When a "Terrorist" is not a Terrorist

Thom Hartman opened his show with this topic this morning. That guy who set off the car bomb in Norway and then killed 68 children at a "labor party supper camp" was constantly referred to as a "terrorist" while they thought he was an Islamic working for Al Qaeda or whatever. But when it was found out he was just your garden variety right wing Born Again redneck, the word "Terrorist" was suddenly dropped from all news accounts. This shooter is pure evil. We know that. He was dressed as a police officer to gain admittence to the island. From then on it was like shooting fish in a barrel since nobody at the camp was armed. The furtelizer bomb had the same chemical compound as the bomb in the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy Mc Vey and Terry Nichols. He is of the identical political stripe. He wrote out a Ted Kazinsky style "Manifesto" which had some anti technology stuff in it but mostly he just raged against the immigration policy of his country and how they allowed Moslems there. Some of the right wing and not so right wing sources made pure jackasses of themselves in their editorials over the weekend. "The Wall Street Journal" was running stuff like "This only goes to show that President Obama is wrong in wanting to wind down the war in Afghanistan, and why we shouldn't cut our defense budget because we never know there the next attack from Al Qaeda is coming from". Others went so far however as to declare this "labor party summer camp" is a "Hitler youth" training facility by liberals. However if you actually check the FBI.gov web site and look at the statistics on terrorism you find that a full 42% of US terrorist attacks are Latino in origen, such as various Puerto Rican liberation fronts. There are a number of left leaning groups on the list. But there are only six percent of the attacks tracable to Islamic groups and they trail attacks by the Jewish Defense League at 7%. And yet we are told how much a threat "Islamo-fasciests" are. This term is an oxy-moronism, of course. People will say or write anything if they think it will sell newspapers, or raise them up a few notches in the polls. But years ago there was some major terrorism report done by the Bush administration that stressed that the political right of this country was a major threat as far as future terrorist attacks in this country are concerned.

Of course the beating of that Giants fan at Dodger Stadium after the game on opening night is in the news again. They had the wrong suspect for months. But now it's determined that though he was guilty of parole violations and other offences, he was shacking up in a motel room with his girlfriend and wasn't at Dodger Stadium that night. The two new suspects they do have now, and a third girlfriend of one of them, are bad dudes. Apparently they cut out the guy's tongue and gauged out one of his eyes in one of the attacks. The police had never released that information before and it sheds rather a new light on the thing- - as being something of a whole different order than your garden variety beating. They do have things called "enhanced" charges - - such mayhem- - which I imagine could get the suspects 25 years to life.

This is a period of firsts and last. Yesterday the Tour De France came to a conclusion with a winner. Last Friday they officially did away with "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" but the edict does not go into effect for another sixty days, or till about the first day of autumn. So I guess you could still get kicked out during this period. Of course over the weekend they had their first gay weddings in New York. So what is the in thing now- - - a gay ceremony at the foot of the Status of Liberty with doves and flowers and everything. So I guess it's all "Best Men" and so it's a whole line of men up front, like a glee club, probably dressed in white tuxes to symbolize purity or something, and no bride's maids. The whole thing is a little much for me. I see little difference in this than a ceremony where a man marries his car. I don't see a good future for the institution of marriage. And on Friday the last space shuttle craft landed in pre dawn darkness officially ending the thirty year long space shuttle program. Now we'll only have private groups in space funded by corporations. And of course Amy Weinhaus' carrier came to an end on Saturday when the British singer showed up dead of a drug overdose. It is one of those cases where a lot of people saw it coming. She now joins the "27 Club" along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. Brian Jones only made it to 26 before he died, as you know from the poem on "Through the Past Darkly", a vague Corinthians allusion.

I'm trying to read my notes "Buddy Ruemey" (?) anyhow there is another Republican running for President who is probably "too old" or at least that's how they'll attack him. He wants to restore the economic terriff policy we had in this country from Alexander Hamilton through to Jimmy Carter where the average terriff on foreign goods was 22% (or was it higher?) At any rate it was a primary means of raising taxes for a big part of this country's history. And I thought we were looking for new revenues, but apparently not, because nobody is upset about the August 2nd deadline any more. Anyhow our policy now is the subsedize the transfer of a corporation's factory and headquarters to another country. Moving is expensive, you know. People like Judy and Dr. Levy act like it's as simple as pie and anybody would do it. No, our governments HELPS them move by allowing them gigantic tax write-offs. Apparently the House passed a bill to get rid of this anti job provision of the law when the House was ruled by Democrats, but a minority of Senate republicans killed it. Keep in mind the forty percent of republicans in that body at the time probably represented only ten or twelve percent of the entire US population. Otherwise the President would have signed the bill into law.

I have had various Deja Vu experiances involving the Beatles at the BBC. For one thing the song "Young Blood" when I first heard it by the Coasters, probably in the LATE sixties- - seemed to me to be way too slow and just "wrong". It turns out I was right. The Beatles did it completely differently. I experianced Deja Vu listening to the BBC tape with "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" on it, because before that song even came up I KNEW it was coming, even though I had never heard this tape before. I also had never heard the Brian Matthews introduction to this song, which, knowing his kind of humor, was predictable. Of course the chronology is a little different from the CD package because one of the early sessions had "I'm Gona Find My Baby", "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" and "Young Blood" all recorded for the same program. Brian Matthews introduced the middle song - by Arthur Alexander by saying "Wel'll feel better or we will, after a shot of rhythm and blues". The segment opens with a rather contentious John Lennon. Of course "Lonesome Tears in my Heart" spawned Deja Vu thoughts, partially because I think maybe I heard the song before but more because the guitar riff sounds like the guitar riff in "The Balad of John and Yoco". As to the song "I Just Don't Understand" I sure thought April Stevens and Nino Temple did this song, but nobody else remembers that. You know, I was going to make this a whole lot longer paragraph but we'll save it for later.

This is Monday July 25, 2011 and Augustine was just in to check for toilet paper. Nora was in here and unhappy about my moving the chair out of place and having the spread on the floor and the bed unmade. I just called Mom at three using the number of the new card, which I had to fish for because it’s been some weeks since I even got that one. The problem has been too few calls and too long a period of clasped time. Judge Pirro is on right now. The floor buffer still smells of mildew. There seems to have been other commotion in the hall but so far I have not seen the green cart. Me and Mom had a nice conversation. Her weight is holding steady, but not going down. She lost the ‘House and Garden” station on her cable, and perhaps others. I confirmed that her cable still isn’t HD. She still gets visits from [name deleted] who checks out her computer. They exchange magazines. [name deleted] recommended the grape juice. I told Mom that they have stopped serving milk around here for lunch. The weather isn’t as hot today.

Last night it was ABC network news and at twelve after six I went down to the living room despite my generally feeling a little sick and definitely tired and not operating on all eight cylinders. I sat on the couch and waited there 25 minutes for Seid and Nicky to arrive, and listened to Wally talk about his experiences as a fork lift operator. Finally I left and had a smoke. Then I went back down at ten to seven and now the size of the crowd seemed to have more than doubled. Seid a Nicky are nothing is not erratic. They brought vanilla ice cream with them and I had one standard “large” serving and a second small serving. We were also served a Russian “hot dog” that Seid says is made out of lamb. I don’t know – but whatever it was it was going bad. We talked about the Temple ceremony yesterday for four people here that were officially confirmed into the church, Manfred, Wally, Elizabeth, and Marcia. Lorrie had told me that Marcia felt she was being socially shunned, and puzzled I asked why, and she said “Because she is Black”. This is the God’s truth but her race didn’t even register to me - - I never thought about it – till that very moment. It’s kind of a sober eye opener. When I arrived Seid greeted me and shook my hand. I was looking for a chair and brought one over and set it down and this guy in a wheel chair ordered me to “move it” because I was blocking his view. The room had so many walkers and things scattered about and I said “Where shall I put it?” and he said “Take it out to the street for all I care”. He later gave another late arrival a hard time and Laurie told him to “Knock it off”. Good for her. I didn’t stay but about twenty or twenty-five minutes. Then I went out for a cigarette.

