The Desperate Need for Discourse Civility

You know the right wing is positively relentless when it comes to Obama. The way they have kept up their attack on this president even after the killing of Bin Laden shows they don’t care about the real world or how the terror threat is vastly reduced now. All they care about is keeping up the steady stream of accusations. I’ve been hearing how were it not for torture and rendition and black sites and water-boarding, how last Sunday could never have taken place. Supposedly this is what Sean Hannity says. Today Rush was babbeling hysterically and incoherently about frog marching people in the CIA and how Obama and the left want to destroy this country. He would remind us that people on the left are not just political opponents but “Evil” and are out to destroy this country and therefore in no need of being the least bit civil. If you saw today’s Days of our Lives episode you saw Samantha Brady confronting two people who both claim to be Raphael Hernandez. Maybe it’s just me, but I would be inclined to believe the man who wasn’t waving a gun around the room menacingly. Long term watchers of Rush Limbaugh have got to be scratching their heads and wondering whatever happened to the Rush Limbaugh of twenty years ago. After the 1996 campaign, Rush lost all his sense of humor and approached every situation from a point of bitterness. If you want to talk about drugs changing people’s personalities look at Rush Limbaugh. I don’t know why more radio stations haven’t fired him. You know it’s a saying that a lie has traveled half way around the world by the time the Truth gets its boots on. The right has such a hammer-lock on the media it’s hard to get a word in edge-wise. Of course these people still hold Ronald Reagan to be “The greatest President America ever had” even though most of their talk is pure sentimentality. Reagan wasn’t that right-wing by today’s standards. And Reagan believed in working and negotiating with the political opposition of the other party. And Reagan in his latter years was eclipsed by his wife, Nancy, who kind of was the one who determined whom the President could even talk to, because she characterized the President as “too open to other peoples’ ideas”. So astrology and Iran-contra, and Alzheimer’s and all the rest of it really doesn’t figure into the mix.

It seems as if Newt Gingrich will be the first man to declare for President on the Republican side. He’ll have a lot of supports on the Christian right despite his shakey marital history. It’s pointed out that few points of the Contract with America were actually adopted. That’s a good thing. Sometimes people on the right will give up on an idea and then come back to it later when the climate is more favorable. I’ve heard people say in the past few days what a wonderful energy windfall these “oil sands” of Alberta are and how many years of oil reserves they contain. A few years back it was acknowledged that this whole mining operation was an ecological nightmare. I highly doubt that twenty-five years ago a major radio couldn’t say “The main thing wrong with our foreign policy is that there’s not enough torture and black site renditions.” Six years ago the idea of privatizing Social Security was pretty much toast. Now they have come back to it by cutting the FICA tax putting Social Security in financial jeopardy, and also have launched an all out attack in trying to end medicare as we know it. Some of the recent changes in strategy are interesting to note. Up till virtually months ago they were talking about a repent hyper-inflation that would inundate the nation once the effect of the President’s economic policies was in full force. Now they are changing their tune. Now they are saying “Don’t trust in silver or gold, but go out and buy land that you can farm on to grow your own food”. It’s the old adage, “You can’t eat a precious metal”. They are right, of course. I’ve been saying for months I didn’t trust the run up in precious metal prices. There is certain compelling evidence from looking at the graphs that we may be forming a top in the precious metal markets. With Al Qaeda now toast, there is a vastly lessened threat of terrorism. You know from experiences that these run-ups in precious metal prices only last a short time and then they come crashing back down. It’s funny how seldom you hear the name “Barry Goldwater” uttered from the lips of right-wingers now. And you know people like Thom Hartman and myself are completely baffled why the Republicans have given up their 150 years of economic protectionism of US Industry. This is not your father’s conservative party.

Now we move to the puzzle of the birth certificate that Whitehouse.com issued a week ago yesterday. When I saw the document that had previously been held to be the President's birth certificate I mused "You got to be kidding; that doesn't look like any birth certificate". When they released the document a week ago Monday there were immediate problems. First of all the name of the hospital was wrong. It wasn't called by that name till it merged with another hospital in Honolulu years later. Also the father's race is labeled as "African" rather than "Negro" and if you're my age you've filled out a lot of forms and know what I'm talking about. We have another problem with the father's nationality as "Kenya, East Africa". It was never called that. It was called the colony and protectorate of Kenya. Also the date says August 8th 1961 rather than August 4th. There is other more glairing evidence that this document was "assembled on a computer" and not merely scanned in from a piece of paper. We even know the program. It's Adobe Illustrator. Why is there a line all around the main part of the document with green outside, as if the center had been pasted? Were it scanned in from a piece of paper there would be none of the layering we talked about previously. More importantly on a color scanner there WOULD be chromatic distortion. That is it would be turquoise on one side of the letters and reddish on the other. There isn't even a little on the government document- - no matter how you blow it up even to seeing each individual pixel. Also of course there is the matter of the layers, and also a strange inconsistency in the color of the letters. Personally I'm very surprised the government has not recalled the document by now, because these glaring anomallies are plainly there to be seen by all. If this is a forgery, which it obviously is, then we still need to see the President's real birth cirtificate. Other "birthers" point to things such as the President's term papers in the many colleges he attended being a top secret and not viewable to the public, and this even includes a term paper his wife wrote. Some people say "Let it go; it doesn't matter". But if the President is not a natural born citizen he is not entitled under the constitution to serve as President, and to me it's just as simple as that.

