SENATE HEALTH CARE BILL PASSES

ALL IMPORTANT SIXTY VOTE HURDLE

The US Senate last night voted sixty to forty basically along party lines to allow a final vote on Obama's health care bill. This was at one o clock in the morning. The Republicans have tried and will continue to try to put obstruction after obstruction in the path of this bill's passage. The sixtieth vote was assured when the Senate made a deal with Ben Nelson of Nebraska on Saturday to assure his vote. He won the concession of anti abortion language in the bill, and also got a sweetheart deal for the state of Nebraska not having to pay any of the Medicaid expenses that the rest of the states have to bear. The final vote on the bill is scheduled for 7:00 PM on Christmas Eve. This bill will cost 871 Billion dollars and will raise a number of taxes including the "Cadillac plan" tax on coverage that exceeds minimum. Also taxed will be Union benefits that go to health care. There will be a requirement that every individual have health insurance. Some may compare it to requiring every driver to have auto insurance. But the difference is that you have a choice whether or not to own a car. There may actually be constitutional questions concerning this insurance requirement. The phrase "lipstick on a pig" comes to mind when describing the provisions, or lack thereof, of this bill.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is coming under heavy restrictions in its home in Western Turkey where the roots of Christianity run further back than just about anywhere else in the world. Of course the book of Revelation describes a circle of Seven Churches in the area of western Turkey and they may have sprouted up as worship centers for the semi-historical figure of Apolonius of Tyannus, who died about AD 115 and was said to have ascended into heaven forty days later. Many unsubstantiated myths have grown up around the figure of Apolonius. It's my belief that in a reversal of what Scripture says, that the Apostle Paul came to this circle of Seven Churches and was in fact the first Judahiser. Justin Martyr says he got "saved" and became a Christian because he met an "old man" walking along the sea shore one day. It is my belief that the "old man" was the Apostle Paul, or some historical antecedent. Marcion wanted the Gospel of Luke (minus the Christmas Story) and the first ten letters of St. Paul to be adopted as the New Testament cannon. Justin Martyr, like St. Paul was a "Judahiser" and Marcion reacted to this force and came up with a counter doctrine. But before any of them got to western Turkey, that the "Church" of Apolonius already was functioning. Merged with belief in this man was the cult of another man, an Egyptian with Zionist beliefs, called "Crestus". Paul in his letters seldom ever uses the name of "Jesus" but almost always prefered the generic term of "Christ" or "Messiah", leading many to believe that Paul did not actually believe in a historic figure who actually lived. Mark, according to the Coptic Church teaching, was an Egyptian with "African" features, and is said to be the founder of the Coptic Church. The Gospel of Mark lacks most of the "Q" sayings of "Jesus" or Crestus, that were originally in what we call the "Q" document, such as prophecies of the end of the world. This Crestus cult thus pre-dates the Apolonius cult by many decades. Crestus was a man who died as an older man about age 55 around fifty AD. It is possible that Crestus came to Rome, where his cult ended up being centered. The book of Acts actually makes reference to this "Crestus" being a living man, in an edict that tried to expel them from Rome under Claudius. But Nero let them back in. At some point the Crestus cult merged with the Apolonius cult in western Turkey.

The economy is going into its third year of economic recession. Cities throughout the "rust belt" are suffering through their third Christmas of economic want. Taxes and welfare services are being strained to the max, and the continued lengthly unemployment of people will be depressing the GNP. A double dip recession appears ever more likely. The Republicans are trying to blame President Obama for everything, but in truth things would be much worse, were there no stimulus packages. But all of the economic aid has not been enough.

Our next posting will be at a different blog. I don't know which one that is right now, but it will be one I haven't posted on since early last summer. Last Friday President Obama bombed Al Qaeda centers in Yemen. The President said in that speech that he would root out Al Qaeda wherever it was throughout the world. To me it doesn't seem like you'll be able to stamp out Al Qaeda, any more than the Caesars could stamp out Christianity in the ancient world. It's hard to fight against a belief, even a destructive one such as Al Qaeda. But as I have said, the CIA itself funded and supported these extremist Islamic sects in decades past, and at the present, it's only a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

PLAYING POLITICAL GAMES

This marathon business with congress may be more theater than substance. I was informed by C-Span that they were to meet at midnight to discuss foreign policy. It seems that the funding bill from our troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere expires tonight at midnight without an extention. But they are not above playing the tackiest political games with the lives of our servicemen. But as Randy Rhodes pointed out on her noon show today, if you’re a democrat you can vote against a certain bill “for conscience sake” and the leader will seek for another to “cover” your vote. You only need vote the party line when every democratic vote will be needed. Bearing this in mind, Russ Feingold stated that he was opposed to the Afghan war and wanted to vote down this funding bill but with everything on the line he voted to break a republican led filibuster. You heard right. The republicans were filibustering the pay of our troops. So they are pretty bogus. They are the ones who are pro war but against our troops. Meanwhile Thad Cochrin of Mississippi was preparing to cut a deal for his vote. He got 45 pork barrel items for the military in his state. And after getting this major concession he still voted to uphold the filibuster thus voting against his own amendment. By the way the amendment went through but he can go back to his voters and try to claim that he voted no on all of that extra pork. Mc Cain was going on and on today about pork spending and of all of the unnecessary things in this bill. It sure gets exasperating.

Obama is a total fraud. I’ve always wondered what the President’s heart was made of and now we find that it’s pure Jell-O. I’m not talking about the climate meeting in Copenhagen that went nowhere this week. That was expected. I’m talking about all of Obama’s psychophant apologists such as Randy Rhodes. These are the ones who say that we have this “one shot” at getting health care passed and it has to be this year, or all is lost. Yet at the same time these same people say “We should go for the insurance reform and try and get the really good stuff at a later date”. If one premise is true, it knocks out the other one, so which is it? These Presidential apologists play you on a lot of false premises. First of all who says that December 24^th is a deadline. This is a self imposed rule and they can change it at any time. They could scrap the whole bill and come back next year with a better bill if they want. But it’s a falocy that passing a small portion of this bill will make it easier to pass the rest. It will make it harder. Because maybe the “easy” stuff can get passed with 75 votes. But now the portion of the senate that will go for the more serious reforms such as a public option, will have shrunk to about forty votes without a prayer of the thing getting passed. Do you see the problem? So what is “really going on” with these people like the President who want a bill passed at any price? Well this week the President personally scuttled a drug importation bill. This would have allowed pharmacists and doctors to import drugs from Canada and Europe. But the President had to nix this idea fast because he’s already in bed with the drug and insurance companies and has probably already cut a deal with them that he would continue t restrict imports. The President campaigned on this issue of liberalizing drug imports and now is actively fighting the idea. So of course he wants the insurance companies to have their extra billions from the added business. There is another little fact in that you can’t say, as some might try, that “Well look at all the millions of American citizens dying every year from not having a health bill”. But the provisions of this bill under the best odds don’t kick in for another four years. Also there are yet people who say “Well, pass the bill and work it all out in the conference committee”. But as you know, bills tend to get weaker and not stronger on conference committees, and what comes out may lack some of the “good stuff” that hasn’t been taken out of this bill - - yet, such as ninety percent of the premiums actually going for health care.