Sixty Minutes had this thing on the corruption of cops in New Orleans I had never seen before. They said the murder rate in “The Big Easy” is now the highest in the nation and rattled off troubling statistics. One person said “A lot of cities have temporary spikes in their murder rate. We just seem to have more of them than most. In that class poem there was a line about “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that the food is greasy”. Dr. Levy set the bar real low on this poem. How about “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that getting away with murder is easy”. Or if you want to be not so nice you could say “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that the Niggers are greasy”. At any rate I wasn’t real sure what sort of “corruption” the P D was experiencing. Then they had that thing on sharks and how “sharks are people too”. The thing is to find a shark who is “a player” and one you think you can swim with. Kind of like Nicole picking out her next husband, hoping she doesn’t get devoured. You want a shark who is curious about man, but not angry or aggressive. He went on to say that the death statistics on sharks is really low and how “in fact many people at the beach have actually had positive encounters with sharks and didn’t know it”. Kinda like space aliens, huh? The trick of course is to never show fear and of course, don’t splash or do anything else to make them think you’re a seal, because they love seal blubber for its high fat content. And sharks don’t like contact with metal so the camera is kind of your protect device that says “Don’t come close”.

After this it was a strange Simpson’s episode. (They’re ALL pretty strange, these days) Last week’s Cleveland Show was so awful I’m never watching it again, so switched to some unknown show on KCOP. I went to bed at nine, and managed to sleep well. But I wasn’t 100% in the morning and had diaria. My innards have some sort of bug. We are on page seven. I brewed coffee. We had corn flakes for breakfast and then scrambled eggs and butter and jelly. Andrew gave me his orange juice. The rest of the morning was pretty non eventful. I had Stephanie Miller on before and after breakfast and had Thom Hartman on. I did make a lot of notes I intend to use but not here. We had ham sandwiches for lunch and red tomatoish soup. Laurie gave me another half sandwich and also her Fritos. We had bananas for desert. Coffee is a less important factor now that I have my own coffee maker and can have it any time I want.

This is after dinner. We had pepper steak with unflavored white rice. We don’t seem to get the good stuff any more, and also coloflour and broccoli. We had peaches in lemon pudding for desert, which was different. Eye Witness news is on now. Janet wants her coffee. Joe wants his coffee. Everybody is eager today. Well, coffee is not cheap. It gets used up, too. It doesn't last forever. Dr. Levy said maybe I should take donations when I buy the coffee - - along the same vein is chipping in to buy a pizza.

Today the NFL announced that the players voted and ratified a ten year NFL contract so we are all set for football in the fall. “Captain America” actually beat out “Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows Part II” in the box office, which slipped to number two. The smurfs are starring in their first 3 D adventure. I saw a preview of that movie yesterday and the idea of using that cartoon series for a movie is idiotic. Jerry Brown wants to give illegal aliens student financial aid while putting the screws to the rest of us.

America Dodges A Bullet

The threatened government shut-down we all feared to occur at nine o clock tonight has been averted. KTLA interrupted the boy Lex Luther running in terror through a corn field to bring us an address from the President of the United State. Democrats and Republicans came to an agreement tonight to compromize. The President had to make sacrifices, but now government workers and our troops in uniform in particular, will get paid. Details of the agreement are still not forthcoming but apparently the budget is scheduled for long enough for congress to take one of its many, many vacations - this one two weeks - to return to this budget problem upon their return. The President generally seems happy about this compromise. This breakthrough constitutes a major defeat for the Tea Party, who was counting a shut down to cause general chaos in government and to sabotage this already weak economy. We can now all rest knowing metaphorically that we will live to fight another day.

The following news dispatch hot off the Google press flagged my attention because of it’s assenine nature, so in Rush Limbaugh fashion I am now going to repeat each line point by point. Later on we are going to have some plum remarks by an actual Tea Party afficianado. I decided to go with the alias of "Minister X" because people on the Right are forever quoting "Minister Faracon" on his various statements. (I believe the term is a veiled allusion to the old Black Panther Party that used to address its appointed officers as "Minister") Anyhow, I got to thinking how unfair it was and decided that people on the right deserved also to have the "honor" of being elevated to the status as "Minister". I almost didn't run this tonight but due to a glitch in my computer shutting down, when I came back from buying cigarettes the screen was still up and so I canceled and got to work. The following is vis Fox News.

As the deadline for a government slowdown approaches, liberals are leading the charge to blame the budget impasse on the Tea Party movement. This is because the Democrats last night agreed to a seventy billion dollar budget cut but the tea party crowd said no, and thus quite rightly the tea party is responsible for the shut-down. They after all are the ones with the signs “Shut It Down” and the like.

This progressive political strategy serves a two-fold objective. First, by assigning responsibility for the failing budget negotiations on the Tea Party, liberals hope to avoid any culpability in the morass. But “Hope” has nothing to do with it. The liberals and Obama tried to avert it with every manner of compromise. Second, if there is a government slowdown, they want any public hardships blamed on anyone but themselves. Not just “anyone” but the Tea Party themselves.

After years of trying to label the Tea Party movement as extremist, liberals now hope that shuttered museums, national park closures and concerns about grandma not getting her Social Security check next month, will turn public opinion against the social movement responsible for ending liberals’ virtual monopoly on political power in Washington. That’s true. A government shut down will cause chaos, and the tea party will do anything to sabotage this faltering economy to improve Republican chances next year.

With the potential loss of the Senate and executive branch next year, liberals are looking for the political equivalent of kryptonite to weaken the relative superpower of the Tea Party movement. The tea party controls one half or one half of one half of one third of governmental power. It’s truly a case of the tail wagging the dog. Republicans themselves are divided about the Tea Party. And Republicans comprise only one half the house, which comprises only one half of the legislature, etcetra, etcetra.

Given the high stakes of a government slowdown and an opportunity to exploit the crisis for political gain, it was not shocking to hear about the liberal’s strategy to blame the Tea Party coming straight from the mouth of Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. If car dealer A rips you off and you now turn to car dealer B, I suppose it can be said that “B” profited from how badly car dealer A screwed up.

In a recent conference call with Senate colleagues in which he unknowingly laid out the strategy to reporters who were also on the call, Schumer instructed that the spin was to blame the Tea Party movement for conservative Sen.s sticking to legislation already passed in the House of Representatives that cut a mere $61 billion in spending. “I always use the word ‘extreme,’” he said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.” “Extreme” seems to me to be the best word for it.

Schumer followed his marching orders as dutifully as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. Durbin, commenting about House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “And he has to tell his Tea Party ‘roughriders’ to put their horses in the barn. Save this argument for another day.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., can’t open his mouth these days without slamming the Tea Party movement. The irony, of course, is that it’s not the Tea Party’s fault that in April 2011 Congress is sill haggling over the budget due in September 2010. The accountability for not having a budget resides fully with President Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill, who controlled the legislative agenda with a vast majority until this past January. I don’t understand that myself. Only that congress last year was very productive with a lot of other vital legislation. Like Obamacare, liberals could have used their political advantage to ram a budget through Congress and Obama could have signed it.

But the budget was not a priority. Instead, Obama and his progressive congressional allies spent their political capital and time having the government take over our nation’s health care system and trying to legislate fossil fuels out of existence through a “cap-and-trade” scheme. A budget just didn’t fit into this busy progressive agenda. “Cap and trade” sucks. Taxes on energy are the last thing we need in this recession.