A lot of us have that occasional "dream that stays with you". No matter how nightmarish a dream may seem at the time usual when you awaken the fear vanishes. But I have had certain dreams where this was the case. One was about December first, or maybe late November of 1990. Another was the first Sunday night of 1992. To this day I still haven't completely figured out what these two dreams were trying to tell me. But for a dream I had on July 10, 1992 it was different. The message to me was obvious, if true. Needless to say this dream really freaked me out. You know how I've said there is a lot of evidence that "The asshole from El Paso" knew my parents in some capacity unknown to and kept secret from me, and seems to have emotionally "bonded" with my father. Well there is another couple, or should I say, family, that my parents know- - with shall we say, tentacles reaching back to the past, notably the wife. How I came to know this couple myself is obvious. In July of 1988 they were residents at an apartment complex I was considering moving into. My Mom was hot on this place before seeing it. But once there she completely changed her tune and came up with a whole long list of things wrong with it. But I moved in for a lot of reasons. I'm going to shorten this paragraph up considerably from what I planned. Suffice it to say that if these people had regular social interaction with my parents (the "clues" start at least mid 1991) it seems to be a deep, dark secret kept by both sides. (one "clue" is coming upon a locked closet on one of the rare times I was alone in parents house on Sunday November 2nd 1997) Of course my Dad is dead so he's out of the picture now. I guess there is a saying "Just because you're a paranoid doesn't mean there aren't people conspiring against you. The "against me" part is a misnomer but - - it's like that Star Trek episode called "Clues". They kept running into them the more they investigated. I guess my point is if they could keep this relation as a secret so well, what other secrets were and are they able to keep with ease, which might not be so benign? I want to go back to a theme I broached a while back about "another life" that I have been having dreams about the past ten years. It's now gotten to the point when I can tell if I've had a dream about "that life" even if I can't remember the dream itself. Because it's a certain lingering vibe I have waking up in the morning. I hope that other life stays just that- - because the last thing I want is to astro-project into a world that's even less happy than the one I'm in.

LA Lakers Are No Longer World Champions

The Dallas Mavoricks defeated the LA Lakers 122 to 86, or a whopping 36 point margin in today’s game four in Dallas aired on ABC. We were lucky to get coverage for a round two game. Had the Lakers taken it to seven perhaps they would also have shown that game on TV that would have been next Sunday. Dallas was fantastic in the record number of three point shots during the game. The Marvoricks were ahead 24 points at half time. It’s sad to see the Laker’s season end six weeks early this year but they will have a long off season to think about things. This was Phil Jackson’s last game as Laker coach and Wednesday was his last game at Staples Center. There was an unpleasant incident near the end of the game. I don’t know why the Lakers fell apart since about the first of April after I was bragging about their performance on one of my postings then.

This morning I got coffee from Dana. As I was walking down there I was thinking about turning on the Jesus Christ show thinking “He can’t disagree with me in EVERY program, can he?” I got coffee from Dana and turned on KFI. Savedra was talking about bad mothers and the need for everyone to forgive them. I thought it was a rather unfitting remark for the day, which is to honor mothers. As you know Neil is the one who likes to peg people as “good people” and “bad people” pretty quickly- - and once he’s pegged you he expects you to stay in your box. Neil is also famous for making the remark “People don’t change”. How odd it was, then, when he said “Forgiveness is not for the one who wronged you but for you”. And he went on to speak of the cancer of bitterness and how mentally unhealthy it was. In the first place in the vast majority of cases lack of forgiveness hurts the one NOT forgiven. I know this is true in my case. I’d love to go around with a wish list and say to various people “You will forget this, and this, and this ever happened. I want you to erase it from your very brain cells”. But forgiveness done under duress is meaningless. That this host of “The Jesus Christ Show” would say that forgiveness is for the benefit of the person doing forgiving seems to highlight another slogan of Calvary Chapel Christianity of “It’s all about Me”. Jesus seems to approach every situation expecting all of his callers to be as self obsessed as he is. Don’t come to him with tales about the missionary running out of gas. He doesn’t want to hear it. The only time failure to forgive would hurt the one asked to do the forgiving is if you have some sort of gun to their head, physically or emotionally. For instance if you have someone by the balls and control every aspect of their lives, or at least the key ones, then the victim has no choice. It takes no “grace” for Nicole to say to Elvis Di Mira “You know I forgive you for having an affair with my sister. In fact I’m not even going to bring THAT up. Instead I’m going to blackmail you into staying married to me forever- - so you better start smiling and putting on an act right now”. But the absurdity of “Jesus’” words can be seen if you die and God accuses you. Can you say to God “I demand you forgive me?” or “You know, not forgiving me will only hurt you”. God will laugh in your face- - and Jesus of K F I fucking well knows that. Try that with the phone company when you’re three months behind on your bill”. Besides this- - to judge someone because they will not forgive their worse enemies who oppress them- - is in itself to comit a sin under Christianity. You don’t stick your nose in things that are absolutely none of your concern.

We all have questions about Bin Laden and “What did Pakistan know, and when did they know it. I know this. If I’ve overdue on paying a parking ticket, the government will come after me. They will hunt me down. Bin Laden is guilty of a lot more than a parking ticket but to this day I do not know whether Pakistan was on the side of our government in capturing him. One would have expected that Obama and the leader of Pakistan might pose together for a picture or something. They say George Bush didn’t o to ground zero because Republicans were afraid someone might snap a photograph of the two of them together. We were told that Al Qaeda had plans to launch nuclear bombs in the event of Bin Laden’s death. Where are they even going to get a Nuke from, Iran? They don’t have one, at least yet. That leaves Pakistan. I can’t believe at the very hub of information for Al Qaeda there is nothing more ambitious than blowing up a train on a bridge on the 9 – 11 anniversary. How many people would get killed that way- - given the steep drop of Am-track ridership these days? Al Qaeda is pretty much washed up as an organization. Some Christian group said something awful would happen on May 22^nd, 2011. “How’s that one working out for you?” Strange as it seems we may well be in an era of reduced terrorism threats. We should be happy about this.

