Is Osama Bin Laden Dead?

Thursday morning it was announced that former prime minister of Pakistan, Benizir Bhutto was dead, that she had been shot and the neck and died after doctors worked on her a half hour. Then the Al Qaida terrorists or whoever they are set off a truck bomb that killed the perpitrater and twenty other people. Now the people are rioting because they think the Musharif government was behind the killing. Bhutto popped her head out of a car roof to wave good-bye to her fans and they say that the government had blocked off all the exits except one and this is suspicious. Thom Hartman says that Musharif should delay the elections next month after people fought so hard to get them, just so that Bhutto's party could mount an opposition campaign. If Musharif even so much as "allowed" the killing to take place he was being foolish because this might be the critical mass "event" to set off some sort of nuclear chain reaction to set off World War III kind of like the shooting of Arch Duke Ferdemand in 1914 set off World War I. We know that in 1914 people chose up sides and Alliance mutually backed each other. We know that with 20 / 20 hindsight this might not have happened but at the time you can be engulfed in events swerling around like water around you. We need to thank God we have not had another World War in my lifetime. But there is that last brief case yet to be opened - and for some reason that always seems to be the one with the million dollars in it- - and you realize too late that you pressed your luck one round too long. (Selah) But now the news is that there is a detaled account of Bin Laden's funeral held in December 2001 in Tora Bora and everyone who was in attendance, and how he was burried in an unmarked grave according to the wanabe (?) tradition in Islam. Furthermore Bhutto on one of her speeches in October made reference to the killing of Bin Laden and the guy who did it, but the remarked escaped the notice of one and all reporters. This is a little hard to believe, but if it's true that Bin Laden is really dead it will further reduce President Bush's cradibility.

One wonders about other people who may or may not be dead. Billy Gram's death will most certainly set off a hysterical comvultion throughout the born again community. Many people will lament it as the death of Christianity itself. One wonders about Chuck Smith, pastor of "Big Calvary" in Costa Mesa. He is known for predicting all these eronious dates for the end of the world, almost as if he wanted it. He has spoken of wondering what kind of world his little grand daughter would inheret- - - and this is 25 years ago. I haven't heard much from Chuck recently but he for the longest time spoke of looking forward to death and "leaving this tent, which is his body". If you're a Christian leader you can do no wrong. If you're someone like me you can do no right. Even if my prediction of the death of Christianity within thirty years proves completely true, nobody is going to celebrate my accurecy, any more than they have celebrated any of the other things I have correctly predicted over the years, and a few of these, such as the rise of Democracy in Latin America, are even in my book. I have spoken of the year 2010 is a "year to watch". Obviously there is the novel and movie "2010" with the tag line, "Europa is mine", which the Federation goes along with. If anybody disappears at midnight of the ninth of October 2010 I don't know whether it will be connected with my predictions. Chuck for the longest time predicted the Soviet Union would get nuked in World War III and utterly destroyed. Then when the Berlin wall fell in 1989 Chuck turned his attention to the countries along Russia's southern border like Georgia, Kasicstan, and Uzbeckistan, which Chuck said would now form a dangerous Moslem confederation that would invade Isrial. But that didn't happen either. My sources tell me that the backers of Calvary style Christianity (that is the Centaurians) have now "lost interest" in their protegy, Chuck, and so that this brand of Christianity is destined to wither on the vine. How interesting it is that Mit Romney is preferred by some of these people for President- - as opposed to an actual ex Born Again preacher.

People get their history screwed up. Karl Rove has stated that Bush was against Congress voting to give President Bush war powers against Iraq before the 2002 election "before the coalition had been gathered". Statements from Bush to congress easily bely this assirtion in that the President pressured congress no end to hurry up and pass the resolution without further debate. Why do certain people resort to "revisionism". I guess one person said that History is the future which hasn't happened yet. Some people like to shape the future.

