Emotions Frozen in Time

People like to look at photographs. The reason is because they can live in that same moment a while that was captures by the camera. There is another reason why people like photographs is that these moments normally don't come in the hustle and bustle of every day life. Life is a movie, not a photograph. When you see your TV freeze up on a digital picture, you know something is mal functioning. It's having trouble with the signal. But it seems a lot of conservatives have "trouble with their signals". There was someone who when we were studying Buddhism a couple weeks ago said that man should "let his thoughts be in the realm of thought and let his senses be in the realm of the sensual. In other words, man should be "in the moment". Somehow this idea seems more Taoist than Buddhist. Our friend on the radio Neil Savedra broached a rarely talked about subject today- - - Heaven. He said that heaven existed in the pure realm of feeling "in the moment" like making that first kiss last forever. Heaven wasn't about "doing" but rather about "being". Perhaps it's how my mind works but later I heard John Lennon talk about how he came to write "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and he said "A warm gun is one that's just been fired. It's a gun that's just killed something or some-one". I happened to think- - what if a person's fondest fantasy they would want frozen in time is the feeling they got right after committing a murder? It's probably not what Neil had in mind. But the thing is that life is about DOING and not about BEING. If what I said that "Desire" is one of the more important things in life "Doing" is perhaps Thee essential thing that demarcates life. We are what we do. This is karma. I always wondered what we DO in heaven. Well Neil has answered that question- - we DO nothing. Obviously because we are out of the realm of mormal time. Neil says "You humans get just the slightest taste of what heaven is like". Jesus, on the other hand has spent almost his entire existance in this apparent state of bliss. You know, one evangelist said "I can forgive a man much who says to me "I never knew my parents". Well, we are orphans who never knew God. I don't think I have known him. I'd like to go back now to July 15th. 1990. This was kind of a key day for me. Linda Hammer, whom I had known for about thirteen years, invited me to a gathering over at her place with her new husband and some friends. At first I felt good about going. But as the conversation continued- - the more and more convinced I became that I shouldn't go. When the day came, I stayed home. I reasoned "I have a swimming pool here is I decide to go swimming". As it happened it was a warm sunny day. I listened to a special on Jimmy Page on the radio, which I was glad to have heard. Then I went out and talked to a couple Mexican girls in the Jacuzzi. What I didn't know then was that seven months later my thirteen plus relation with Linda Hammer would come to a grinding end after one phone call that went really badly. There was nothing I had DONE. Like with other Christians I could name it never seems it's what I've DONE but how the other person suddenly FEELS about me. It's not what you DO but what you ARE that seems to impress God. Personally, as in the case of the Linda pool party, I don't think hanging out with God is such a good idea for me. I have a good feeling about avoiding the subject alltogether. But Thom Hartman reminds us that liberals and conservatives have the same problem. For a liberal like me they value what you DO. A conservative is fixated on what you ARE, and if you happen to be Black or one of the other ten categories that they despise, you're kind of out of luck.