Liberals’ failure to act left it up to the new congressional leadership. The conservative House passed a budget in February, but the Senate — still controlled by liberals — has yet to pass anything similar. The senate is controlled by Democrats. I would not call them all liberals.

Words can lie, but numbers don’t. In context, cutting $61 billion — or the $100 billion wanted by the Tea Party — from a federal budget expected to spend $3.8 trillion is far from extreme. They aren’t cutting waste in medicare or the military or funding for any of our three wars. They aren’t closing tax loopholes. They are cutting the small percentage of discressionary federal spending that helps the least fortunate among us. The sheer fact that liberals are threatening a government slowdown over a mere 1.6 percent cut in the total budget just reeks of political shenanigans. No liberals are “threatening” a government shut down. Again it is the tea party that is clamoring for that.

As opposed to the last government slowdown, liberals are misplaying their hand. Clinton-era slowdowns hurt conservatives, and that’s what the liberals expect this time. Or in the words of Dr. Phil, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”. What they are not considering is that debt was not a concern back then. This bit of detail is immitareal to the general belief it will hurt the tea party. Fear of the exploding national deficit — a key Tea Party rallying point — is on virtually everyone’s mind these days. Moreover, progressive demonization of the Tea Party movement is not working. It didn’t work when they tried to marginalize and discredit the movement by calling its members racists and it’s not working now as they try to blame the Tea Party movement for the lack of a budget deal. The racism of the tea party is there on the public record for all to hear, and this debacle will also be evident for all to see.

More problematic for Obama and company is that more Americans are siding with the Tea Party, and this rise seems to correlate with increasing frustration over Congress.

According to polling conducted by Rasmussen Reports:

• 49 percent of voters believe the Tea Party movement is having a positive effect on the nation; I don’t believe that number for a second. • 48 percent of likely U.S. voters say that their opinions on major issues match the average Tea Party member more than average member of Congress; and • 45 percent think Tea Party members understand the problems facing America better than the average member of Congress. The media covers any rally of the tea party no matter how small but when massive demonstrations occur in support of labor unions or against the Wars we are in, the media ignores that.

Tea Party activism is the driving force demanding accountability from the government that serves the people. Liberal efforts to play political word games and smear tactics is not a substitute for an effective political strategy to meet the challenges facing Americans. The clock is indeed ticking, and time is running out for politicians playing the same old games. Dylan once said, “Don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin and there’s no telling who that it’s naming”. I predict that a year from now the Tea Party will be just a bad memory as Republicans scamper to nominate someone like Mitt Romney who is not universally known as a political extremist. The whole political strategy, formulated by the Koch brothers, is based on sound bites and talking points to be repeated endlessly without question. One tea party afficianado made the following remarks about President Obama just this morning, as follows.

The following are actual remarks. Then we started talking about current events. Minister X said that Obama was a socialist and hung out with Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and now a new name is added to the list. Obama is best friends with Louis Faracon and consults with him on making policy. Also Obama “Has made the economy worse than it already war”. And “The President’s policies have not added one single job”. Minister X says “There Is No Recovery”. Also the run up in gasoline prices is all Obama’s fault because the President is against drilling in Alaska. I told him we had only a year and a half’s supply in Alaska” and he said “You’re wrong, Marcus”. I also reminded him that the United States had only two percent of the world’s reserves. Minister X said that if gasoline prices were this high next year it would doom the President's re-election hopes. Minister X said to carry out his socialism he is redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor so now that rich people have no incentive to earn money or to give to charities. Minister X exhibited a complete ignorance of the forces and regulations driving Manufacturing out of this country. I said that if I were a multi millionaire I wouldn't mind paying fifteen percent of my vast accrewed interest in taxes. I said "I wouldn't let a four percent hike from 35% to 39% make me decide I no longer desired to make money". Minister X said, "It's a lot more than four percent, Marcus". "If a businessman has more money he will open up new stores and hire more people". I did not challenge this last remark because it is so demonstrably untrue as far as the big picture is concerned. He also said "People are insecure about their 401 K". There is no need to be; the market is up. Minister X's remarks were so “Beyond the Pale” that I did not even challenge them in my letter to him this afternoon. That would be pointless. Neither did I question or challenge just where he got all his ding-bat “facts” from. He trusts them as if they were handed down on stone tablets. I did not embarrass him by asking just how much news on the economy Minister X listens to on TV each day. This after all is a man who openly brags he only watches ten minutes of news a day because his time is so valuable he can’t “waste his time” on unimportant things.

Government Shut Down More Likely Every Day

It's just two days till Friday. Nobody wanted it but it looks pretty certain at this point that there will be a government shut down. The last one we had was the one brought to you by Newt Gingrich in late 1995 that apparently lasted several weeks. You may not be able to visit our National Parks over Easter break. Of course now the Republicans have rolled out a plan to end medi-care as we know it. They call it a "bold" move and they say their plan will "put us on the path to prosperity". Oh yeah, brought to you by the same people as Camp Krusty complete with all the pitfalls and death traps. They say they wand to give Governors of states more power to facilitate "flexability" but in reality these officials can just pocket the money themselves. This plan will save 6.2 trillion over the next decade or some such thing. Of course from what I hear, no defense spending is even under consideration to be cut. Right now democrats and republicans are dickering over a piddeling thirty billion. They want to keep National Public Radio funding and Planned Parenthood funding. My advice is that they drop these two things if they are the only sticking points. John Boehner says he controls "one half of one third of the government" but he only controls one half of the Republican party. The rest of the Republicans think the Tea Party crowd are nuts. It will only be the second anniversary in a few days when the Tea Party was organized- - on the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride or whatever. Just two years. Apparently the recall efforts in the Wisconsin election yesterday are breaking in favor of the liberals. That's good news. You know on the soap opera I watch there is a lot of talk about impostors. Old time "real" conservatives may think the whole movement has been hijacked by corporate internationalists. You know they don't mind regulation for some people. If regulation will drive small business out of the market and no allow them to be competetive, the internationalists are all for that. Somebody has to draw them all a picture. Liberals have been wondering aloud for three years why this President hasn't used the bully pulpet the way Kennedy and John and Truman and Roosevelt did to make their points. When I was in school we were taught that it was the responsability of a man of principled conviction to lead and convince his fellow man of the moral superiority of his beliefs. But we don't have that today. The same way we don't have news reporters that actually investigate news stories.

They aren't telling us much about the Libyan's campaign today except to say that on the right they are becomming increasingly anti war- - as they seem to now see Kadaffy as a good guy, no doubt because we need his oil. We know America has basically lost her moral compass. We embrace trade with China as though it were our path to salvation, and not our eventual path to economic ruin. People on the right don't even care that much about getting rid of dictators or furthering democracy and freedom. The big reason why they have been behind the previous two Bush wars is because of the profits they have been able to make with under the table military contracts. War really is a racket. I suggest you all read the book "War is a racket" because it really is. Today money is no longer a by-product of a war but indeed is the reason for fighting it in the first place. Nobody seems to care how much they are lied to, and the media won't tell us anything. At least half of the network news is just fluff pieces.

Donald Trump may "trump" all of the other republican candidates if he is the first to get into the race and steal the limelight from all the other candidates. Apparently in years past, by this time we've had a lot of candidates declaring for the office by now, like the President did yesterday. I never knew that Donald Trump went for all this tea party shit. Now he has become a birther saying that the President was not born here. But clearly Donald Trump is the most visually appealing and verbally articulate of the field of ten or more republicans, who are too lilly-livered to throw their hat in the ring. Many of these other two bit wanna-bes are such media whores they don't want to give up their radio talk shows or whatever else they would have to forgo to become an actual candidate. They know the minute they declare their lives would be scrutenized in ways they prefer not be done. Maybe that's it.