The Beatles are guilty of this in their description of the song "Revolution". For years I've been hearing they had this slow version worked out but at the last minute the other three Beatles besides author John wanted to put out a faster version. However there exists a recording- - of the song revolution being played fast- - and the lyrics have not been worked out- - and the song is in a very raw phase. - - Of course on the album Imagine there is something with the date of October 1971 on the liner notes. However I have a clear memory of the album being out in late August of 1971. But not only this I have a tape of the songs being recorded at that date, which is around August 25th. of 1971. This is an unexplainable descrepency.

Also a few years back someone spread the story that Santa Clause's red suit first "appeared" in the 1920's when Coca Cola launched a campaign to go with their red bottles. However recently there was a batch of mail from 1912 that was discovered- - and yes, there was a Christmas card in that delivery, and it plainly featured Santa Clause wearing a red suit.

One thing it doesn't take a psychic to predict is people coming back from the dead on soap operas. At the time of John Black's death I remarked that this death was as phoney as a three dollar bill. I'm being proven right. Of course sometimes myth cannot even hide the truth about things. Christianity would have you believe everybody mourned the death Jesus, but that for some strange reason they all had this obsession for hanging around his tomb, as if they expected something to happen. Interestingly Isiah 53, which we have quoted before not only doesn't include anything about crusifiction, but also says that Jesus was presumed "dead" to "his generation". For those of you in Rio Linda, that means that everybody in Jesus life back then assumed that he had died- - somehow, because he "was on the dark side of the road" to quote Dylan. I know a pastor who publicly told this story about when he was fired from his job and how he "figured he'd just have to get a job as box boy at Alpha Beta or something". And yet I was at the meeting where the whole "Church coup" was planned. And I also heard his prayers where he ranted in General Patton fashion about "How could God deny him his moment of glory after bringing him this far"- - that kind of thing. Facts can be tricky things.

In terms of the previous blog just let me restate certain facts. People become "Born Again" Christians because of some lucky flook event in their life that turns their life around for the better and they make a religion out of that event. As for me I've had a lot of "experiances" with Christians but very little "experiance" with God. I'm like the guy on the cliff looking at the saves on the beach, and I keep track of their shapes and how they interract and which direction they are going. Surfers come to me for advice. Yet metaphorically I've never been down to the water and never felt its wetness or saltiness, or examined the marine life in it. Most Christians practice an type of auto-stimulation. They say that joining government gives you a power high that they can't get enough of and it makes a Junkey out of you. Pastors get high on their own words. But these people haven't met God, they have merely auto stimulated themselves from flook events in their own life. Answer me this: There are two teenage boys. One masturbates ten times in a week, and the other masturbates three. Has the one who masturbates ten times a week had three times as much experiance with the opposite sex? Probably not. My response to Chuck Smith who says "experiance isn't important" is that these people SHOULD have a little experiance with God- - because it would get the attention off themselves, much like our masturbating friends. Masturbation is distasteful enough when done in private, but doing it in public simply is not allowed by society. Let me give you one more example. Suppose you're on some geology safari looking at rocks, and Otto from the Simpson's comes along and says "Hey, that's narley man". What if Otto's next statement to the group was "You all speak of experiance with rocks- - but hey, I'm above that sort of thing, man!" They would think he was a jack-ass and why was he here? And yet if a Christian says "I don't need an experiance with God, I've matured beyond all that" we applaud him. I suppose inexperiance gets almost as many applause from a congratation as humility does. We know what a crowd pleaser that is. As I've been saying- - I don't know how the next War is going to happen or just what the next five years holds. Christians have boxed themselves in as Bush Kool-Aid drinkers. My prayer is that our next President won't be a Bush Kool-Aid drinker when he tackles terrorist threats.