The question arises why the Senate doesn’t pass a more potent health care bill by using the process of “reconciliation” where you need only 51%, One senator today said “We are too far down the road for that”. What road? It was used in the Ronald Reagan administration to pass COBRA and it was used in the Clinton administration to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and in the Rush administration it was used for funds cuts in Medi-Care and Medicade. So why can’t it be employed now for the spending portions of this bill? Then they can pass all the insurance regulation stuff in a whole other bill. In a third bill they could eliminate the anti trust exemption that Insurance companies enjoy now. It seems to me the only sensible thing to do. Howard Dean is saying that the entire health care bill should be scrapped. That wouldn’t be a bad idea since we have no assurance the republicans won’t even try to strip more provisions out of this bill. Four of the five original health care bills to make their way through congress had a public option. How do you average four out of five and come up with “None”? Essentially of Obama doesn’t pass this bill, he’s been wasting his time this whole first year of the administration. He’s put all of his eggs in this one basket and hyped the idea as a number one priority, ahead of several other priorities the voters might have wanted. I can’t picture a Roosevelt or a Johnson having such a major failure.

And then we have Afghanistan. Here is another area where the president is looking farcical. It would seem that Pakistan continues to be a question mark as to just which side of this conflict they are on. We wanted the Taliban to be “between a rock and a hard place” to eliminate them. But instead they have the soft, secure underbelly of Pakistan to take refuge in. Apparently it’s estimated that it would take 600,000 troops, I kid you not, to successfully quell all insurgent action in Afghanistan. It’s said that the President decided on the figure of thirty thousand because it’s a figure that might make the hawks happy and it’s the “upper limit” on a figure that the American people would deem politically tolerable. But of course the President’s poll numbers have dipped to below fifty percent. Randy Rhodes suggests that liberals lie to the polsters and say they like the President even when they don’t because “this will give the President the added confidence that he needs to get the job done”. Well excuse me! I thought our leaders were supposed to be “self starters”. It’s their job to motivate us- - rather than the other way around. I’ve always said “Let’s end this campaign before it starts”.

Iraq may have hacked into our drone monitoring system so they can get early warning of all of our attacks, and Afghanistan may have done the same thing, for some software that you can purchase for $26.00. Now Iraq and Iran in conflict over some disputed oil fields. It wouldn’t be the first time that a world war started over some dispute between two nations that mushroomed out of control after one nation after another chose up sides to back.

UNDERGOING A CREDIBILITY MELT-DOWN

I have in my writings spoken of soap opera characters having a "moral melt-down". As you know melt-downs are chain reactions and they don't stop till the whole reactor is destroyed. In the case of a soap opera character, it is an individual, usually of the female persuasion, who has some pecadillo she is guilty of, often it's to cover up some other lie. But she lets this moral weakness, this "thing" take over and dominate her whole life so her whole personality melts down. Today and this week, Joe Lieberman is the dog de jour. What he hinted at on Face the Nation last Sunday became a reality and he says he's going to join the Republican fillibuster to stop this health bill from going through with the "insurance exchange" or the Medi-Care elligability at age 55. And to heighten this outrage a video has surface where Lieberman just over three months ago said he would support Medi-Care at age 55 as part of a health bill. Some paranoid ones among us say "He just wants to spread the misery and when he sees liberals so happy over a development, he just has to be the grinch whole stole Christmas". I don't know if I'm prepared to go that far, but it's funny how certain people such as Tammy Bruce and Laura Schleshenger, for example, once they begin their "drift to the right" it seems to have an unstoppable momentum and soon they're off the political radar screen. Of course Joe's wife, Hedassa, works for Smith Klein and other drug companies and is basically a lobbiest for the drug companies. Now of course there is no reasoning with Joe. Liberman is like a spouse that knows the marriage is over and smashes the furniture on the way out. Now they are saying that Lieberman will run as a Republican, that is if he's even electable any more. 56% of the people in his own state don't like his policies. Unlike what Thom Hartman says, I highly doubt any amount of pressure from his constituants flooding his office with phone calls will sway this Senator in the least. He's already pretty much decided he'll leave politics and go where the real money is - being a lobbyist. They say that President Obama met with all sixty caucus democrats and that included Lieberman and Sanders. Were it me I'd have made it a real kick ass speech where I cranked up the pressure and said things like "If you fail on this vote you will be letting a country down. This is the time for real men to show what they are made of even if it means standing up to their wives". And oh yes, after the speech was done I'd be sure to see that it was leaked to the internet. I don't think even someone as subborn as Joe wants to be seen as a man who let down his President. Of course Obama has a growing gonad problem himself. (wait a minute- - no I'll let it stand) Obama never had the stones to demand single payer in the first place as a starting negotiation for a health care bill, just as Marsha Clark never had the "ovaries" to demand the death penalty in the OJ Simpson's case. Had both things occurred history might well be different today. Now we have a Health Care bill that's a big, wet sloppy kiss to the insurance companies. Joe Lieberman has taken over a million dollars from insurance companies since 1998. Yes they have to provide coverage to everybody but no, they don't have any rate restrictions on these people in either the house or the senate bills. In fact as I look over the past eighteen months of the Obama administration it's been one long nightmare for liberals. And many Black people still haven't gotten over his throwing his Chicago Pastor that he'd known for twenty years under the bus. And it only gets worse. He's not going to prosecute for war crimes of the Bush administration. At least I don't know of anybody yet. If a President Mc Cain had won the peace prize and given the identical speech lauding war, there would have been howels of protests among the liberals. There is the illegal wire tapping that the President goes along with. And in so many other ways I have talked about till I'm blue in the face, the Obama administration is like a third term of President Bush. Meanwhile back in Congress the Health Bill is stalled again and even the democrats are fighting among themselves. The insurance companies will make out like bandits. They can charge more for insurance coverage, and they will get a lot new federally mandated customers. As long as people including liberals don't see the "banksters" and insurance and drug companies as the problem, we'll get nowhere. I'm beginning to think perhaps we should ban corporations from donating money to political campaigns. It's clear that this money is a "clear and present threat to democracy". I don't see how it can continue to be allowed. I would hope that the Supreme Court would deal with this issue and do what they know is morally right. Corporations don't have first amendment rights! The massive amounts of money involved are staggering. It can be said that buying a politician is the best "investment" that a corporation will ever make. They invest millions and get back billions!

Roy E Disney, son of Roy O Disney died today at age 79. He was born in 1930 and is credited with "Keeping the Disney legacy alive". But he never attained the state of leadership he wanted because Walt Disney had this idea that his brother, the elder Roy, should be squeezed out of the business little by little, just as Henry Ford seemed to have a personal vendetta against his own son, and once took a literal sledge hammer to one of his son's design cars produced as an update to the model T. Walt Disney is said to have been very tempermental. He would rap with his fingers on the table when he was in the "creation process". Supposedly when the creative juices were flowing, both hands would rap in unicen, but when he had a mental block, the hands would rap alternately. Personally I like Hanna Barbera or Warner Brothers cartoons a lot better. I always thought the Disney plots were a little on the "didactic" side, meaning he would try to cram the "moral of the story" down your throat. Of course this only increases the appeal of Disney movies among born again Christians. I think that now the Disney corporation has enough momentum to go on forever, no matter what they turn out from now on.

