Panning For Your Own Gold

The trouble with Christian Evangelists is

Is that they want you to exchange something Real

For Something that is clearly Not

There’s loud Mexican radio playing through the PA system now. I don’t know what that’s about. It’s an overcast Sunday April 11, 2010. Portland brought their bad weather with them. Temperatures are dropping. It’s only 48 in Sunnyvale, with rain. The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Lakers 91 to 88 in a hard fought game. Portland was out to prove a point at the Staples center, where the Lakers almost never lose. They fouled a lot. The score as neck and neck late in the game but previously Portland had been up comfortably. I went out for coffee in the courtyard, and there was a wait.

They are demolishing Texas Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys played so many games from the 1970’s on. I’m not crazy about all these fine stadiums from the sixties and seventies being demolished. The shelf life of a major construction project just isn’t as long as it used to be. You could joke that really they’re just going to send in some Al Qaeda plains to get rid of it. You know of course that virtually all the evidence says that the Twin Towers were deliberately imploded with explosives. You see the video. Things fell not only at the speed of gravity but stuff was actually being blown outward. And people wonder why they had to clear the crime scene so quickly when they’ve built nothing there in ten years. The same person wondered how so small a hole in the pentagon could have swallowed up a whole jet. To me it seems there’s an awful lot of disappearing metal. They shipped all the steel from the 9 – 11 crash site to China. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s my second E mail notice.

I watched the Mc Laughlin report last night. I am reassessing my position on that Nuclear Posture Review lf last week. I plum forgot about chemical and biological weapons. Those are obviously also weapons of mass destruction. And I can well envision a situation where just hitting the enemy with Nukes would be the most expedient way of dealing with the problem. I agree with Pat Buckhannon now. We should not take any options off the table. We should not tie our President’s hands as to which options he chooses to exercise. And frankly, I don't believe we should pick a fight with the right-wingers on an issue that I agree with them on. Of course I saw that Santaurum video yesterday. The good senator very artfully responded to one question. He was asked by a woman why he campaigned for Arlen Specter seeing what a liberal he’s become. Santaurum’s answer was that Specter promised President Bush he would vote for whatever Supreme Court justices that Bush put before the Senate and Santaurum knew that Bush would appoint only pro Life candidates to the High Bench. So if you are pro Life yourself you will want to end abortion as quickly as possible and that was the fastest way to do it. I admire a man who will answer a difficult question honestly and forthrightly. We need more of that.

After this I watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Then it was that movie about the San Diego TV news reporter. I slept rather restlessly. I went for coffee from the bakery in the morning. I was thinking of responding to Dr. Levy’s question about “What is your philosophy of life”. How do you sum up such a broad question in a few sentences? It would be like a property insurance form asking you “What is the total dollar valuable of your precious things”? It would be hard to come up with a number that would be really fair off the top of your head. But if I were to answer the question on a life philosophy I might say “I have a problem with people such as Christians and therapists wanting you to exchange something in your life that’s real, for something that is not”. Therapists and pastors have a lot of shit they are peddling. They make artful use of words. For instance on optimism, well- - I say that is putting a rosy slant on the facts - -seeing them in their best possible light. For instance in my mind I hope to move out of here some day and take my vinyl record collection with me that is being stored. If the truth be known I am far more hopeful about myself than other loved ones are about me. But in Dr. Levy’s mind I’m not an optimist because I don’t make up facts out of thin air and call it reality, or deny certain obvious realities that do exist. Let me throw in this little nugget: “It’s better to wonder just ‘how much you are really worth” then to join in one of these occupational programs Dr. Levy talks about- - and remove all doubt!” Because only then is your worth “quantified” as being worth about 35% of minimum wage when you are “given” a job that inferiors fight you for position (in) in even that.

We had oatmeal for the second day in a row. The menu was fried eggs and toast with butter and jelly. Two toasts but only one cup of coffee. We had to wait and wait to even get into the dining room and had to wait once in there. I didn’t get back here to watch “This Week” till just after eight. I had “Meet the Press” on briefly during commercials and also later on. I watched the Beatles shows. April 10^th was the fortieth anniversary of Paul Mc Cartney announcing in the press one Friday in 1970 that the Beatles were breaking up. As one person put it “They were already working out the terms of their Divorce”. Paul on the radio said “Once John met Yoco it was clear he was looking for greener pastures”. KLOS says Paul and not John wrote “Every Little Thing”. KOLA had the Beatles and the press. They pretty much got the better of the press every time. Their live segment was April 11^th 1965 in Wembly Stadium. KLOS did a mash-up of “Ticket to Ride” and “Here Comes the Sun” that was actually pretty ingenious. They signed off with this demented type record of a guy spoofing the “reunion” of the Beatles in 1993. I missed the coffee break in the courtyard in the morning.

