few weeks ago. Atheists asks questions and people are afraid of their questions. As was pointed out fundamentalists don’t ask questions. For them all truth was handed down on stone tablets from God. What Randy is really saying in her attack on Atheism is “I’m afraid I’ll lose if I get in an honist dialog with someone who may have thought more about the issue than I have”. You know it was Gene Scott who said “I hate know-it-als”. Well, I don’t hate know-it-alls, if they really know what they are talking about. The thing is with a Christian is you can’t learn anything from a Christian, at least constructive, but anything you managed to assililate from them, even if by accident, will only do damage to your soul in the long run and somewhere, somehow, will come back to bite you in the ass. This is a free country and people are free to believe what they want. They can believe Jesus Christ stood for peace and non violence, when it’s only out of anti semetic racism that these passages were put in scripture. Jesus never condemned the violence of Rome against his own people. Who will stand up to condemn the crusades and all of the other violence of the church, or the rape of the native peoples of the New World started by Columbus and continuing? In short many liberal Christians like Thom Hartman believe in a phantom that doesn’t exist. And to me it’s silly to condemn others for not believing in some religious opiate. And one more thing. No atheist would ever use the line on people “You may think you have a disagreement with me but in reality your battle is with God”. Churchmen use this line on people all the time whom they want to subjugate. An atheist doesn’t have to hide behind something he intented to begin with in some attempt to play a mind game on the person they are trying to subjugate. It really sounds suspicious to say “Well, I’ll respect an atheist as long as he not a fundamentalist atheist”. That’s like Chuck Smith claiming that he has the power to dissern a genuine question about God from one that’s disingenuous. For instance, according to Craig, if you say “Who is God?” that’s an acceptable question. But when told of the Love of God if you bring up all the deaths and violence in the world than that’s not a permissible question. Of course their next line is most likely “Why do you care?” And it’s asked more ion the form of an accusation, as though there was something wrong with you for caring, rather than a question they want you to answer. Let me just add one more thing. Now Craig is a lone wolf in his fundamantalism around here. I admire his bravery. Christians as a whole tend only to be brave in numbers when they have you surrounded, like the characters in Pac-Man. Often they take pride in their cowardess and being able to do fence straddling, like at work, in order to get ahead. Sean Hannity went so far as to say that if you're doing a Philosophy blue book assignment and a religious question comes up, it's just "smart" go give the teacher want he wants and get the grade. In reality getting back to our main point- - Christians don't want to know if you believe A God exists, but rather that THEIR God exists. And remember their watch word, unlike what they say publicly, what they believe in private is "Your God is too Big". Meditate on that a while.

IS OUR NATIONAL SECURITY

BEING COMPROMISED?

