Facing Reality Is A Healthy Thing

President Bush for the second time recently has finally done something "Presidential". The first thing was a couple of months ago when he concluded that agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw our troops within a reasonable, but set time. This is something that John Mc Cain's followers seemed to hope would never happen. Yesterday Bush in an address I watched announced that Chrysler, Ford, and GM would be getting a 17.4 Billion dollar bail out. This is that famed 17.4 number we've talked about as a certain planitary formation. This is a good thing. Bush has finally realized that the health of the economy of this country and the security of all those attendant jobs was more important than Republican politics in the Senate. So it would well be that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The auto makers have three months to pay back this loan. We hope that the companies will make good use of this money.

This next paragraph might be called "now they've gone too far". They are instituting drug regulations for championship chess players. This covers not only stimulant drugs but also such things as beta blockers to slow down their heart rates so the players don't get flustered. If you're someone like me you have to take beta blockers to control high blood pressure. These regulations are instituted because some people want chess to be an Olympic sport and you know they don't allow drugs in the Olympics. Now the Bush adminestration is issuing anti abortion regulations that are even absurd by my standards. They even allow medical receptionists to refuse to write appointments if their personal belief about abortion is offended. If a doctor is part of some medical group that is opposed to abortion that doctor cannot perform one even if he himself would like to. Some say this ruling will extend to people at Rite Aid filling prescriptions for birth control pills. Dr. Edell today talked about how doctors used to not advertize on television because it was bad "ethics". But modesty is not a part of today's culture. Today whatever you hear on Oprah Winfrey it must be true. Soap opera doctors are constantly asked for medical advice. It used to be that quacks offering some product would pay to get a real doctor endorse their product, but they stopped doing that because they found nobody even cared whether a "real doctor" endorsed their product. They just cared whether Hollywood endorsed it. Dr. Edell said something we already knew that today's teenagers do not suffer from low esteem but rather, high esteem such is that they as a generation are "satisfied with themselves". 93% of teenagers are satisfied with everything about themselves.

Today I heard a preacher announce that he had an original thought. I was all ears. He says that the biggest beef the world has about churches is that "they are all only after your money". In the first place this is a charge you will hear very seldomly from me. It's how preachers screw up your life that bothers me more. After all "it's only money" but there are worse things that can happen to you. But the more important thing pastors are oblivious to is when they disparage a football game, or even disparage apperations of the Virgin mary in a water mark on a building what they neglect to tell you is "at least things are Real". They are really happening. Meanwhile all the stuff preachers engage in verbal auto eroticism about exists only in their minds, and they want you to partake in the delusion they are peddeling. We could take a look at Christmas for what's not real. The Christmas Stories in Matthew and Luke rank right at the bottom as far as historical credibility is concerned. Romans don't care who your great grandfather was or what city your "house and liniage" is from. And King Herod did a lot of hanious things but no historian is accusing him of genocide of Hebrew babies. People in general need to "get real" about what they believe. Dr. Edell reads a list of things people believe and he does it to shame the audience. We are much more a "magical thinking" society than we think we are.

One more way in which the law has gone "too far" is the idea of revoking all the gay marriages that have occurred in this state. I don't think there is legal precident for making an official leagel act now retro-actively illegal. I think we conservatives are swimming against the tide on this one. There is some "force" that is propelling gay marriage into the main stream of society whether you or I like it or not. While it's true that I know of no society that has ever had something officially called gay matrimony, there is always a first time, and we may be experiancing that today.

In the book "Visions" it speaks of the advances that will be made in society by the year 2020 and even beyond. There are a lot of REAL things to get excited about today without believing in supernatural hocus pocus. In an early chapter it's brought up that all the internet access we have today will bring people together and in the Obama tradition, we are re-thinking how we do things in society. And eventually we will all begin to think like one organic, intelligent unit. The advances that will be made in the near and far future in medicine are fantastic when it comes to curing diseases that are now seen as incurable and correcting genetic malodies. What the blood of Jesus was unable to do, we can do tomorrow with the wonders of modern science. There are of course things we do not know. Nobody knew about radio waves 200 years ago so that lack of a belief in them did not peg one as an oddball. Today it is a "reasonable" assumption not to believe in God or extra terrestrial beings for the same reason. There is no evidence of some personal, concerned being out there. If there arises other new evidence on the subject, I and I suspect many of you will be glad to listen.

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28 - THE SATANIC CYCLE

Do You Know What I Mean? (Lee Michals)
Julia Dream (Pink Floyd)
Good Shepherd (Jefferson Airplane)
Your Wildest Dream (Moody Blues)
The Weirdness (Iggy & the Stooges)
A Song for Jeffrey (Jethro Tull)
Wall of Sleep (Black Sabbath)
40,000 Headmen (Traffic)
Much Too Late for Good-byes (Julian Lennon)
And In Every Home - A Nightmare (Joe Jackson)
All the Young Girls Love Alice (Elton John)
Hellen Wheels (Paul Mc Cartney)
The Court of the Crimson King (King Crimson)

Occult means "hidden". Did not St. Paul say, "Behold, I show you a mystery?" so is not Christianity occult? Jesus Freaks occult the Bible. Just remember that while some say "the unreflected life isn't worth living", I say unto you rather, "The un-lived life isn't worth reflecting on". Some have also said "Those who know - don't Say and those who Say don't know". But I'm telling you of those whose motto is "If they don't ask - Don't ask, don't tell" what they think they know - doesn't exist and what they Do Know they would be ashamed to tell because it would Expose them.

