Change - Nothing Stays the same

In Loyalty to their kind

They can not tolerate our Minds

In Loyalty to our kind

We can not tolerate their Obstruction

Change is such a key reality in human affairs that all the more the things which never seem to change stand out like a sore thumb. One of these is the way family members think of me. Another is the Christian religion itself. Also when confronted with something new, many people rerun old scenarios in their minds as their way of dealing with them. I often feel people who should be listening to me are “rerunning old tapes” in their minds while the conversation is taking place. I’m being judge not on what is occurring at the moment but rather by a series of “reactive” notions that are just re-treaded thoughts they’ve had about “things” for a long time. I get this feeling a lot when I talk to Dr. Messina. Often being the most advanced civilization won’t buy you the sort of immortality that you think it will. The Minoans were a highly advanced civilization on the Isle of Crete, but sometime between 1600 and 1100 BC this civilization was destroyed by an earthquake and today wave that occurred on a neighboring island. I myself choose to average out the dates at around 1300 BC. If I’m reading my tea leaves correctly these Minoans became in turn the Sea Peoples that invaded both Egypt and also Palestine, and in fact became the Philistines of the Bible. Rather than being barbaric, they were in fact more advanced than the Canaanites and had Iron and “Smiths” to work it, such that their weapons of battle were feared above all others. But they didn’t “grow” and so disappeared from the scene, except for the name they gave to the region. How can we modern people learn from these failures to adapt? Let’s take the airlines. We know that the mode of air transportation has become “unacceptable” now, as to the number of congestions and “circling the airport” from arriving several hours early for security checks, to what happens if a terrorist is found on a plane. There have been so many cases in the news of “events” like a flight from Portland to Hawaii where a mental patient went brazerk and the pilot had to turn the plane around. There is the enormous cost of jet fuel, if nothing else. You have weather to contend with. To me the solution is simple in that we need high speed bullet ground transport such as a bullet train that travels over two hundred miles per hour. What you would lose in initial speed you would more than make up in reduced time driving to and from airports and impossible security procedures. You wouldn’t have icing of wings or other weather related mishaps to contend with such as fog or the icing up of runways. And pilots wouldn’t overshoot their destinations.

We may be taking a step backward with this health bill in that more and more people will be receiving inadequate health care. This is because for a really “good plan” you get taxed more by your employer and many Unions may be unable to negotiate for anything but the cheapest health care, that is covered. This is not a good thing. How much better it would be if ALL health care for everybody were covered in a single tax that you could pay when you made out your 1040 and then forget about money the rest of the year. The House bill contains a millionaire’s tax, which is a vastly superior way of paying any necessary costs. The President is one of those people who not only is NOT changing with the times, he is in fact in political retrogression. Personally I grew up in a time when there was a lot of change, particular in cars and music. So to me the greatest “hurdle” in being a young person today is getting over the reality that nothing changes and people will make reference to either a ‘sixties or ‘seventies “Classic” song, or else make reference to, for instance a late sixties “muscle car” as being a “Classic”. To me this would give me an amazing inferiority complex. I would feel as though my whole generation were just some useless appendix on the fabric of society, with nothing to contribute. The two party system in this country is an anachronism that has outlived its usefulness, and it’s time some political organizers shook things up a bit.

People are psychotically wired- or at least I am psychologically wired, to think in terms of “what rights do I have”. Therefore I like the Bill of Particulars at the beginning of “When I Say No I Feel Guilty”. You have the right to be wrong. You have the right to change your mind, and so forth. I’m glad to hear Thom Hartman say that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are negative rights in that they are all geared to limiting the power of the Federal Government. He had Ron Paul on his show this morning who mentioned that the CIA appears to be growing in its power and influence, and may in fact be dictating foreign policy to the President. Yesterday it was pointed out that Jimmy Carter wanted a bunch of CIA documents released on the Kennedy assassination, and that the CIA came out and told him that this would never happen. I don’t like the idea that Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan may have somehow been forced from office by the Obama administration because they ran afowl of the “powers that be”.

You’ve heard the charge that Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles because “Pete just didn’t grow with the rest of us”. Last night I watched Jeopardy and then the Simpson’s (who says War isn’t good for something?) and then a thing on Neanderthals. The stereotype is correct in this respect. We regard Neanderthals as narrow minded and inflexible and rather limited in intelligence and this is precisely what they are. You Afro-centric people out there will be happy to learn that all the real human evolution was going on in Africa a hundred thousand and more years ago. But a smaller group left the herd behind so to speak, and migrated way north to Europe and eastern France in the valley of the Neanderthal. These people had very set ways of doing everything from how to make tools and how to hunt, and they never varied from this. They would not fish the rivers and they would not grow crops. This was too much work and just required too much thinking. The people back in Africa evolved into cro-magnum man, which is where we are descended from. There or only very slight genetic variance between ourselves and Neanderthal man. Part of their problem was that they never “multiplied” but their population seemed perpetually limited, and though they survived for two hundred thousand years (“wow!”) they eventually died out. They say that modern man would not even mate with them. Modern man had traits Neanderthals never achieved. One was the ability to think in abstractions such as the making of symbolic jewelry. Another was the ability to come to a new problem with a “fresh” mind set. I happened to think that we need this today. We are trapped in using 20^th Century logic to settle 21^st century problems. I can not help but think of Christianity. People will tell you that you can’t be a real scientist without a belief in God because modern invention is based on the notion that the laws of physics and chemistry are constant and do not vary. Francis Bacon is pointed to as such a Christian. However others such as Newton and Einstein are more deists than theists, in the proper sense. When I was six years old I remember having a conversation with my Dad about the names of musical notes being constant for all the instruments in the orchestra. I had assumed they would all be pitched differently. In reality when I joined the Band, I realized that I had been right after all in that various instruments were pitched differently and had different music. Also when I was young I believed that everybody had a different “normal” body temperature. This is another reality I had to unlearn- - that my mother had told me. It seems now that not everybody has a “normal” temperature of 98.6 degrees. But Christians today don’t grow. The Church has a legasy of fighting scientific progress wherever they see it. The big thing now is stem cell research. Every time a Christian faces a new problem he trudges out the old Nicine creed, and measures all of his “new thoughts” by this ancient standard. Since I was young I’ve been plagued by the question of “Why doesn’t God send a Messiah for our time who will authoritatively “update” Christianity to today’s realities?”