I was just watching a debate between Newt Gingrich and two others on C-Span on the topic of Islamic terrorism and national security. Some point out that many who are released from Guantanamo go on to commit more terrorism. Does this mean we suspend all legal protections for those in this country accused of terrorism? Does it mean that we invent some new category of criminal that falls neither under legal protection or the laws of the Geneva Accords? I don’t think so. It’s pointed out that bomber who was arrested in New York around May first of last year was spotted by an alert vender who told a cop and they took it from there. Some may say “It’s dangerous to assume that any criminal arrested is not a radical Islamic terrorist. Some say militant radicalism in any religion is dangerous. Newt pointed out that there aren’t many radical Lutherin Norweegens, for instance. Therefore according to Newt this proved that only Islamic people are radical. We move on to the Egypt situation now. Rush Limbaugh yesterday said that the Islamic Brotherhood is a radical organization connected with Al Qaeda and they want to impose radical Islam by force on the nation of Egypt and make the nation of Egypt as a whole numbered among our enemies. Rush went on to say that the “Drive by media” spent all weekend saying that the Islamic Brotherhood was not dangerous and “apologizing for them” or whatever. In point of fact the only time I heard the first hint they were not dangerous was on one four minute interview on “This Week” and it was the guest who said it and not the talking head reporters. Rush went on to attack the Federal Reserve of this country saying that because of what they did last year in its “monetization of the debt” drive, drove up the price of corn in Egypt and therefore all the food riots in Egypt are really our fault. It was pointed out today however that the Islamic Brotherhood neither organized the protests, but were relative late comers to the movement. Neither are they leading the movement now. Rather it seems to be young people who are suffering economically who are spear-heading the movement. They say they genuinely want democracy and this just isn’t some ruse for radicals to get power, like took place in Iran over thirty years ago. We need to be aware of these things. Now Mubarek has stated that he will not run for reelection this coming September. But this concession is not enough for the protesters because they think between now and then he’ll “pull something” to stay in power. But we can’t let the tea bagger right like Gingrich telling us how to think and what to think. They’ve done it their way for ten years and it hasn’t worked. As was pointed out today now Turkey is becoming radicalized. Of course if we sent 150,000 troops in a small country with advanced weapons we are going to win in that area, at least for a while. But we won’t be getting to the underlying causes of radical movements, or whatever political perswasion. Few people would take President Obama to be some kind of a closet Islamic sympathizer who is weak on terrorism. Indeed there seems little difference between the Obama foreign policy and the Bush foreign policy. If George Bush were still President would Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich be calling him “the enemy” simply because terrorism hasn’t vanished overnight? I don’t think so. Rush Limbaugh is such a congenital liar- - I couldn’t believe what he said even fifteen years ago when I agreed with him. How much less now, that we disagree on virtually everything. We need to deal with events one by one as they present themselves.

PANDEMIC OF MIDEAST PROTESTS CONTINUES

President Mubaric is still holding on in Egypt. Of course you know there has been a lot of arson and looting. The death toll was 75 and then went over a hundred, but I’m not sure which side is getting killed the most. These protesters are anything but peaceful. Of course I’m glad they stop everything to pray. It can’t hurt to consult God at a time like this. Now vigilante groups of property owners have been formed, to shoot looters, and I don’t blame them. The idea of a withdraw of the police force to “teach the people a lesson” seems idiotic to me. If you listened to Mubaric’s speech the other day it sounded conciliatory. I don’t entirely get it myself. All we know is that after thirty years of Mubaric rule the people are economically discontent and feel politically repressed. Personally, recent history has shown that you can’t trust the results of elections in this area because Moslem extremists will hijack them for their own perposes. I don’t think the US is helping one bit by threatening to withhold aid. Mubaric is kind of backed into a corner. My hope is that we reassure him to “stay the course” and eventually things will settle down, after the people have it all out of their system. The US has steadfastly supported far more corrupt dictators. Mubaric has appointed a Vice President for the first time, whom he might want as his successor. Of course this wave of mideast protests began in Tunisia a few weeks ago and toppled a government. There also have been protests in Yemen, Lebanon, and in Jordan, which don’t get the press. I think the President needs to be more resolute in his support of Mubaric because if he goes, then the mideast treaty with Israel of some 33 years duration is in jeopardy. Some have said that “this would encourage Palistinians to seek peace”. I see it completely the opposite. There are going to try and “poke the bear” and attack when they think their enemy (Israel) is backed into a corner. (and they will lose) But these protesters don’t want democracy; most seem to want chaos. And they say even the Army wants chaos and some of the protestors are chummy with the Army. Unlike in Iran in June of 2009, the Army shows no inclination to fire on the protesters or to quell the rebellion. This is because they hope to take over. Also this Moslem Brotherhood, which nobody head of till last week, seems to be a dangerous thing. They want to turn Egypt into another hard line Islamic state. I think we had enough of that thirty years ago with Iran. People like Mitch Mc Conell on the other side of the fence see things pretty much the same as those on the left do. Obviously these events have eclipsed anything Obama said in the State of the Union address, which now seems ages ago. It worried me that religious whackos in this country might be rubbing their hands in glee thinking that Armageddon has arrived. You’d think Sunday sermons would advocate peace, but don’t hold your breath. If there is any late news I’ll add it to this posting if it occurs in short order.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S

