LEAVING THE PAST BEHIND

Now I have the darkest shade of green up here.  I thought I'd be doing this posting in Firefox but just this morning Google Chrome invited me to download so I did, so now I have their nice picture on like I had before.  At least they wanted to transfer all my settings.  Andy got my bookmarks to the new Firefox but History seems to be lost.  History begins with "Today" in Firefox.  Just to update you readers as to what's been going on, I know I did not post for three days.  The last entry was a Saturday morning update.  Andy came in the afternoon to bring me my new Computer which is one of these Jay Leno antique jobs from Leno's garage or something.  But the boot up is faster.  I have about 50% more RAM and the speed is up to 3.07 gigs.  But the big thing is I don't have all that junk clogging up my system upon start up.  Before there was all this stuff I didn't dare un-check because i didn't know what it did- - - and I had stuff like Voice recognition I'm only ever used a few times because it makes mistakes.  Adobe Media player kept rechecking itself in the Start-up menu.  And I'm also free of Yahoo Messenger now.  Before my desktop was filled with stuff from Dell and Napster and Kazzah, and Vongo and Milkago - - stuff I never used.  The programs I do want to download again are I Tunes, Sketch, Picassa, and Earth.  So understandibly I've been busy shuffling files around and organizing home page defaults the way I like them.  I've been doing other things and yesterday I developed a sudden, bad cold, which threw off my rhythm.  But the thing is there hasn't been anything in the news worth commenting on later so it was no real loss that I wasn't posting for three days.  I was never cut off from the internet, so I could have posted if I had wanted to.


Mc Cain and Fred Thompson were on Sunday.  Mc Cain is smarter than any of the previous eight republican candidates running and strangely, even at this juncture, Mc Cain would be a better candidate choice out of those eight.  Fred Thompson has that distinct type of "David Mc Millon" Tennessee accent that Al Gore Sr. had and some of Elvis's friends like Red West and Sam Philips had.  Newtie is looking bad in the polls.  He still has that Kermit the Frog vocal inflection he needs to do something about.  Romney is leading fifteen points in the polls, but Romney has been there before and we know what happened.  If Romney wins Florida it may be all over because places like Maine and Nevada in February will favor Romney and by March, Newt may lave lost all his momentum.  So February will be a new month in a lot of ways.  Of course in my personal life my monitery problems will be a thing of the past after tomorrow- - at least hopefully.  These past two weeks have been rather tight.  In terms of the photograph, when I get around to downloading it, it is Loretta Hill and Richard Powers, two people I miss.  One is dead and the other is not available.  Seid and Nicky were apparently unable to get Loretta to sign that hospital visitation form they wanted people to sign so that Seid could visit them if they became ill.  I didn't want to do it.  Of course now Seid and Nicky haven't been here this whole month of January.  I don't know if it's from our end of perhaps their end.  The last time Seid was here on Christmas night he said that "I'm making an exception and saying it's OK for you people to smoke as long as you live here".  That could have gotten him into trouble with the Mormon superiors.  Clearly the people who run this place are fundamantalist Christians who talk about Satan all the time, so there may be a problem there, too.  Anyhow- February will be a new month and a different month.  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we enjoyed what I call "super-bowl weather" because those three days, and some of Monday were warm, dry and clear blue sky with streaky clouds like the desert.  If they had Super Bowl when they used to that would have sync'd right in.  I've never understood this whole two week thing.


Sixty Minutes had that Texas ranch that's turned into an African safari hunting experiance.  It's kind of like an amusement park for rich people where you pay a fancy price to bag a rare wild beast.  I've been the matter a lot of thought and concluded that there is nothing wrong with the opperation.  It certainly will preserve a lot of species that by now might have gone extinct in Africa.  It's a place where people can come and have that "African safari experiance" kind of like Lion Country safari used to be in Irvine 40 years ago.  But the government is sticking their nose in things.  Governments like to do that.  Now you know that "Tweets" will be  censored  - - so that there can be no more "Arab Springs".  Of course Qatar organized the previous Arab spring a year ago and it was a good thing.  But now "twitter" is bowing to pressure.  Google will start collecting information on all of us, hopefully not to be turned over to the government, but you never know.


Thom Hartman wants to remind us that by law in the 'sixties- - all health care coverage had to be non profit and so Blue Cross and Blue Shield and all the rest used to be strictly non profit.  They say a single payer health care bill narrowly missed passage by two democratic votes here in California.  That is interesting to know.  Now Hartman wants us all to contact four particular democratic state senators.  Of course you know that it's a myth that Grover Norquist is for small government.  He is only against limiting people who would cramp his personal brand of dictatorship style.  He wants a center statist government where Cities are "owned" by the States and have no rights to their own property but all the property belongs to the State regardless of any contractual stipulation.  So valuable local parks and monuments will be turned over to a central government to opporate at a profit, or not at all.  Also the European Banks want to take over the Greek government and buy up all their ancient wonders and conduct tours at a profit and not give the Greeks access to any of their own revenues.  Sounds crazy.  Now Norquist wants to impeach President Obama if he allows the Bush tax cuts of 2003 to expire.  And of course there is this one billionaire republican congressmen who wants to hold up all sorts of government posts that are vacent in the Obama administration, till he can get some sort of hard assurance about the Canadian - Texas oil pipeline.  So these are crazy times.


Now on the Thom Hartman show there is a new term introduced called "solipsism" or something, and I see that word is not red lined.  Far from being an Objectivist as I claim to be,  solipsism is the belief that only the Self exists and when you die, you don't really die; it's just the world that goes away.  But a more dangerous aspect than this is that people like Ayan Rand and such are classic sociopaths in that they view other people as just cardboard cut-out things like targets in a video game to be moved around and shot at, but having no life of their own.  Classicly a sociopath has no empathy or feelings at all for any other person.  I talked about two major flaws in Calvary Chapel Christianity.  The one if the obvious is that your status is determined not by your own character or by how much you love or give to others, but rather how much "God" has loved or given to you and bestowed Blessings on you.  It seems that "Blessings" are the 'moral capital" in the world of Calvary Christianity.  But the other is the Grover Norquist problem.  That is not that their government is too strong but too weak.  So that you don't feel as you are joining a Church with an established government and set theology and organizations and rules everybody knows about and respects.  Rather it's like some dog eat dog business.  It's a cult of personalities where the strong rule over and devour the weak.  As I said, with Grover Norquist he doesn't mind big government is he gets to be the dictator.  Indeed his form of government might be called the Dictatorship of the international Corporatist.  It's just that Norquist doesn't want any governmental rules on his own actions.  Just as strong, carismatic figures within Calvary Christianity don't mind weak government of the church because it gives Them a lot more personal power with no sense of accountability or checks and balances.  Otherwise Chuck Smith senior comes out of a Calvinist Baptist tradition and as such in this way his background is little different from my own, and as such it's hard to have a genuine dispute with any of his basic theology - - except for the end of the world stuff - which is only used as a basic lure and come-on for new-comers, and then is discarded.  There is of course a psychological danger of anyone why buys into this stuff too much in that their alligences are with some imagined fantasy "hereafter" rather than problems of this real world, with real people with real lives and real concerns.  (Selah)  Dr. Levy asked us yesterday why more religions don't teach tollerence of other Faiths.  I said "It's just anathema to everything we've ever been taught, no matter which denomination we come out of.  We just aren't conditioned into even thinking in those terms."  (Selah)