Nationalize "American International Group"

It’s time for a lot of us including this writer to make a reluctant departure with a cherished belief, and that is personal property rights. It’s time for the Federal Government to Nationalize the banks, notable American International Group, or A I G. There seems to be no way around it. President Obama doesn’t want to do this because he has surrounded himself with Wall Streeters not all that different from the people Clinton or Regan surround himself with. In the same vein I say if we are going to go for National Health Insurance at all, another move I am reluctant to make, then we have to make a clean break with the past and go for the single payer health plan. One woman on a radio show says she didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries because “She wanted it to be a requirement that everyone get private health insurance”. She had hoped that Berock Obama would be different. The thing is with A I G they are taking $165 Million dollars in bonus payments. While compared to the billions the government has already paid out, it’s still a lot of money to the rest of us. I don’t see why a “traditional” conservative would not balk at this waste and corporate welfare. Pat Buchannon may be upset about the stock holders “taking a bath” but it seems to me that these companies are already pretty close to insolvent anyhow, and I don’t imagine that stock holders have that much left of their equity. I don’t know how “Nationalization” works entirely. Is it just legalized theft by the government of private enterprise? Wouldn’t it be possible for the share holders to be compensated envoking the laws of Eminent Domain? The thing is that they say that the Government already owns eighty percent of A I G anyhow. If conservatives believe that “property ownership gives you rights” then by my way of thinking, and check out my math- - it would seem that a 62.5% percent vote of Congress would be enough to pass any law regarding the corporation. You see you just divide by 4/5^th.

What is clear is that nothing else will work. Obama wants to threaten and cajole them or somehow “use leverage”, meaning he’ll give them another three hundred billion if they will just cancle the bonuses. This really is burning down the barn to get to the rats. The government believes it would cost double the 165 Million figure to take AIG to court and stop the payments that way. There is decay in our system and we aren’t dealing with it. You would not send your dentist a photograph of yourself smiling and ask him to make a full dental diagnosis from that. Just as Christians claim ( - ) that corruption runs so deep in the human soul it takes Divine Intervention to remedy the matter and nothing short of an act of Divine Sovereignty will suffice- - so it is that you can’t cure dental decay by slapping on a whitening solution- - or just patting the same crooks on the back while Congress continues to throw money down a rat hole. Conservatives will not hesitate to say such measures as The Great Society don’t work with the poor- - - so why should they work with the rich? You’ve heard the adage that if you give a poor person a million dollars he will spend it all in ten years in ten years and be broke again. Likewise if a rich person gives away all his money, in ten years he will have earned all his money back again. Such are the ways of money. Timothy Geitner may be the problem because his speeches are so universally regarded as too complicated for the man on the street to understand. People have said, “What harm will it do to temporarily nationalize certain banks and then return them to private hands after we’ve got them on their feet?” If you dry out a drunk for thirty days, at least he’s got a fighting chance of making it now.

The price of cigarettes has been skyrocketing with several hikes in the same brand and prices in general seem to have gone up fifty percent in the past month. How ironic it would be if President Obama’s actually had a negative impact on the poor and people like me, rather than the other way around. I don’t see why we need a regressive tax such as cigarette tax hikes in this time and circumstance. As to the money President Obama has promiced, it hasn’t arrived and there is no real indication of when it will.

The stock market is continuing up on the news that housing construction is sharply up. Evidence continues to mount that we have rounded the economic corner. Meanwhile the secretary of the Federal Reserve says on Sixty Minutes that we were much closer to an economic melt-down last fall than anyone cares to admit. It’s a sad thing that most of us peons out here in the real world don’t know what to believe any more. You know, if Ross Perot were President I bet we wouldn’t have this problem because he believed in “Straight Talk”, as Franklin Roosevelt believed in straight talk. But today there are no Davids out there to overthrow the Corporate Goliaths.

