The World Is Too Much With Us

It's really had to keep on top of all these fast breaking stories.  Mark Felt alias "Deep Throat" spoke wisdom when he said "follow the money" or as I like to say in pidgeon Spanish "Vaya Con Dinero".   Now we hear that Governor Christie was hoping he could delay the break in this scandal he is in, till today, because the incoming republican speaker had given Christie his word that he would close down the case against him and issue no new subpoenas.  Now all of that is out the window.  A lot of this blog posting was spliced together willy-nilly, and there is more in Christie later.  Apparently A-Rod managed to get fifty games knocked off of his 200 plus game suspension- to 162 games, which is an entire season.  I thought seasons were 182 games but I guess I’m wrong.  Nora is here right now.  Now a daughter’s DNA identity is discovered not to be her father but a worker at a fertility clinic.  We had sloppy Joes for lunch with onion rings and catsup.  I got two more rings and most of another Sloppy Joe from Laurie, who came all around the back patrician to give me the plate, rather than pass it in front of JW Serell.  I thanked her when I got up to leave.  I had another half Sloppy Joe from Hilda.  We had mushroom soup and I took another apple with me.  

  

West Virginians are facing a fifty day without drinking water, which contradicts what I heard yesterday.   But in Cincinatti they are saying there that there is no downstream water danger.  City officials say that they will be able to rely on city water stored in water towers and resarvaurs till the toxins pass by on the River.  Let’s hope.  But yesterday people were complaining that the water still smelled, though it was deemed safe, and people weren’t trusting it. One lady they inerviewed said "I'm not going to serve my babies tap water ever again, but I'm just going to dip a little more into my food stamp allotment to buy bottled water.  Yet even now there are so many right wingers who have no problem with hydrolic fracturing to boost natural gas output.  It seems that some Court just ruled against BP because they claimed people were getting settlements from that hadn't even established proven damages.  But the Court told BP "This is just a part of a deal you previously agreed to".

  Expects say that Christie would be smart just to ignore Bridge Gate in his State of the State address today, just as Bill Clinton avoided the Luinsky case in January of 1998 “Because no matter what else is in the speech, people in the media will only pull out that one clip”.  Good point.  However it turns out Christie did make a reference to the event in that famous passive voice of "Mistakes were made" used by politicians since the dawn of time to dodge personal responsibility.  Randy Rhodes is on right now and there is another “Gate” Gate, and Randy says “let’s just retire that word.  It’s been forty years already”.   The funny thing is that in the "only poll taken since the event" Christie remains at 59% approval by the people of New Jersey.  Go figure.  A Hoboken lady representing a city that had experienced heavy Hurricane Sandy flood damage asked the governor for a hundred million.  She was asked for her endorsement in the spring of 2012 and when she said she was staying neutral- - she walked away with only three hundred thousand.  It seems that Christie has shown a lot of animisoty tword the state legislature and the president of the State Senate in particular - - in nominating Supreme Court justices, including yanking one woman he himself had put forward “because he didn’t want her answering any questions”.  Another time- - Christie refused to renominate an African American justice, when the custom of the state and succeeding governors- - IS to renominate Court Justices.  Mayor Sokelitch of Ft Lee successfully was able to get a 16 acre parcel of land granted a Billion dollar redevelopment deal that is “currently under construction” or twin 47 floor towers.  The idea that Governor Christie would not know about the mayor in possession of that much money, is insane.  Just how many billion dollar land deals are there going on in the state of New Jersey.

Apparently the National Football League lost a bit Court case involving head on head injuries on the playing field.  The NFL had submitted some sort of settlement they hoped that the Courts would approve.  But the Court isn't having it because the lady judge claims that injuries could run way higher than what the National Football league was offering as settlement.  And so the way is opened for much bigger lawsuits by the affected players.