Oral Roberts is dead. Of course if you wan't a prophecy, "All of these Born Again Christian evangelists are going to die". I imagine that Billy Graham will go next. All of these people are getting a little long in the tooth. First there was Walter Martin, then Gene Scott, then Jerry Folwell. One can invision a time when others such as Chuck Smith, James Dobson, and Chuck Swentoll will be breathing their last. And the thing is we are taught by people like Jesus of KFI that heaven is such a wonderful, intoxicating place, that these people won't even care what happens to their ministries when they're gone. In fact if we believe Jesus, your dearest loved ones will suddenly become "unimportant" and you will just stop thinking about them. In short, dying for a Christian is like receiving a massive dose of Prozac or some other anti-depressent.

Now there is a brain chemical they have isolated called Leptin, that keeps brains from shriveling in old age and prevents the elderly from getting Alsheimers. As you know if you're a GNLD fan is that the brain is a fatty organ and fatty acids are essential to brain function. And if you tend to be a little over-weight you are engaging in activity which may have the effect of helping you stay younger, longer. I think you've seen a lot of older people who have lost a lot of weight suddenly and far from making them appear more fit, their frame takes on a much more frail, haggered appearence. They had another study out last week that said that consumers of large quanties of coffee and caffeine products will make you less likely to come down with diabetes. This is welcome news indeed. I'm still waiting for the survey that shows that second hand smoke is good for you. I can think of one good thing. If an old folks home smells of tobacco, that may help cover up some of the other unpleasant smells that are associated with old age. The whole emphasis on "old age" and products for those of advancing years, would make me real nervous if I were a young person. I thank God I was young during a time when it was fashionable for advertisers to appeal to the youth market and discount old age.

PRESIDENT OBAMA

- JUST ANOTHER POSER

President Obama looked for all the world like just another Poser last night on his Sixty Minutes interview, that lasted only twenty minutes, although they said you could see more on the internet. They promoted his macho “get tough” line with the big wig Wall Street bankers, and yet after firing off his little 4^th. of July flair, he had nothing else to say on the subject. There were no teeth to Obama’s words. Of course today the President will actually be meeting face to face with these same bankers, so we'll see if he still "talks tough" then. Personally I think he'll melt like cotton candy in a blizzard. And he will mostly be kissing ass when he meets those bankers and investment people today. After all he is supporting the reappointment of Federal Reserve head Ben Vernanke. By the way I thought Allan Greenspen was the "least irrational" of all those economic big whigs on Meet the Press yesterday. If President Obama wants to show off his education, he can proved that he's really learned something about what really drives this economy, which is jobs, wages, and demand. But you'd never know Obama ran as a radical by the choices he's made as president. And he still has Larry Summers and Timothy Geitner in his administration. Nobody is talkiing of undoing the effects of all those measures that repeal investment laws that had been put in place in the 1930's that were undone in the Clinton administration in the late 1990's under a Republican congress and turned Wall Street into a gambling casino. If the President were really mad at this “giant sucking sound” we hear, this vacuum cleaner that sucks up any extra money, not for spending in this languid economy but rather for fat cat bonuses of ECO officers, then the president would do something he’s chicken to actually do. He would get radical and get to the root of our money problems by firing them all and putting in people who can be trusted and who care about expanding this depressed economy. People are scared shitless about somehow “re-igniting the fires of inflation”, which is almost as unlikely as my winning the state lottery tomorrow. This whole phoney macho attitude was carried over into Afghanistan. He loves to point the finger at Al Qaeda and yet we with our CIA help, aided and abetted the growth of this Wahabiest movement that came out of Saudi Arabia in the late ‘seventies. This is the extremist faction of Islam that had made all of the headlines in the past ten years or so. President Obama is still trapped in this Viet Nam mindset talking about “the enemy” and “our side” and how “our side needs to train troops to take over the fighting”. We are all so sick of these same tired lines from our President that it’s nauseating. When it comes to health care, Joe Lieberman may well have been speaking for the President yesterday on Face the Nation when he said, “Actually this isn’t such a bad health care bill, if we can just get rid of any last vestige of a Public Option, as well as scrap the idea of lowering the Medi-Care age to 55.” Like the President, Lieberman says “If we could do this we would have a good bill we could all get behind including many Republicans”. However I think the best bet for the democrats now if they want ANYTHING passed is to invoke the “nuclear option” and change the rules so that it only takes a majority of the Senate to get anything passed. The Republicans scared us all endlessly with this threat back in 2005 or so, and it’s time that we democrats learn a lesson from our adversaries. I think the President needs to have al altogether more radical mindset on all of these issues to get to the root of the problem.

Annise Parker was elected Houston's first openly gay mayor last Saturday. This is a real break through for such a supposedly conservative city as Houston, which has now grown to America's fourth largest city passing up Detroit and Philadelphia in the past few years. This is the largest US city to have an openly gay mayor since- - well I'm thinking of George Musconey and Harvey Milk who were gunned down, but only Milk was a homosexual. Apparently sexual identi is not an issue American's consider relivant any more when it comes to electing a person to high office, so I supposed you could say we've progressed as a society.

They may soon be growing body organs comercially, much as they grow hot house orchids and they raise salmon and other fish on "fish farms". Apparently they use stem cells and they use some kind of mold for the body organ, such as a bladder or kidney or lung or heart valve, and somehow the cells know what they are supposed to grow into. That doesn't even make sense as an explanation so I am certain that it has to be a whole lot more complicated than that. The point is, they are already doing it. They had this topic on Sixty Minutes last night. Some people say they are not bothered by the idea of rich people being able to live till 120 or something and they just get a new organ when an old one wears out. But I'm thinking that in terms of allocation of monitary resources, it will take a lot more financing to give rich people these exotic services, than to provide basic health care to a whole lot of poor people.

People flatter me now as some kind of a mathematical whiz or something. But if I were really that intelligent I'd have several girlfriends, not to mention a whole lot of job prospects. Dr. Levy was so over the top in his flatter of me at last Saturday's Christmas party calling me the star of the class, I thought they were fixing to name a whole sing of the building after me. I say things not to be recognized as "intelligent" but to make whatever point it is I'm trying to make that I regard as important. If I were really as good at communacating as people say I am, I would not have all of the personal problems that I do.

WHAT ABOUT "JUST WAR" - ?