The Origen of All Sin

Some say that Pride is the source of all sin. Here is how I look at that. Pride might be called a “gateway emotion”. It may or may not lead to “vanity”. It’s kind of like when Thom Hartman was talking about Calvinists yesterday. He equated Calvinism with the notion of extolling the Rich and debasing the Poor. But this is not a part of Calvinism per se. What Calvinism does is set up a “moral matrix” if you will, where such condescending beliefs about the Rich and the Poor are possible.

The whole notion of sin is “missing the mark” or put another simpler way, “being wrong about something”. What a prudent person does when faced with “being wrong” is to correct the situation once it’s exposed. Sin is not the same thing as transgression. Transgression is the volitional stepping over of moral lines. But I’ll tell you this- - Christianity os loaded with sin, and some can say it is founded at its very foundation on Sin incarnate. Some people using the ontological argument will say that if man is capable of Imagining something, then that “something” must have some basis in reality. This is a variation of the idea that God can’t make a rock so big that he’s unable to lift it. But why stop there, you Athiests. Don’t be a piker. Ask God the big question. “Is it possible to destroy himself so that in reality he never existed?” If he can’t so the argument goes, then there is “Something that God can’t do- - nyah- - nyah- - “. In the four dimensional construct we have used for our Universe, such an act of God is inherently Impossible. But now back to Christianity. It says in Daniel chapter nine somewhere that among the things that the Messiah will do is “to make an end to sin”. Did Jesus do this? Did Jesus make an end to all sinning in the world?” No. So does Jesus fail scripture at this point? The answer is yes. It proved to be a “vain imagining”. Talk of life after death is probably a “vain imagining”. As little as I know about hyperbolic trigonometry I even know less about life after death. None of us have any information available to us. The thing Christianity has to be aware of is what does it do NOW when confronted with this self evident Truth that “scripture has failed”. Does it make up reasons and rationalizations so as to deny the basic reality before it? If so you have now moved into the volitional transgression of self-deception. And lying to yourself and more importantly to others- - is a transgression. It’s a transgression because the assumption of a student is that he’s there to learn and that a teacher will tell him the truth. So the teacher has violated a trust and defrauded the student.

More Technical Stuff - - - - -

How are you doing this morning? Did everybody get a good night’s sleep? Good. Now we’re headed for deep water. The origin of all sin can be traced back to two words- - Vain Imaginings. You find this phrase of “vain imaginings” a lot in the Bible but what does it mean? Last night while doing that blog, notably in the last paragraph, I sinned. I made a few “mental errors” though reading the text it would be hard for someone to isolate them. You would have to be psychic to know what I was thinking. We were talking about hyperbolic functions. I’ve read the Wickipedia article and I know I was way over my head. I still don’t understand “Taylor Searies” or any of that. For the benefit of those of you who want to know, the three lines associated with hyperbolic trigonometry consist of an S line that travels horizontally below the zero grid and when it hits zero zero on the Y X axis it blips above zero and then keeps traveling to the right in an S formation. One of the sine lines does a vertical “S” in like manner. The other line starts off by hugging the other Sine line in positive territory but then does a “U” when it gets near zero and goes back up in the upper left quadrant. One might describe a portion of the line formation as a “horn of plenty” with an opening bell at the bottom that turns horizontal at the end.

But I made a mental error that Martin of the Simpson’s might have made. Actually a ten year old of a 135 IQ isn’t all that bright. It only makes him as intelligent as the average eighth grader, and I’m known a lot of really dumb eighth graders. The whole IQ thing supposedly is doing your “mental age” and there is that test in my baby book I took when I was three where you seemed to be able to directly divide mental age verses chronological age and come up with a percentile figure. It’s just too bad people don’t keep mentally developing at the same rate all their lives. But what is “vain imaginings”? If I were a poker player playing with some Las Vegas high rollers I’d be in a position last night where I bluffed, and now my job is to insure that nobody finds out about it and just maybe I can get away with something. Which one of us- - a homosexual couple engaged in an impassioned act of sodomy in bed- - or “Muah” last night? Who was sinning the more. The correct answer is “Muah”. The idea of sin or “vain imaginings” doesn’t really carry any moral connotations. The thing with sin is not having it, but what do you do when you are guilty of “Vain imaginings”. Some say that Ted Bundy was guilty of “vain imaginings” but in reality most of the time he wasn’t because he made all his “imaginings” come true. So ponder that one a little.