GRAND VISION FOR AMERICA

The question with last night’s State of the Union speech was how many times the President would use the words “civility” and “investment”. It’s kind of silly for a conservative to balk at the word “investment”, since they say they are so fond of it. But if it involves spending they don’t like it. Dr. Levy said the bailing out of General Motors was a bad thing because what should have happened was that the labor unions would renegotiate their contract to cut worker’s salaries, and now that didn’t happen. Only someone who was basically anti workers rights would make such a statement. Dr. Levy also said that any involvement in government in a business venture is bad. I asked him, “What about the New Deal?” and he had no answer. Dr. Levy is truly a DINO or Democrat in name only. Last night was “date night”. I wasn’t sure about all of this strange pairing up. People were making jokes about it. I will say that things went faster than usual. There was less of a built-up before the speech. There were fewer government dignitaries pointed out. The three most conservative Supreme Court justices were not there. That sends a message loud and clear. The President started by talking about how great America was and dwelt for a while on Congresswoman Giffard. I wouldn’t have done that. He went on and on about how Americans are supposed to act. Then he started talking about energy. Dr. Levy believes we should drill for more oil here. But of course we are over forty years past “peak oil” and this is why prices are up. Even at ten times the price it apparently is not worth reopening long capped wells in Texas. The President had an “anything but oil” philosophy. He wants natural gas and nuclear and “clean coal”, if there is such a thing. But he singled oil companies to say he wanted their subsidies yanked. He then went on to education and spoke at length about that and the restoration of respect for teachers in the classroom. Does he aim to bring back corporal punishment in the classroom? He talked about kids turning off the TV and doing their homework and studying hard to compete with the college grads from India. Though from what I have seen of India they are still living in the seventeenth century, at best. Apparently their government isn’t spending a dime on the poor. He said the US was ninth in the percentage of college grads, though I suspect we are worse than that in some subjects. He then moved on to immigration and getting illegal aliens out of the shadows. He alluded to the dream act of enabling college grads who are illegal aliens to at last obtain citizenship. He moved on to infrastructure and didn’t talk about this nearly enough. It’s the elephant on the room that will be ignored by Republicans. Of course we need more roads and bridges and better sewers and such. But Judy thinks high speed rail is some kind of a commie conspiracy, and voted against Kurt Pringle in Anaheim, because he advocated high speed rail. So what is China and every other nation has it. The president moved on to talking about a universal wireless internet for even the most rural areas. Maybe. Next on the agenda was easing the regulations on business. The President also wants to CUT corporate taxes, after of course, closing tax loopholes. He talked about how many jobs his trade deals with various nations have gotten. However here he again ignored the elephant in the room, mainly our soaring deficit, particularly our 250 trade deficit with China. He talked about the national debt and says he wants to freeze federal spending for five years and even cut some personal favorite programs of his, and says he wants to cut defense. He spoke fondly of his famous deficit commission. The President brought up Health Care and how many people it has helped and will help. He then talked about reorganizing the whole federal government and gave the example of Salmon. It would seem that completely restructuring the entire cabinet would be complicated, and in my estimation, that in itself would mean hiring more beaurocrats to do it. Finally he got around to foreign policy and spoke of our victories against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and spoke of getting tough with Iran and South Korea. He mentioned the separatist election in Sudan but I’ll believe that when it actually happens. Finally he talked about supporting our troops and congradulating gays for obtaining their full rights. One way to cut veterans hospital expenses is not to have them fighting in any more wars for a while. He concluded by one again saying how great America was and how our best days are ahead of us. The speech ran an hour and one minute, which is definitely short by the old Bill Clinton standards. There were fewer references to various individuals but these were in evidence. The applause he got seemed much more curt. Paul Ryan started his speech by saying that the President made many good points, if he’ll follow through on them. In terms of the issues Thom Hartman raises, these were almost completely absent.