Atheisum -A Sound Beginning

I guess a lot of us after Christmas presents have been open go through and reorganize our stuff and see what old things can be moved or discarded. One wonders whether this wouldn't be a good idea with one's religion. It's known that computers process better once they've had their registries cleaned and unnecessary start-up files eliminated, and undergone a de-fragging. It would seem to me in the name of sound mental health one should look at the world with an idea to exploring and examining it, that is, the things that are actually here, and not ideas in one's imagination. If this is true aren't we starting off not too differently from the Hebrews in Egypt, who "didn't even know God's name"? They didn't have all that theology cluttering up their brains or 2nd. and 3rd. hand ideas from old sermons that won't go away. If then there is a God, he or she would have to introduce himself afresh. Something like, "Hi, my name is God, glad to meet you. I'm a monotheist- and I'm really into self worship". People balk at this because it would mean asking a lot of "questions that have already been answered", so they think. The thing is the reason why people who are objects of worship fear questioning like the devil, is because they are afraid that some other competing deity will come up with a better answer than they can, and the layman will run to worship him. Such a God assumes that since he is so self obsessed, every other god must be equally self obsessed. Perhaps such a God will even say to you, "Don't go after that other god- - he opperates out of corrupt motives", when in truth this just a case of his projecting his own guilt. Of course were you to start with God afresh, every experiance you had with him would be a new and learning experiance. If you know pastors you know their deepest, darkest fear is that a congragate might actually learn something. Because if a pastor's congragation actually learns something there is a chance they might one day be smarter than their pastor. Also they would have to apply the same standards to their own religious experiances that they demand of others, that they "look with a critical eye" upon ANY experiance. Since so much of religion is built on the idea of post hypnotic suggestion, pastors would instantly lose an awful lot of their power. And the lay person just might discover like John Lennon did, that he doesn't need God at all to be happy and that would be just awful!

Some may say "what about man's evil impulses that need to be restrained"? We all know about the tiger in the zoo that has twice gotten away and attacked people. We know that tigers look dosile when they know they are caged but if oppertunity ever strikes they will revert to their old natures. I guess my question is if our whole religious "experiance with God" should be one of being "restrained" by him. Why cope endlessly with a god who sees your entire existance as some big mistake? You know people point to the book of Judges as an era where may sank to his lowest depeths. And yet Samuel in his warnings about not being able to trust King Saul said the entire idea of a king was inherently evil and you people don't know how good the old days really were untill they're gone. John Locke is a person who taught tha man was inherently good. Thom Hartman holds it as a matter of religious "faith" that Intelligent design is a lie. I'm not ready to take THAT leap of faith yet, though I'm getting closer with each passing day. Some may say that capitalism is bad but I say that Adam Smith was not far wrong and that if capitalism were left to its purist free market nature things would "work out" amazingly well, without corporate rules. The Federation has pointed out (and Thom Hartman has also stated this- ) that a lot of big corporations didn't get their power from out of the Blue. They got it from some sort of corporate Fasciest state. Many people don't know how "corporate" fascism is. It would seem Musselini actually had corporate heads rather than elected citizens, as members of his parliament. The Federation has pointed out that perhaps patents would not be honored. If you came up with a good idea somebody might steal it. The rejoinder to this is "Better to steal a Good idea than a Bad idea, and religion is a Bad idea. It would not be the worst thing in the world to let "market forces" that conservatives value so highly, to set the prices of competing goods and determine whether a certain idea was really "all that good" or not. Or course the Federation only applies this "free market" idea of patents to outside competing cultures. They have their own "State Secrets". But their reasoning is, that since it takes enlightened intelligence to come up with any working idea, particularly a vast improvement, it's never a bad idea to have "competetion for enlightenment". St. Paul said the same thing about preaching the Christian gospel in the Bible. He said that others would compete with you, perhaps even out of spiteful motive, in on-upping you on preaching the Gospell. But this whole idea of "motives" in doing something only becomes a major issue when the THING DONE itself is of questionable merit. Nobody attacks another person for out-giving them to a charity. (Selah)