I had Leo Le Port on, and I know I misspell his name all the time, except the thing is “Laport” gets red-lined, and I don’t like that. We had a tuna sandwich and potato chips for lunch and huge bananas. Again coffee was limited. Chris Marquardt today was talking about opening curtain flash and closing curtain flash, and how the latter produces more “natural” action lines in the photograph. He said flashes were only five thousandths of a second or something. If it’s that fast you should use a faster shutter anyway.

I did go out for coffee in the afternoon. They’re still using those big cups filled only one third full. If they filled them higher, people wouldn’t be so needful to go back for seconds. Now we’re on page seven. I really don’t have any good topical points to blog about. Since it’s going to be the lead posting for a while before we switch blogs, I would like it to be a half way meaty topic that I can delve into in detail a bit.

I wanted to mention this whole Mormon thing around here. That new lady at the table says she’s worshipped with Mormons. And Larry said that he found Mormons to be among the kindest people he’d ever met. You might rename this place Mormon Central. But this paints a rather contradictory picture. Because usually you associate Mormons with family life and also with people who neither smoke nor use caffeine products, and that rules out Bob Guyer and a lot of other people around here.

Conservatives wonder why Obama or other liberals are afraid to trust “our allies” such as Karzai. That’s a pretty silly question. Karzai has just recently said he admires the Talliban. And he’s met with the Iranians. There was that roomer last week I may not have reported that Iran is covertly sending aid to the Talliban in Afghanistan to shore up their positions against US drones. To me this is a pretty clear sign we just need to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Just think of all the money and manpower we’d have later when we really needed to put troops somewhere. Nobody thinks of that.

Justice Stevens to Retire from Supreme Court

Justice John Paul Stevens made it official this morning. He is retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of the term. His most likely successor is Elena Kagen, a lady solicitor general. Dianne Wood is another contender but she is liberal on abortion issues and would be the hardest to confirm. The third leading candidate is a guy, and the guy is the easiest to confirm but he had a conservative streak on criminal issues and so many of the civil libertarian left might object. Justice Stevens was appointed by President Ford as a right of center candidate, but he became the anchor of the liberal block of four. Stevens will be turning ninety in a couple of weeks. People had been expecting him to retire but Justice Stevens wasn’t sure whether or not it would be this year. He only hired one law clerk instead of the traditional four, and this was a tip off. Stevens broke with tradition in that he liked to put on his official black robe himself rather than have the usual assistance. People say Stevens has an “independent streak” in his rulings. He wrote in a dissent to the Bush verses Gore decision that “While we may never know who the winner of this year’s Presidential election, we know who the loser is and that is the American system of justice”. Stevens was confirmed in just nineteen days by a vote of 98 to nothing, and it’s highly doubtful whether that fear will be repeated. Back when Al Franken was on the radio they played that song “Hang on, Stevens, Stevens hang on” because liberals feared that he might die or something while President Bush was still in office. As I wrote a few postings back, I’d go hard left on this one to stem the rightward drift of the High Court. President Obama only needs eight republicans to break rank to get a confirmation. One cannot help but think Stevens took present party balance into consideration for retiring this year. It could be argued this is the round to get set for a major battle in congress. Justice Ruth Bater Ginsburg is expected to be the nest to retire.

Bart Stupac has decided not to run for reelection as congressman. This is the author of the famous Stupac amendment that outlawed abortion in the recently passed Health Bill. It is suspect that the barrage of pro life hysterical callers drove him from not seeking office due to their venomous remarks. This is a sad thing. I find it disturbing that, as the saying goes, “bad money drives good money out of circulation”. And so it is that the bad apples in the barrel are taking over congress, raising the threat that the next congress will be much less responsive to the American people and far more responsive to the intimidating tactics of the tea party political right. As it stands now about as many Republicans are not running as are Democrats. But I feat this will change. People like Chris Dodd are shoving aside their nobler instincts in favor of the easy bucks.