Going Main Stream

The big news today is that President Elect Obama has picked the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at next month's inoguration. When I heard this my first thought was they must be referring to someone else. President Obama wouldn't do this. But it's true. While it's possible some would say "Well there is a chance for bridge building" or else "It took courage for the Pastor to even accept Obama's invitation, knowing how conservative his congragation is" still the move is an attempt on Obama's part to try and "go main stream". Randi Rhodes, for one, doesn't see any percentage in it for progressives. The reason is that we on the left have made concession after concession to the "main stream" from the FISA bill to Iraq troops staying longer. Hillary Clinton will be a handful as secretary of state. You have Barney Frank at his post as the so-called guardian of our banking, and we've seen how that turned out. And you have Gates as secretary of defense. This is just another blow to the left that "they'll just have to get used to". Obviously given Warren's stand on proposition eight in California, the man is a polarizing figure. Clearly Obama wants to "send a message" to both pro gay and anty gay groups alike. Obama risks "losing touch with his base" if he goes too far in his accomadations to the center. That's what I think.

Caroline Kennedy is up for consideration for Hillary's old senate post in New York. And now her supporters are saying that Caroline Kennedy hasn't "paid her dues" and all of that other stuff about being "seasoned". Of course Hillary herself dares not directly go against Caroline because she risks alienating her future boss. But as Randi Rhodes puts it "elected posts wern't meant to be a carrerr but merely were supposed to be citizens serving their government for a while". As such Hillary can hardly say Caroline is unqualified because Hillery herself had no experiance other than being an ex first lady, when she ran for the first time herself for the Senate.

People have spoken at length about the Iraqi reporter who threw one shoe and then the other at President Bush on his last trip to Iraq. About the only reference to shoes in the Bible is a line in the Old Testiment of "he from whom the shoe was loosed". This refers to a man who refuses to empregnate his dead brother's widdow so that the family line will have post humous "seed" to carry on the family name. I don't know how you could apply this to our Iraqi policy. There are also various places where it says to "shake off the dust from your sandals as a witness against the city that would not hear your message". We can all chew on that one a while.

Days of our Lives has suffered from some bad writing lately. Marlena Evans is still on the show despite news of her departure. But she seems perpetually confused these days and doesn't seem to know what she is saying. Meanwhile the idea that Melanie would face down Victor Kiriacus to "change his mind" is absurd. That's like sending Barney Frank to change Jerry Folwell's mind on the topic of gay marriage. I would have expected that Victor would have thrown Melanie out of his office - preferably out the window for daring to propose a project where she personally gets all the profits of the unproven scheme based on the word of a murdering psychopath. Victor's son, Philip was right to turn down the plan. Particularly in the light of how Victor distrusts scheming young women such as Nicole and Clowie. Melanie is the mother of all manipulaters with a downright larcenous personality. Can't Victor give his son just a little credit for knowing Something - - having actually worked with her and seeing her in action? Apparently not.

Here's some fishy analytic geometry. You know that basic or "circular" trigonometry has to do with right triangles. But what geometric form does "hyperbolic geometry" allude to? Well, I've come up with the form. It would be a long, skinny fish, with the head bitten off and a really wide, but short tail fin. The two lines of the fish would cross. One line is the sine and the other is the cosine. Now imagine a bunch of slides through the fish like a master chef disecting a blow-fish. These are potential tangent lines. Whatever line you pick, look at the rest of the fish from that point. When it comes to the tail fin the lines cross. The line that goes down below zero has now become a negative number. The end of the tail fin is also a negative number because its vector runs the oposit direction. Now you know.

Crooks On Parade

Drew peterson is in the news again because he is getting married to victim number five. Drew Peterson is marrying Christina Rains and her family is trying to talk her out of it knowing that he's probably murdered his third and fourth wives. His fourth wife is now missing. Formerly Drew Peterson had argued that his fourth wife was alive and not dead. Will he now change his stance since he now has to prove his fourth wife is dead before he can marry Christina? It's like the song 'Henry VIII" with the line "I'm getting married to the widdow next door. She's been married seven times before". Of course the other Peterson, Scott Peterson is now in prison for offing his wife and he still gets love letters from women in prison. There is a sydrone among certain women that they believe "Love conquers all". Of course this is a Christian belief and there are times when I've been suckered into this belief myself in dealing with Christians. But the fact is Agape love, which is the kind Christians talk about has nothing to do with the character of the other person but everything to do with your own emotions, and you know what they say about "Give me the strength to change the things I can and the patience to endure those things I can't change and the wisdom to know the difference". Drew Peterson apparently did not even divorce his second wife before marrying his third. I don't know about the others.