Today President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace price and he gave the appropriate speech there in Norway. But to peace lovers the speech was kind of a contradictory obscenity and smacked of the Orwellian “War is Peace”. The President used the opportunity to justify the war in Afghanistan. He also threw in the obligatory remarks about how he really didn’t deserve this prize. But I didn’t see him doing a John Lennon and giving it back. Ronald Reagan had a guest on his show this afternoon and they discussed the ethics of war in general. Clearly this Afghan is a “war of choice” and not of necessity. You know, when Mark Bove was at our church for those few months in early1978, Mom used to complain that Mark used the word “Just” too often. He would always say things like “We just want you to bless everyone here” or “We just want healing for our bodies”. Well, today President Obama talked about “Just war”. And that’s what we have been getting this whole decade from our leadership “Just war”. It’s the all war all the time TV station. You know that some would say that man wars because of his sinful nature. If you read my last posting you know that I question this view. I would say there is an element of “sin” in that a lot of wars just aren’t “smart” to conduct, and the US has engaged in a lot of counter productive wars lately. But really I wonder how far removed we are from Arlo Guthrie’s “I want to kill!” statement to the Army psychiatrist. People everywhere want to defeat what they perceive as Evil. But if you’ve read my writings about the Federation you know there is a state of often uneasy peace between the various Federations, Empires and Star Systems. Those not at war would like to be if they thought they could win. It’s innate man’s nature to want to remove sources of Trouble from his life. But really according to Ron Reagan the US has not been “smart” in that through the CIA we encouraged various Wahabiest sects from Saudi Arabia that made their way through the mideas in the 1980’s. We supported these extremists giving them aid and covert support. And now the chickens have come home to roost and our deeds have come back to bite us in the butt. Why doesn’t Obama give a speech on that? There are other peaceful sects of Islam such as the Sufis and the Bahai, which is a mixture of things. Why couldn’t we encourage these religions rather than violent factions of the Sunis? I do not believe that the majority of Moslems would embrace in their own lives the violent morays of their spiritual leaders.

But Christianity has its legacy of violence. There are the Crusades, of course. Then there is all the violence, both verbal and otherwise, against the Jews. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Jewish people are so resigned to believe anything Christians tell them about their faith. Why aren’t they out picketing that Christianity is a dirty religion that spouts nothing but viscious lies about the Jewish people? People believe Jesus’ words saying the trouble with the Jews and the Romans is that the Jews didn’t LOVE the Romans enough, and if they did they would have peace. But the Christians were not at all coy about wanting to take back the Holy Land from the Moslems, or when they conducted the inquisition or burned heretics and witches at the stake. And there were a lot of “good people” who “just weren’t sure about how they felt” about Hitler’s actions against the Jews. But even in their Holy books, like the book of Revelation, this blood lust goes on, wishing not blessings on their enemies, but rather eternal torment in the Lake of Fire. Jesus on KFI has spoken often of the justness of eternal Hell Fire. And his reasoning is that since God is such a GOOD god, then anyone who would “refuse his gracious atonement” is deserving no less than eternal torment for ever and ever. Back in 1995 I raised the example of a dog, that bites President Bush or someone important and another dog that bites a homeless pickpocket, who engages in seedy con schemes and in generally is just a shiftless, worthless fellow. Jesus would say that the first dog needs to suffer eternal torment in Hell because of who he bit. But you say, “It’s just a dog, stupid, he doesn’t know any better”. Well, that is just my point. At the end of the book of Jonah God reminds Jonah of all the people “There are 120,000 people of Nineveh who don’t know their right hand from their left” or to use the vernacular, “Theologically, don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground”. (Selah)

I want to return to the Special Relativity again. The message of this paragraph is that God built in ego-centeredness into every living entity. The question is how we deal with this reality. Some of you might relate to me the following example to try and stump proponents of the theory, along the lines of the Saducee in the New Testament who asked Jesus about the man who had been married seven times (sequentially) and in the after life which one would be his wife. Here is the example. Suppose you have a space station that is “all stop” in space as they say. This big craft launches a ship to the right, and one to its left each going 9/10^th the speed of light. Now the craft going left in turn launches a smaller craft going in turn 9/10^th the speed of light in reference to this ship. And this smaller craft in turn launches a shuttle craft that is in turn going 9/10^th the speed of light. Now flying in front of this lead shuttle on thousand yards in front is another shuttle craft. And this craft shines a bright light. Now the question is, how can the light from this beacon be measured at 186,000 miles per second by each and every one of the ships behind it? If you think you have the answer - now picture a space ship a thousand yards in front of the ship at the other end of this “train” also shining a very bright beacon. How can the light from both beacons be measured at 186,000 by each and every one of these space crafts? The answer lies in the saying of the “old umpire” in that baseball example, “They are what I call them”. In this case they ARE as you see them, and you SEE them differently depending on which end of the train you are viewing. Because remember- - - objects (meaning measuring devices such as tape measures, yard sticks, or whatever you are using) shorten if they are headed away from you. They LOOK shorter (we’ve proved that) therefore they MUST BE shorter. And with a shorter inch, you measure differently. And you can Jerry-rig the figures to make it all come out right because the smallest “foot” or whatever - -will be at opposite ends of this train depending on which direction you are looking. Of course remember “If it’s reciprocal” than how objective can it be? Human beings view everything from their own perspective. Or as Dylan says “Seems everyone’s been having those (post Holocaust) dreams. “Each sees themselves walking around with nobody else. Some of the people can be right some of the time but all of the people can’t be right all of the time.” And then Dylan closes the song with this hopeful sentiment, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours”.

CHEAPENING A TIME HONORED REWARD FOR ACCOMPLISHMENT

Rush Limbaugh has talked a lot about it. How elementry schools will often reward students for basically nothing just because they "want students to feel good about themselves". Some schools have alledgedly even thrown out the grading system because of this and have substituted other words for description such as "emerging" and "developing". But one time-honored prize was the Nobel Peace Prize. We used to know what that was for. It was for bringing about peace. The award is clearly intended for achievements of accomplish. Now they are giving this award to President Obama who had two wars currently on his hands. Iraq is by no means "peaceful" right now since we still have troops then and the deadlines for withdrawal may not be achieved. Now the President is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Peace is a wonderful thing, just as forgiveness is a wonderful thing. But you can't have forgiveness at the point of a gun, as I often remind Christians and family members. Forgiveness is a positive symptum of a state of being that is now recognized. Forgiveness should not be used as a way of procuring favor or brownie points from somebody. Yes the other side wants peace. They are seeking the peace of the graveyard, when there is no enemy left to vanquish. Surely the President's ego is not so shallow that it has to be puffed up by such a bogus honor of achieving something he has not achieved. They might as well give the aware to two warring street gangs in south central Los Angeles.