One More Time Around the Block - - -

I could like to call this essay “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for Twelve Year Olds”. There was a story on a talk radio program last week where there was this one classroom of twelve year olds, one may presume mostly boys, where the kids were sitting on the floor and on the window sills just having a “bull session” apparently, engaged in heeded discussions. My take on any proposition is that if you can’t explain or “disseminate” it (big word) to an intelligent twelve year old, you’ve got a major problem on your hands. The argument against the Theory is a similar one to Robert Cumming’s arguments on behalf of Margo Wendice in the movie “Dial M for Murder”. He says, “It all comes down to the jury not believing her story- - and for the jury believing the faboricated incident about “seeing C A Swan at Victoria Station about the same time that Margo lost her hand bag”. Just two little premises like this can knock reason into a cocked hat. In order to “sell” the theory of relativity you likewise have to “buy into” some rather simple but absurd propositions. First you have to believe that light is NOT bent by gravity when it goes past a massive star. This is one of the so called “proofs” of the theory. The idea being that is light is not bent but by “definition” is straight but you have no other choice than to believe that space itself is bowed or contracted by gravity. For the next proposition you have to disbelieve Einstein’s OWN WORDS elsewhere in his argument. You have to deny that said gravity is one & the same for purposes of physics as Accelerat-ING matter, but rather that Accelerating matter is identical to Accelerat-ED matter. The final leap of faith you have to undergo is that light really isn’t a wave as we know like sound is, and as such is NOT affected by the “doppler effect”. You better read these three propositions over again before we go further. Having thrown out these three - - facts, we are free to invent our own reality. The next thing I want to do is to talk about mathematical formulas. I have a formula for gravitational acceleration otherwise known as the “gravitational constant”. I also have a formula for hyperbolic hyperbolic trig functions. Both formulas “work” precisely as they’re “supposed” to but neither is the one I’ve seen on-line. One looks at E = M x C x C and this bears little resemblance to the “functional things” we are taught about the Theory. Rather the formula would go something like this: As the speed of an object approaches light the gap in matter speed and the speed of light narrows. At ninety percent of the speed of light only ten percent of the speed is the “gap”. Now- - you take that factor of ten and slow time down by that much, and you shrink space by that much in ONE direction, and you increase Mass by that much, or ten times. Now before you throw a spaz- - the actual numbers are attenuated from the ones I have used. For instance nine tenths shrinks down to a factor of two or something. I’ll tell you what. Let’s make it the square root of ten – OK. That would be just over a factor of three. Are you following? Now for the final pies de resastance- - let me give you a real life picture of the theory in action. Picture a two hundred meter foot race. Now picture the track shrunk down to twenty meters rather than 200. OK? According to ordenary logic- - let’s go back to our Gravity verses Accelerat-ING matter. Make the leap in logic and say accelerat-ING matter is the same is Accelerat-ED matter. In our example, as you may surmise, the runners are all running approximately nine tenths the speed of light. (given our previous caviat) Because we deny the Doppler effect- - we “assume” that time has physically slowed down. And it’s a deductive fact that when time slows down mass increases. Every time you see mass it’s a function of time. Were time to run backwards mass by definition would have to go negative- along with space in one direction. If we assume the shrinkage of one the other conclusions must logically follow. We assume space shrinks because we “proved it” with telescopic observations of Mercury during a solar eclipse in 1919. We assume time slows down because of the Doppler affect “Cant” be the answer because they say it doesn’t exist. As far as the people running the race are concerned- “Mark, have I got your theory right?” - - then the people in the race perceive themselves as running in normal time and ten times as far because spacially they have shrunk. Since their sense of time is wrong they don’t “know” that their mass has increased by a factor of ten. Do you have the picture? Now here are some bonus facts that I’m throwing in for free: According to modern physics, the nature of the atomic particles determines the nature of the space around them. Hence, anti-matter cannot exist in our universe. Black holes cannot exist - - for a whole host of reasons. Produce a Black Hole and the theory of relativity goes Bye Bye.

Gordon Gecko verses Bible Prophecy

This is one of these "verses" things like America's Funniest Home Videos. I don't know if you're into any of what they call the psychic arts, be it crystal ball reading, tarot cards, tea leave reading, palmistry, or astrology. But if you are perhaps you're a little annoyed at Christians, notibly Jesus Christ of KFI "dissing" your favorite vehicle of choice. These people love to make claims such as "Not one verse of Bible prophecy has ever failed in over two thousand years". Sounds pretty impressive, doesn't it. Jesus of KFI has been so bold as to state "Of all the psychic and prognosticative arts, astrology has the poorest track record of any of them". I can tell you from personal experiance that my own predictive powers are way above those of chance. Sometimes it's important to look for key words- - in this case "Personal Experiance". If I were to make a prediction such as "The stock market has probably made its all time low. We will probably see a downturn in the market the next couple of weeks, but the lows won't take out the lows we saw on Monday" this prediction would be made by your sticking a microphone in my face, and turning on the machine and rolling tape, recording my words. And when I was done with the prediction I wanted on the record I'd say, "This concludes my predictions". Then you would have me on the record. But what about the Bible? How much of the Bible is prophecy? Well, a Christian would say "Well- - all of the major prophets, all of the minor prophets, plus Psalms and Proverbs, I guess". Out of a typical Bible how many pages do you suppose that would take up in the Book. Three hundred? OK, let's go with that. These people will say there are 298 prophecies about Jesus Christ that have come to pass. What they won't say is that there are about 1,800 predictions of Jesus' second coming that haven't come true yet. That already makes them one for six. But then they will point to the odds of even a few incidents being predicted. How many points are you prepared to spot them. What odds will you give them saying "OK, I grant that it's, say 100 to one". How high are you prepared to go? One thousand to one? One million to one? How about ten billion to one? Do you want to concede that the odds may be ten billion to one that the events they say the Bible predicts just happened by chance? I'm going to show you a valuable lesson here so watch and learn. OK now we have to do just one more thing. On any given page of "prophecy" what percent of a "typical page" to they actually quote? We're doing averages now so give me a figure. Ten percent? So on the average they quote ten percent of prophecy they call their own? We'll be generous. We'll grant them ten percent, per page. Now start counting pages, each at ten to one odds. So at three pages in we are already at one thousand to one. Keep multiplying each figure by ten till you come to three hundred or ten to the three hundredth power. Now, take that answer and divide it into the Ten Billion to one figure we mentioned before. Suddenly ten billion doesn't look so big any more, does it? But I'll go you one better. Take their favorite, most prized passages of scripture and just use that, allright? Many say that Isaiah 53 is their nearest and dearest scripture. This has to be predictive of Jesus, doesn't it? Well, these verses say that the Survant was esteemed as worthless and lived a life full or sorrow and that one and all called him worthless and accursed by God, ect. ect. Now, reading the Gospells, how many people in every day called Jesus "worthless" or "Good for nothing" or a "neglegable person"? Where in all the Gospells does it say Jesus didn't have any friends, you know like the classic nerds they always mention in High School that sit in the back row of the band room. You mean Jesus was never called a nerd? Jesus was never ignored or dismissed as a nothing? In the gospells people divided into two classes. Those who thought he was the true Messiah and those who thought it was a misleading false messiah. But nobody but nobody regarded him as unimportant. So to quote an old movie, "See you really did have a Wonderful Life". I just have one more line I want to bring to your attention. The one that states "I (God) will allot him a portion with the great". No, I'm not disputing that Jesus was rewarded for his suffering. I'm making another point. I'd like you to focfus on two words, they are "Allot" and "Portion". If you allot something you Give it, to someone that didn't previously have it. And the word Portion suggests, that Jesus shared this reward he received with Others. What does this do to Jesus' claim of pre existant sovreign Deity? I really don't know! Don't look now but Gordon Gecko is selling the air craft plant. He's reviewed the financial figures again and decided putting in Comdominians would be more profitable. If you don't sleep with whores, you don't wake up with them the next morning.