We then have Bernie Madoff, or he "made off" with fifty Billion with a B dollars. What's ironic about this is that Bernie conned rich people who ought to know better. But I have mixed emotions. What he did was dastardly and wrong, yet at the same time it's interesting to see that even rich people can be conned by their own insecurity and greed. Chuck Smith is wrong. Rich people "have not transcended their need for money". Rich people can be just as desperate and money grubbing as the rest of us. But the ironic thing is that 50 Billion is twice the figure all three auto makers were asking between the three of them. It's a question of priorities. 25 Billion is too much to spend to save the US economy from ruin, and yet 50 Billion is not too much for rich people to spend in an attempt to get even more money. I've often said that I thought Martha Stewart should have been given a break for her insider trading charges because for once somebody "stuck it to the system" and came out ahead. But it seens either in Las Vegas or in Wall Street you are penalized for guessing right, and steep penalties are enforced to insure that you always lose money.

Then we have Rod Blagoiavitch. The Federation is still writing sympathetic articles about him. Just this morning on the Stephanie Miller show a caller was saying "In drug deals they wait till money actually changes hands before they make an arrest". Here they moved in and the guy can say "Oh that was just idle talk. I didn't mean anything by it. The idea that Offices are not For Sale all the time is a naive one. Now Blagoiavitch is out on bail and out of the prison cell and back in the penthouse, and he has to wear one of these ankle bracelets. Like Clinton he is not giving up his job merely because impeachment charges are leveled against him. He intends to fight to keep his power. It will be interesting to see how things develope.

Now we have another news headliner from yesterday. This is the fact that virtually nobody has been saved from defaulting on their Mortgage loans from the 700 Billion bail out plan. Few people have even applied for loan relief, and none have been successful. Not one person has been helped by the Barney Frank - Hank Paulson bail-out. If I were Obama and Frank were recomended to me for a job- - I'd say, 'I wouldn't hire Barney Frank as dog catcher at this point". I don't see why the senate doesn't remove him from his lofty post as head of the banking committee because he's obviously dropped the ball big time. He's played right into the hands of and the fondest dreams of the Bush banking community whose idea is to horde as much cash as possible. Like Mr. Potter from that old movie- - they'll never be able to spend all the money they are hoarding. But these people never heard of utilitarianism or the notion that you should do the most good for the most people and the way to do that is to put money in circulation, and in this way society as a whole is helped.

When it comes to belief about God, I am what you call an anti dyspensationalist, Calvinistic Deist. I believe in an all powerful overriding diety who runs things. I believe totally in divine grace, and I believe in expressing gratitude to the deity for the grace we live by every day. This morning I prayed for my TV to go on because due to the cold weather or something, my TV hasn't always come on first thing in the morning when I push the button. Gratitude is an appropiate emotion in response to divine grace. Where I part company from the Christians is that they are Theists, or Tri-thiests, if you will. The theists love to anthropomorphize God into some human quality. These Theists believe God has a personality, in fact three of them. They in some form or another believe that God is just as subject to the sway of human emotions as the rest of us. Chuck Smith has alluded to this many times in his teachings. I am a deist, on the other hand, in the finest Jeffersonian tradition. Jefferson once wrote in a letter of "Swearing before the alter of the Deity, unswarving hostility to tyrany and tyrants in all forms". Of course if God is a person then the next step for a pastor is to "Assume the role of God by adopting what you think is God's personality". These people don't appreciate the inherant unapproachable nature of God. Some say Adolph Hitler was a Christians. Evidence would suggest he wanted to bring back the nordic Myths of old. One Christian is even now saying on the radio that Adolph Hitler was an atheist. Of course Tom Hartman and myself shouldn't mind the notion of "Atheist" because both of us are Deists and not Theists.

It's A Question Of Priorities

Greetings from the building that still has no heat. It’s raining now and it rained much of the night. I took a long hot shower this morning to get warm. Thankfully that is still working. We had Raison Bran for breakfast along with a fried egg and an English muffin with a lot of grape jam on it. But there were no seconds except on coffee I went for myself. We just edged on to page six. A lot of thoughts were going through my mind this morning. I thought of Joel Olsteen and how I’ve watched him more in the last few months than ever before and my life if the worst financially it’s ever been since that dark day on September first of this year when everything came crashing down. I remember one evening in late August where I went out for coffee about sunset and was praising God that Obama had been nominated. Contrary to what Joel Olsteen says, a lot of negative stuff catches you totally by surprise. The issue was raised about able bodied people “charging ahead” of people in wheel chairs to get in the door. Assuming that it’s true, how is my getting in the dining room more quickly in any way impeding the speed that he gets in the door with his wheel chair? This is a classic argument raised by Rush Limbaugh about Clinton raising taxes because “Well, at least the rich are getting it worse”. It’s raining harder now. I listened to Drive radio doing 1972 till they got to the Who song, then I started doing this. The bottom line is I’m sick of four months of economic extremity, being squeezed. I value people more who make me feel better about myself. Inversely, I lose respect people who are constantly de-valuing me and “Don’t know what I’m about” and are constantly trying to “put me in my place” or worse- , feeling dependant or even “obligated” to someone whom I despize.