Some may question what would happen with agression and bullies. Just yesterday a black man in a wheel chair got angry at this new guy for mistreating a long time female resident. Loyalty is the karmic fruit of good deeds. The truth even the Bible agrees with at times, is that there are more good people than evil people- - and when evil is brought to light- - the good people will rally around to eliminate it. This is why the notion of "Do not resist one who is Evil" spoken by Jesus, has never sat well with me. Even Jesus had an errant teaching now and then. Many evil people are artificially empowered- - -perhaps by a corporate fasciest state. There are various evil people in my life who have been "empowered" by certain other influential people in my life. The asshole from El Paso is a person who would have been far less dangerous to me, had it not been for certain people (one of whom is dead now) who empowered him. If we let the "free market" take care of morality and retrobution, it's just conceivable things may not turn out as bad as you think. You may point to stories like "Lord of the flies" or the Stanford Prison experiment where people sometimes give vent to their evil. Liberals are always talking about "psychoanalyzing terrorists". Do you mind if a psychoanalyze a tiger? At times a part of me feels gratified any time a member of the human community "gets it" from an animal. We don't know what "shit" that tiger has had to endure from his master over the years. Don't you think that tiger is entitled to have "issues"? If human and animal had equal access to our court system to sue each other for unjustified injuries, who do you think would be awarded favorible judgement in most cases? Look at the sharks and those Chinese who cut off their fins and leave them to drown. When there are perhaps nine or ten deaths world wide a year from sharks.

Some like on that Bones show last night say you can psycho-analyze a person from their writings and by their handwriting, kind of like tea leaves. I'm never found this a satisfactory method of determining who wrote which NT book in the Bible and I don't think it's good evidence- - if you have better evidence like getting to meet the actual person and know them and see how they govern their lives and how they face challenging situations. Some may see the story of Zachery in my writings and assume I have a messiah fixation. But if one views the totality of all my writings and go back even to teenage and childhood years if you can, you will know that in September 1976 this whole baby-messiah thing was a highly alien one, and even after this date all the other imaginary people in my existance went on with their lives with no need of any Messiah. People - - shrinkos- - seem to disregard that people actually pick up alien things from their environment and incorporate them from time to time- - and not every syllable ever written comes from deep in the subconscious. The Federation has spoken of these people, "We do awful things to people who try to psycho-analyze us". If you psychoanalized all the New Testiment people in the Bible you could come up with all sorts of things if you wanted to.

I guess what I am in favor is a state of rigidly enforced- - - Fairness. You know the saying: Life isn't fair. This means of course that God isn't fair because everything that happens is predestined. If you go to talk to God about things you see as problems he'll go "What problem? I don't see any problem". God's idea of handeling problems is to ignore them. After if he had wanted the problem not to exist he wouldn't have created it in the first place. And since there is "no problem" - - God ipso facto- - never has any complaint about people being out of his Will, because they never are. Gene Scott has stated "Once you're in God's will it's harder to get out of God's will than it is to stay in it". There is a perverse truth here. There are probably people who if it were put to a vote would go for a super-hero like Superman, rather than "Jesus Christ Superstar". I know this- - I have seen Christianity more from the inside than most people of the world have. You've heard that expression "If they could see the side of you I see every day they'd never say the things about you they do". John Lennon said Christianity would "vanish and shrink". I just don't see how it's possible for Christianity to last the century and I really believe we'll be seeing the end of it within fifty years. After the war in the 2030's which the Federation walls "World War IV" for some odd reason, people will see the abject horror and ecological disaster of war- - and it will probably be caused by ecological problems to begin with. Federation teaching says that in the early 2040's a "new kind of" spiritual revival will take place here on earth. Circumstances have tested my Faith- - and pretty much destroyed it. When everybody else has the same experiance I have had, the chickens will truely be coming home to roost on Christianity. Christianity has yet to really be "tested" by the Modern World so far. But we know that major World Wars throughout the history have fundamentally "changed" both sides in the conflict. People who "learn" things come to embrace the new and disregard that which doesn't work. Dr. Dean Edell says "People will cling to an old product- - even one that doesn't work". But they don't go on forever. Behold, a time After Forever is approaching.