It could be said that A Sarah Palin – Michelle Bachman ticket would be the ticket from Hell. But they both were at some rally M C’d by Sean Hannity. Sarah Palin made the statement that this Nuclear treaty with Russia is like the school bully going around to people and saying “Hit me and I won’t hit back”. I had that happen when I was six and in the first grade. This third grader comes up to me while I was walking home and says to hit him because that’s the way you make friends with him. Well, I did it, and of course got clobbered. The President responded to Palin merely by saying “I don’t think Sarah Palin is very qualified to talk about Nuclear armlements. The least she should do is learn how to pronounce “Nuclear”. At the Vice Presidential debate of 2008, Sarah Palin was asked a question on Nukes. She just said that basically it would be better not to exchange missiles. Of course that’s only because her Republican tea bagger friends hadn’t told her how to come down on this issue yet. Republicans are really upset about this Nuclear Arms treaty because it cuts our warheads by one third. But the thing is there hero and professed mentor, Ronald Reagan, signed a Nuclear Arms treaty with the Soviets. But back then they weren’t bothered by that. But now Republicans want to keep all their options open as to who they kill and how they kill them in the next war. However this treaty does not affect defensive missile installations we may deploy in the future in Europe. However our side has been warned that should we try and put in any new missiles Russia will pull out of this treaty. Personally I don’t know I would sign this treaty if I were President. Frankly I don’t think I’d care. I’d just look at the poll numbers and make my decisions from those. Randy Rhodes says she would love a Palin – Bachman ticket because it would draw a clear line in the sand and provide a target easy to campaign against. Most of the people cheering at this rally appeared to be women. (It was radio) This treaty has to pass the Senate by a two thirds majority and once again, eight republicans will have to break ranks with their party for the treaty to be approved.

People in the old Reigellian Federation were making the “V” symbol for Villanova to win, when Villanova was in contention. Contrary to what I said, Villanova is championed by the “Portland” Reigellians or the dominant race of Reigellians who pretty much make all the laws for Reigel VI. The Romulan connection that I had made previously must have been a mistranslation or something because the “Portland” Reigellians have been sponsoring Villanova since at least 1985. Xavier is the team backed by the Romulans. In a related note, it seems the Sirius A natives make a distinction between Romulans that have been on their planet a long time, who are from either Toronto or Hamburg, as opposed to the refugees from Regelus V from the great disaster of 1989 on their home planet. There seems to be an increasing urge to return to their home planet now that ecological restorations are making progress - and the Sirius A people are basically saying “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out”.

The Perils of Early Adoption

They refer to people who wait in lines to buy the first I Phones and I Pads as "early adopters". They are seen as fools by many since most likely the price will come way down and the design will be streamlined and worked out in later incarnations. Of course some news people like to consider themselves "ahead of the learning curve". Take that episode with Homer Simpson last night. What he learned as "Mr. X" from gossip and imuendo turned out to be the gospel truth in almost all cases. With such a corrupt town as Springfield, it's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Even if you're a bad shot you'll most likely hit something. Of course then Homer upped the stakes and began making stuff up entirely. But now he had an early problem because some UFO alien creatures didn't like the truths he had unearthed. So they banished him to an island and put a double or "duffelganger" in his place. Some Romulans say the song "No Reply" by the Beatles is about a duffleganger". Of course sometimes knowing the future ahead of everyone else carried a curse. Do you remember that Star Trek episode where Bones went insane and "leaped back into the past" into the 1930's. And Spock was dispatched to track him down. And Spock was an early "adapter" adapting a vacuum tube age to building an electronic device, where they learn the future. It seems this do gooder woman who had befriended them later hooked up with President Roosevelt and due to her influence Roosevelt negotiated a peace treaty with Hitler, which he broke, and today we're all speaking German. Of course because of this Bones had to restrain himself and allow her to be run over by a car and killed. We've all heard about the Rapture. But in the Bible a lot of questions lie unanswered. For instance there is a line that one translator has "Two men will be in a bed. One will be taken, the other left behind". Does this mean perhaps that gay men could be Saved? Gene Scott would taunt you with this proposition. We don't know where the person "taken" is taken away to "gehena" and destroyed, as other parables, such as the wheat and tares imply, or are they taken to a better place, or perhaps somewhere intedermanate like an island alluded to on that Simpson's episode. Are aliens really watching our every move, monitoring our actions like a gardener overseeing his plants just looking for that first weed that is a threat to take over? What we also can't be clear about is whether a body will be left behind? Will that gay man wake up next to a corpse and figure that AIDS must have gotten his bed partner? And finally there is the duffelganger option where the people in society don't even suspect that something has happened. Like at twenty to five on October 9th. of this year perhaps millions of souls could be swapped out with duffelgangers and nobody suspects. Certainly there were enough movies made in decades gone by about space aliens placing things in people's necks that control them. Some would say, "Well if such a thing were to happen it would be instantly discovered". Not necessarily. Stephen King writes that when really weird things DO happen to a person he does everything he conceivably can with his mind to try and rationalize or explain away what is happening, assuring himself that he's not really going mad. The "early adopter" leads a perilous life in this world.