Well Barney Frank was on Sixty Minutes last night. It’s all a question of priorities. Frank is a liberal on social issues such as being gay. But he’s a “pragmatist” on financial issues such as banking. Let’s examine this to see how “pragmatic” Frank really was. You’d think as a liberal and a democrat who heads up the banking committee he would be in a pivotal role when it came to constructing a financial bail out bill. He could put any stipulative provision in the bill he wanted. If he wanted he could demand that any recipient of the money climb a flag pole and do an Irish jig on the top. But now Frank comes back and says “Well, things just didn’t work out as I planned”. I expect to hear that sort of crap from God, but not from the chief liberal democrat on a key committee who could have been such a pivotal person in insuring that the down and out had their high mortgages renegotiated to terms they would pay. Now Republic Windows or that company from Illinois got screwed by the Bank of America, who didn’t pay them the money they thought was due them. The priorities of these republicans, and I’m not even going to include Bush here, is to screw over the auto workers of America who are part of the labor movement. These republicans want to bust the unions. They want to throw people out of work (it’s raining even harder now) and start a chain reaction of job losses in America. Now we hear that this “chain reaction” is going to occur in our economy from other causes. There are two other types of Real Estate loans whose “bubble” still hasn’t burst yet. The “Altier” or “Altey” loans, and some kind of “Arm” loan. These two classes of loans are set like a time-bomb ready to go off next year, so the economic crisis is not even half over. But even after real estate has run its course, there are a lot of other asset areas of the economy set for an implosion. Now they are saying that this recession could last the whole four years of the Obama administration, and I find that an overall bummer. Joel Olsteen would say by say of solution “Just don’t talk about it and don’t get socially involved with people who Do”. The trouble is if you carry this out to its logical extreme and unfortunately some people go for extremes, you end up either like George Bush, who walls out everybody and hasn’t a care in the world, or else like the pastor of Calvary, Anaheim. This is a fearful man. He’s afraid he might accidently talk to someone who will bring hin down and “rob his joy”. But he seems to spend much of his life just fearing that this “worst case scenario” will happen. I am a big believer in the idea of balance. The Tao Te Ching teaches that everything is in constant progress tword its opposite. So that while it’s true I regard “being positive” like that USC coach, as a trait so valuable I hold it as one of my Seven Golden Virtues. But on the other hand I don’t let “fear of fear” rule the day where you can’t come out and call a spade a spade. I believe the best way to resolve issues that bother you is to come out and hit them square on and deal with them right then, neutralizing their impact.

BUSH WAS OUR WORST PRESIDENT, EVER

Last night I watched Jeopardy and the Simpson’s and then Bill Moyers, who had a guest on who said George Bush was probably the worst President this country has ever had. He said Bush has a “tragic legacy” but Bush himself is not “tragic”. Indeed old George is one of the lucky, blessed ones of society who has been living high as a kite these past eight years of destroying the US constitution. He’s been as happy as a lark oblivious to that tragic legacy. Bush is a Manachian, who believes in extreme dualism. There is only black and white in bold relief with no shades of gray to fill in the rest of the image. To Bush’s way of thinking any attack on any Evil is inherently always Good no matter what extremes are pursued to those ends of eliminating the so-called evil.

"RAMONA" - REVISITED

I was going to write the Jesus Christ show. You know in any unguarded moment any pastor would say about [Marcus], “[Marcus] thought Christianity would give him a sense of identity and purpose and meaning. But Christianity can’t offer him those things and he’s too dumb to know that”. In other unguarded moments Don Halboth says things to me like “I’m sorry you didn’t hear the things you needed to hear in that sermon”. I used to on occasion critique a really Bad sermon saying how poorly structured it was and how poorly it represented any Christian truth he was trying to get out. But to quote Dylan “I can’t apologize for something you forgot to say”. It works just as well to say “I can’t forgive you for something you forgot to say”. Or again it can be “I didn’t hear something you forgot to say”. These people aren’t “sorry” that I came away empty. What they are sorry about is for themselves, that they are schlepping around a dead-weight theology that in reality does nothing for them or anyone else but they can’t face that. In the song “Ramona” by Dylan there is the line “I’ve heard you say many times that you’re better than no one and no one is better than you. If you really believe that then you know that you have nothing to win and nothing to lose”. The last thing Christianity wants to do is deal from this level playing field. The thought of not “winning” in the sense of looting the poor and down and out would be appalling to a George Bush. There are in fact outlets of pure Evil out there and the Bill Moyers guest admits that. But they are isolated, few and far between, like that black “skin of evil” blob on Star Trek. The best thing you can do with such evil such as a Bill Halliday is to avoid them, or it. As the line continues in Ramona “It’s all just a con babe, a vacuum, a scheme- - that sucks you into feeling like this”. Ie, depressed. Chuck Smith’s supernatural body may be suited to living in a vacuum but most people aren’t. If dogs in a dog pound had the power to escape they would, and when you’re in Church and the preacher begins talking and you feel as though the air is being sucked out of the room, you know that you are just another captive animal that was turned in by someone. (Selah) We can live our lives well and easily without having to worry about any of these things that Dylan used to have the good sense not to worry about, until he “learned how to be a human race drop-out”.

