This is the first posting since I have switched to A T & T Yahoo high speed internet. I have no beef at all with the speed for things like videos and music, however certain files such at USA Today meteriological and Blogger are still a little sluggish to boot. I do like all the extra nifty software that Yahoo has for paying customers. I was told by two people I could have gotten a better deal with Time-Warner cable. One guy told me I could have gotten a $29.95 deal for both internet and digital television with two hundred stations. Well, I don't have that. One should count their blessings. We're going to try photos and I bet that goes faster now. I have one cigarette that has to last for the next 24 hours. I've spent all my money and made all the bargain deals I can with people. My only hope now is that some outside friend lends me a few dollars till tomorrow.

War truely is hell. Dr. Dean Edell was mentioning on his show that women who are sent over seas to fight for their country return often to find that they no longer have rights to see their kids because their back-stabbing husbands have gone to court against them. Dr. Edell says "There has to be some limits to this Best Interest of the Child reasoning". In a world run by me adult's rights would supersede the "rights" of children. Children need to know that this is a world of adults and not children and that some "Shirley Temple" child charmer can't beguile a judge into making an unfair decision. Children are often used as pawns and are quite easy to bribe as you know. But children need to know that the real world is not like that, or shouldn't be. We need to respect all the rights of our vetterans, be it in the job market or with children. The doctor also stated that it's women, more so than men, who do not want to have children at all. Men apparently have what some would call that sexist macho thing about leaving their "seed legacy" and also having someone to carry on the family name. Perhaps the Bob Dylan song is all too relivent here. "You've been threatening my son, unborn and unnamed. You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins". That's from Masters of War. One has to wonder what God sees when he looks down from heaven at this Bush Adminestration. To quote Dylan again, "I can see through your masks; I can see through your brain, just like I can see through the water that runs down my drain". In George Carlen's words, this adminestration is "circling the drain" on a moral karmic basis. On Sixty Minutes last night they had a thing where they will allow the deaths of up to thirty civilians in Iraq bombing raids in an attempt to "take out" suspected terrorists. But in reality they've killed over a given period two hundred civilians and missed all eighteen terrorists on their target list. Why can't the Republicans go back to their 1952 Campaign slogan of, "A vote for Eisenhaur is a vote for Peace". Amen to that.

In dealing with the right wing sometimes you've got to have a little understanding how they think and the language they invoke. In my book "God's Winepress" I too spoke in rather hell fire and brimstone damnation tones "a little lacking in love". People use the words and phrases they are exposed to in their lives and are products of their upbringing. So deep inside that hell fire and brimstone pentacostal preacher is just another human being like the rest of us. I was talking to one guy yesterday who says after hearing one pentacostal preacher in Oklahoma he had nightmares for several nights and was afraid. I'm not bothered by these people because in the majority of cases they just express themselves in words they are fermiliar with. I got the title "God's Winepress" from two Biblical sources. One is from Zachariah where it talks about the winepress of God's wrath and the blood running in war up to the horses' bridals. But the other reference is to Gidian, who was afraid of the midianites and so threshed his wheat in a wine press, which we are to take was a hole in the ground, sort of like a wine cellar. Yesterday someone was talking to me on the phone and there's a story about a conference between the US the British, The Canadians, the Austrailians, and the French, and the French raised a big stink about "How come we never conduct these conferences in French?" and the answer from one of them was "Because 65 years ago we arranged it so you people would not have to be speaking German now". Touche! Of course these people on the right can be gingoistic and insist that everyone, including the hispanic immigrants, speak English and are like Pat Buchannon in that they fear our culture being inundated by foreigners. This is the last worry on my mind. I know I should learn to speak fluant Spanish and am surprised I haven't picked more of the language up from living around here and being among the people around the corner.

Of course another Sixty Minutes story was the trouble with the bees. It seems that the bees just lose their way and abandon their hives, and now growers have to pay top dollar to import bees for key seasons like raising pumpkins for Halloween and Thanksgiving. Just as the canary in a coal mine is a harvenger of things to come so are the vanishing hives. Some have said it's the pesticides and their is nicotine in the honey and that bees won't even use the honey in abandoned hives, which is their practice normally. It's kind of what was happening to main stream Christian Churches in the sixties where millions of Christians were "losing their way" seemingly with their inate sense of direction gone, and abandoning the churches that formerly nurtured them, and are now drifting on their own only to eventually die out. It's hard to say what keeps a hive or a church going. It's kind of one of those God-given instinct things and once it's gone, chaos reigns. It's kind of like the movie "The Birds". "Something" is happening.

Gerald Ford has a new book out now called "Write this when I'm Dead". Gerald Ford told William Saphire in April in 1974 that Nixon had had it and that he would be President soon, but he also told people to forget he'd made this utterance in a moment of weakness. Ford also has his oppinions of Clinton and Reagan. He thinks Ronald Reagan is a good salesman and puts on a hell of a show, but he's hopelessly ill-informed on many issues and lacking in real substance, and foreign dignitaries have told him this. But after 1994 Ford stopped saying unkind things about Ronald Reagan. He thought Clinton had real moral lapses on the Paula Jones and the Monica Luinsky affairs and should have not purgered himself under oath in court. If there is one thing Gerald Ford has a reputation for it's being an honist, decent man. I may buy the book.

Now we hear that George Bush is going to put sanctions on Iran and also accuses various branches of the Iranian military of certain things. People on the right really want war with Iran and some may even advocate it during the upcomming campaign. Of course these people see it as a culture war against Islam even more so than terrorism. "Terrorism is just a TOOL to these people but the underlying issue is the war between Islam and Western Culture". These people claim you can't be a Moslem unless you're willing to bomb the US because that's the one way you can be assured getting into Paradise. These people say (as one did to me) "I'm not so hot on this idea of the Rule of Law. Christians deal in grace and not the law". My response to her is that she is completely off the track. This is a nation built on the principle of the Rule of Law, much more than it is of religion. As Abraham Lincoln said, "No man is above the law, and no man is beneath it". I also regard this attempted implementation of democracy in the midease as a Nobel Experiment. It didn't work, apparently, but it was worth a shot. Our focus should be on terrorism and how real the threat is. Collin Powell is said to have said "Regeime change is not grounds for going to war in Iraq, but weapons of mass destruction are". I told her, "Look, we're winning the war and things finally seem to be shaping up and going our way". She said, "Therefore we shouldn't get out". No, my "therefore" is, "Therefore we can put this whole Mideast episode behind us and move on to the many other pressing security matters".

I must stress that we do need a third party candidate. I foresee a possible alliance with people on the right. Me and my conservative friend both agree that we like Ron Paul on SOME issue. But she and I disagree on WHICH issues. In a World Net Daily debate, Ron Paul was the one candidate that said we shouldn't be in Iraq and that those mideast people see us as invaidors of their lands. I think it was Thom Hartman that said we need some candidate who is not tied to the Fascist corporate structure of America. We need someone of "Traditional American values" and I say "Amen" to that. There really is time go get something going, if we're motivated.

The Red Sox won the World Series in four straight games over the Colorado Rockies. And I did not hear one line about the Rockies having a lot of Born Again people on their team. It would seem New England is pretty much unbeatable both in football and in baseball. Unlike the previous celebration Sunday, I watched the game continuously from 7:30 on. In Federation labelling it's the Red Sox rather than the Rockies who are labeled "Pikes". the "Pikes" live somewhere in the constellation of Pisces and are sometimes allies of the Federation and sometimes they are rivals. By the way, Google Earth comes in a lot faster now.