There was a 7.7 earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia yesterday that might just be an aftershock of the December 2004 9.1 earthquake that set off that tidal wave. They had a tidal wave watch up for just two hours then cancled it. If you look in Wolframalpha.com for earthquakes, you see the three biggest ones this year occurred along the Pacific rim. There was the one in Chile, and the two that occurred just in the past few days. Bible freaks would tell you there is some kind of trend here. My feeling is perhaps our shaker on Sunday will be "It" for a while and we can relax.

Many people are becomming concerned about the progressive militarization of local Police departments. They buy all this surplus military gear like rocket launchers and granades and M 16's and according to Thom Hartman many of the recruits charged with using this cache of weapons don't have any experiance to draw on except for their experiance in the military. I can't imagine it's as bad as Hartmann says. But just remember, you early adopters, that today's jest and exaguration is tomorrow's reality. That's an unnearving thought. Also of course since they have suspended the posse comotadus law in place since after the Civil War, that now the military can turn its guns on its native citizens. Now they want Obama to sign a law that gives the military the right to arrest anybody and detain them indefinitely, for five reasons, but of the five the most frightful is "or any other reason the President deems proper". That all depends who the President is. In former times Christians on the right recoiled at such roomers. Now they just might welcome them. In the past few days they are apparently tightening regulations on when the United States can get into a nuclear exchange with another nation. Apparently is the other nation has no weapons, we won't attack them- - unless they happen to be Iran or North Korea, and in that case you're on your own.

Many ideas for postings I haven't pursued. I was intending to do a Flash Forward of October 9th. of this year where people black out (I had in mind on Easter) and they have visions of October 9th. and they realize these visions all have in common - and that is people missing. I also plan to do a posting on "What 1986 was really like" sometime before the next ice age. But don't expect that one any time soon. Some people whether I invision an extra terrestrial world where like on Star Trek there was a master race that "seeded" nineteen humanoid races that spread throughout the universe. Nothing in the ETI history of myself or Mark would suggest that such a comonality or "starting point for civilization" existed back in the past. Neither myself nor Mark would rule out the probability that MOST of the races "out there" are NOT humanoid but take other bizzare forms that haven't been talked about "by the guides" so to speak. Of course just earlier today I thought I'd review the racial origens and mixes of various peoples. Suffice it to say that it's all based on halves, quarters, and eighths and the like. This is because the divisions as we discuss them are (apparently) dissimilar enough that mixes of races have to be specially genetically bred in a test tube. Also I've thought of describing "Life in the sixth dimension" otherwise known as hyper-space or the psychic dimension. I'd like to do this one. Unfortunately I'm just lacking in information in this department. OK. Tread carefully.

7.2 Earthquake Strikes Mexicali

Yesterday at 3:40 we had a 7.2 earthquake centered just southwest of Mexicali just across the border in the Imperial Valley. Actually the damage doesn’t seem that great considering it’s the biggest earthquake to hit this area since the Landers earthquake in June of 1992 at a 7.3, which was larger than I remember. They showed lots of scenes of water sloshing in swimming pools however when I was back in the apartment there was a lot more sloshing action in the pool with both the Landers and the Northridge earthquakes in 1994. Lucy Jones was the Cal Tech spokeswoman getting a lot of air time and there is stuff even I, who has lived here a long time, didn’t know. This was a 7.2 quake upgrated from a 6.9. It is a strike slip fault action meaning you have sideways rather than vertical ground movement. They showed cracks in the roads however – with Northridge I think you had cracks of several feet rather than several inches. There seemed to be little building destruction but mostly just cracks and obvious structural damage. She said that the slide action was northward and probably crossed the border, which is why we felt it so strongly to the north. The quake was also felt as far away as Las Vegas and Phoenix. San Diego felt it more strongly than we did. She said there was a five percent chance of a bigger quake but these odds tick down minute by minute. She said the Landers quake was rich in “triggered earthquakes” in the five point range. You had trouble escaping coverage last evening as it was on all the major stations even pre empting the Network news. Of course most of us felt it here though James and Paul said they didn’t. It was apparently felt more strongly on the second floor than the first, where a lot of people were at that Kerioke gathering. Will said that the chandeliers in the upper room were swinging wildly and objects were sliding around in his room. Of course at the time I was right here at the computer and felt the earthquake as a broad swaying motion such as you might experience from a wind blown high rise. I haven’t called Mom yet but I imagine the quake was just a little stronger down south where she lives.