GALLERY OF DIRTY ROTTEN STINKING RE-MAKES

Listed in order of severity of infraction

Hooked On A Feeling (1974 remake) "Ooh-ga-cha-ka"

Please Mr. Postman (Carpenters)

Maggie's Farm ("Live Rain" live version)

Panic In Detroit (Live Version from Rare Bowie)

Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Rod Stewart)

Talk Talk (Alice Cooper)

Stand By Me (Rock and Roll by John Lennon)

Summertime Blues ("Live at Leeds")

The Loco-motion (Grand Funk Railroad)

Hand Jive (1974 Eric Claptin album)

Baby, It's You ("Smith" (?))

Eight Days a Week (Procol Herem)

I"m So Glad (almost ANY version attempt done Live)

Gloria (The Shadows of Night)

Only You ("Goodnight Vienna" Ringo)

Not Guilty ("George Harrison" album version)

Dancing in the Street (Van Halen)

You Really Got Me (Van Halen)

You're No Good (Linda Ronstat)

When Will I Be Loved (Linda Ronstat)

Out of Time (Stones orchestra version)

Lucille (Beatles at the BBC)

Lovers Concerto (The Toys)

All Things Must Pass (official Album version)

Let It Be (Album version)

Sincerely (Mc Guire sisters)

Good Night, Sweet Heart, Good Night (artist?)

Hearts of Stone (Fontane Sisters)

Hang On, Sloopy (Mc Coys)

Tracks of my Tears (Johnny Rivers)

Hi Heel Sneakers (Jose Feliciano)

Accross the Universe ("Let it Be" album version)

I Me Mine ("Let It Be" album version)

Teddy Boy ("Mc Cartney" album)

Heat Wave (The Who from "A Quick One")

Shout! (The Who from "Who's Missing?")

Peter Gunn (Jimi Hendrix from "War Heroes")

"OK they were just screwing around in the studio here"

Koran Burning Sparks International Incident

Well some people are just plain stupid jackasses. This Florida pastor couldn't leave well enough alone but had to burn a copy of the Koran twelve days ago and word got out to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and our people at the Embassy there were violently attacked. To this the Florida pastor says that none of it was his fault because if he didn't burn the Koran, the Moslems would just find some other excuse for their violence. The Federation has practically called the Moslems sainted martyrs in their editorials lately coming down on the desecration of a Holy Book. I think the US troops are spread too thin around the world. It's some incident like this that just could give the enemy new found strength to rally his troops. It's too bad the US can't say to the Afghan insergents, "Remember when we were on the same side of a conflict allied against the Soviets?" I just don't see why we don't engage in better "diplomacy". And by the way I think Wikkileaks.com was wrong to publish diplomatic communaques. Confidence here is important to national security. Mc. Laughlin is on now with their suddenly anti war mantra.

The media is making much of the "drop" in national unemployment to 8.8%. They point to all the places over the USA that are hiring now. However I heard unemployment among Blacks is up. The Mc Laughlin group sees a double dip recession, which by then will be a full scale depression. Many say a new mortgage is inching closser. Home sales are down and home prices are down 13% or whatever in February. Also consumer confidence is down 9%. As is pointed out this is all the more troubling because this economy is already the most enemic recovery in the face of such massive stinulus. You know, there is a logical possability that it may already be too late to salvage this economy, even if we were to have 20 / 20 foreknowledge of the future. It could be that all possabilities for salvaging this economy have passed. (Selah)

It seems as if the NATO crowd crapped out on the Libyan rebels. Last week beginning on Monday the rebels were halted and then retreated a hundred miles in a few days. Monica and others on Mc Laughlin say that these rebels are a mixed bag and we could well end up with some radical Islamic group in power like the Moslem Brotherhood. Pat Buchannon points out that the President may already have his feet in hardening cement because if we try to get out now, Kadaffy will seek vengeance on all those who opposed him with stern reprisals. We already know the President's poll numbers are down. This campaign hasn't played well in Peoria. Now there is talk of "doubling down" to insure that Kadaffy leaves office. People like Pat are saying there will be foreign "boots on the ground" and let's just hope and pray they aren't ours.

Well the LA Lakers have won 17 out of 18 games since the NBA Allstars. It gets to be monotanus covering the LA Lakers. The thought just occurred to me that once the play-offs arrive the Lakers will be able to slack off a bit since in the play-offs in this sport they have unusual latitude, and lose almost half their games from then on and still emerge as World Champions. As such perhaps maybe we can just dispense with the next two & a half month play-off schedule and declare the Lakers winners now. I guess since the team as a whole is getting a little long in the tooth, a lot of people will be retiring at the end of the season so next year's Lakers team won't be half the team this year's was.

MY BACK PAGES

(If your preference isn't the Dylan version -

then chirp, like the birds in the cage this morning .

This is an overcast Saturday April 2^nd. Right now on KTLK is this Purity product guy pitching “Astazantan” that name I couldn’t think of in my letter to Tim. If you give it to animals on an otherwise high fat diet, they won’t get fat. It works wonders on the complexion, and if given to race horses in Europe it helps them run faster and if you give it to Rex and Rover they will have energy like they never had before.

John Boehner was doing the same old song and dance about how government spending prevents jobs from being created because it “creates uncertainty”. All these tea party people get their talking points from the Koch brothers. One of these days the American people are going to figure this out, if they haven’t already.

The big news of the day is that Dana will again be selling coffee in a week or so as soon as he gets to Wall-Mart to buy supplies. Last evening just before six when it was baking out on the patio, Janet mentioned off hand, “Well, I guess I won’t be needing my heater tonight” and there was a pause and then she added “They were supposed to have taken all our appliances yesterday but they didn’t”. Now we hear people can keep their coffee makers and stuff but they can’t sell the coffee. So Dana says he’s going to “give it away” and the people will leave a “tip”. I see nothing wrong with that. Dana said he would like to recoup his losses from having to sell everything and make the coffee extra strong the last week or two. Morally, we his customers owe him that and should at least for a while pay him 75 cents for a sixteen ounce cup, which is up from fifty. That will still save us all kinds of money. Right now I have six dollars left and I can buy a pack of cigarettes and not get coffee till after I get to the bank on Monday, at least not much - - or I could borrow cigarettes when I run out and have coffee twice a day till then.

Last night was Bob Geyer’s memorial service. It was just about to start when I got there at a couple minutes to seven. They were very prompt. I was given a program and all the officiators were in suits. The service ran almost an hour. It contained both a Eulogy of his life- - centering on a hit and run auto accident that changed Bob’s life adversely - - causing long term kidney damage. I’ve heard conflicting reports about Bob’s being in Viet Nam. Now they are saying he was a sniper. Loretta Hill, Marcia Merideth, Wally and Manfred spoke, and Richard Powers gave the benediction. There was also a mini sermon discussing Mormon beliefs about the after-life. Afterwards they served ice cream and Oreos. You had your choice of vanilla, chocolate, and chocolate ripple. Dr. Levy was there but I looked for him afterward and couldn’t find him.

The Superman episode was a rerun but I hadn’t seen the end of it before. Judy called a little before 8:30 to talk about adding a new Accronis program to my computer to monitor my hard drive that runs all the time. My worry is that it would tax my limited RAM and slow my computer down more than the stuff already on it. And I know that stuff isn’t free and I sure don’t want to pay for it. She kept going on and on about it and I wanted to get back to the program because there was stuff now on the screen I hadn’t seen before. Judy said something about my giving them her credit card number over the internet or something. Judy still suggests I get a new terabyte hard drive, which is just way more than I would ever use. My feeling is “Yes I’ll have to replace my computer in a few years but up till then I’m good”. If you do the math - 29 Gigabytes is still quite a few 4 Gig camera chips, each holding over two thousand pictures. Then I got back to the TV programs. I went out to the patio and talked with Dana and Steve and others and Dana says he just saw a bunch of colored blue and red lights sweep across the sky really fast. We were a little puzzled. My back, for one, was to the sky. But then he said “I haven’t had any sleep for several days so that just might be it”. The conclusion of that Superman episode was that Lionell Luther is a genetic impostor who was artificially created and has the exact mirror image DNA of the real Lionell Luther. After this “Supernatural” was on where they talked about the archangel Gabrael. I sstayed up this night later than I have been for a while, and once in bet it took me a while to fall asleep.

