Well now Pakistan’s leader, Karzai, has agreed to a second election in Afghanistan to resolve the problem of one third of the votes being invalidated by election officials in that country. This is good news. He says he just wants to resolve any doubts. Even in Afghanistan they have a run-off rule where the guy in first place has to get 51% of the vote in order to avoid a run-off. Only in this country to we allow elections of Presidents where they get in office by winning just 43% of the vote. Yesterday apparently Karzai met with John Kerry of all people and Kerry was alledgedly the one who perswaded him to have another election, apparently after visiting a mosque together. It’s been said that Obama may be holding off the committal of 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan until he’s certain that the government there is legit, and that he is “someone whom we can work with”. Personally I think John Kerry gives better speeches when he’s not running for president, as opposed to when he was.
A lot of interesting poll results came out yesterday. They said only nineteen percent of the people supported what the Republicans are doing in congress. That ought to be a wake up call for the party. Also only twenty percent of the population actually called themselves Republicans, and they say this is the lowest figure in over 25 years. I guess that’s back when unemployment was last over ten percent. Also, the current Bauccus health bill only gets 48% support as opposed to 49% opposing this bill. But at the same time Americans favor a “public option” by 57%. That ought to be a clarion call to congress to change their strategy and include a public option in the final bill.
President Obama has been meeting with the big leaders on Wall Street. On the one hand he is soliciting buckets of money from them and on the other hand he is trying to perswade them into being more civic minded and to things that are in the interests of the American people. To me I don’t know what to make of this. Randy Rhodes says that Obama is refusing to speak to their hired lobbyists and this is why he wanted to speak to these Wall Street leaders directly. But most of this cabinet Obama has could well be an extension of the George Bush administration. Only Eric Holder could be called “one of us” alias liberals. And the Attorney General has now stated he will not pursue “medical marijuana” arrests. Apparently the number of dispensaries in the LA area has skyrocketed and they are now on nearly every block in some areas. Funny, but I haven’t run into one yet just walking around the neighborhood. Eric Holder remains the only real hope of liberals as far as prosecuting the things that need to be prosecuted like offences of the Bush Administration in regard to torture and violating civil liberties.
I guess a healthy intellectual stand is to “Doubt Everything”. Let me carry that a step further. Doubt everything- - including doubting the doubters. Thom Hartman has made dire predictions as of late in regards to the US economy saying the economy is going to fall apart in 2010. Rush Limbaugh made the same prediction about the Clinton economy in 1994 and both are equally wrong, because that’s not keeping very savory company. Why don’t you people have a little faith. Perhaps we are “re-inflating the bubble”. But the bust isn’t going to come tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It may not come for years. All of the economic indicators are increasingly headed up. There are people I know who still do the poor boy routine saying their stocks have been wiped out or that their real estate equity is gone. Well, perk up. People with IRA’s and other financial instruments should begin seeing a rosier future. But this whole idea of doubting the doubters goes into other fields. Who would trust a used care salesman whose line went something like “Oh yeah, all those other guys are a bunch of crooks, but you’re lucky you found me because me you can trust”. I think I would say “Thou protesteth too much”. The same thing goes for Christian bashing. If may or may not come as a surprise that a lot of the bashing of Christians is done by other Christians. Geoe Scott, and Walter Martin were two such people, and Chuck Smith has had his moments, along with a guy named Hunt, who wrote a book. Jesus Christ on the radio has done a lot of preaching how anybody who trusts God for a healing is a fool, and anyone who witnesses their faith had better make sure his life is a walking advertisement for abundant living because lord knows you can’t put your trust in preaching the straight gospel. Also, how many times have you heard “You can’t trust the Bible. Don’t you know that Satan quotes scripture?” If you’re me you don’t even want to think about how many times you’ve heard that line. And then we come to ABC Sunday news. They started off the program talking about “balloon boy” and how the whole thing was a hoax. But to play on the same general theme they went on to attack the ministry of Benny Hinn, and his alledgedly fake healings. You know it is a funny thing about liars. They aren’t very trusting people at all but assume everything they encounter is a lie, because they are projecting their own personality failings on to others. Once I said to the Asshole from El Paso, “Well, even if some of the supernatural stuff about Christianity turns out not to be true, still living a Christian life is a good thing merely by natural reasoning, and in the end living as a Christian will be better in this life”. The Pastor shot back, “That’s a bunch of bull!” He himself doesn’t believe that adopting Christian virtues “in the natural” is a good thing.
I would like to talk about a topic that got buried at the very bottom of a long posting concerning some startling new revelations about Gravity. In the case of gravity the new rule is “What you see is what you get”. According to Astronomy Cafe the travel of light with respect to gravity is instantaneous. It used to be that if you saw a “displacement” of Mercury behind a total eclipse and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be I assumed it was because the light was being bent by gravity. The new rules are that gravity itself behaves as light and gravity itself gets bent and also has a delay effect. If you don’t see the object, it has no gravity. This of course is the most definitive thing yet in ruling out the existence of Black Holes. Not only can light never escape a black hole but gravity itself can never escape a black hole. This also means that for distant planets like Neptune, the planet really IS where you see it, at least gravitationally. This should make orbital calculations a whole lot easier because it means with respect to gravity, that the propagation of light is instantaneous. Like light, gravity propagates in waves. Don't even ask me what that means. This whole new reality takes some getting used to. Because it means if matter comes into existence, and you are a few light-hours away from the object, for you the gravity will not be “turned on” for those few hours. This is an alien way of thinking.
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