Now I'd like to turn my attention to Bernie Madoff. Perhaps you've heard how badly the Securies and Exchange comission screwed up in the Bush Administration. Whistle blowers were willing to put everything at risk because they wanted to take this fellow down. For Bernie Madoff it's do not pass go, do not get two hundred dollars, go straight to jail. So far he's in a "Club Fed" type place where he spends an exausting day of ping pong playing and TV watching. And these ogres insist that he get a full night's sleep from eleven PM to 5:30 AM. He's lucky he doesn't have it worse. You know in the movie Wall Street, Buddy Fox not only was willing to sacrifice his vast income, but also his reputation with his father's company not to mention going to jail despite turning State's Evidence. Buddy Fox may never have been even touched by the SEC people. He with his own hand brought the SEC hammer down and blew his own brains out. But just to play Devi's advocate for a moment, do you suppose all those people Bernie Madoff bilked out of money- - were altruistic people totally lacking in any personal greed? I think not. People used to making lots of money are "used to" the idea of fantastic rationalizations of how they got it. And to play Devil's advocate again- - let's talk about Blue Star Airlines in the movie "Wall Street". They said "If Gecko wouldn't have dismantled the company someone else would have and Buddy Fox wouldn't be able to stop it, as he WAS able to stop Gordon Gecko. I see Blue Star Airlines as "My Life". It pretty much sucked before I ever had anything to do with Born Again. It's not dickerong over WHAT happened, but it's only a case of "Do you want to be the one pulling the trigger? Think about it.

Opposite Land

In last night's Simpson's episode aside from the lack of hints about Massachusetts being the locale of Springfield, Homer thought a trip to Brazil was a trip to"opposite land". A place where it is cold in July and hot in February, where snow is warm and falls up, where the crooks chase the cops, where girls chase boys, and where all the Foster Farm chickens are really from Arkansas. But you can pick up your newspaper these last four days since my last posting, and feel as though you are in actuality in "opposite land". Because the stock market has gone up four days in a row. Indeed from the first day of the current rise, we were bombarded with the news "the consensus is that everyone thinks we've hit bottom". Now we are told the economy is really up. The consumer confidence index is up, housing sales are showing helpful signs, and Citi Bank and all the other banks are showing good earnings reports and Citi bank's rise in stock price has caused all the other bank stocks to rise. There is seemingly no end to the good news. Does this mean that the republicans are going to throw in the sponge and say "all resistance to the Obama budget recovery plan is futile?" Well, not yet. You'd think if this sudden optimisum were real that it would continue longer than four days. Sixty Minutes bombarded us with stories about how it may take years for us to get out of this recession and how there were other rounds of economic crises yet to appear on the horizon. I think this four day period might be just a case of a little too much "irrational exhuberance" about this economy.

In other news, Lamar Alexander is meeting with other republican big whigs to lay out their own ideas before the press. Hillary Clinton is in China but notibly defensive about the subject of human rights, which one gets the feeling that Obama, like Bush before him, wants to put on the back burner, for the sake of other economic concessions. Of course every morning they do a White House press briefing and you can see it any time on C-Span, but mostly it isn't really much to see. There is the employee free choice act. I read all about it in Wickipedia and I still don't have the vaguest understanding as to what it's really all about except it will be easier to start up new labor unions. To a lot of people labor unions have been a part of the problem. They propped up wages in earlier decades and now that economic forces have equalized, it's time to get back to reality and what the labor market will really support. And then there all these teenage sex stories in the news and talk about teenage "Sexting" over cell phones. Of course if they're caught they say they can be liable for violation of under age pornography laws. For a teenager it's illegal to involve anyone of your same age in any sex act or pornography, or else you're a criminal. One wonders whether the internet as we know it is going to be slapped down hard by the government soon and that secretly, the President wishes that we really were more like Communist China where everything is so regulated. And then there is a new proposed usury law where banks are outright forbidden to charge any more than fifteen percent on loans, and I guess that goes for credit cards, too. This would mean an end to charging 24% and 27% on credit card fees. I guess my feelings about loan interest rates are that eventually, market forces should drive these rates back down to normal levels, although why this hasn't happened yet is a mystery to me. The fact is that we're all, one way or another, going to be living on borrowed money for a long time to come. Thom Hartman says our economic problems stems from the fact that too many people at the Top want to loot corporate wealth for themselves rather than plow the money they make back into the business. Clearly from a tax law point of view we need to make reinvestment more desirable, and salaries and expence accounts less desirable.