I had KOLA on before seven. “Sixty Minutes” had this rediculas notion of patenting the human genome. There are a substantial portion of human genes, maybe a quarter of them, that have been “patented”. This idea got started when a court in 1980 allowed some microbe used to clean up oil spills to be patented. Now women suffering from breast and ovarian cancers can’t get the treatment they need because it will cost them a lot of money because only out outfit holds the patent on all genetic testing. We will pray that a wiser court overturns the foolish 1980 decision. However is Justice Stevens resigns this year, Obama will have to be on his toes to make sure and get a liberal that this Senate with all its intransigent Republicans will approve.

President Bush is still President as far as the people in Uganda are concerned. I knew those people were backward but come on! They are all grateful to president Bush for distributing some anti AIDS pills people take by the handful to cure AIDS and bring people back from the brink of death. Their slogan in Uganda is AFC, which doesn’t stand for automatic frequency control. It stands for abstenance, fidelity, and condoms ad a back-up plan. But there are so many Christians in Uganda I sure didn’t know about that now there is a sweeping campaign that isn’t working to try and get Uganda’s young people to walk the straight and narrow moral path. OK. But what if your spouse gets infected?

And there is some new smokeless tobacco product that college students here are using when they can’t smoke. A lot of times they will combine the product with cigarette smoking. Anti smoking laws have become so oppressive that smokers need some sort of “fix” to get them through the day, that doesn’t involve tobacco spitting. Nicotine addiction in itself doesn’t cause all of the lung cancer and COPD that cigarettes do.

The dirty little secret about this economy is even if we do get some real recovery action going, as Thom Hartman and others say, it will be just another economic “bubble” that will burst in the near future and we will be right back where we were in September of 2008 only worse. Nobody is talking about real banking reform or any sort of restoration of the financial regulations we had in this country up through the late 1990’s. Glass-Stiegel is not going to be reinstated. I think Obama must be hoping that if there is another major economic bust it will be on January 21^st of 2017 after he’s left office.

Apple Finally Puts I Pad On Sale

Apple is finally allowing reviewers such as P C Magazine to examine and review the I Pad. I saw their video yesterday. It seems this device even plays the piano. It does the trippy spread with the photographs. If you click on one photo it gives you all the others like it. My guess is that the I Pad will set all sorts of sales records. They say it's what older people have been looking for. It's not a computer but an "appliance". It's heavier and more expensive than the Kindall or that other reading thing out there. But the keyboard is bigger and brighter and in color. We all know the negatives. There are certain applications it won't accept, because it's an Apple after all. It won't accept Flash and some say they hope Flash will go out of business because it's "big and buggy". That's their oppinion. The I Pad doesn't have a camera and it doesn't "Multi task". Even if it is just a bigger version of the I Phone, I see nothing wrong with a bigger screen to display more data at one time. Leo Le Port "hopes" to have an "unboxing party" for the I Pad tomorrow on his show so that he can finally review it.

I see a trend in all of this terror alert stuff. It all seems calculated to raise fears in the US population like they've done for the millionth time. Now the Obama administration is worried about surface transportation. Looking at the thing objectively, one wonders where it all doesn't seem reactive, rather than pro-active. In other words, you would have thought that they would have come up with a "master plan" before this. But you know in the old Superman and Batman episodes Gothan City or whatever was in fear of the Joker or the Penguin for a while and then they'd be put away and be off the street, so that the population can breathe easy again. This is the whole part we are missing. We're kind of assuming, as Bush once said, that there is no "IT" to "Win" or lose, but that this whole terror thing is just an ongoing struggle that can only get worse with each passing year. Instead of subside, our obsession with 9 - 11 only seems to be increasing as the years pass. The conspiratorial part of my personality wonders whether all of this fear and hype isn't just a prelude to a more drastic solution, like national identity cards, and massive screening of where every citizen travels to and where they have been.