You know the President tells us all that America should strive for academic excellence. And yet the easiest way to do this would be to get rid of teacher tenure laws, which make it virtually impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. Students themselves know when the teacher isn’t bringing his A game to the classroom. Like that Sociology class I took in the summer of 1971. The teacher announced “This session we’re going to keep the academic bull down to a minimum. I was disappointed to hear that. I came there to learn – not to get a free grade. He spent time talking about spending his youth in a Japanese internment camp. And we’ve all been in those math classes where a few idiots in class don’t get it, and the teacher has to slow down the whole class to accommodate them. Or there is the Bible study leader that decides “I feel led by God to have a prayer session this week”, which is code for “I didn’t plan a lesson” and it’s usually a sign of the soon demise of the group. And then we have Dr. Levy. I thought we were going to make a major study of existentialism but that’s just another thing Dr. Levy got bored with, so we are again doing “creative aging”, which we are all bored with. I think Joe used the term “sloppy seconds” for Dr. Levy who teaches other classes, but somehow we here don’t benefit from the vast knowledge he supposedly has. Rush Limbaugh is right agout one thing in that a good teacher “pushes” his students. A good academic environment is also one that fosters competition. It’s the American way. Unfortunately- - there are a lot of “life’s lessons” American youth today don’t know.

Richard and Dana and I were talking about Christianity on the patio just now. The sheer number of separate, independent reasons NOT to believe in Christianity is simply staggering. Let’s try and enumerate them quickly. (1) I believe the doctrine of Blood Atonement is an immoral doctrine going out the gate. This is a highly primitive doctrine that believes a Deity can be "fooled" by seeing the blood of an innocent thus "covering" the sin of the individual. (2) There are at least sixteen internal credibility conflicts in the Bible itself whether the resurrection occurred as reported and this doesn't include the contradiction between "Will you at this time set up your Kingdom?" after the resurrection and Jesus going into lengthly detail about the church age the previous Tuesday evening - -warning them their struggle was only beginning. (3) Marcion was an anti-semite and his beliefs pervade the new testament despite the fact he was declared a heretic. He had the first New Testament Cannon, and ALL of his books were kept. (4) Christianity was heavily influenced by Gnosticism. They like Buddha believed in having an “experience” where you come to “know” God, rather than objective reality. By the way angels are somewhat denigrated in the New Testament. They were ignorant of Christ’s coming. And St. Paul referred to Satan and Demons as “ruling the powers of the Air” and I think “Air” is the same word used for “Spirit”. Paul went so far to say that even if "an angel out of heaven" preached a different Gospel from the one he just told you, "let him be acursed". (5) There is no real evidence that any first testament writer even knew of Jesus, let alone a whole organization of Christian churches that apanned the Medeteranian Sea. Nazareth does not appear on first century Roman maps, I'm told. (6) Other myths were paramount including the historic figure Appalonius of Tyanus, who died around AD 110. Also Mithraism was prominent in Roman times evolving into the religion of Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sun. By the way the Angels at the Christmas story (alias ancient Persian myth) seem to contradict other scripture about the angels “not knowing”. Or perhaps the Christmas story in Luke hadn’t been written yet. (7) Any writing prior to Justin Martyr around 140 to 160 AD seems to be mainly myth rather than actual history. The first “historic evidence” of the Gospels is probably around AD 150. Justin Martyr lived till AD 165 and Tatian, a student of Justin, was the first to speak of the then novel idea of their being Four Gospels. (8) None of the atrocities of Nero or Domecian or Caligula are even mentioned. Nero is mentioned in a favorable light in the Bible as someone who seems to have given St. Paul from those persecuting Jews, so he was free to write and have visitors come and go. (9) Evidence I dug up in one of my first blogs ever suggests that the “Historic Jesus” was an “Egyptian” referred to in Acts, who wanted to tear down the temple and was regarded as insane by Pontious Pilate. Other version have his “escaping” execution and by law those guarding him had to be crucified in his place on November 24^th 29 AD during a partial solar eclipse. The man’s name was “Crestus” and he surfaces in 50 AD as a living person whose organization was expelled in Rome by Emperor Claudius, the only Roman Emperor anything bad is said about. Egyptian tradition had “Jesus” or whoever living on till at least 50 AD. DO THE MATH Let’s say each of these propositions has only twenty percent “validity” as a reason. If you consider all nine of them you get 13.42% likelihood that Christianity is a worthy religion. And I am being REALLY generous with the eighty percent. No enlightened Las Vegas gambler would take a gamble on the historic and moral veracity of Christianity. Why are You so in love with it?

People should at least Glance at this Evidence-

Intel Chip To Revolutionize Computer Industry

Intel has a new computer chip developed that will be publicly aired later this year and will be in use in computers sold to the public in 2012. This chip is called the “Tri-Gate” chip. It appears to still be a liniar chip, but unlike all the other computer chips out there this is a 3 D chip with all the information stacked in rows. All the other chips have circuits on a flat plane. I didn’t know this. What this means is that the long held “speed limit” of 2.4 gigabytes will at last fall and that year and a half law can resume. I got this computer seven and a half years ago and as you know all that time the maximum speed has been frozen at 2.4 gigabytes. If you try to go faster the computer “runs hot”. A few weeks ago James had told me there was a new chip coming out. They say it will be cheaper to make and they will be able to put more information in a smaller space. That’s good, if it’s true.