In the morning I got up at 6:07 and got coffee from the bakery. I turned on KNX radio as usual for a Saturday. We had oatmeal for breakfast and a fried egg and toast and butter and jelly. Sarah filled the coffee cups half way decently. It was after breakfast that Dana told us the good news. I was worried that if I withdrew a lot of cash at the beginning of the month he’d be gone by the end. Now I don’t have that worry.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE LATE IN ARRIVAL

TO THE ROCK AND ROLL SCENE - IF (an amusing bit of self deprecation)

-If most of what you know about James Dean comes from books and encyclopedias

-If you hear the title “Mary Lou” and think of the Ricky Nelson song

-If you think “being square” has something to do with a well balanced diet

-If you think the letters D A stand for District Attorney

-If you associate “jive” with a well coordinated fashion ensambo

-If you never heard “Stranded ion the Jungle” as a new song on the radio

-If you never knew Clyde Mc Phatter was lead singer for the Drifters

-If you can not name the first four of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands- in order.

-If you can’t remember the 1952 Earthquake

-If you can’t remember Columbus Day ever being a school holiday

-If you hear the title “True Love Ways” and think of Peter and Gordon

-If you hear the name Bobby Freeman and think of “The Swim”

-If you thought “Bo Didley” was a new song by the Animals

-If the first song you heard from Fats Domino was “Lady Madona”

-If you think Estes Keefofer was a Johnson croney who went to jail

-If you think Nixon’s “Checkers Speech” was something to do with Kruschev

-If you think “The Twist” first came out in January of 1962

-If you never watched “Milton Berle”, Edward R Murrow, or “I’ve Got a Secret”

-If you can’t remember Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Cecil B Di Mille and Arturo Toscanini all still being alive.

If the first time you heard “Maybeline” you thought it was a Canned Heat re-make of a Johnny Rivers song.

-If the whole concept of an “open campus” is alien to you

If you think the term “nerd” originated on the show “Happy Days”

-If you CAN name all five songs with the words “Little Bit” in the title. (Don’t count “Shout”, “A Quarter to Three” or any song by Donnie Osmond)

-If your school didn’t allow motorcycle gang jackets on campus

-If you never knew that Ronald Reagan used to be a democrat

-If you don’t associate Moroborugh cigarettes with being a “woman’s cigarette”

-If you DO know that few jets are supersonic

-If you never heard the Larry Williams originals to “Slow Down”, “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”.

-If you think “There’s A Riot Going on” (Beach Boys) “Ruby Ruby” by Dion Dimucci, and “Such A Night” by Elvis Presley – are new, original songs.

-If you don’t remember a time when there were no liquor stores open on Sundays

-If making an office memo doesn’t consist of putting a new cylinder in the Dictaphone

-If the whole idea of prayer in the public schools is completely alien to you

-If you think Lonnie Donnigan only had one hit

-If half your high school football team doesn’t consist of nineteen year olds

-If you associate “colored laundry” with clothes that shouldn’t have bleach.

-If your local shoe store doesn’t have X ray things so you can see your foot bones

-If you didn’t have an older brother who fought in the Korean War

-If you don’t know on what “Day the Music Died”.

It's a Question of Values

Back in November of 1993 or so I bought “A Question of Character”, which was a profile on the Kennedy family and Jack Kennedy in particular. It said a lot of things about the family that weren’t very nice. My Dad saw the book in my apartment and I worried that he might know it was an anti rather than pro Kennedy book. Still there are things about our heroes we turn a blind eye to that maybe we should be just a little aware of. Everything isn’t all black and all white. Thom Hartman has probably praised the administration of Richard Nixon more than anybody in the media in the past twenty years. He points out that Nixon was happy with our progressive tax system. In fact there was talk Nixon was toying with the idea of a negative income tax to help the poor. According to Thom Hartman, Richard Nixon had a health care plan he rolled out in early 1974 but without Ted Kennedy’s support the idea was doomed. Teddy didn’t think the plan was radical enough. And we should not forget that Nixon was responsible for instituting the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon got us off the gold standard. If we had stayed on the gold standard, Ft. Know would have long ago been depleted of gold. Now we are in this Libya campaign, and suddenly my Christian brother is anti war. Well you know that it’s true. We drop a few bombs- - -there go the millions for the school lunch program. We drop a few more bombs - - there go the millions we set aside for water plant safety inspectors. Some say it’s OK if we kill brown or “olive skinned” individuals. But if a Brown person institutes the killing, suddenly it’s wrong. Hopefully it’s dawning on them that the lives of olive skinned individuals are worth something too. Hey - - I’m one of those olive skinned individuals. Now we have one group of olive skinned people possibly emigrating across the pond to Italy, and invading another bunch of olive skinned people. I’m going to say something that may unnerve some readers, particularly those of you on the left. You know Bob Dylan had a saying “You take all the dust down Oklahoma way and all the smog in Californie - - and all the soot from the Minnesota mines, and it’s all much cleaner than the New York kind. Well, I have a saying, too. You take Bill O Riley and Glen Beck and Sean Hannity, and their conservatism is still saner than the Rush Limbaugh kind. Some people think Glen Beck is insane. But a lot of stuff he said at that rally last August in DC is rather similar to the stuff I wrote in my prophecy book thirty years ago. Perhaps the most controversial thing Glen Beck has said was that the Obama administration is deliberately trying to wreck this economy by “re-inflating the bubble” causing a far worse economic crash down the line. I guess if you want to set out to Disprove this then you would look for evidence that points to the contrary. The trouble is, you can’t. You have that 916 billion dollar tax give-away, and you have three simotanious wars in the Mideast, and you have the health care plan that won’t even kick in till 2014, and you have an utter unwillingness to do anything about the trade deficit. And most important, you have this gambling casino mentality in Wall Street we owe none other than President Clinton for- - and you have nothing less than some sort of economic suicide pact. I don’t know how much time we have. I think Obama should get through the election next year OK, but just how long after that we will be able to keep this illusion going- - I can’t say.