What We Didn't Learn

We all know now about Governor Blogoiavitch (?) of Illinois who is one of these classic "shake-down" artists of old. He would hold up a highway construction approval if the cement manufacturers didn't kick in with a donation, or withhold funding from hospitals if they didn't do the same. He tried to get a reporter from the Chicago Tribune fired because that reporter was working on a story on him. Now the federal government had to move fast with our old friend Patrick Fitzgerald at the helm to stop Blogoiavitch before he appointed "Senate Candidate number five" to Obama's old senate seat. In an explitive laden tape he went on and on about what a plum prize this was and how he wouldn't let it go for just "appreciation". But now the question is how to get this governor to resign. Impeachment could take some time and there is talk of getting the state Supreme Court to remove him. But now Jesse Jackson, who is candidate number five, himself is under suspicion because his name was on a tape as willing to negotiate the terms of his taking the seat. Some on the far right have tried to tie Obama to this governor even though Obama is clean as a whistle and doesn't have the sort of political ego that other politicians have. As the Federation put it "People love having sausage but they don't want to tour the plant and see how sausage is made. We people in Illinois kind of resent the idea that this is some sort of unusual situation in politics, as if it doesn't go on every day. We all know how the Republicans love to fixate on one thing and exploit it for all it's worth.

In the election campaign for President in 1968 the Nixon campaign tried to sabotage the Paris peace talks while our men were dying in Viet Nam at the rate of twelve thousand a year. Lyndon Johnson talked to Republican Senator Everett Dirkson and said this action of Nixon ammounted to "treason" and he just wanted him to knock it off. But Johnson didn't dare go public with the news because he felt, I believe wrongly, that it would reflect badly on the Johnson adminestration that he was trying to somehow throw a monkey wrench in the Presidential campaign and "interfer with the electoral process". Instead Johnson got the Christian Science Monitor to pull the story they were preparing to run in the Nixon sabotage. It is generally conceded now that Nixon lied to his face when he said he had nothing to do with it. Part of the problem is that when you deal with crooks all day you expect everyone to be a crook so that if you ever come accross an honist man he comes off as an odd-ball. Johnson was used to political wheeler-dealers and to him this sabotage was just another of the routine events in political daily life. But of course even now the news media isn't talking about this new Nixon revelation on the Johnson tapes. The media is too interested talking about Brittany Speers or Paris Hilton. People think that Nixon was as clean as a whistle before Watergate but now we know he won the election by manipulating events.

Congress is giving the auto makers fourteen (or is it seventeen?) billion, which is way less than the 34 billion they asked for. But the Republicans to not hold their oppinions with pure motives. These people from Alabama speak of Michigan as though it were another world where the workers need government help to keep their jobs but nothing like that would ever be the case in Alabama. But as Thom Hartman points out there are a lot of foreign auto makers in Alabama, which is a leating center in the south now. And Hartman says each job down south costs $200,000 a job, as opposed to five thousand a job up north, which the Democrats want to give to the big three. The bill appears to have passed today. But we know that forty percent of the senate can hold any bill up. My only question is why they just didn't wait for the new congress where all this stuff could be voted through with much less friction.

OJ Simpson has been sentensed to at least nine years in prison now for his hold-up in Las Vegas last year. Of course you know our friend Stewart Sutcliffe from the "other side" was a defender of OJ during his murder trial and even at this late date is sympathetic to Simpson saying that "he was only trying to get back his own stuff". I don't know if we've heard the last of Simpson. My hunch is that he has a lot of friends out there, and somebody may try and break him out of jail and he'll be in the headlines once again.

Back in 2007 this author remarked that December 12th. of 2008 would signal some event of cosmic significance and it may have some astronomic aspects like the discovery of some new Super Nova or something, or some other world event of cosmic significance. I might at this time mention that there was a little recording of Mal Evans included on the CD version of those songs listings that ran 6:54:32 and that isn't six hours. Rather the Federation uses a unit that is a sixtieth of a second that is in the comon language that everybody knows about. The whole bit with the descending numbers seems to alude to a count-down of some sort. What stands out on the tape about John Lennon's death is that Mal acts as though he hasn't been in touch with Lennon at least for a really long time. I don't know is this is some "role assumption" for dramatic sake, or whether it is an actual fact. OK you all think I'm nots anyhow. It does raise a question in my mind whether certain people are held "incommunacado" from other people.