You know they were running those adds about "The Messiah" and how he's going to run for President in 2012 and how he has his own plan for prosperity and universal brotherhood and whatever. It got me to thinking. I don't know who this Messiah is. Maybe he doesn't exist. Maybe it's all some internet hype. But you know, Zachery will be ellagable to run for President for the first time in 2012. That's when the Mayan callendar runs out. We know how the Mayans are obsessed with Venus. The other night they had Superman telling Lois Laine his true identity but it was OK because soon the "reset button" would be pressed on Society so that again nobody would know Superman's identity. That sounds trippy to me. The ZAC has always said that Burt Lombard was the founder of the ZAC. But isn't Burt Lonbard just a made up person himself?? What if there is some real life person who masterminded the ZAC and just left "clues" for the rest of us to find? There is a guitarist and otherwise multi-tallented musician that Mal Evans said a few days ago "He's everything that Brian Jones fantasized that he was". He's also a Mormon. There's that connection again. He also played in a band with a famous Rock Artist for five albums and did three solo albums, plus more session work with other musicians than you can shake a stick at. I'll give you another hint. He's dead now. He died in late April of 1993. But the key here is that it's while he was alive that he did all of this "ground laying" and "clue planting" for the ZAC, so forget about our usual "dead musician" stuff. Here are just a few of the clues about Zachery that have everyone intrigued. On "Manish Boy" on the Rolling Stones best of album from early 1981 there was a line "When I was a young boy at the age of five". Zachery was five at the time. The letters on the cover spell out "King Event" at least twice. On the Jefferson Starship's first album there is a line "Look to the summer of 1975, all the world is going to come alive". On the Elton John song "Levon" there is a line "Jesus wants to go to Venus", which means Jesus is a Zachery worshipper, because Venus is associated with all that Rizzonian stuff and Friday as the day of the week and Zachery was born on a Friday. He was born on the Jewish Newyear, the Feast of Trumpets, when it was a New Moon. So throw in "Dark Side of the Moon" into the mix. There is the chugging train at the end of side one of "Satanic Magesties Request" saying "Brian Jones - - Brian Jones". Of course there's "Slow Train Coming". There is also the Beatles line from "It's all too much" that goes "With your long blonde hair and your eyes a blue" referring to Brian Jones. And don't get me started on Queen songs, that would take too long. The question is all this and more- - just whisteling in the dark, or is there some cosmic plan to it? It's funny how all the gurus have said "Well there's a Messiah coming but there are also a lot of false messiahs out there you have to watch". We're about due for some mystery demogog out there to show up. People are fed up with the mundane and the ordenary. Personally, I think there is going to be a lot of really Weird news to come both concerning the economy and also concerning wars and roomers of wars, that is still not on the horizon yet, but will be soon.

No Crisis Left Behind

DATELINE 1962 -
RUSH LIMBAUGH RUNS FOR
STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT
OF HIS GRAMMAR SCHOOL

Rush says he is running on an irretractable progressive campaign platform. He graduated at the top of his fifth grade gas, and is flatulant in three languages besides his native Ozark. Rush says he wants to usher America into the jet age and bring about the complete Stratification of society. He also wants courts to exhibit a maximum ammount of equivication in its court rulings favorible to the poor. He says he wants to abolish prayer in schools so students don't cheat and get test answers from God. He also wants let fast food chains advertize in the cafiteria line.

By now you have all heard about that fourteen year kid, who looks more like twelve, who lectures old conservative men five times his age on the subject he knows best. He claims he stands for four basic ideas. He's a constitutionalist. Well, so am I. I am an originalist constitutionalist for just about all issues but I also believe in "staree decesis" or whatever that word is that means "settled law" provided the rulings have preferably been around for a century or two and aren't and wern't considered "contraversial". The lad's second plank is "A reverance for Life". I don't know if that means if he sees a caterpillar on the ground he will gently place it back on the left it fell from. I reverence life, which means I'm against abortion, euthanasia and all that other stuff. Nowhere was the 14 year old talk about God. As you know I now call myself an Anti-dispensationalist Calvinistic Deist Objectivist, with Utilitarian tendencies. I'm a utilitarian when it comes to harmonizing with the Planet and making society work smoothely with the caviat that any "Life" issue trumps utilitarianism. I'm against cloning or anything that smacks of eugenics. OK? The 14 year old's third issue is limited government. I believe we should all try for limited government. I believe in the free market. In fact, I'm for vouchers, which is the free market with poor people choosing private schools when given the choice. And I also am for plank numver four of "responsability for one's actions". This separates me from a lot of Born Again Christians, who don't believe in that. I believe in the work ethic. In generally my views as per those four items differ little from the 14 year old's. The Bible teaches against "oppression of the poor" and also teaches charity tword the poor. The Bible is also against any sort of "corruption" including business corruption. Averice is one of the seven deadly sins and yet Gordon Gecko says, "Greed is good". Wantint to better yourself and your family is good because it's a survival mechanisum and as such is necessary for natural evolution. But Gordon Gecko says at one point "Why did I wreck Blue Star Airlines? Because it was Wreckable". You know the saying, "Why does a dog lick himself in the groin? Because he Can".

