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.