I have been speaking of how you can't "find God" on your own. We proved with mathematical logic that in order to achieve some "spiritual plane of existance" it takes some sort of super-natural transformation (and I use that word in its generic sense) from some Power outside this time-space continuoum we call the physical universe. We know that there is evil in the world and evil is not Sin per se. Sin in the generic sense is "error". People can make a "mental error" or a "judgement error" any time. But I would classify evil for instance as that restroom scene from The Shining where the attendant tells Jack Nichelson "You know, your son is trying to bring an outsider into this situation". In other words "Good" is seeking help and THAT must be prevented. This is not sin; this is deliberate, purposful action. You "deal with good" in one of two ways. Either you destroy the good that would help. Or you block the good from reaching the point of need, or in the case in my life, you "co cpt it". For instance I haven't talked about Bill Gunderson much lately, because several weeks ago he was "co opted" by my family. This means he became "One of Them". (the Enemy) He was "turned". It isn't paranoid to admit to a reality that is in fact true, as I told Dr. Levy in my last letter. Bill Gunderson has been a friend of mine and has known Pete Richards a long time. But never before recently has he been "co opted". Henry is another individual who was "co opted" by my mother, decades ago. The question arises whether those Dead ones who are trapped in the "lowest circles of Hell" close to this earth are in fact the most evil. I'm highly inclined to answer in the affirmative. Yet for instance in latter 1973 I had "Romulan friends" who were from Stanton, and other "Romulan friends" from northern Santa Ana. I certainly don't regard any of these people as Evil. Can a person "volentarily" descend through his karmic funnel to touch those of us here on this plane of existance? We know that various ghosts (spirits) tend to be confined to localities. Yet I don't regard all of them as evil, either. Neither does Sylvia Brown. But it could be that they are uninformed. A person who volitionally swims to the bottom of a swimming pool - - most always has it within his power to re-ascend and rise to the top. But if you are a bottom dwelling fish you don't do this. I don't know what happens to the really evil people. Maybe their "funnel" or locality is no longer on this planet and that's why you don't see them around.

Iran has stated yesterday that if Israel attempts to take out it's nuclear facility, that Iran will respond by taking out Israels nukes. I wonder if they have the power. I only mention this because it shows that hostilities between these two countries is still there. This is indeed an "Evil" that has not yet been "Dealt With" by the Good. As such it is a dangerous and rising danger, untill it is dealt with. My prediction was, is, and will continue to be that Iran will be dominating the news in the very near future and will rise to the level of number one problem in the world. And you and I know that Iran and Israel are not going to arrive at any peace accords tomorrow. They ignored Hitler too, till the time came when nobody could ignore him. A term used by Randy Rhodes was "mono-causality". This is the attributing of all evil in the world to just one thing. Christians say this thing is "Sin". Some Catholics might say "It's all the Jews" whereas a communist would say "all evil resides in Capitalism". Such mono-causeality reasoning is seldom the whole picture, and people who resort to it are usually invaribly Paranoid.

I would like to answer your questions about "Why do light images warp out when it's assume that light travels very slowly- - like maybe a hundred miles an hour?" Some would ask "I can understand a delay in the image but why the mis-shaping?" The answer is because when you are dealing with a relatively flat image, for instance watching fireworks at a distance or something, then the whole image comes late. But when you have a mixture of short and long intervals of light then you have the oppertunity for misshaping. You ask, "But why do things in approach mode seem smaller and farther away and things going away appear closser?" The answer comes from the ammount of "verticality" of the light. If you have ever looked at a swimming pool when it was drained, as I had the oppertunity to do in August of 1992, and you compare the same pool to when there is water in it, the pool appears markedly deeper when it is empty. This is because water travels more perpendicular or vertical, in water than in air. When light travels faster in reference to the object you see- - -as in the case of objects going away, the light "makes up for lost time" and has increased verticality, so things lose depth. On the other hand approaching objects feature light being "slowed up". When an object is approaching - - - not only distance but time is affected. So when two space ships are headed head on twords one another the distances are stretched and time on both vessels is slower - - so that the light travels slower - - so you never exceed light speed. The light has less "verticality" and as such things appear deeper and more cavernous than they would otherwise.

TALK RADIO - FEEDBACK

I like to think I’m a thorough reader but I missed the fact that among congress’s actions yesterday was the extending of Medicare to age 55, which would cover me. This is good news assuming I’m qualified and I guess I am. It would enable some services I currently don’t get around here. It’s strange, though. This virtually doubles the size of the Medicare recipient population and now Randy and others are saying it’s a good thing because more healthy people will pay premiums into the thing, so that this move just might save it from insolvency. It would seem that Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartman and Randy Rhodes are all strangely happy about yesterday’s Senate decisions. They say that this new non profit insurance exchange will be “just as good as the public option” because ninety percent of the premiums actually have to go for services of the insured. If this is true perhaps it’s not so bad. Naturally I’m interested in how it impacts me.

Randy Rhodes wants to clarify the issues concerning this global warming fuss. It seems that the E mails in question are actually ten years old. I didn’t know that. Also I didn’t know that they were debating whether to release a certain report when in the end they actually made the report public. Also as to the idea of a “cooling trend” it was pointed out that 1998 was a spike hot year, but in general, smoothing out the spikes, we are still in an uptrend. The ‘ought’s have been hotter than the ‘ninties. Also Randy wants us to know that when it comes to photographs of Arctic ice and glaciers, they have been melting steadily for forty years. And 40% of Arctic ice is now gone. Also when they do these ice sheet tests that go back tens of thousands of years- - obviously in an ice pack melts this wipes out ice that has been there perhaps a hundred thousand years. This is no small thing. But given all this I still don’t feel a carbon tax is the way to go at this time because this recession has slowed development more than any conservation measures could now. But we don’t have the choice according to Randy.. Because the Bush court in 2007 ruled five to four that edicts of the EPA must be followed, even when George Bush didn’t want to follow them. And in 2007 there were already laws on the books regulating the use of carbon dioxide. So I guess we are all at the mercy of the machinations of the government whether we like it or not.

Sean Hannity interviewed Dick Chaney on his program today. Of course this gave Dick Chaney an opportunity to “go off” on the idea of holding a criminal trial in civilian court for the architect of 9 – 11. Now Dick says this trial would help Al Qaeda and “give aid and comfort to the enemy”. He’s gone further to say that President Obama is actually guilty of treason. Dick Chaney says that the idea of Eric Holder prosecuting Bush Administration officials as “a losing proposition for them”. Dick thinks that “we did a lot of wonderful things” to prevent terrorism this decade.

You know, it’s important for a teacher to “know his shit” when he gets up to speak before a class. It’s certainly true of a math teacher. It’s true of me if I am ever going to successfully impart to you my knowledge of higher math and science. It is true of the Christians. This is one area where Henry Drummond in the movie “Inheret the Wind” got the better of Matthew Harrison Brady in the “Keats trial” on Evolution back in the twenties. For instance Drummond got his opponent to admit “that a sponge has the right to think”. He also got him to say that “sexual intercourse is original sin”. Also he gave that remark about “Where did Cain get his wife?” responding “I leave the agnostics to hunt for her!” Also in the matter of Joshua stopping the sun- - nobody is saying that God did it instantaneously. The earth spins one thousand miles per hour. I see nothing wrong like perhaps God took an hour or so to stop the earth and than another hour to start the earth spinning again. This would not cause nearly as much harm to the environment. When you pitch any case to someone it’s important to have all of your bases covered and know your subject backwards, forward, and sideways- - and be able to field any and all questions no matter where they come from- - even the real curve balls.

Being thussly forwarned, let us now tread again into the deep waters of Albert Einstein. You know, that posting in its original version back in “Psychic Balance” ventured farther into speculative conclusions than I felt comfortable at the time going public with to you people, and so I changed the text. But there are four axioms about Einstein’s special theory of relativity I want you to meditate on today.

When you see an event Sooner, it means speeds are slower

When you see an event Later, it means speeds are faster

This is because apologists of the Theory

Jerry rig the speeds of light to match the theory.