Perhaps I should make this paragraph the lead paragraph. Certain Things Just Have the Ring of Truth to them. When we see Truth, we know it sometimes instantly. In my prophecy book (the second book I wrote) I state that bank employees are never shown counterfeit money but only shown the Real Thing to study every detail of, over and over. That way is something varies even slightly from that, they'll pick up on it. I know almost instantaniously that that version of "Sunshine of Your Love" wasn't the original record, when they were running that. That's because "Disraili Gears" has a very unique "accoustic signature" or ambient sound, and this recording didn't have it. When I was a senior, Coach Freeze was our sex education teacher for the duration of the class. I remember very little from that class. But I do remember his saying when you find true love, you know it. He says with his second wife he only knew her two weeks before they decided to get married. Sixty Minutes had a thing on recognizing suspects in a police line-up or from photographs. The more you "have to think about it" the greater the liklihood that you aren't sure and should keep looking. People who see it know it. You know that old expression "I don't know what it is but I know it when I see it". People talk themselves into things from mis-placed "positive reinforcement" of a pre existing error. I myself am not that good with faces, but even I would have passed that "Test" they gave on Sixty Minutes. Maybe I'm smarter than I think. This principle extends into the field of religion. When one is exposed to Atheism, one senses an almost magnetic attraction quality to the whole philosophy. Something just "rings true" about it, even though you may not even be able to place it into words. I say again I'm a deist, like Thomas Jefferson and not a "Theist", hence an A-theist. On three different occasions (three being a significant Bible number) desciples of Jesus either "wern't sure" or "didn't know" that they were talking to Jesus. On one occasion they didn't "decide it was Jesus" till he "vanished from their sight". Once perhaps I could overlook, but for three times having as it were a witness "impeached" doesn't bode all that well with juries.

I salute President Obama's signing off on the stem cell research funding order. While adult stem cells are useful for a lot of specialized things already, they don't provide the wealth of possible options that embryonic stem cells do in areas including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimers, Parylisis, Diabetes, and other areas. As you know I am a utilitarian. These empryos are "only going to get thrown out anyhow" to parody a George Carlin skit. Sometimes it's better to be a leftover, like if they're taking people out to be shot. Thom Hartman says that nature is utilitarian in that nothing gets wasted and everything is used by something else. The thing with religious people is their argument is basically a re-worked centuries old one, "Well God has his reasons for wanting people to suffer, because we don't know what wonderful works might be wrought in them, that they never would have done hadn't they suffered". My philosophy is simpler, like the Little Red Hen. "If you won't- - then I'll just have to do it myself". Again let me repeat the caviat about not using the research for either Cloning or some sort of Eugenics where some sort of programmed "race" is manufactured. A lot of people are scared by that line of President Bush "- - Human - Animal Hybreds!"

President Obama came up with an appealing position today. He said that good teachers would be the ones to get a raise in pay and that bad teachers should be repermanded or fired. This is a simple, old fashion concept, but we need it today. Unions say that "Competetion is bad". I am tempted to say "competetion is never bad". Perhaps that's over-stating it. But I believe the market place- - - free markets can resolve a lot of problems with more equity than can be done by any other means. I just wish that they would have government vouchers so that ghetto kids would have some kind of a choice where to go to school. If they were given some monitary help from the government they would. If private schools wern't superior to pulbic schools, people wouldn't be trying so hard to get into them. Some would say we need to extend the school day or the school year, so we're like Korea. "I don't want to be LIKE Korea". Oriental people are really bad at original, creative problem solving. They do everything by the book. What we need are better teachers and bringing discipline back into the classroom. Also an aid to student performance is that the student be well rested with sufficient "down time". There are places in America right now where it doesn't begin to get light untill after seven AM. And there are also places where kids are picked up for a long bus ride at 6:45 or earlier. Education should be a joy for our children, but I don't believe it should consume every waking moment as Obama would have it. My watchword is "Quality Time" rather than quantity time. Most student's heads are like sievs anyhow. There is a tremondus ammount of waste and repetition, as the teacher gears down the learning curve for the dumbest students in the class.

People say that our economy is like a car with sabotaged brakes careening down a steep road headed tword a cliff. Another image is the one of falling dominoes. Pat Buchannon said that if one bank falls it will cause a run of the other banks- - not of depositors but of stock holders, who will sell off their stocks. The question is whether President Obama can surf the internet and chew gum at the same time. If a house is on fire and a fireman sees some unused cans of gasoline at one end of the house, isn't he going to move those cans out of harm's way before they explode? There was a republican on C-Span this morning who spoke of this carbon tax that's going to get slapped on everything and increase the price of everything we buy, like a nation-wide sales tax. I disagree with Obama in that I do believe it's possible to spread yourself too thin, like with Health Care, or education. Our primary objective indeed should be the economy. I don't even think we should expand the war in Afghanistan now because it will only escalate into a boondoggle that we'll only live to regret later. So why not making this one war we stop before it starts? I agree that the government should direct increases in funds twords reducing the deficet and not engaging in some permanent expansion of government. Obama is a man who wants to do it all. If it begins to look as if Obama is whisteling in the dark and nothing is getting passed because congress doesn't trust him, he could have the worst of all worlds if the Republicans use this very failure to gain votes next year. On the other hand if Obama is focused and makes the economy number one on his list and solves that problem, then the democrats will gain in 2010 and in his last two years perhaps he can toy with some of his other ideas.