Well now we know the government is still giving us “cover stories” and conceiling the truth. We were originally told that those Navy SEALS had engaged in a forty minute “fire fight” fighting for their lives. Now we are given a completely different story. The seals encountered almost no resistance. They killed two of the curriors who had shot at them. This is the only enemy fire they apparently encountered the entire time they were there. We are told that Bin Laden’s son was killed but I'm not certain he was armed or whether he fired his weapon. We know some grand children died. And Bin Laden's youngest of four wives lunges at him and was shot in the leg by a seal, but she wasn’t being used as a human shield. Instead Bin Laden was in an upper bedroom along. One of the seals shot at him and missed as Bin Laden peaked over the stairway banister and then retreated to his room. When the troops found him Bin Laden was reaching for a weapon. He had an AK 47 and a Russian semi-automatic pistol in the room. Apparently two small children who had wandered into the area were grabbed and taken out of harm’s way. But the seals spent most of those forty minutes going through Bin Laden’s computer hard drives. All sorts of information was obtained that they are not about to share with us. But we did learn that they were planning to blow up a train on some bridge on the anniversary of 9 – 11. As terrorist plans go that doesn’t sound very ambitious, not for a tenth anniversary. President Obama went to ground zero yesterday to lay a wreath or something, but did not make any media speeches.

Well it is apparent that the Republicans are still living in an “alternate reality” of their own. I know I’ll have to face some of this from Judy tomorrow. She says that “all the money in the Social Security trust fund is gone. It’s been spent”. That is absolutely not true. Apparently it’s been invested in US treasury bonds where it can gain interest and grow bigger. The Heritage Foundation was on yesterday and they were saying that we are at a “bare bones defense budget” right now, and the government wants to make it even lower, which would damage our security. The truth of course is that Gates and all the others don’t want all these weapons that congress is funding. These are done a lot more for corporate profits, rather than any national security interest. Of course they were debating some oil bill in congress yesterday by which they want to lease more land off of Virginia and the Gulf Coast. I see nothing wrong with that as long as they actually use it for drilling and just not sit on it to drive the price even higher. They said that Alaska has more oil we aren’t using than all of Saudi Arabia. This is another blatent untruth. I have been told from our side that the US as a whole has only two percent of the world’s oil reserves and that if we had all of Alaska’s oil now, that supply would only last the US a year and a half. I do agree with whoever says it that we need to break the will of these speculators. This may have already been accomplished as the price of crude oil was down nine dollars a barrel yesterday and has in fact dipped below a hundred dollars per barrel for the first time in months. We were told by the media that the Republicans have given up on any Medicare cuts. But clearly this isn’t true either since Paul Ryan was at it on C-Span yesterday saying how “grandpa and grandma” aren’t worried about rising oil company profits as they have their stock in those same oil companies”. That may be the case. You know I’m still not sure how this “hands off my medicare” crowd feels about Paul Ryan’s plan to “revitalize the economy” by eliminating Medicare as we know it. Are they willing to make that bargain with the Devil and to sell out their children when they themselves will never live long enough to see their children impoverished when they grow old?

As you know Wednesday morning’s writings compass a body of material, most of which I have decided is not suitable for blogger. However I’d like to offer up the following dream. After I got back into bed I had a new dream. This is one of those harmless dreams you know means nothing. I dreamed I was scheduled to go up with a Christian group to the mountains. I was only half into it. But I watched the scenery as we ascended the roads. We came to a lodge and we prayed and other activities were discussed. Someone put on a record album. I used to have this album. It was of different groups but it contained the Beatles’ “last single” in June of 1970 that was played a lot on the radio at the time but seldom heard since. One side was sort of a rockabilly number reminding me of the Stray Cats that had the words “yet it is” in the lyrics. Paul was singing the lead. The other was a bit more downcast called - -something- - something Sam. But it wasn’t mohair. Ringo sang it. It kind of reminded me a little of Junior’s Farm, but it was a little slower in tempo. After this we hiked higher in the mountains through the snow. I don’t think we were planning to sled or anything. I think it was kind of a winter wildlife expedition. I climbed on top of a big rock. Then the rock began sliding down the hill. Others off in the distance said, “Look, [Marcus] is on that rock and it’s moving. The boulder kept going, not rolling but sliding- and I was afraid it would never stop- - until I hit a cliff or something. Finally it did. I can’t say how far- - maybe it was 100 yards- - maybe an eighth of a mile. We went back to the lodge. By now it was getting dark and I was thinking “they never said the outing would last this long”. But some fat lady picked out six of us to go in her van, and the rest of us would travel back in the same bus we came in. I was a bit confused. As we came to a small town one of the passengers said to me “Well, I guess we’re just about at the bottom”, and I said “Hell no, do you remember how far we came up? We’ve got all sorts of descending to do”. Like I say- - it’s one of those dreams with absolutely no meaning.

According to evidence I just received President Obama's long form birth certificate is a fake that was composited in Adobe Illustrator. It has "layers". This, if true is one of the worst forgeries since those documents about President Bush's military service that got Dan Rather fired. The birth date was changed from August (for some reason I had "July" on the brain), and the "1" is a darker shade and a different "layer" and many items on the document are obviously darker and lighter shades. I don't know where the source of the video got his document from, but I would suppose, if he's being honest with us, he got it from the official WhiteHouse.gov web site, which he said earlier in the video that he did. As you know fifteen percent of the American public still thinks the document is a fake.

But What About Pakistan and their Nukes?