Remember: Addition means smaller numbers

With Subtraction you get bigger numbers

When you are running away from something

You get bigger and faster

When you are pursuing something

You get smaller and slower

Above all remember this:

Things are just what they look like

And not as logic would dictate

What you see is what you get

I’ll be the first to admit that all of these are counter-intuitive. But you have to enter that Alice in Wonderland arena of mind altering perception, with or without a chemical assist to your brain. Picture that scene I said you would see outside your fleeting space shop- - things smaller in the front and bigger behind you- - and all of that. What if things didn’t just SEEM that way they really WERE that way. And I’ll add something not mentioned before. Suppose things to the sides of you were curved lines. Like “space being bent” or something? Some may say “Don’t some of your ideas validate established physics?” Well they violate Newtonian physics, that’s for sure, but we’ve left that behind. Here is another illustration that may help you relate, though it is an imperfect analogy. You remember the “circirama” movie in the round that Disneyland used to have? Now if they were showing a straight street, if you were off to one side of the theater, you would perceive this street as curved. It would be curved away from you so that you would be on the outside of the curve. I would go further and talk about an “Ether Wind” that would blow you off course if you went sideways. You may say to me that “OK, but suppose you were standing still and the Star Trek Enterprise goes past youi and you watch it go from left to right?” Allright. I would tell you that this ship would approach the median quickly and then slow way down once it got “past you”. But saying just when it went “past you” is the problem. Because as you watched the ship it would zoom in quickly across the sky but once it got past the media it would slow way down and crawl out of the scene. But if you interviewed Scotty on board he would tell you that the ship kept a steady keel the whole time. So what of it? You ask “Why would you see a straight line as a curve?” I’ll tell you. Normally if you throw things out the window on both sides of the car, it makes sort of a “V” pattern out the sides. The shallowness or sharpness of the “V” is obviously dependant on how hard the wind is blowing and how hard you throw the object. But the line gets rounded because of our old friend trigonometry. You see you have the reciprocal cosine function to deal with. Because you are either looking DOWN or UP at a curved surface. If you put the curve at eye level it would form just a line, as far as a photographic image on your retina. Normally you are either looking Up or Down at something and this introduces a whole other direction. I hope I explained it. I hope further that my reasoning is sound. I have already gone into edit once and I may do it again.

DEFINITELY HEADED THE WRONG DIRECTION

Well as you know my vote on the Health Care plan has been swinging in the ballance like a loose pendulum. But today two definitive actions of the US Senate have pretty much insured which way my vote will swing when the moment counts, and that is to vote in the negative. As of today I as a California senator would vote a reluctant "No" on the Democratic Senate health care bill. The two actions today are as follows. The public option was scrapped. This was part of a "compromise" move to secure the elusive vote of that sixtieth senator, Joe Obstructionist Lieberman. I hope the people at KTLK don't lose their testosterone or overies as the case may be and somehow rationalize this bad decision. It would be as if they voted a civil right's bill that said that Blacks would not be covered by the provisions of this bill. As far as I'm concerned, if I ever heard the news I heard today, that would be the ballgame. There will be no public option. So yes, a health care bill will be passed to "give Obama a victory" but all it will do is blow a few beaths of Rush Limbaugh hot air into Nome, Alaska when the people were hoping for something more substantive like central heating. Glen Beck exhailed a few breaths of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide the other day to illustrate the utter absurdity of the cerbon tax. Today's bill development is about as absurd. The other cute little move is to defeat the Hatch abortion amendment. I thought abortion was off the table, but someone found the fleeing patient and strapped her back on the opperating table. So now women will be able to sign up for abortion plans they couldn't afford before - because of this bill. It's a deal breaker for this writer.

Dana Rorebocker was speaking tonight on this whole cap and trade movement. He doesn't want congress to surrender its sovreignty for some internationalist agency of some sort of a perternal all encompassing nature - regulating all sorts of aspects of American commerce. India and China of course would not be subject to these provisions. So the "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot warned of in 1992 will only become more pronounced as even more industrialists take their jobs off shore to areas where they can practice their pollution without US interference. I sometimes wonder whether there is a "Hate America" movement throughout the world. They seem to regard the United States as the ultimate sugar daddy "sucker" of all time!

It seems this anti American feeling as even pervaided the courts of Italy. They voted to convict Amanda Knox of pre-meditated murder even though they didn't sequester the jury or even screen then for bias. And they were allowed to read newspapers and have biases going into this case. And they say there was NO forensic evidence Amanda Knox was even at the murder scene with not so much as a speck of DNA. The case is on appeal and the concencus now is that she won't get the 26 year sentense but this will be reduced to about ten. Italians in the tradition of Stephano Di Mira call americans "errogant", which usually means they know we are morally superior and resent us for our superiority - - but they'd rather name call than face reality.

Name calling was on Rush Limbaugh's aganda today. I didn't hear any of today's program escept for excerpts on the Randy Rhodes show. It would seem that Rush Limbaugh in one stroke compared Tiger Woods to President Obama saying that they were both losers, and neither one was good at their appointed jobs. And because both Woods and the President were of "mixed race" they were necessarily "unhappy people" and in the case of the President, left only a wake of misery for all the Black People who supported the President hoping for an economic recovery and are now disappointed. When I heard that "mixed race" line I cringed. Does Rush Limbaugh really want to set race relations back fifty years where a White's worse fear, over and above Black people - is people of mixed race? It is Rush Limbaugh's greatest dread that this economy might recover from this recession. Indeed signs of recovery are becomming more apparent every day and now the President himself is fanning the fires of recovery anew in his new jobs program, where he had launched a new round of economic stimuli. Congress will have to pass the new stimulus measures, but that appears to be no problem. The President wants to do more to directly help small business and "free up credit". But also people want to take some of the recovered TARP money and spend it where it will count. But now the Republicans say "This money should be used to reduce the deficet". But we are reminded that many who passed the Bush tax cuts of 2001 did so to "give back the [Clinton] surplusses to the people who "over paid". Ha! Randy Rhodes is right in that if you placed bets on "who will be proved right" in the upcoming months it will not be Rush Limbaugh and the other nattering nabobs of negativism or the right wing, including Glen Beck.

Now some "Good Guys" institute issued a report against the Zu-Zu hamster pet toys that are so popular for Christmas this year saying that they had dangerous amounts of Antimony. This is a element that is closely related to Arsnic. But the agency did not conform to government procedures in testing, and today it was agreed by one all that the toys are not dangerous.

Yesterday an agency of the Obama Administration officially decreed that we indeed were suffering from Global Warming and that we should institute all of these "carbon footprint" measures that have been talked about. Meanwhile we here in Southern California have been going through a protracted cold spell, and the cold weather is expected to last all week. This could be the best ski season in the High Sierra that they've had in years.