The "Buy and Hope" Strategy

This morning listening to a TV program the announcer was mocking to the "Buy and Hold" strategy you are always told is the wise one for buying stocks. This strategy would seem to be a "no lose" strategy with one caviat or assumption, that the economy is alive and that it's merely in a slump and will "come back". But they showed chart after chart of all these corporations that were essentially flat over the long term and lately were downright disterous in their downturn. Microsoft's graph stands out in my mind because for all the talk of Bill Gates being a billionaire several times over- - Microsoft seems to have peaked in price about ten years ago and right now is pretty much flat-lining. So I guess you have to ask yourself "is this economic sickness we are in- - a sickness unto death, or will the economy recover?" You know, things often die without our even knowing. A tree may be dead and yet it is still standing. When a person dies no doubt certain cells are not all dead. Skin cells and other cells may still be very much alive but the organisum is dead. In the story, The Lottery, the big question is whether there was once somehow a justification for human sacrifice in the minds of the people. Were there various other rituals that went along with the killing that now have been completely forgotten? So much so that the reason for doing the sacrifice of a human life is now in question? If hypothetically one were to put a death sentense on the economy would it die all at once, or would it "take time". For instance, we know that a freshly murdered corpse is still warm. It takes a while for a corpse to "assume room temperature" as Rush was so fond of saying. One could measure the temperature of the corpse and get readings and you'd say to yourself "Well the reading was 91 a few minutes ago and now it's 87 and I just took another one and it's 83. But in truth you're dealing with something that is essentially room temperature. So yesterday's unemployment "reading" came out and it was 8.1% and a month earlier it was 7.2. The question is are there yet undiagnosed things will still kill the patient or indeed have "already killed him" but it's just a matter of time for the symptums to manifest? You know when I became a Christian I participated in the "Buy and Hope" strategy. I figured I was "buying in" to good things headed my way. "Blessings are coming!" "The rapture is coming!" When you die you get to go to heaven so that's coming". But the truth is that even things I observed from the outside about Christianity, in my own case, were dying. My brother's Bible Study he'd had for years was in it's death throws but I didn't know that and would only last till the end of July. There was an adult Sunday school class I really liked and that one too died around July of 1976. It took a while for new entities to form that formerly I "knew not". But I don't want to complicate this. Sometimes the grass does always seem to be greener on the other side of the fence.

Jesus on the Jesus Christ show once had this disgusting analogy or imigry- - - to describe Terry Shivo, whose brean death status we all were arguing about four years ago. He used the sock puppet analogy. He said that Terry wasn't really alive but she was just a sock puppet animated by all these electronic devices and once these all were withdrawn like an animating hand, she could crumple like a piece of cloth. I find this very interesting. One might well ask about his own show. Could Jesus get his ideas out on KFI were he not present to say the words and be the human vehical for conveying his ideas? How far do you think God could get conveying Jesus's ideas without Jesus in the studio pitching them. And they are such alien, loveless ideas so foreign and at odds with the Gospells I don't see how God could possible get such ideas out without him. Is Jesus indeed the animating hand for God who in this analogy is reduced to a sock puppet. Does Jesus regard God as just s sock puppet? In the old testiment, Jehovah once (and probably several times) said of Baal worship, "Let Baal plead his own case. Why do you have to speak for him?" Jehovah said of the astrologers, "Let their own astrologers deliver them from the problems they now face". I might say the same thing to the Republicans. As you may know the Republicans were hoping that the Bush economy would hang on and fall apart the day after the election so that Mc Cain and Palin would win. Do you remember how afraid of Mc Cain and Sarah Palin we all were back in early September? There was a time back then when it looked as if Mc Cain and Palin had a pretty fair chance of winning the election. Why wouldn't all the Republican backers pray to their God to deliver them from a bad economy for another two months so they could win the election? After that they could tell all the lies they wanted. Of course look at the people they've got up front now. John Mc Cain and Mitt Romney. Neither one used to be a conservative. How is it that they seem to like to put "fresh meat" up front at the microphone. They salavated over Bob Dylan. But now I think Dylan has grown tired of the Born Again community. Who have they got? Raul Ruis? Ted Bundy? Charles Tex Watson? It seems like the longer people spend in the conservative movement, the more "second thoughts" they have about it. (Selah)

I'd like you to meditate on this phrase. "Death is an observed phenominum". People never experiance death first hand. Death is only observed in other people and things second hand. Once you are dead you are dead to everything. You're dead to God. If God is dead, then we ourselves observe that He is, for as the Bible says, "The dead know nothing". The dead know no sorrow or pain or joy or inspiration, nor the passage of time. As far as we know death lasts forever. Life is a passing phase; death is permanent. As we have mentioned before not only so we saints not go to heaven, but this "Heaven" that exists now is destined to be destroyed at the end of the book of Revelation, along presumably with all the angels and demons in it. St. Paul speaks of "Wars in the heavenlies". Jehovah tells us not to attempt to contact the dead. Jesus of KFI would have you believe because once you die you become more self centered and don't want to be disturbed after you die- - presumably in some sort of heroin induced exticy all of the time. Jesus speaks of hell in terms that are not at all alien to me in terms of "Unfulfilled desires and continued frustration". If that is Hell then I ought to feel right at home because that's what my life already is. Jesus never answers the question "If God never changes then how is it that the downtrodden and oppressed expect God to deal differently with them, more kindly, than he already had ample oppertunity to do with them when they were alive on earth? (Selah)