In Search of a "Pearl Harbor"

Perhaps due to our over-watching of Christian "movies" (though basically they are just desguized propaganda) we have gotten the notion "If things just get bad enough, at least when worse comes to worse and a crisis hits, the situation will finally get God's attention". This is the Pearl Harbor sidrone. Don't count on it. I remember thinking this when a really bad incident occured on October 8th. 1987 in my life. I remember thinking it also when one sibling was giving me a particularly hard time. Parents would say "Don't react yourself but let us handle the problem for you", and of course they never did. There is a truth in life that "sometimes a bad event is just a bad event". There is no "silver lining" or some result later on that somehow redeemed the situation. You see this illustrated in bold relief in the Gospells, where Isrial could well say "The Messiah will come when he sees there is no hope for our nation without him". Don't count on it. God would rather consign a race to living in doubt for 2000 years rather than be true to his word. Even the Bar Koplah (?) war was a possible sign to some that perhaps help is on the way, and for a while Isrial was actually winning. But in the end things were even worse than before the war. Now we are in an economic crisis. Many look to Obama as the new Messiah or something. We can always hope. We can hope that Obama is an agent of needed change for so many areas of government. Now Obama is promicing to have ever school kid hooked up to the internet, and to get the whole nation wired for broadband. But Obama also promised he was going to make rich people pay for it by hiking their taxes and now Obama is not going to do that. What Mc Cain failed to win at the ballot box, he is winning simply through Obama's weak resolve to be true to his word. One person at NBC said that perhaps they should hike gasoline taxes so we pay a one hundred percent tax rate on gas so that we are again paying four dollars a gallon "since we are used to it already". Hopefully this would "pressure" the consumer into "going green". The world is filled with unintended consequences so don't count on it. There were a lot of adverse "unintended consequences" to the Christian religion but don't expect God to care about it. Now auto manufactures have been taken down a peg or two and they are only getting half of the $34 Million they were asking for. People say of them now "Yeah they'll spend it all and come back begging for more?" Why couldn't I have used that argument when my church was asking me to increase my pledge? OH by the way, giving to charities is down 35% or so. We shouldn't be particularly surprised by this. Now we hear that the U S will be hit by some form of "weapons of mass destruction" by the year 2013. Whatever is destined to happen to this country, God already knows about it, but it's not telling anybody a word on how to prevent it. Many are saying that Obama is looking more and more like a conservative every day and this is like the second term of the Bush 41 adminestration or something. More and more you hear reason after reason why liberals should not be happy with Obama. Do you think Obama will stand up for the auto workers Unions, or will he negotiate their rights away? Who can say? Much as people would deny it, it would seem that economic recessions are like hurricanes or any other natural "acts of God" and you just have to weather them. Now we have gotten the worse report on jobs losses in a single month since 1974. There is no guarentee things won't get worse or even that the pace of the decline won't accelerate further. Thom Hartman has stated that the solution is to about double the national minimum wage and at lease give the least fortunate among us a shot at earning a living. We know if we used pre Reagan unemployment numbers, the unemployment rate would be about double the 6.7% they claim that it is now (or WAS at the end of last month) We obviously need massive government intervention and we need it quickly but I'm not sure this congress will give it to us.

Ten Inch EP "Six Pack" Produced by Mal Evans rel. December 6th.

A Song for Jeffrey (Jethro Tull)
Wall of Sleep (Black Sabbath)
40,000 Headmen (Traffic)
- - - - - - - - -
Much Too Late for Good-byes (Julian Lennon)
And In Every Home- A Nightmare (Joe Jackson)
All The Young Girls Love Alice (Elton John)

There may be a double CD somewhere in the future but it could be months from now. Today is the anniversary of a lot of things in 1980. There's that woman who was injected with insilin by her husband who lapsed into a coma and finally died just lately. Laura was beginning to "slip away" mentally starting in December and by March she was back in an Institution. I think this was the week, or the first week in December when I received delivery on the Prophecy books I had printed up- - that I might have gotten myself in too deep money wise. Tomorrow of course is the anniversary of the assasenation of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman. Of course he said that John was a "sell out" who cared more about confort than protesting now. I could not disagree more strenuously. I don't think half the shit that came down with Ronald Reagan would have been near as successful were there the active John Lennon constituancy out there protesting and such. We would have John's speeches and commentary on everything. It's kind of a truh that certain "forces" can't triumph till other "forces" are first done away with.

In 1990 this is another anniversary. I was just learning BASIC programming at ROP and was enthusiastic about that. My parents did not seem to share my ebuliance on the subject. It was Sunday December 9th. 1990 that the Rev. Bill Halliday first comandiered our local church, and he has been there eighteen long years. It was a black day for justice and truth the day our church voted him in, with almost no questioning, as is the tradition of our church. Of course a lot of the membership had been and would continue to "vote with their feet" in the biggest mass exicuse that church had ever seen, such that after a few years membership was decimated. It is said all that is needed for Evil to take over is for good people to do nothing. I had been associated with that church a long time. Let's illustrate it this way: If we had gotten Nuked in the Cuban missile crisis of October of 1962, I would still have memories of this Church in the Afterlife, theology permitting. Our family started going to that church when I was eleven. In the first directory photo my mother was still taller than I was. (we were both standing) You know- - Joel Olsteen said this morning "Don't talk ABOUT your problems; talk TO your problems- and tell them that you have a God who is more than able to conquer them. I would like to believe that. One thing better than BELIEVING something is to actually have it happen (Selah)