OK we’re back to lavender in our color background rotation, in honor of Gloria’s top today. I told you I would be starting a new file. You just didn’t think it would be so soon. It just a minute after three now. Bill isn’t here so Judge Pirro isn’t on. At two I went out on the patio for a cigarette and conversation was lively. I went down stairs a bit early and sat in one of those chairs in the shade where I thought they would have put in new cushions a months ago. As I was walking through the building there was that music class. All those percussion instruments and the lethargic singing reminded me of that “Larry” movie. It was about 1974 and Larry spent his youth in an Institution but then got cured of his mental retardation. And he came back for a visit and this lady singer was trying to whip up an outdoor group into singing along. He no doubt remembers when he was one of them. Then as he continues down the corridor this well dressed older man says “Sir I’m looking for such and such ward. I’m here to visit my grandson. He’s mentally retarded”. You may remember that paragraph of Dr. Levy in the publication about his experience as a lonely Jew on Christmas Eve, eating at a Denny’s in 1990 and he overheard the dialogue between a father and son. Although it soon became apparent that the son was retarded by his actions and that he said almost nothing, and the father kept trying to make awkward pleasantries. And he reasoned that later that evening the son would go back to where he lives, and then spend Christmas day alone.

At any rate through an open window with the shades drawn I heard Glen Beck on the television. And he was going on and on about the killing of Bin Laden. But it was clear he wasn’t a bit happy about it. It reminded me of the Sallenger – Murphy debate where George Murphy kept talking about Johnson’s foreign policy in doubtful terms - -but he really had nothing negative to say but this didn’t stop him from going on and on trying to find that illusive banana under someone’s foot. Well, Glen Beck made much of the idea that we should have filmed the actual shooting of Bin Laden, and in this manner we could have documentation that the Islamic community could actually believe. Because they weren’t going to believe the sight of a body covered in plastic being dumped over the bough of a ship. And Beck got “Osama” and “Obama’s” names mixed up. There seems to be an epidemic of that these days. Apparently there was an Al Qaeda memo saying that whenever Bin Laden was killed that there would be a major nuclear strike at some major country in the world. That won’t happen. But Beck kept saying how this killing of Bin Laden was almost a bad thing because it has made the world less safe. He reminded his audience that Obama took a big gamble by even pulling off this operation so deep into Pakistan because of the questionable terms we were on with that government. Also that just maybe since the Bin Laden compound was so “obvious” and hardly hidden with his towering walls with barbed wire on top- - that surely Pakistani officials must have known who lived there, since this compound was also a stone’s throw from a military base. Of course as someone said a year ago “Iran has zero nukes, but Pakistan has all sorts of nukes, and if we’re going to be afraid of someone, we should be afraid of Pakistan. After this coffee call came and I got iced tea from Dora, since it was such a hot day. Then Loretta asked me if I got my money and I said I did. She then said that she has “eight extra dollars” this week, and can afford to buy four packs of the cheap brand of cigarettes. She said “I can either smoke only in the day, or only during the night, but I can’t do both”. Four of the five birds were visible in the cage.

But of course the right wing won’t be convinced of anything. Now the birthers are at it again and reinstituting all their law suits. I told you 15% of the whacko right still doesn’t believe the President showed his real birth certificate. If you put a gun to their head they’ll admit the President exercised brave leadership, but they would really rather now. Now we are hearing that water-boarding was the thing that turned the tide. But the left says that the “break in the case” occurred long after the water-boarding had stopped and that “We’ve known since World War II that torture wasn’t the way to go to extract information”. We should have things like the Stockholm sidrone working for us. Beck said that even George Bush 41 had problems in the polls after a while. If a chimpanzee issued the order to kill Bin Laden the chimpanzee would get a ten point bump in the polls. Bush 41 was at 91% at one point and he still lost the election due to hard economic times which continued to befall the nation. I remembered I was going to R O P because I felt if I had a few more certificates to wave in the prospective employer’s face that I’d get re-employed. But you know something? People who are negative and are proven wrong are far less likely to be forgiven than someone who was positive and gets it wrong. I stand behind my statements made a couple postings back. You have to remember that the tea party is kind of in hiatus now. They must be in a process of re-grouping to come up with a new image, just like the “New Nixon” presented to us by the media in 1968.

Right now I’d like to play “Guess who I am talking about”. This man is a writer and has published many novels. But personally I find a biography of his life would be more interesting than the books he has written. I’ve tried some of them and couldn’t get more than a few pages because they seemed hopelessly wordy and just not “connecting” with me. One of his books was made into a Movie and I got that from Dad once. (I don’t have it now) Apparently the movie was given a big build up but it bombed when it came out. So they decided to go and re-edit the thing and tighten up the action scenes. The movie still bombed. This writer is a hero of Dr. Levy’s, and an article about him appeared in a publication he gave us a few weeks back. I don’t see what Dr. Levy sees in the guy. They seem so utterly dissimilar. However if you value Bob Dylan’s opinion- Bob Dylan has acknowledged a lot of people and writers over the years for inspiring him. But so far as I know, Bob Dylan has never mentioned this author. I guess the only reason why I care at all is that a person from the “other side of the Veil” (Mal Evans) has stated that this man was Howard Richards in a previous incarnation. Though since their life spans overlap, it would mean that Howard Richards is thus a “walk in”.

On The Border

As to the upcoming opus magnum it’s kind of a “Pop Sampler” (of Metaphysical possibilities) like some of those records my parents used to buy in the ‘fifties filled with “cocktail lounge songs”. You people have read much of this before but there are area that merit emphasis, or in at least one case, new material. You know- - I don’t know it for a fact but someone might want to characterize me as a person as “Someone who plays people off against each other”. You people know about Jim Cooper and Mark Campbell, and some people might make the accusation there. But you don’t need to go back thirty years, but there is a contemporary situation that will do nicely. I have wondered to myself where I am trying to “Play off Dana and Craig against each other”. I tell each side I agree with them. The thing is that Craig has it right as far as “What the Bible basically teaches” and Dana is all wrong. On the other hand Dana has a lot of basic “common sense” which is a rare comedity around here. I admire Dana’s “utter lack of faith”. I’d like to say to Dana “I envy and admireyour utter disbelief in religious stories”. All the while I know this is a Christian run facility, and I owe a lot to these people, which probably includes a deference to the Faith that governs them.