You really ought to think of the "What ifs" of life. What if this economy is destined never to come back. You can wait till Hell freeses over. By the way the only "Hell" that is "Final" is the Lake of Fire" and there is nothing "gradual" or "gradated" about that. This is the second resurrection and will occur after the destruction of the Universe, when the heavenly bodies melt and "disappear with a loud noise". That ought to be about twelve billion years or so from now. So for all practical purposes- - the dead stay dead. Some like my Dad say "Why can't the dead be simotaniously decaying corpses in a grave and also experiancing Eternity in heaven". To this I will just ask "What is your definition of Simotanious?" To be mathmatically precise- - simotanius means two things happening at the same time but for this to be so there has to be Time in both places, if you catch my drift. If there is no Time in heaven then we can't measure or quantify or compare it. (Selah) When Time Magazine said God was Dead, the inference is "- - - and He isn't coming back". Just as Gene Scott isn't coming back. You know in the Bible is speaks of people "going to sleep" or "he fell asleep" and we assume it's talking about their Bodies. First of all those people are smart enough to know a sleeping body from a dead body. So if they aren't talking about their bodies they must mean their souls. Because people aren't their bodies anyhow. People are souls. You know the expression "There isn't another soul around". There may be dead bodies if it's an old battle field, but nobody living". So now if the soul "sleeps" - - vualah! We have the Soul Sleep doctrine. Here's another one for you. If we are resurrected "at the end of Time" or after there is no more Time as we know it, then one might turn the statement around and say "There is no Time in the future when we will live again". Think about it. Death Don't Have No Mercy. You know the song "It's never too late- - - not while we're living". How do we ferret out the trees from wood? You know- - we all know that Rome fell. But even if you pin a date on it like 404 AD you can't sound a trumpet that day and say "OK the empire is officially dead today". People's lives keep on going. They probably continued to have gladiator fights in the Coloseum. Marriages were being conducted. But just when Rome died we can't be sure. But THAT the Roman Empire is gone- of this we can be certain. (Selah)

Examining the New Federal Budget

I guess the catch phrase now is "Oink - Oink!" because the earmarks are back. Obama has broken a major campaign primise that both he and Mc Cain made. Now Mc Cain can criticize the budget from higher moral ground. One thing about the budget is that there is some provision where people having trouble meeting Mortgage payments will only have to pay 31% of their income under the new deal, and to me that seems like a good thing. Our President has stated that now is a good time to buy stocks in the market, and I am in agreement with that statement. The markets are down now to near twelve year lows with the Dow Jones Industrials breaking back below seven thousand, or the lowest that figure has been since late October of 1997. I remember that. There is one provision I would add to this budget. We know old people can't afford the luxury of "waiting for the market to come back" before they retire because they haven't got that much time left. I would make a provision that is you are 65 or older, the government will write you a check for the fifty percent value that your stocks have gone down. You are free to live off this money on the provision that you don't touch your principal investment in the market. When you die the Federal Government will put a lein on your estate so that your descendants will pay back the loan. But as an added incentive, suppose the price of your stocks explodes in the future. I would wave the estate tax on any valuation that took place after the new bull market began. However you'd still be liable for capital gains after the decedent died. The government needs to do all it can to keep markets from dropping further.

Some conservatives have stated that if you wanted to have a ballanced budget for this year you'd have to raise the tax rates on everything over $75,000. If it were that simple I'd do it because if you're earning $75,000 you're basically doing allright. You are still above the median income for a wage earner. What Rush Limbaugh and others are saying now is that the rich pay most of the taxes. This is not what Rush was saying a few years ago. Back then Rush Limbaugh made a big thing out of the supposed "fact" that even if you hiked the tax of rich people to ninety percent, it would scarsely made a dent in the national debt, and that basically it's taxes on the poor that keep government afloat, because there are so many more of them. Now Limbaugh and Hannity are singing a different tune. Many state that charities will no longer be deductable and that mortgage payments will no longer be deductable. If these two things are true than this is a situation I would correct. Intrest on mortgage payments obviously would be a major factor for the poor as far as keeping them solvent. Charities are in the public intrest. The rich people by nature would get a bigger deduction for the same contribution as would a poor person. The effect of this law would be to provide a rich person a stronger incentive to give than a poor person and I believe this is a good thing. But by the same token if you are poor and win twenty thousand dollars at the black jack table or on a Game show, you should be able to walk out cash in hand and hardly be liable for anything in taxes because you aren't in that tax bracket. This is my oppinion, any how.

I think Michael Steele needs to "grow a pair" when it comes to apologising to Rush Limbaugh. This is the most undignified sort of humiliation any political figure would have to go through. Steel was absolutely right in calling Rush Limbaugh an entertainer and a figure head, not to mention an air-head. You know what they say: The truth is a perfect defence to slander. It was high time someone put Rush Limbaugh in his place. Were I to hear Rush Limbaugh's response to my remarks in his place- -the utter diatribe of invective spewing out of his mouth saying I wasn't worthy of my position, etcetra, etcetra- - rather than apologize loke a whipped dog, I would have escalated the war and played as it were a verbal war of "chicken" with Rush. You know, Michael Steel is giving Black people a bad name. I guess you could say Steele was acting "Niggardly", if that's even a word. Nobody is doing Sambo auditions now, and this is no time to start. Michael Steel had, and still has, a golden oppertunity to re-mold the image of the Republican Party into something approaching today's reality. Only 26% of the people call themselves Republican now, or something like that. The Republican party is on its way into sinking into oblivian and every Republican should worry. I predict that much like 1934, the Democrats will again gain big on congress in the 2010 election, regardless of what the economy is doing. These people will come to look on the 2008 campaign as "the good old days".