Randi Rhodes has stated that this Democratic Congress passed some "thought police" anti-terrorism bill that controls so many aspects of the behavior of a free citizen such as organizing and protesting the government. Even bastions of the right wing are not safe such as religious beliefs and gun clubs and "Anti Globalists", or people who resist the New World Order, Bush Sr. was so fond of talking about. Randi says "When they come after you right wingers- - I'll be the only friend you can turn to because I'll defend your right to be different". Apparently it was a near unanamus vote of congress. Of course there is the whole bit about people not getting proper medical care in this country like that seventeen year old girl who needed a liver and was denied one. I suppose the corporations will somehow be exempt from all these new fasciestic rules that have just been instituted by congress. Just how does that work. Does Dick Chaney hand them a "get out of jail" card or something? It's kind of like Calvary Chapel Christianity. You may not be sure who all the insiders are but THEY know who they are. Just how they achieved the status as insiders, perhaps Randi Rhodes can tell us.

Getting the Christmas Spirit

Mit Romney doesn't have the Christmas spirit. He wants to cut taxes for the rich to virtually nothing. He thinks the rich are still overtaxed and that people shouldn't have to pay any money on dividend income. He says corporations pay 40% in taxes, which apparently is also the figure that Japanese corporations pay in Japan. In China the rate is 33%. Thom Hartman has stated that rather than 40% US corporations pay seven or eight percent of their income in taxes. There is a discrepency here. If Scrooge were alive today, he and Mit Romney would be kindred spirits, because both have this idea that levying taxes on the rich to aid the poor is wrong.

Today is December 19th. and I'm feeling a little mentally weighed down. I’ve found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year as you know. Maybe they need to adjust my medication or something. For the first time in perhaps years we are actually just above the "normal" rainfall for the year. There are hints of more rain to come.

[we'll just delete a little material that used to be here]

Of course people are wondering as they go to Christmas Eve services next week, “How can they light a candle for peace on earth with the world in the state it’s in”? If I were a preacher I’d try to feed you a bunch of bullshit. The answer is that each and every one of us needs to work for peace on earth every day. And we can do this by being kind to our neighbor and everyone we meet, like the song says. We need to wish people we don’t know a Merry Christmas. But one thing our leaders need to work on is this whole torture thing. Thom Hartman says that torture just does not work. That Al Qaida guy we thought we got information from from waterboarding- - it turns out that we got all the good information before we began water boarding, and from them on the information we got rapidly deteriorated. This is what happens. People will admit to anything to be done with the torture. Thom says that the Romans only tortured people after they were convicted of a crime and not before. How Cardassian of them. I’ll comment further on this later. People use torture according to Hartman, not to gain the information but to instill terror in the population at large. If everybody knows a neighbor who was arrested and tortured they will think twice about doing whatever it was they were going to do. Of course Jews were tortured in the Nazi era. One Jewish woman says she owes her life to the fact that people who knew of her father while he was being hidden from the authorities did not rat him out but held their tongue, even unto death. This is what a brave people do. On the other hand Hartman says that the Germans who were captured by our forces sang like song birds because they knew which side their bread was buttered on and they had sided with the wrong country in the war. George Washington treated captured “hetian” mercenaries (Germans) hired by the British with kindness and later they became the most loyal of American citizens. There is still a place for Christian charity in this world. And as the Bible says “By being kind to your enemy you shall heap burning coals upon his head”. (Maybe that’s a bad example)

People blame the democrats in congress for getting nothing done this year. And yet there have been 63 filibusters held by republicans to hold up badly needed measures to help out the American public. This is needed legislation that’s already in many cases passed the house but it’s only the log-tight jam in the senate blocking it. This level of 63 filibusters is approximately double the rate of the next highest record of 61 for two years in 2002. Back then republicans were threatening the “nuclear option”. I don’t know why they don’t revive that talk now and dust off the regulations and put them in force. Can’t they just take a vote and abolish the filibuster? Of course in the old days with Jimmy Stewart in the movies you actually had to keep talking during a filibuster and not “yield the floor” but they’ve done away with all that formality.