Of course I admire intelligence and intelligent people. For instance I recommend you listen to Thom Hartman’s first hour this morning from nine to ten PDT, because he really hit it out of the park the last hour. He spoke of George Bush ordering people out of Afghanistan to find Bin Laden in 2002 into the Iraq theater because he knew he was planning to go to war there. Also George Bush had the offer to receive custody of Bin Laden and he turned it down, because aerial bombing was too much fun. President Obama had the choice to either “wait and gather further intelligence” or do aerial bombing or do his risky surgical strike, which he went with. Of course in keeping with my “equal time policy” let’s hear from Stewart Sutcliffe. He was the one I got the whole fifth dimensional thing from. While it’s true the germ of an idea may have come from some TV program on the Big Bang, still without Stewart explaining the thing to me I might not have “ever gotten it”. Also Steward was going against Mal Evans and Federation teaching in general. In terms of the Wickipedia article, the thing is badly in need of a rewrite because the facts aren’t presented systematically. As to Stewart’s art - -the pictures I’ve seen of his haven’t been so dark, but also rather more geometric with mathmetical formulas imbedded in them- - but it’s not something apparent to the eye, you have to have it explained to you. I think we’re ready to go into our main feature now. You may note the lack of any reference to "ether" in the piece. I couldn't think of everything at once.

METAPHYSICAL POSSABILITIES

Well Dr. Levy if you remember in class I made passing reference to metaphysical realities. Right away you associated that with the para-normal. That’s a correct but incomplete perception. I define metaphysical is those aspects of nature which man cannot measure or quantify, at least under normal circumstances, Scientists make the metaphysical that there are four and only four “basic forces in the Universe." [I wont name them] I guess we have to accept their word on Faith. OK. There are three basic realms where I postulate that we need to learn a whole lot more than we do. One is of the micro world of sub-atomic particles. Atomic particles I have no problem with. These consist of electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons. But scientists have found scores of “sub atomic” particles, which seem to exist almost in their own imagination. These include leptons, pions, mesons, positrons, and the like. Other scientists look at the world of the microscopic and come up with this “string theory”, which seems really strange to me. There seems to be an ongoing battle between the “string” and the “particle” people.

In realm number two which is mysterious is a byproduct of the Big Bang theory. Picture an infinite number of thin straight lines radiating from a single point. Normally you count “our four dimensional space-time continuoum as the lines point up. Ontologically only in our own realm does effect follow cause. In lines going the opposite way cause follows effect, don’t ask me how. But this is only in our own perception. They would see us as entirely the opposite. You’re into existentialism. Here is an exestensial riddle for you. Suppose you put four “points” on some three-dimensional blackboard. Four points suspended in space. Which one is the one that doesn’t belong? Well the answer lies in the fact that three points “define” a plane. That’s a funny word, “define”. You can “define” things so that any combination of three of the triangle form a plane and each of the four cases there is a fourth point that is the odd man out or “non plainer” as the Sketch people say. I think you can see what is implied by this because many say there is only one way to reach God and the others are improper, but it’s all how you “define” the plane. Returning to our Big Bang example- - we have a number of parrellel universes- - or shall we say “highly oblique”. In my model these universes never cross but are always headed farther apart. I define these other lines as in the “fifth dimension” or Twilight Zone, if you will. This is the “dimension of unreality”. Here is another proposition that will blow your mind: “Everything that CAN happen HAS happened- -in some other dimension or parrellel universe. As such psychic visions may be accurate but useless if they apply to a parrellel universe. As to the statement “God cannot do the intrinsicly impossible” Pilate may ask “and what IS intrinsically impossible” and the answer is anything other than what God has scripted for our own universe. They used to have a TV called “Sliders” that dramatized this dimension. (All the good TV shows are no longer on the air)

The final realm of mystery is objects that travel faster than light. I have another of those metaphysical truths to lay on you so get your notepad out. “No matter how many well executed Possible acts- - all perfectly timed and carried out to an infinite degree of precision and persistence- - they can never add up to what would be Impossible. This alludes to the addition of velocities equation Einstein came up for the special theory of relativity. [A guy named Paul talked about evidence of the psychic in class and to me it was the most intelligent remarks made this day. I respect intelligence even if it's made by whom Stephen King might label as "Not a Nice Guy] To both agree and disagree with Paul (in class) at the same time- - I’m sure one in a million coincidences have occurred many times in my life, and in yours. But contemplate this: What are the odds of your life by chance ending up the way it did. I’ll give you a hint. There are seven billion people in the world and you could have been born as any one of them, and so could I have. How many “events” have occurred in your life. Ten million? If so then there mathematically are ten events with odds of one in a million of happening. I’ve seen all the math odds and they tell me they play out with stunning regularity, so people like Neil Savedra say there IS no such thing as the paranormal. Still others speak of a realm where Ideas and Concepts have some sort of material existence. As some preachers say “With God- - Words are Things”. What if Ideas were physical Things? Here is another notion. Karl Jung speaks of the “collective unconscious”. I have in the past entertained the notion that this collective unconscious exists in some psychic dimension and is in a constant struggle for dominance, and it could be there is some connection between what goes on in this realm and the events that occur in this physical universe. Others speak of “energy forces” such as exist in haunted houses where emotion and traumas get “frozen in time” and go on forever.