The strangest story of yesterday is this new theater shooting in the outskirts of Tampa, Florida, I believe, which began as an argument over cell phone texting and this retired 72 year old retired police officer told the man to turn off his phone.  And the officer had gone out to the Lobby.  And the 42 year old man with the cell phone said, “What did you do?  Go out and report me?”  And they got into some altercation and the man with the cell phone threw popcorn at him.  Well that’s it!  It’s the death penalty for throwing popcorn at a police officer.  The officer shot the man and his wife.  And then another off duty police officer appeared and helped to apprehend the shooter.  People really have short fuses these days.

There has been yet another Middle School shooting.  These shootings seem to usually occur in the mornings.  A yet twelve year old seventh grade student shot a 14 year old boy and a 13 year old girl, as targets he had marked in advance.  The event occurred in gym class and the boy was quickly subdued within ten seconds.  I wonder if the class was co ed.  The parents were told to pick up their kids at the local shopping mall and not to come to the campus, which understandably was closed down. Apparently there were rumblings of how the shooter used to be a victim of bullying.  By some people's count there have been nearly thirty such shootings by fellow students on campus since Sandy Hook.

According to Bill Press and one other source, Hillary Clinton kept a political hit list because in her 2008 campaign a lot of people “burned her” by endorsing Obama who she was sure would come out for her.  Among these are Ted Kennedy (who ended up dead) and John Edwards (who developed a scandal, and Clair Mc Haskle, I don’t know who she is, and Chris Dodd, who apparently was later investigated, and even Howard Dean.  I guess some new book is coming out about Hillary.  But Hillary also politically rewarded those who backed her.  I can't help but wonder whether the tea party would come out nearly as boldly against Hillary in 2009 as they did against the President.  How much of their "courage" would remain f they knew that the person they were going after - - actually fought back.  We could actually use more of that toughness Hillary has shown - in the Oval Office.

There is that Boeing 737 that almost ran off the runway that was only half the length it was supposed to be because the gun didn’t land at Branson, MO but rather a site seven miles away, and there was a sharp embankment right at the end of the runway.  The guy had to use heroic breaking and turning and whatever to prevent disaster.  None of the passengers were hurt.  I’m only wondering why when the pilot saw his major mistake that he didn’t just pull up on the stick and get out of there and take off again – especially with a cliff at the other end.

 
There is one saying of "A Picture is worth a thousand words" and another that goes "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and you morph them together to get "A picture is in the eye of the beholder".   People "frame" conversations and terms of debate the same way a photographer "frames" a particular shot, or crops it that way later.  Some say this life is all there is.  Others say "If you knew the whole picture you'd see the true meaning of this event that appears to be a tragedy".  That's how it works.  But here is the bottom line.  If BAD people are not dealt with in THIS world, in the here and now, the World and Society will continue to suffer from these same bad men.  And good men will forever be prevented to living up to all they could be because of the presence of others with malevelent motives that want to stop them.  So in soap land the "bottom line" is that Stephano Di Mira has never been charged with any crime, much less convicted and sentensed.  If there is a "meaning' therefore to Days of our Lives" it's that Bad Men have power to enforce their will.  They beat up or sneak up and knock out men, and they drug women, they break into offices and never get caught.  They always make their "escape" in mysterious ways.  They hack into multiple computer systems at the same time and wipe out all traces of certain information, yet strangely never leave evidence of their own "fingerprints on the deed" that can ever be traced back to who sent them.   An esententialist might say "I'm honest enough with myself to say that there is no "ultimate" meaning to Life".   But the authors of the Old Testament write in "meaning" with every turn of the page, with every Story.  Yet come new testament times in 70 AD it all blew up in their face, and even the most avid apologist and rationalist capable of the greatest of mental and rhetorical accrobatics, would have to admit 'You know- - you Got Me.  I'm Exposed".  If there is no other lesson the Jewish people should "learn" from the Gospels and the NT, this one is it.  You apparently "get by" with this Story that Jehovah God is Supreme- - but somehow in the here and now, in the real world, it all falls apart on you.  Given this reality does the Existentialist look so synacal after all.  The exestentialist's problem of course is that "once you discover that there is no point to anything then your quest is over.  Move on; there's nothing to see here".  But if that were the case the Exestentialist would be out of business.  Therefore he has the absurd task of finding a Meaning in why there is no meaning.