This next paragraph is about values too. You may think you’ve heard it before but the end has a twist that will surprise you. Once upon a time there was a very rich man, who had a son. And the son decided he didn’t want to hang around his father but strike out on his own. So his father gave him a bunch of money to invest with- - and he would hire people to come up with new products. The thing is the son had absolutely no business sense and everybody kept telling him this. But his father kept pumping him more money- - so that in time the son became an object of derision. When one time it looked like he’d be on skid row or something other people said, “Don’t worry, his father will just give hum another hundred billion or so”. And now I am here to say this. The Christian church worships such a man. All of us value life. It is the most precious of all gifts from God. And yet Jesus said of his life “Nobody takes my life- - I lay it down and pick it up again”. You know, if that businessman son were to be robbed, it would be no big thing. They may get his wallet and be satisfied and stop. But he’d still have his billions in his Swiss bank account. Sometimes Jesus Christ reminds me of Bonnie Lockhart. Do you remember her on Days of our Lives. It’s not that she was a crook, but that she was such a stupid crook that galled me. If you or I had only a small fraction of the resources Jesus Christ had at his disposal, just think what we could do with it. Dana once asked me “If Jesus was so in to curing disease, why didn’t he teach the people to make penicillin, and all the other wonders of modern science”. Jesus was never his whole life subject to the temptations and worries of life that commonly beset the human race. He never wondered “Why am I here?” or “What is the meaning of Life”. To him life was as worthless as a hog trough in a town square filled to overflowing with gold coins. And the town’s people would stuff their pockets with it. I have often used the quotation of Ron Hubbard on a tape that’s so good it’s hard to repeat it too much and that is, “If you’re going to put out a fire, and there are a pack of dogs nipping at the wheels of the fire truck, you don’t stop en rout to the fire to address the yelping dogs chasing you. To do so would be quite mad”. People talk about criminals committing “Suicide by cop” and yet it seems Jesus Christ was trying to “commit suicide by Pharisee”. You know, Jesus called them all “snakes”, and every parent tells their children not to provoke the snakes in the snake house in the zoo because you know what happens. (Selah) You know, in that thing I sent Dr. Levy last week the thing hinted all around the proposition but never saying it directly that "I believe if you are going to have a worship relationship with a God, that God should share your values". The line is not entirely original with me. Dennis Prager said that your spouse, whom ideally will be your life partner (pardon me is that sounds gay) that partner should share your values.

Barry Goldwater in his book attributed to Nixon the saying, "I'm a conservative with a heart". I wish we had them today. Nixon grew up poor and knew and appreciated the value of hard work. He spent a lot of time in the Pacific Theater gambling aboard ship, but then would send the winnings back to his mother. One of the crowning highlights of the Nixon presidency was the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Israel and Egypt. Egypt attacked on a holy day and Israel found herself fighting for her life. Golda Meir called and asked President Nixon for his best jet fighter planes". When you have a good and close friend you want to help them when you can and equip them with the best tools available to you to help them to fight their battles. You know that a comon saying among many is "I have compassion on those who deserve it". In the case of the Protigal Son story in the Bible, the younger son, who had squandered money that was prematurely given him to begin with and now it was gone. But instead of turning to his new friends for help he remembers what a soft touch his father had been and muses to himself "If I say to my father that I have sinned and no longer deserved to be called his son" he will take me back in some capacity". One can note a few things here. What was the older son doing all this time? He was working in the field. Note that he was not playing "Lord of the mannor" ordering the other servents around. When the elder son finished his day's work he approached the house and was puzzled by the merryment that appeared to be going on inside. Strangely he does not go inside the house. Perhaps he already was sensing this was something that would be inappropiate to do. Instead he sees a servant outside the house and calls him over and begins asking him questions. One thing we might glean here was that the party was not for the servents. What we also know is that the father on his own did not go out to the field to call the elder son in from work to party. Eventually when the father does come out, the younger brother does not come with him. Some Christians like to "blow off" a bunch of their friends on impulse. Some people are so in love with the "Now" that they ignore Dr. Phil's admonition of "The best predictor of future performance is past performance". But let me say this. Today "sheep" are in as abondant supply as the gold coins in the earlier paragraph. If you lose ten or a hundred or more, as the saying goes "there's a lot more fish in the sea". Indeed there is a seemingly endless supply.

The world is falling apart. Gas prices are making record highs. Now they are selling padded bikinis to seven year old girls, and dolls who breast feed. There was a twelve year old boy with Aspurger's sidrone who think he's come up with revised math that says light is not the fastest thing in the Universe, but the limit is higher by a factor of 1.9. Just between you and me his theories should be pretty easy to blow out of the water by people who know. Judy was mentioning there are still small kids who's parents say have autism because they were given a vaccine with primarisol in it that has mercury. But I don't think they have put primarisol in vaccines in ten years. Now they are worried about red, orange, yellow, green, and blue dyes in foods that little kids eat that gives them attention deficet hyperactivity disorder. This is far from being a new proposition but it's being trotted around the block again. Maybe they'll be like cigarette packages and start off with a mild warning "This dye might cause adverse symptums in sensitive children". But then they'll update that to "This dye is dangerous and will give your child hyperactivity". And that won't be enough so they'll get more graphic and say "This dye has been strongly linked to sociopathic behavior and suicide and complete mental breakdown resulting in internment for not less than one nor more than ten years".

A T & T wants to buy out T Mobil, so that the number of phone carriers will be reduced from an already low four, to three, and some are saying two, because they think Sprint will go out of business. The federal trade comission has to rule on this sale before it can go through and I strongly suggest they turn it down. Back in the day there were all these "Baby Bells" competing with each other. What ever happened to them all? I mean you know once they are convinced they have a virtual monopoly they will begin jacking up prices and reducing the quality of service, like the Airlines did when so many of those of years gone by bit the dust.

Mostly Chemistry Test Final

MOSTLY CHEMISTRY INTELLLIGENCE TEST

Name the three magnetic metallic elements

Name the most chemically reactive elemental gas

What color is “hydrous” copper sulfate

Xenon got its name because it reacted violently with just about every other element

. (true or false)

Aluminum’s closest chemical relative is what element (Aluminum used to be located in a different spot on the periodic table to be closer to it.

What color does barium nitrate burn?

A battery cam be fashioned by using copper and zinc, and the electric current is produced due to a difference in the WHAT of the two metals.

Electric generaters work most effectively when the maximum number of BLANK is transversed (I’m looking for a three word term)

Stromtium 90 and Cesium 137 are substances known to Chemists as WHAT

Ethyline gas functions as a WHAT in the process of the ripening of fruit.

Ethyline glycol is sweet to the taste (true or false)

Butane has a lower temperature of evaporation than Propane (true or false)

Methyl-Ethyl ketone is commonly known as WHAT cleaning substance?

Prophanol has the same chemical formula but different molecular arrangement, as a subatance commonly sold as WHAT

Arsenic and Thallium have in common usage as WHAT?

What color flame does magnesium have when burned?

What color flame does strontium have when burned?

Which metal is least like the others: Chromium, Titanium, Tungston, Palladium.

Sillicon, Germanium and Arsnic are known as metalloids or THIS other high tech term.

An isobar as known by meteriologists is having this definition.

Aside from metalloids, metals fall into four major categories. Name them.

Stanus Floride contain what common metal the body needs anyway (I think)

Name the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

The dissecting of a cone by various planer lines- - helps illustrate this scientific phenomon that is very useful in a certain branch of modern science.

Name the heaviest metal, if you don’t count bismuth, which I know little about.

Name the heaviest naturally occurring chemical element going by the long standing number of elements in the late ‘fourties as 94 elements.

Eventually Uranium will continue to degrade in steps of two elements, until at last it ends up as THIS substance.

An energy (?) particle contained in cosmic rays that can change magnetic hard drives from zeros to ones and visa versa is known as a WHAT?

In a cyclotron, substances are “trans-muted” into other substance mainly by bombardment of THIS, which is also sent off in a chain reaction.

An isothermic chemical reaction is one where heat is lost in the process (true or false)

Name the lightest element on the left side of the periodic table that catches fire when exposed to water.

Hydrogen sulfate becomes a much more dangerous, volatile substance when exposed to water- - (true or false)

The axiom is “Acid into water; never water into acid” (true or false)

When salt desolves into the water the individual elements function as THESE (two different answers are acceptable here)

What metal has the highest melting point of any element?

Strontium 90 is mistaken for WHAT substance by the body?

Cesium 137 is mistaken for WHAT substance by the body?

Tri-methyl pentane is more commonly known as what substance?

A mole is a quantitative measurement that measures THIS

The reason why X rays are dangerous is because they contain photons (true or fralse)

How many hydrogen atoms make one helium atom in a thermonuclear reaction?