On top of all of this, like the painter of a painter of a picture- - you have God. God created all these realms, even the psychic one. Some people try to quantify God but you can’t do that. God also created the number Infinity, so that the concept of Infinity, like Time- - is an artifact of God. I have previously said it can be a quantifyable number such as repeating decimal numbers. [Because at lease you know you're "getting there"] Or “parrellel lines meet at Infinity” in a painting. They don’t meet sooner, and they don’t meet later. Infinity is also a definitely quantifyable line on a camera- - not mine but others, as a focal length. If a prayer is destined not to be answered by God how many times does a person have to pray? Infinity won’t be enough. Some people think they can quantify God, but they may be the same ones who think they can divide by zero. You can “prove zero divided by zero is one because “Any number divided by itself equals one”. But you can't quantify - - Nothing. When it comes to God, “You can’t get there from here”. God himself says so with statements like “Man on his own can never reach God” and “In man dwells no good thing” and the like. I am a man of science and even my theories about God derive from scientific writings rather than from religious writings. I guess things like Yoga and Acupuncture have metaphysical elements to them.

END OF ARTICLE NOW FOR A 'BONUS TRACK'

I want to talk about death a little. I find, contrary to what “normal” is, that as I grow older my fear and uncertainty about death only increases. Obviously the first time I saw “ending it all” as an option was when I threatened to commit suicide on August 2^nd,1967. Of course Dad, like the asshole that he was, saw it as - - “Oh you don’t like that? Then I’ll rephrase it”. Dad fool that he was sitting there with his head up his ass saw the event in a manner I could not have dreamed of then, at least consciously. I thought I was alerting him to a problem that can’t be ignored any more. But he thought, “This is just another indication to add to my long list that [Marcus] is “damaged goods” and not really human like the rest of us, and therefore unworthy of common human decency, like demanding to be treated civilly by his brothers”. Oh, Dad had let certain remarks slip now for months- - but at the time I wasn’t connecting all the dots in Dad’s mind. So I guess from then on and for years and years to come I thoughts “Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing is the World came to an end like Jeane Dixon and all these Astrologers have been predicting.” But I had my moment of enlightenment, or a “Come to Jesus” moment if you will, perverse as the context which I am using that phrase in. And that was at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday September 8^th 1977. Chuck Smith was giving part two of his End Times presentation. I remember thinking, “I’m not going to die in a Holocaust of someone else’s perverted fantasy, or “wet dream” as Randy Rhodes would put it. Here was a man reveling in gore and death and horror, and all the while swelling with pride at how superior he was to the rest of the world.

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead

Last night at about a quarter to eight CBS interrupted a piece on Zinyatta to inform us that Osama Bin Laden was killed by an elete regiment of US Navy Seals, apparently working in coordenation with the CIA and then stormed a fortress deep in Pakistan where they had good intelligence that Bin Laden was. [Apparently they landed a helocopter on the roof with an amazingly small team. Bin Laden was in this huge Mansion with eighteen foot high walls, almost in an urban area. He used no cell phones or internet or anything tracable. So he used curriers and these were followed around for months, till we knew it was him. Apparently Bin Laden used his wife as a human shield, that didn't work.] Apparently the President received the first usefull intelligence in a long time on the subject but obviously kept quiet about it and last week the President was confident enough to go ahead with the plans. Bin Laden was killed and Americans took posession of his body which subsequently was burried at sea, where no Islamic pilgrim could make a shrine out of his grave for the people to come and worship at. As Henry Morgan said in a Western once, "What I'll do over your grave when you're gone won't pass for flowers". I think they should have had a ceremony where Bin Laden's naked body was covered in pig blood and blasphemed against, and the whole thing photographed and distributed on the internet. That would be nice. This morning on Stephanie Miller they referred to President Obama as the "Anti Carter" because his spring surprise, as opposed to the failed attempt of Carter to rescue the Iran hostages in April of 1980, this one turned out successful. All parties concerned were true to their word. The Bush policy was to pursue Bin Laden contrary to what President Bush said once by joking about it. And President Obama wanted Leon Peneta to know when he took office that killing or capturing Bin Laden was a top priority in his administration. So we kept sending those drone rockets into Pakistan. Not all of them were for killing but some were reconisence taking high resolution photographs. Apparently the buzz in the Arab newspapers is stunned silence. The whole Islamic community is in a state of shock. (I have heard nothing from the Federation) Clearly this is a turning point in the battle against Islamic terrorism. As Jesus once said, "Once the strong man is bound and gagged, you are free to plunder his house. This act yesterday morning oviously proves that Obama does have balls after all. This "stunned silence" is likely to pervaid the Republican community in congress, who can't make with any wise cracks on this one. About all they'll be able to say is "Sir, yes sir!" It indeed is the close of a- - very long chapter in US history. President Clinton sought to capture Bin Laden. I remember the bombing in Sudan in August of 1998 and how Rush Limbaugh continually mocked the action saying "Why do we want to bomb an asperine factory?" Rush and other anti Clinton people kept talking about "wag the dog" and how all this anti Islamic terrorist stuff was just a distraction from the Monica Luinsky scandal. And then Hartman tells us that George Bush had an offer from Iran or something to capture Bin Laden or someone was going to turn him over or something, and the President turned him down. We all believed that Bin Laden died in a cave in Tora Bora of some terminal disease in late 2001 (about the same time as George Harrison - - not that there is any connection) We kept hearing all these reports of "capturing the number two in Al Qaeda, with number one continually eluding us. Now all Americans can stand with pride knowing that the dastardly deeds of 9 - 11 will be avenged at long last.