Hitting the Ground Running

Right now Obama is unveiling his national security team and Joe Biden is speaking right now. For Secretary of State, it's Hillary Clinton. Husband Bill's activities and financial entanglements are a subject of debate and scruteny, and Bill hopes he's made enough compromises and surrendering enough power to make the Obama liberals happy. Robert Gates will continue as Secretary of Defence as a holdover from the Bush adminestration. This does not make me happy that he would hold anyone over from the previous adminestration of another party. Such a move seems unprecedented to me. Obama picked Jim Jones as National Security Advisor. He picked Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN. She appears to have a little Black blood in her from what you can tell being hidden by the over-sixed microphones. Janet Napolitono will be head of homeland security. She is the current governor of Arizona. People like Randi Rhodes were saying that if Mc Cain were picked to serve in the cabinet then Janet would pick a democrat to fill Mc Cain's senate seat. Finally we have Eric Holder who will be an African-American Attorney General.

The Federation is saying that this line-up is proof that the same old Washington insiders will still be ruling the roost, particularly keeping on a member of the Bush Administration as Secretary of Defence. Washington kind of exists as a good old boy network where everybody knows everybody else. We are also hearing that Obama will not roll back those tax cuts for the rich back to the Bill Clinton levels as promised so contentiously in the campaign. Obama fought a hard fought campaign against Hillary in the primary and now those lofty promises made as a candidate are disolving like the morning mist. Apparently Obama is not going to roll back as many of the George Bush executive orders as people hoped. It could remain that civil liberties will continue to be restricted. Of course we wish Obama all the best, though I can't vouch for the Federation. Their view of things is that if there is a ship traveling with an ice berg ahead is "Damn the torpedoes!"

India and Pakistan

Of course you all know about the Al Qaida type attack that occurred in Mumbai, India that went on for sixty hours. Several luxury hotels known to be frequented by Americans and Britishers were attacked by a Pakistani group called by one count "Deja-Muhajadeem, though now they're being called a different name. This group wants to see an all out war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, a territory disputed over the last six decades. Some people have said even partitioning the nation in 1947 into India and Pakistan was a mistake because there are many Islamic centers even in the heart of India. 183 people were killed in all. About ten different sites were attacked last Wednesday including hotels, resturants, a railroad station and a Jewish center. This whole incident over the past five days will make it a whole lot harder for whoever is President to get Pakistan to cooperate with us when it comes to rooting out Al Qaida from Pakistan. Since both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the danger is all too clear and apparent. This group wanted to cause another 9 - 11 and they were hoping for five thousand deaths but fell way short of that. Now sixty minutes is saying that they are "imbedding" women with the ground troops without officially "assigning" them. The death toll for both women and men is climbing and will steadily be climbing higher as we continue in Afghinistan.

This is the first new posting we have done in any blog in a week. I hope you all enjoyed the long five-day holiday weekends many people were taking. It would seem that Diedra Hall is taking a permanent vacation from "Days of our Lives" after a 32 year run. That's really something. As of today's episode she is very intertwined with the plot but sometimes it's intriguing to know HOW they are going to do something even after you know WHAT they are going to do. The "plot line" on Obama is not done yet. Many liberals are feeling just a little unconfortable with his move to the center about now. Franklin Roosevelt ran a conventional non threatening campaign but then moved sharply to the left once he got in power. He openly threatened the banking establishment both by speeches and by deeds. He regarded it as his mandate to take down the corporate power structure that caused the recession. I hope Berock isn't laboring under the illusion he can somehow get Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to like him if he can just prove that he's centerist enough.

They have exposed a gigantic scandal involving cheating at internet poker on two widly used internet sites. You can tell a cheater because he's a bad player that always manages to "get lucky" despite himself. Geoe Scott said "I never bet except on a sure thing". The trouble is if the "sure thing" is seeing the cards of the other players then it's cheating. Obviously even the worst player could beat the very best players if you're allowed to cheat. Jim Cooper once said "My philosophy is to never give the Devil an even break". I don't like that expression because it's the same as saying "On a level playing field, the Devil would defeat me every time". So much of Calvary and fundamentalist Christianity bases its come-on appeal with the idea of somehow "cheating the system" of "getting people what they don't deserve". They will quote Bible verses about "learning military plans uttered in the King's bed chamber". I have often thought that certain TV game shows would be an awfully easy game to rig. The thing is most players are so awful at playing the game nobody would suspect it being rigged. If "certain things that just don't happen hardly at all" begin happening all the time, you know some scam is being played on you. I don't think Christians value either good sportsmanship or honist competition highly enough. Some Christians like my Dad seem to regard any competetion as some tool of the Devil. Other Christians like Chuck Smith poo poo the idea of "games" but would rather that instead of getting excited over some game, get excited because your names are written in the book of Life and that you are going to heaven when you die. But when you think about it, you learn an awful lot about the character of a man when you compete with him in some contest or gamesmanship.