Now I would like to do "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off Number 397". You all know that I said I would have voted against this Health Care Act. I have fresh doubts about the Health Care bill. First of all there is the unfunded mandate on States to fund Medic-Aid, or Medi-Cal. Governor Swartzenegger commented on this unfunded mandate. Then there is the guimic of saying the deficet is cut when provisions don't kick in till 2014 so you have ten years of taxes funding six years of services. Just recently I learned that it's conceded that insurance rates will be going up for everybody. They say this is a bill to insure availability and not to cut costs. The liberals on KTLK failed to apprise us of this little fact. How long till the American people realize this? Also they say this bill is a jobs killer because companies will be spending money insuring new employees, with month they could be spending hiring new employees. So this bill really is a job killer after all! We already know this is a jobless recovery, even with the numerous positive economic indicators we've had lately. State and local governments continue to contract. Certainly added fees and taxes cut into "discretionary spending money" that people could otherwise be spending to stimulate the economy. That's not just Republican hype. People have an abiding fear their money is being misspent. Now we hear they are hiring 16,500 new armed IRS agents employed to keep tabs on the US population. I'm worried that besides do absolutely nothing to solve the underlying cost of medical care problem, that this bill will just lay on a whole new layer of government beaurocracy and spend our money with pencil pushers. Now some insurance companies are already trying to get around the children with pre existing conditions provision. Our court system will be log jammed with States and others arguing the constitutionality of the unfunded mandates of this bill.

I think that what President Obama did with opening up new oil drilling was a good idea. But these corporatists argue that "The trouble is the laws keep changing with each administration and corporations can't do long term planning based on what may be a short term reality". I would however like to reverse my position on Nuclear power plants. Now I'm against them. We are better off with oil and natural gas. The disposal problem is something that's only going to get worse. And I'm reminded that Uranium just doesn't fall out of the sky. I don't know what I assumed. That the uranium was free? Or perhaps Jack Bower would be dispatched to negotiate a treaty with an underground Russian syndicate. But digging up the uranium obviously is an expenditure of energy. And also the life of nuclear plants is only half the estamated lifespan of a solar pannel. In Germany they produce the equivelant of several nuclear power plants already and they get far less sun than we do here in the Southwest. We need to cultivate all alternate forms of energy. They say with these factory farms that so much methane is produced that there is a danger of it exploding and unleashing a brown manure cloud. Why can't we put in a methane recovery plant right next to these factory farms? My guess in the long run we will be eating less meat one hundred years from now than we do today merely because of the massive pollution costs of these factory farms, not to mention the energy costs of raising the livestock. We need to look into wind and tidal powered turbines. Those on both the left and the right say that the ammount of new oil produced by the President's actions the other day will only be a fraction of what we routinely import right now and this will not change. In short the President has done just another tap dancing act where he institutes a policy that pleases no one.

I guess Good Friday is the day we honor Jesus of Nazareth as a man rather than as a god. Because the Gospels highlight his manhood in passion week. During that final week he does no meracles, which he used to do at the drop of a hat. Of course the Gospels do say that Jesus often got up early and spent hours on end in prayer, seeking the will of God. We all know of Jesus' prayer in the Garden where he was in such anguish he sweat great drops of blood. Chuck Smith tells the tale of the Romans putting a burlap sack over his head and them hitting him, and not seeing where the blow came from he could not brace his body against the force. On the cross he said "My God why hast thou forsaken me?" This is hardly a prayer that God Incarnate would make. How does God pray "Not my will but thine?" I don't know. Yet Jesus of KFI will tell you that Jesus was God with all of the knowledge of God- - from the cradle. Jesus of KFI loves to say that how the true "miracle" of God is the miracle change in the hearts of men. And this is how God really works. God doesn't work through physical miracles. These would "violate the ecological balance" or some such rot. So I guess I have a question. We know that among the unchanging aspects of God is- - simply, that God's nature does not change. People love to point to the resurrection as something in the past. But that "God doesn't do that sort of thing today". I guess I have a fundamantal problem with a religion that is based neither on the future nor on the present, but an isolated incident that occurred in the past- - a long time ago. How about you? Do you share such similar questions? Happy Easter Egg hunting!