Today’s Thom Hartman message was “follow the worms”. He spoke of some weird kind of German toilet where you deposit your crap on a slab and then examine it for worms to see if you need to disinfect yourself. But they don’t do that any more because they no longer have a worm problem. He said it was hook worm rather than pin worms. It seems worms prevent allergies and a whole host of other things such as Crone’s disease, and arthritis, lupus, and muscular dystrophy. Even asthma can result from auto immune disorders. These ailments are much more comon now than they were fifty years ago when they were rare, when people didn’t routinely de-worm their pets. One woman went to Israel and picked up some bug and then “lived like an animal” when she got back here but after eighteen months in the booby hatch developed all sorts of allergies because her worms were all killed off. One guy Thom knew couldn’t bare to be around cats even for a short time till he went to Peru (Machipichu) and now his roommate has a cat. Thom said that the good Lord had us evolve the way we did for a reason. But Jewish people are more prone to Crone’s disease, I would imagine, because they refuse to eat pork. Activia put out by Dannen is good for re-seeding the digestive system in bacteria, and rightly advertises that they have cured all manner of disease. If they say so. According to Hartman people now recoil from fresh picked produce from the garden, fearing all the dirt won't be washed off, when in reality we as a people generally need to get back to the earth "from whence we came".

Time for Forward Progress

Many may believe that Obama has overreached with his budget that seemingly does the impossible; it makes the deficets of the Bush adminestration appear tiny. Even though there are things in the budget I may think excessive, all and all after you have starved the "Beast" of government for eight years, the people are entitled to something. Most of these programs will do good for society, even the ones that appear frivelous such as tatoo removal. Of course it is now pointless to ever again speak of "cutting the deficet in half". Many conservatives such as Pat Bucnannon say that "The era of big government is here to stay. There is no way of blocking it". All of the speakers at that Conservatives convention last week were pretty much "Out to Lunch" and that includes Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and even Mitt Romney, whom I must have disagreed with about 70% of what he said. It's odd that after the Goldwater deboccle, the Republicans got smart and "liberalized" their party platform. This time they seem to believe their salvation rests on ultra conservative doctrine. This is political suicide but if they want to do it- - they'll lose.

The gross domestic product was down at an anualized rate of 6.8% in the last quarter, and that's pretty bad. Unemployment in the state of California is topping ten percent. Governor Swartzenegger is saying we need to modernize our water delivery system because it hasn't kept up with population, and now mandentory water cutbacks are being considered. The end of either the water shortage, or the recession don't appear to be in sight. I don't think anybody has any idea just how huge this deficet will be, but it's measured in trillions of dollars and that is a first. I've been informed by a vaguely reliable source I'll be getting a check for $250.00.

Obama wants to leave fifty thousand troops in Iraq and also start a war in Afghinistan. Iraq is Bush's war but if we escalate in Afghanistan, this will be President Obama's war. I have an idea; let's stop this war before it starts. The roomers are that the United States is losing popularity with the comon people of Pakistan and the region in general. They don't see us as any better than the talliban. All the talking head news pundets say that Obama better have some kind of goal in mind for Afghanistan before he goes to war. Fifty thousand or even 35,000 is too many to leave in Iraq. You would think somehow we could get some sort of "peace dividend" they used to talk about. Now that we've done a such a great job in Iraq and the Meliki government is doing so swimmingly, you'd think we could be prowd of ourselves and pat ourselves on the back. But instead the concencus is that we haven't won Anything in Iraq, and that some crisis might spring up tomorrow necitating our re-escalating our efforts there.

We're losing our News icons one by one. We lost Paul Harvey yesterday. We lost Tim Russart. Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather have both dropped into a hole of obscurity. Mike Wallace is on the air less often. Everybody is saying how we need reporters who will do leg work like Woodward and Burnstein did in "All the President's Men". We need people who are willing to dig for the truth and we don't have that today. We need to have people willing to risk being wrong on occasion. I don't think Dan Rather was wrong; he was caught on a technicality. People say that if the newspapers die, then the news coverage on the Internet won't even be as good. That is something to think about. They say Craig's List had deprived newspapers of revenue from their classified adds. The Rocky Mountain News has gone under and the San Francisco Chronicle may follow. If this isn't the meatiest blog I have ever written it's just because all of the news is so depressing and it's hard to know how to digest it all. But at least now you know where to find us, at least for the next two weeks or so.

It was twenty years ago early this month that I first started listening to the twin talk show hosts of Rush Limbaugh and Tom Leykis. One of the first days I took note of Limbaugh was a day when there was a partial solar eclipse of the sun in early March of 1989. These two hosts are the ones who brought talk radio back from the grave. In many cases a literal grave, since most of the callers to these shows back then were over sixty-five. It's a good thing that talk radio was made marketable again. Now we need to revitalize the rest of the News Industry.