Cold-fusion of hydrogen is a demonstrated, certifiable fact. (true or false)

Methanol has a more volatile combustion power than does gasoline (true or false)

The element with the highest electrical conductivity is gold (true or false)

A tetrahedron is a three dimensional figure shaped like THIS.

An octahedron just might be a double one of THIS other geometric figure.

A symmetrical octahedron (as above) will touch a perfect sphere on THIS many points.

An “old star” like Betelguee will continue to produce heavier and heaver atoms within it’s thermonuclear reaction but will stop at THIS element (so I’m told)

Gasses on other stars and planets can be deduced by this time tested process. (I’m kind of looking for two words here)

Describe the process known as UV florecence. What is happening atomically?

Something becomes magnetized when all the electrons do THIS

Name the lightest metal (any hospital R N should know this)

Neon subjected to an electric current glows with WHAT colored light

Sodium subjected to an electric current glows with WHAT colored light.

What is the least efficient colored light for photosynthesis to take place in plants?

In the normal course of things people get most of their Vitamin D from sunlight ( T F)

In optics- - infinity is a fixed number with numbers above and below it (true or false)

The median current of a rectified AC electric current is .707 from the peak (T or F)

Short wave radio is possible because of this phenomenon of the atmosphere.

Atnospheric radioactive fall-out got that term because of THIS process.

The photochemical process happens because of exposure to THESE particles

Non cosmic radiation is successfully blocked by THIS substance

Name an element that evaporates at fifty-five degrees or so.

Krypton is a metal theorized to once be on earth but no longer (True or False)

Ozone is made up of atoms of this element.

Heavy water contains trintium, which is an isotope this elemental substance

Modern laboratories have been able to cool substances below absolute zero (T or F)

Acetate in its pure form is translucent (true or false)

Light received by any subatance is calculated by THIIS relation to distance

Intelligent information or “bandwidth” is calculated on a logarithmic scale (T or F)

Another word for “viscosity” is THIS

Groups of solid molecules held up by molecules in a liquid are known as THIS

Half life – as in Uranium, is calculated (or defined) by THIS

How is the root formula for circular trigonometry the opposite for hyperbolic trigonometry and in what way are the two formulas similar?

S T P are initials that stand for WHAT in chemistry

What is the formula for chloroform?

Among elements on the right side of the periodic table atoms bond by sharing electrons and this is called a WHAT?

When a photon is split in the laboratory it forms a WHAT and a WHAT that go off in opposite directions.

Rare Earths all have similar chemical properties (true or false?)

Atomic numbers are based on the number of BLANK in an element.

When light is refracted it generally increases its perpendicularity with the surface when it enters a denser medium. (true or false?)

Polyunsaturated fats are molecules with two more BLANKS missing

Dextrose is referred to as WHAT generally in hospitals?

Specific heat is a measurement of BLANK transference

Polymars are created by doing THIS to simpler compounds

An element can be said to be “inert” when THIS condition is met.

President Obama Addresses Nation on Libya

Today President Obama scheduled his speech a half hour early before the evening prime time shows commenced in the majority of the country. It was a well written speech with lots of appropiate flowery rhetoric at the end to get the patriotic spirit going. Some may argue it's a low blow to praise the service men for an action you personally order. The only thing about the speech was that there were times where the President hesitated, as if he were not sure what he was saying was true. If I picked up on that you can bet John Mc Cain did. Our President did a pretty good job of summarizing how we got to where we are now. He spoke of the sanctions that were imposed and the UN resolution, giving Kadaffy a choice, and of the iminent danger to the city of Bengazy, a city of some 700 thousand. He spoke of how the US initially took the lead but how we plan to turn the campaign over to our allies in a few days. He spoke of how effectively we have already halted Kadaffy's progress. What he neglected to say was that in the past two days the rebels have re-taken city after city along the coast, and now are prepared to do battle in Kadaffy's home town. Of course certain nay-sayers like John Mc Cain and Newt Gingrinch will never be satisfied. Either the President waited too long, or else he acted too soon. Many accuse the President of being unclear or unfocused. I think the President made himself quite clear tonight. Many nattering nebobs of negativism in the media keep on saying how "something unforeseen might come up to spoil the mission". What these talking heads never consider is not "what if it doesn't work?" but rather, "What if it does?" The prospect of a positive outcome doesn't seem to enter the minds of these people. Were they in charge at the time of the Civil War they would have surrendered after the battle of Bull Run. I think it's important also to not compare this mission to- - for instance- - sending the military in to stop genocide on the Ivery Coast. Certain tasks are inherently more "doable" than other tasks. But after this mission is accomplished, then maybe we can think about Sudan or the Ivery Coast. The key thing to remember is that this campaign is a UN Security Council mandate, and had we failed to act, and that would have reflected badly on the United States. He also spoke of the higher ideals of the United States.

In Japan those nuclear reactors are inching closer and closer to a melt-down. All the time they are discovering increased radiation in far-flung places of the world. We can pray for those people. Thom Hartman is wrong. The reason why they call them "fall-out" shelters is because the radioactive isotopes "fall out" of the sky and land on the populace. But it is of course true that food toxins tend to concentrate in the biological food chain and the higher up the chain goes the more deadly the toxin. I told people at last Friday's residents council meeting I wish they would bring back spinach, and Marcie seconded my notion. I guess they are considering any further remediation of the reactor as a "suicide mission" and few will volunteer fore it. I don't see why they haven't developed more advanced radio controlled robotics to handle the problem. A big criticism of the second Star Trek movie was that Spock was sent in to a radioactive area tantamount to a death sentence. I'm going to research this story more thoroughly before my next posting. I'm sure you people probably already know a lot more in the way of updates than I do at this time.

I went to bed actually before nine, which was a mistake. I had this dream and it’s one of these cases where I am beginning to theorize an “other life” that I keep dreaming about, like an alternate existence. I seem to have had a lot of dreams about this alternate existence lately. One a few weeks ago was about playing an old reel to reel tape that was made in the year 2000, which was quite a long time ago for this person. It was made in November when there was a dry Santa Ana wind, and I was making observations about certain trouble points with people in my life. In a lot of segments in these dreams I go to college- - which is “somewhere to the northeast” like CSUF. And I know this- - this area is not in a completely urbanized area because there are open fields and hills and stuff between where I live in the college even though it isn’t that far away. I think I picked up the vibe that I lived in Bishop or some city on the back side of the Sierra Nevada. Or maybe it’s some place like El Paso or Tucson where it doesn’t get that cold, and the air is dry. This character is a long time member of a church fellowship group, which he doesn’t particularly like even though he goes to a lot of activities with them. At times I have lived in various houses with male housemates. But there seemed to be some key traumatic event that occurred in April of 2008 that caused me to black out for three months and have no memory of that period. After this I think I went on some "vacation" with my parents that I did not want to go on. Also this life is punctuated by large, lavish family holiday gatherings with a lot of distant relatives. As I look back on this life- - things seemed good up to about ten years ago in these dreams. This would be the first “alternate existence” that wasn’t even at least hinted about in one book or another. Anyhow when I would wake up I would be restless. Finally when I did get up it was just after six, which means I got just over nine hours sleep last night, which is way too much. The following is an extra just for blogger.com. Back when I was in Green Harbor one day we had a substitute BINGO caller and he was doing B, N, and O, and you're a winner. Well, I flashed back to a dream I'd had or a vision or something. I was arriving in a parking lot just after dinner. It was pitch dark outside and by the shape and position of the moon in the sky (just short of full) I acertained that this was probably November. There was a not too cold "Santa Ana" wind blowing softly from the east, that was dry air. We walked southward to an amusement park area that was an east to west strip like Nu-Pike is, only there were no stairs you walked down. It was flat. We arrived in the middle of the east-west strip and went westward. There were all the usual amusement park rides lights and crowds and carnival style booths like Nu-Pike has, but over the PA you could hear the BINGO caller asking who had a B, N, or O. As you may know during my hospitalization in June of 2001 I often felt "trapped in another life" like I would never get back to who I was. I remember being at the front of some white concrete building with cement pillars out front, and I would grab a hold of the pillars and muse, "these are solid, all right. I'm really here".