I should call this one 'Houston - We still have a problem". If you saw that Sixty Minutes segment last night you realize that the battle in Egypt didn't end when President Mubarek stepped down from power. Because you still have the stubborn reality that Islamic men are pigs and beasts. An ebulliant crowd saw a blonde reporter with her camera crew there to cover the jubelation and someone said to another in Arabec, "Lets take her pants off" and they tried to get out of the crowd but the female reporter was surrounded by beastly men and a nightmarish scenario unfolded itself. First they ripped off all her clothes, article by article, and then they pulled at her hair and clawed at her skin, perhaps trying to yank her arms off, and threw her to the ground, with fellow Arabs photographing the entire thing on their cell phones. Then she was raped repeatedly for about 25 minutes. Finally some Egyptian veiled women showed up, who helped her and finally the Egyptian army arrived to escort the camera crew to safety. I may want to rethink my position about "The US shouldn't be at war with Islam itself". Perhaps we should be because Sheria law is a beastly code where women and "Infidels" have no rights, and aren't even required to swear to an oath. You cannot cross examine them or confront the witness with their lies and hypocracy. I wish the President would mention the rape of this TV reporter in one of his addresses on the subject. So when you look at Libya, maybe Quadafi isn't that bad, compared to his possible replacements. Maybe the people of the tea party right were correct all along. That this war against Quadafy just might not be a good thing. (Selah)

You know there are different kinds of rape. The Gulf coast has known repeated instances of ecological rape. Sixty Minutes pointed out that New Orleans hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina yet. People like to talk about certain bad events that just "go away" on their own. Dr. Phil would just love that. One of his lines is "Don't you EVER bring that up again". It isn't that simple. Katrina was caused in part because the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico was around ninety degrees about seven or eight degrees above a normal temperature of 82 or 83, for that time of year. And I was going to report on the anniversary of the British Petroleum oil spill of last April 20th. 2010. This was a continuously unfolding horror scenario that lasted three months and every day the situation seemed to appear more hopeless. Then we were told that the problem was solved and the media could forget about it. But last month there were reports anew that little has been fixed. The sea food is still contaminated and there is still extensive oil damage all over the place. And we still don't know the full consequences of administering that 2 butal alcohol or whatever into the ecological system. Neither do we know the damage that will be done to bio-organisms from ingesting major ammounts of these compounds. We don't know what might crop up in the way of elevated cancer rates, in either ourselves or our children. Now of course part is the Republican plan is to "drill, baby, drill" once again. I think we should think long and hard about this one. Republicans say that eliminating the oil depletion allowance would be a bad thing because it would drive up oil prices. Of course Hartman and I believe that oil prices, or the price of anything, is determined by what the Market will bear, and such extranious things as corporate taxes have little bearing on price paid at the pump. Neither by the way, just to be consistent, do I believe that "profits" made by a corporation should be rebated to the purchasser of a product, as some have advocated. Because corporate profits in themselves don't affect the price paid for a product either, and from a Smithsonian point of view, it's none of the consumer's business what a particular corporation makes in profits. If the price is deemed too high than the Market will make adjustments. This whole energy and global warming crisis is not something that will be solved in the next one hundred weeks, nor in the next one thousand weeks, but in the words of John F. Kennedy, "Let us begin". (Selah)

I was going to talk about my own troubled household as a teenager under the heading of "A different kind of rape". There were periods when I was on rotten terms with all four other family members. There were problems with one brother in particular, Al, who engaged in things from theft and destruction of property to erasing of recording tapes to threats and insults and various harrasments- - - and there are things like medications I was taking that made a lot of my problems worse, and I suggest, accademically. Not too many people knew just how bad things really were. Howard Richards did. He would have been a half second cousin, were he not himself adopted. Roger Shepherd knew. But few others did. When Pastor Bill Halliday mentioned to me in that July '91 phone call of "Your childhood was really messed up and that's why you turned out the way you did" of course I was insulted. I wasn't even thinking of my teenage years when he said this but I thought he was trying to lay some Freudian trip on me like "bad potty training as a toddler" or some such rot. Of course at the time I hadn't said word one to him about any of this stuff, so apparently (if he wasn't just talking out of his ass to begin with) had "knowledge" on the subject, either supernaturally from Satan, or much more probably by some human agency, which he wasn't confiding with me about. When you look at the "Glass Onion" of my past, which I have come to call the "Arimid" period- - you see problems that one could argue "went away" after a while. But they really didn't go away, and lingering attitudes poisoned the air- - if nothing else by all the energy people spend lying about this period and acting as if it never happened. "So how come you didn't go to a four year University right out of high school?" "Gee, I haven't the vaguest idea". Yes, - perticularly with my Dad - who seemed to throw up a "wall" and there was a C change in our relationship the first definitive signs of which took place on November 23rd 1966. Whether I recovered from those bad relations back then- - one can say "OK, it's not relivent today" but I know this. My Dad never "recovered" from the bad relations, the seeds of which were laid back then. I was going to speak on this topic in consiterably more detail but this is a long posting already.

John Lennon's oppinion of me according to the Federation (not Lennon himself) was of some spaced out guru wanna-be like Timothy Leary or something who advocated the use of LSD but didn't take it himself, who was also obsessed with revolution and "death" and alltogether a little "dark". He saw me more than himself as someone "who liked to slip secret messages into the music". According to the Federation the phrase "Turn me on - dead man" was a jab at me and not Paul. It may be a counter reference to "I'd love to turn you on". The Federation people also noted that I got along a whole lot better with Paul than Lennon did. "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead" was also a reference to me, rather than Paul. Stewart Sutcliffe told me himself once "Actually, I feel a whole lot more comfortable talking to you than to John".