THE TRUE NATURE OF ACTUAL
AND ETHICAL REALITY

One area that I’d like to get into now that we’ve covered the basics is whether there is such a thing as “enlightened self-interest” that can serve mankind. As you know in the “Dune” movie she asked, “Are you a human or are you just an animal?” What’s wrong with this is that animals are not altogether devoid of such “human” traits such as self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole, or “democracy”. Today Thom Hartman was thumping one of his favorite melons. He was saying that corporations aren’t people and that they shouldn’t be accorded the rights of human beings. There should be an unlikely ally in this from the words of Rush Limbaugh in his having said, “an animal has no rights because he can’t contract together to obtain rights like we did with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Man is there accorded certain “inailiable rights” and also is regarded according to Randall Terry of “being accorded certain divine grace, and also subject to divine laws”. But even the Calvary Chapels, whom I don’t like, can be said to have been accorded “certain inailable powers - - by God”. Because they are what they are and have the power they have because of God’s providence, and I or anyone is a fool to deny this. How you ask can an objectivist deist believe in things like “God’s laws” or “God’s graces”. That’s simple. Because in the words of the Document itself, such things are “Self Evident” and as such exist in this reality and we, be we friend or foe, have to deal with the awareness of that reality. But someone like Captain Piccard would argue that Business Corporations are not “Sensient Beings” and as such should not be accorded the rights of Personhood (although Piccard has at times accorded these rights to things that were clearly just machines) I learned as far back as my senior year in high school in business law that corporations had the rights of persons. But now Thom Hartman says that corporations lack these rights and should under the “death penalty” after a certain set time. According to Hartman, corporations used to need to have a “Reason for being” or a Charter, which explains all the altruistic functions of the corporation and why society would benefit by having them exist, somewhat akin to the Fairness Doctrine of the FCC. But now we learn that according to modern law that a corporations Primary purpose must be to make a profit. And this could become a problem in the area of health care where the primary purpose should be to insure and restore health to the public they serve. If only- - . It is pointed out that in all of Europe including Switzerland, that no for profit corporation is allowed to participate in the health care process. In England the government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors. In Germany and France these are private, but the insurance plan is provided by the government. Last week I heard a guy on the internet talking how single payer health plans could never work, but that doctors would only charge fees for unnecessary care and bankrupt the system. I cannot agree with this assertion. Like teachers, I believe most doctors would be happy just to be insured a decent income and they would give the patient all of the medical care that he deemed that he needed. It’s a question of who you trust. Do you trust the doctors more or the HMO insurers more? This question is virtually self-answering. The question is whether doctors can practice medicine in their own “enlightened self interest” and still provide the amount of medical care necessary and most expedient to the patient. I think it’s an experiment worth running. It’s a solution we have not yet tried in this country except on a much smaller scale. Let’s try out the system they have in France and Germany. In utilitarian terms it will benefit the increased health and “general physical welfare” of society. As such we will get better human beings, because things like mental health and the issues thereof will also be attended to. If you catch a condition in time it will not mushroom into a far more serious medical condition that requires a long, expensive hospitalization. After all we do have police and fire protection and nobody doubts that these things are part of “the commons”. It’s kind of a basic problem that you can’t turn back the hands of time to the 1950’s where the average person could easily afford a doctor. There are times in life where you have to account the past as so much “water under the bridge” and deal with the realities of society that we face now.

Let’s talk about objectivism today. The Wickepedia has a nice article on the subject. This article is closer to representing my own ideas of truth than just about any other writings I have come across. You’ve heard me state the truths in my blogs that the reality is in the thing being under scrutiny and not in the mind or “perception” of the viewer. There are at present completely unknown truths out there and this things are just as real as the things we are aware of, and once we learn of them we need to employ conscious, meaningful, rational terms to describe them. But of course one must have a rational, cognative mind devoid of any misleading engrams for this to be realized. Apparently Descartes speaks of a “veil of perception” and the claim is made that natural science believes in “representational reality” as its philosophical axiom. What is wrong with representational reality is- - we all know that a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, and this can be measured with sound waves. But one might say “suppose you were some as yet unknown and undefined organism and you perceived the sound of a tree falling as that of someone puking on the floor. Would this not be a valid “representation”? The problem is there is an axiom that you are your best source of information. It’s a bit akin to what some defence lawyers do in murder cases saying that someone else must have broken in and did the deed. You then run into the problem of what was in the mind of some imagined hypothetical suspect. The motive here is not to find reality but to deny it. It would be as if one of Phil Specter’s murdered victums went to some cosmic therapist in the afterlife who told them “You don’t know what was in Phil Specter’s mind” and then go into some rambling attack on the person’s character flaws and how they are not qualified to pass judgement on others. This thinking is off the mark. Whether Phil Specter uses and abuses women is not a subject of how I or anyone “feels about it” any more than my evaluation of Calvary Chapel theology and actions of its members is a function of how I “feel about it”. The truth of what Calvary is exists independent of whether I even exist. If I didn’t exist at all the truth of their character or the lack of it would remain unaltered. In like manner if I’m driving in the rain to a party and I get there and it’s pouring rain, coming down in buckets, and I remark to my wife, “boy, it sure is coming down now” this statement is true regardless of for instance a fish in the ocean who might protest “I’m surrounded by more water than you are so don’t complain”. It’s not a tribute to reality to deny the obvious. Likewise I would pose the question “Who is more qualified to say what a block of wood is. A theoretical scientists who specializes in subatomic particle physics, or a life long carpenter?” I give the nod to the carpenter. Because half of the things the scientists looks at and otherwise “deduces the existence of” with his electron microscope or cloud chamber- - half the things he observes are hypothetical constructions to begin with. Some may say that God has to exist because morality exists. But they don’t care to point to any rational scientific evidence that he actually does exist, they merely infer it. Certain aspects of morality are "self evident". But some people in order to hide their charished moral flaws would invoke an alltogether imaginary God and ascribe to said God certain "secret knowledge" about themselves and others that only they alone are privy to.

In the area of ethics, I believe that “enlightened economic greed” might work if everybody plays by the same rules. Of course people like Ronald Reagen and Bill Clinton changed a lot of established economic rules. Utilitarianism may well work- - provided everybody understands the rules and are not just “using the rules” to manipulate the situation to his own greed. Likewise, communism might work- - if people strictly adhere to it. But as David Duke or Tom Metzker may well point out- - it’s this mixing of messigenation of philosophies that gets you into trouble. Because you have separate philosophies designed to work unto them selves, getting all mixed up together creating only a big mess. Adam Smith's economics is a sound theory, in a vacuum. When you play a video game the assumption is made that it's played in the abstract and that no other realities are to be assumed, except the ones presented in the game. An important axiom in playing any game is you don't change the rules in the middle of the game. Human nature loves to change rules while a game is in progress, and the vast majority of the time they do this out of corrupt motives.