Let's get in a short Beatle song quiz here. Of the following list of songs, list the two that were not released in the sixties, under another title, obviously. Scrambled Eggs, That Means A Lot, If You've Got Troubles, That's A Nice Hat, Auntie Gin's Song, One Way Ticket, Won't Be There With You, This Bird Has Flown, Granny Smith, Laxton's Superb, Mark I.

I hope that Dr. Levy was able to relate to that 3 ½ page treaties on “God” I sent him. He appeared to be praising me in class but like I say never made any reference to the letter. Perhaps I should go through the letter and see what parts of it haven’t yet been posted yet to Blogger.com. Like Obama's case for war, I make many appeals to established precedent. Of course the whole concept of the deity is a very personal one for people and each person sees God in his own way. Some are “free will” deists, who believe God leaves it entirely up to man’s ingenuity to solve his own problems. Some people are pantheists, who see every animal as a god. Others see nature as a whole as “God”. Yung and other psychologists see “God” as the “collective unconscious”. At one time I believe I made the case for collective Yung-ism, which says that perhaps the whole “mind” that did create the Universe is our own collective unconscious, so that if we have a problem with His or Its will, we have only to blame ourselves. Finally we come to what might be called the Eastern view which Gnostics also incorporate into their theology. This is the belief that some higher aspect of our own souls that has up till now been suppressed, has some pipeline to the “God” nature, and in this way we can achieve a form of Divinity- or at least some form of sinlessness or cosmic harmony with Him.

Elizabeth Taylor Dies at 79

Actress Elizabeth Taylor succumbed last night to congestive heart failure and passed away at Cedars Sinai hospital at age 79. She is most famous for such signature movies as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Cleopatra" and "The Taming of the Shrew". She made fifty motion pictures but got accadamy awards only for two, "Butterfield Eight" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf". In the latter movie she had to gain a lot of weight for the part and looked many years older than she actually was. Why she didn't get an Oscar for "Cleopatra" is beyond me. She was married eight times to seven husbands. But she wasn't one of these flakes like celebreties today. She was monogamus in nature. Her first five husbands were Nicky Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, and Richard Burton, whom she married twice. She matured early and got her first big role in "National Velvet" in 1945 because the director wanted a young girl with breasts. She played mature roles in the 'fifties when Marylin Monroe was still playing parts of ditzy blondes even though she was years older than Taylor. I liked her in "Suddenly Last Summer" in 1960 where she played the part of a woman who threatened to reveal the truth about certain things so others wanted her to have a pre-frontal lobotomy even though she was not vaguely insane. Of course in her later years she was known for her active role in Aids research. She was a close friend to Michael Jackson. She may be one of the few friends Jackson had who wasn't either a family member or a doctor. She also worked with Elton John on Aids. Actually she was about the same age of James Dean and costarred in "Giant" with him, even though most people think of James Dean as playing roles as teenagers. She was what you might call a woman of real substance in Hollywood. Now all we have left is Kate Roberts on "Days of our Lives". Like Taylor she liked being married to powerful men, and has many of Elizabeth's personality traits. She is one actress who will be sorely missed.

On the subject of Libya, the no fly zone imposed by the UN Security Council appears to be working. After just a few days of bombing RADAR instelations and other key sites, it seems that Kadafy has abandoned his air attack plans. There are none of his plains in the air, and his RADAR doesn't seem to be opperative. US, French, and British planes took part in this campaign, which began only last Friday but now they have gotten to the point where they can expand the No Fly Zone from the rebel stronghold in the east all the way to Tripoli, over six hundred miles away. There are people on the left and the right who are for this campaign, and there are people on the left and the right who are against this campaign. Hal Sparks and Randy Rhodes appear to be for this campaign and Thom Hartman appears to be against it. Many dislike the idea of "Starting a third war against a Moslem country in the middle east". Many on the other side speak of "Mission Creep" where the initial mission of just pressuring Kadafy to behave will be expanded to actively giving aid to the Rebels or even introducing ground troops to fight on Libyan soil. President Obama has already stated that he wants Kadafy gone, even though this mission is more of one of "leveling the playing field" so that the rebels have a decent shot at winning. Some of the people on the other side will complain either that this no fly campaign was adopted prematurely, or else that if we were going to do it we should have done it two weeks ago, when the Rebels were still winning and had not yet lost momentum. I don't see how both assesments can be simotaniously true. It might be as simple as the statement "We are all in favor of the killing of brown people; we just don't want a brown person doing it".

In terms of the Republican field of Presidential candidates, as far as I know, not one of them has openly declared for the Presidency. There is something wrong with almost every one. Ron Paul, who is led consistently in all the republican polls, is too libertarian, with a stance on foreign wars arguably "to the left of the President" as Hal Sparks says. Tim Pollente of Minnisota is "too green". In this case not inexperiance, but rather that he is too ecology minded and concerned about the environment. Newt Gingrinch has all this moral baggage from two failed marriage that might be an impediment to support from the Christian Right. Haley Barber is regarded as "coming off as racially insensive". I don't know anything about this Huntsman fellow, but somebody said he used to work for Obama. Then we have the governor of New Jersey. I haven't come up with anything wrong with him, yet. Mitt Romney is suspect because he's a Mormon and the Christian Right will never go for him. He's also vulnerable for being "too liberal" both on the Health Care issue, but also because John Mc Cain nailed him in a republican debate on the timetable withdrawal issue from the Iraq theater. That leaves Mike Huckibee, who off hand seems the nuttiest of the lot, and with some of the statements he's made lately, I think his own people would write him off as unelectable. I don't think Michelle Bachman really wants the job. Some have said that this could be the first "brokered national convention" since 1952 in this country. That might just worth be watching for its own sake. Clearly there are so many candidates and they all appear to be evenly matched, with no front runners, that the notion of having a candidate clearly leading the pack by next March appears very unlikely.

I would like to talk about former president Jimmy Carter a little. Hal Sparks was playing that July 1979 tape of Jimmy Carter talking about our impending energy crisis. He said that we had to phase out foreign oil now and adopt things like Solar power because for the rest of the century the energy crisis will only get worse. Some may say his observations were "premature". He was just a man who was ahead of his time. I didn't vote for him - - either time, and yet I have come to believe that Carter was one of our most moral, under-rated Presidents. Ted Kennedy actively undermined the President both on Health Care, and also on dealing with Moscow. Carter wanted to boycott the Moscow Olympics whereas according to the Heritage Foundation, Kennedy wanted to get really cozy with Brezhnev, and perhaps adopt some of Moscow's socialist policies here. Of course we hit "peak oil" in this country back around 1970. There was a chart on this on the internet. In early March of 1972 I wrote a fictional piece going into the future exactly two years to March of 1974 where I predicted we would have an energy crisis. Back in March of 1972 one thing that people were noticing was that stations were no longer having all these gas price wars like they used to. I picked up on this. Also ion the same writing I predicted my brother's divorce, who was not even married at the time. But had I actually been convinced to an intellectual certainty that the Divorce was coming- - - I would have actively done everything in my power to avert and prevent it. For a whole host of reasons. Jimmy Carter is a highly moral conscientious man. I think his book on Palestinian relations with Israel needs to be read by everybody. It's a real eye opener. Unfortunately Jimmy Carter remains the one living democratic president whom everyone on the right agrees was a bad president. Even Dr. Levy thinks Clinton was a good President. But everyone hates Jimmy Carter. You have to ask yourself- - - Why?