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!