HOW THE CONSERVATIVES HAVE
LOOTED THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

You know, I can't believe all of the flack Governor Swartzenegger is getting for being a spending liberal, even from people from whom you normally would not expect such criticism. Some people say that those Ballot Measures deserved to be voted down because California is way over-spending. I can't disagree more. Governor Swartzenegger was put into office you'll remember as a counter-ballance to Gray Davis, who allowed the state to be looted by Ken Lay and Enron by unwise financial dealings and jacking up the price of electricity here in California. But you'd never know that our present governor used to be called "The Termanator" by the way people are reacting to him today. Among the hard right he is being referred to as a "liberal cave in" bowing to the Kennedy connection of his wife, Maria Shriver. All this because the governor believes we should start being energy efficient and bring California into the 21st Century when it comes to cleaning up our polluted air and water. But the seeds of our current Financial problems we are having now, and they are serious, date back over thirty years to that fateful day when Proposition 13 was enacted by the voters of California. This is the measure that restricted all statewide property tax assesments to one percent of assesed valuation of property. Prior to this measure, California simply didn't have financial problems. Now it is learned that some deal was made by commercial intrests that goes like this: "Right now commercial intrests pay three forths of the property taxes in the state and private citizens, one fourrth. We want you to reverse this so they pay three forths and we pay a quarter". So they worked a deal, and they had to take preemptive steps before the thing was even voted on to insure their success. You know that in Windows you set a "System Restore" point prior to the time you actually need it. This is a case like that. These conservative power brokers knew that real estate prices would explode in this state, and said explosion would actually be Caused by this measure, Proposition 13 passing. So what they did was set up dummy subsidiary corporations that owned the property. Now, any time a piece of property is sold it's supposed to be re-assesed and re-valued. But they got around that by not selling the property directly but having the dummy subsidiaries own their property. And then they would simply sell their subsidiaries, and leave title to the property untouched. You getter read that again. Any time they want to sell or buy property they leave the property title itself untouched but merely sell the subsidiaries that own the property, which accomplishes the same thing, only now they pay a fraction of the tax they once paid. With prices ageraging eighty thousand in 1978 and five or six hundred thousand dollars now for a private home, you can easily see the advantage of this set up. And they have worked it well, so that it's John Q Citizen that pays the bulk of local property taxes.

Turning our attention nationally to President Obama, we liberals find ourselves less than overjoyed by many of our President's policies. Now I hear he's intending on erecting a status to Ronald Reagan and also planning many other centenial celebrations to mark anniversary of the former President's birth. What if Barry Goldwater had after being elected said he was erecting a giant statue of John Birch to be venerated by the people in the spirit of Daniel chapter 2? Liberals rightfully wouldn't like that. Now we hear so often it must be true that "renditions" are still going on. Renditions or kidnapping people and shipping them off to third world nations to be tortured- - an practice begun under President Clinton- - said rendition is still going on. Now we hear that Obama is in trouble with West Virginia voters. Why the people of West Virginia would have voted so heavily for Hillary I don't know. Maybe it's because their all inbred. Perhaps if I were President I'd start my own racial "eugenics" policy. I'd re-institute bussing. I would bus in twenty million Blacks from the ghettos of our large cities to West Virginia to interbreed with the native population and improve the racial stock of the people of West Virginia. Anyhow, now we hear that to please all the mine workers, Obama has a plan to blow the tops off of all the mountains in West Virginia to strip mine for coal as part of the President's vaunted "Clean Coal Policy". I know strip mining is going on in Montana, but West Virginia is a whole other ball of wax. Imagine the ecological devistation! And we still hear that in the good old days of President Eisenhaur, Corporations paid 41% or something of all income tax in this country. Today they pay only seven. What's the President going to do about this? Well, he wants to get tough on off shore corporations. In a speech about off shore tax dodges he says there is a building in the Caimen Islands which headquarters a thousand corporations. He says "It's either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam of all time. You decide which". He says that off shore corporations only pay a two percent rate on income tax. One wonders, and I was scratching my head whether there would be a violation of some sacred Constitutional principle laid down by the Supreme Court or something, if they were forced to pay their share. Apparently this is not the case. Congress can change the tax law whenever they choose, only they are "choosing" not to. We can speculate why. Some say that altering our current tax laws would "cripple our economy further" and exaserbate the recession. I don't believe this for a minute. These corporations don't pay taxes in this country and they skirt the laws in the Caimen Islands or whatever, so they don't pay taxes over there, either. President Obama says if these tax loopholes were closed and they paid their fair share, we could raise 210 Billion dollars in ten years. No offence but this seems a really paultry ammount considering the size of our debt. I am confident we can do much better than that. Rewriting our tax laws so that corporations stay in this country along with their jobs, should be a high priority item for this president.

Some have wondered about me, "You've said many times what you Don't believe on the subject of religion, but just what is it that you DO believe?" Well, as I have said I'm an anti-dyspensationalist, Calvinist, Deist, Objectivist individual. The objectivist part I'll hit first. That means that IF Jesus Christ rose 2000 years ago, it must be a fact that is waiting to be discovered and Will be discovered. An Objectivist believes "The truth is out there- - and one day will be discovered and scientifically proved". Many don't like the idea of our being a nation conceived "By Divine Providence". I have no problem with this statement. I believe also in a form of Creationism. Let me explain. Some believe, and Hartman has said this, that a Deist believes God is somehow in all animate objects. I don't believe this. I am the ultimate believer in the separateness of God and nature. I don't believe God is in nature kind of "guiding the evolutionary force along". I believe that every decision that God WILL make he has ALREADY made. Hence I believe that whatever form that life has taken on planet earth, the seeds of dezign, if you will, were contained in The Big Bang long ago, and things now are just "playing out" as scripted by God before the creation of the Universe. I don't believe, as some dyspensationalists believe- - in a God who appears to be either constantly changing his mind- - or else playing some kind of mind game like Steve Jobs- - like "Can you guess what I'm really planning". I do not believe God ordained either progressive revelation or progressive evolution. I do believe it's proper to thank God for his grace in our own lives, and thank God that we were born in America. If that's corn-ball, so be it. That's what I believe.

You know the Beatles have that new video game out now containing old Beatle studio recordings with chatter never heard publicly before. Paul and Ringo have been promoting this game, due out in September, the past couple of days. It's nice to see a little Beatle unity, however belated. But I'd like to address the original planned cover of the "Get Back" album. This is the photo used on the cover of "The Blue Album" Beatles 1967 - 1970. This whole idea of "getting back" oddly is a gnostic one. It's born of the belief that "Evolution is only Devolution". Any progression foreward only increases the degradation and devolution of the original product. The trouble is of course that getting back really isn't getting back. The songs on the "Get Back" album were so awful that none of the Beatles originally wanted them released. It was John Lennon having a conversation with a certain "somebody" in the Revolution song where he says "You say you want a revolution - - you tell me that it's evolution". I was a big fan of the slogan "Revolution is Evolution" back in 1968. But John Lennon had other ideas, On a show last sunday, we would be led to believe that that certain "somebody" whom Lennon was addressing the song "Revolution" too was Abbey Hoffman. Now John Lennon is attacking people on the left for "ruining it for people like him" who want to live in this country peacefully and not rippling any waves or troubling the Establishment". I think God placed in each one of us the natural desire to grow and evolve personally and intellectually and yes, musically, as the Beatles did. We should always be "pushing the envelope". But Gnosticism was engendered by the desire of a child to crawl back into its mother's womb and find confort there. The hook of attraction to Gnosticism, is "a fundamental lack of belief or confidence in one's self". It's my belief that the Beatles met their demize before they had to, and that there are musical idea forever now laying dorment.