I’d like to follow up this thought by saying that certain facts don’t need to be ignored. In George Washington’s blog they were talking a lot about Ben Vernanke and how he is “reinflating the financial bubble”. It isn’t just the far right, apparently, that is worried about printing press money. But the logic of these people seems screwy and “George Washington” appears to be playing right into the hands of the fanatical right wingers. If you watched the Mc Laughlin report last night they had a whole slew of economic statistics saying that bank failures were up, and there are too many foreclosures and how sales figures on a broad hose of indexes is down for the 2^nd quarter. In short, people believe there is a very real possibility of a double dip recession. People believe that the economy will be worse six months from now than it is today. It really provides no solice that Ronald Reagan was still looking at really bad economic statistics more than two years into his administration. And all of this time he was speaking of “morning in America”. People bought into Reagan’s pep talks, but they aren’t buying into Obama’s. All the republicans have to do is say the word “Jobs” and the center and right go into some sort of pavlovian reaction. Dr. Levy has said “What’s wrong with this President is that he isn’t making jobs his first priority”. What they mean by this of course is that they want the Rush tax cuts to not expire at the end of the year. Because no matter what the reality is, people buy into this crock about being in the top one percent that will be affected by an income tax hike from 35% to 39%. And corporations will also have their rates hiked from 35% to 39%, which only means this is the new amount that they won’t pay anyway, because corporations never do. Mag Whitman is still spreading these outright lies about Jerry Brown. Now words like “old style government” and “state workers unions” are used as buz words to evoke the proper pavlovian reactions. Some people say “I don’t watch TV because I don’t want to hear all the bad news”. At times I almost wish this were true for people on the right, because that means they wouldn’t have heard these commercials. They may not watch the news but you can bet they’ve had their daily dose of Rush Limbaugh. “Living is easy with eyes closed - - misunderstand all you see”, as Lennon says. But we need to be made aware of something like 2010 being a record hot year world wide. The heat continues in extremes all over the nation today. The Great Lakes are the only area where it’s even vaguely cool, like eighty or so. Of course it’s cool right here on the west coast because our ocean water hasn’t heated up this year. But if you don’t like the news do something about it like write your local congressman and urge him or her to vote for some energy will that reduces carbon consumption. And if you don’t like the losses in Afghanistan, tell your congressmen to pass some resolution against the war and maybe the President will listen. A lot of conservatives don’t trust secretary of treasury Timothy Geitner. Some say “He cheated on his own income taxes and they shoved it under the rug”. Dr. Levy says he doesn’t trust Geitner for this reason. But according to Thom Hartman, having one of those Wall Street people in a sensitive job is good because they know where all the bodies are buried. For this reason Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy to a financial position even though he really didn’t trust him. But one way in which Roosevelt was different in a way that Obama just doesn’t “get” is that Roosevelt’s philosophy is “I welcome hatred of my enemies. I believe a man should be known by which people hate him”. John Kennedy when running for President said “I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I wish that President Obama weren’t so timid in the face of this right wing criticism. People like San Donaldson on ABC state their minds and are not timid. If you’re going to go down, at least go down swinging. President Obama appears more than willing to give up on so many issues like immigration reform and the carbon tax problem, without even putting up a fight. I don’t get it. Why should the President do his enemy’s job for him? For a man who seems to be as scholarly as our President is- - he isn’t exercising very much pragmatic common sense.

I would like to, from first hand experience, heartily refute something I heard Scott Wilkinson said today on the Leo Le Port show. He said that when it comes to overloading a speaker or blowing it out, it’s much more dangerous to have a weak amplifier turned up too loud so as to distort the signal, than have a real powerful amplifier turned up only moderately. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact he has it exactly backwards. When I had my electric guitar I played it through a not so powerful, but efficient amp, and an efficient speaker. As it was I was taking a risk because as with CD’s you are getting those transient peaks that blow out speakers when you play a live electric guitar, that you don’t get from records that have had all the life processed out of them. Thus I was able to blast out a lot of sound and never once did I damage this speaker because electrically it was in the safe zone and the wattage was below what the speaker could handle. I remember John Karchinski bragging to Larry about my amp saying “This sound system is definitely better than yours”. If your wattage of the amp is below what the speaker is rated at, you are safe. I know impedence plays a role, too. But when a weak amp is played too loudly it merely “clips” the wave formations. And this clipping is the safety measure that protects the speaker. As to harmonic distortion, I had very little of that and scarcely how it could be a factor since no harmonic is weaker than the prime, so I don’t know what Scott Wilkinson was referring to. I just went down for afternoon coffee break.

There was this guy on TV on one of these morning educational shows that Mom watched and he was describing the various approaches a politician might take to buying a house in a depressed neighborhood and fixing it up. Glen Beck seemed hung up on this “house” idea last week. The guy said that a conservative for instance might just slap a coat of paint on the house and trim the yard. If the sliding back door didn’t work he’d fix that, and nail down any loose steps on the porch or elsewhere so he didn’t get sued. Now a conservative moderate would go further. He would for instance replace the plumbing fixtures and probably the sinks in the kitchen and bathroom. He’d change the locks, and put on a new roof to the house so it didn’t leak. A progressive moderate would go further. He would totally remodel the kitchen and all the bathrooms and re-do all the cabinets and put in all new light fixtures, and put in new flooring and new carpeting. A straight up liberal would look at this house and say “well the foundation seems sound”. But then he would tear out all the walls and have them reinforced to earthquake codes. He would knock out walls and add rooms- - and when he got done the house would be “re-built” to use Glen Beck’s words. Restored - - rebuilt - - what’s the difference? Now the thing is Glen beck is not a conservative. He doesn’t want to “do nothing”. Instead he is a reactionary who would put a match to the house and burn it down, and then go back to living in a cave. A radical would do something similar, only he would liven in an all plastic modular house, preferably built by space aliens and be in the 21^st Century.