One of the ideas whose time appears to have come is single payer medical insurance. I’m not totally sold on the idea but I agree the current system sure as hell isn’t working. There is a 25% administrative overhead factor. This of course is besides the high profits the drug companies are making in this country alone. Many have suggested that we need “consumerism” in the medical field. People should use discretion in deciding whether or not to have that needed operation. Can they perhaps wait a year or two on that pancreatic cancer until the prices drop or they have a sale or something? Obviously people don’t have that sort of relation with their doctors, even if they do use the internet a lot. Hartman has said that medical insurance and health is so important it’s an area where society needs to pool its sources and “share the risk” among everybody. Again I’m not totally sold on this. Before Halloween of 1997 it had been years, if not decades before I had seen a doctor. I don’t necessarily think avoiding a doctor is going to kill you. But life expectancy is getting longer as “the bar” continues to be raised on what constitutes good health. Yesterday’s behavior is unacceptable today.

People are wondering whether George Bush is a war criminal. Now it seems that the aid to Mucasey is also hedging on whether he thinks water-boarding is torture. Of course Hartman pointed out that one reason why they destroyed the tapes is because they would have had to admit that torture didn’t do the job advertised. I still disagree with Hartman on an awful lot and none more strenuously than public financing of campaigns. I think it would be an awful idea. Hartman says that perhaps if they had laws about who could say what during a campaign that the Swift Boat people never would have come out against John Kerry. I am inclined in this case to “eat the chicken and throw away the bones” metaphorically speaking. I accept what they say about what John Kerry did in battle, but I do not go along with their editorial remarks about betraying our POW’s afterward. I think candidates need to be exposed to mud slinging because this prepares them for the real job of being President, which isn’t all flowers and rainbows. If the average church pastor had to fight as hard for his job as a politician, we’d have a lot tougher, and may I say “worthy” lot of them than we have now, where the spectre of the hot house orchid Christian is alive and well. I’m sticking with Huckibee myself because I think he’s the best candidate in my party running. Among the democrats Obama is starting to look better to me. If he “finds his bearings” like Jack Kennedy did and hits his stride at the right time, he just might go far in this race.

I wanted to take up again this idea of Roman Empire torture only after convicted. As you remember the crowd wanted Jesus crucified. Pilate’s response at one point was to say “I shall have him flogged and set him free”. There was a punishment in Rome called the “Roman half-death”. Contrary to what Chuck Smith preaches, they were not “examining the prisoner” for information. Pilate offered the people this penalty because they wanted to see a little blood. I was just thinking, if all of Jesus disciples left him at the time of his betrayal as shown by the words, “All of you will run away and leave me tonight” and also by the words on the O T “strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered- - and I will turn my hand upon the little ones”. I believe the story of Peter in the Bible “following Jesus from afar” was put in not because Peter was the most craven of the disciples but rather because he was the bravest, just as he was in attempting to follow Jesus in walking on the water”. It’s a case of “Et tu Peter”. Even Peter fell. If this is so I wonder how we could no whether if Jesus was crucified at all because all of the disciples had left town. The gospels, which are pretty united about what happened at the last supper and in the garden and during Jesus’ trial, now suddenly diverge. The only thing we get from some was that Jesus “wondered why God had forsaken him”, and someone gave him some gall on a sponge, fulfilling scripture, “they gave me gall for my wounds”. Others being in all sorts of things. Some say that Jesus’ whole life was kind of a parrellel of Sacrates and his philosophy a parrellel of Plato. Others, like that Italian remind us that Nazareth was not a city build on the edge of a cliff by a lake, any more than Pasadena is a beach city. There are parrellels in the names of Jesus’ brothers to “John son of Judas of Galilee”. The Christmas story is akin to the birth legond of Mithraism, god of Persia, and later by Rome. “Myth” is Greek for “Word” and Jesus was called the “Word”. I have said that after Jesus disappeared from Isrial he went to Egypt and what do you know? Both Matthew and Mark originated in Egypt. Scripture says “by his stripes (last marks) we are healed”. Why didn’t they say “nail prints”? None of the four resurrection accounts agree with any other account. Merry Christmas!