Hello, test, one two three. Will This Pass Go? Blogger has decided to stop accepting my blogs copied from the Word medium and I am pretty darn mad about that. I even tried saving the document in a straight text format and Blogger didn't even accept that. Something is very wrong. They don't offer help and won't give me even a hint of what the illegal text might me.

If I have to copy the proposed posting word by word I guess I will if I have to.

ON BEING A MARKETABLE COMMODITY

This is Friday June 27, 2008, Lottery Day. Sometimes it’s interesting to read novels about things that have never happened like a US city populated by white people instituting human sacrifice. Today is also “decided to get married day”. I’m sure there is a tie in somewhere. Of course a lot of novels are stories about things that have never happened, such as the Cain Mutiny, when there has never been a mutiny in the US Navy. Of course a lot of life in a search for truth is asking the right questions. This is best done when you answer a lot of questions and hope that some of the questions you ask will be the right ones. One question that ranks high on my list is determining when a certain name or entity became a common part of our culture. For instance the word Klingon can be directly traced back to the Star Trek series. There has never so far as I know been a man like Stephano Di Mira in the world who’s one obsession in life seemed to be to torment and terrorize a certain family called the Brady’s. I slept pretty well last night. I didn’t have the troubling dreams I had the previous night. Last night I watched that musical Simpson’s episode and then the Superman rerun, although I honestly don’t know why I bothered. I’m going to have to scratch that show from my regular TV rotation series. Of course in general the next six weeks or so are going to be a crashing bore, when all I’ll be doing is getting economically poorer. The latest economic statistics say that we are still not in a recession, but I have been in my own private recession for the past two years. Last evening I was reading all this stuff on the Apostle Paul and it just gave me a headache. It was one of these “sick headaches” like Mrs. Stephens used to get, where smoking a cigarette only makes it worse. I’m reading all this stuff so hopefully I can digest it for my blog readers so they don’t have to do any lake dredging themselves to see what comes up. There are a few nuggets I have gleaned. I read the Jewish Encyclopedia, who believes Paul was real but that he is a fraud who is a lot less Jewish and more Hellenistic than he’s letting on. Many authors use the term “Paul never - - - “ and there is a whole list of things Paul never did. But the common denominator is that if Paul never existed he never did anything. People will admit that perhaps the Epistles were added to and stuff added to existing Epistles. Some of the sources I read thought that Paul was the antichrist. What I have learned is that people who quote scripture a lot or resort to numerology have a package that “Won’t sell well”. And this is the key to success in the modern world. Charles Colson said “Once you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”. One source sited the notion that “One should never use deception to preach God to others”. With the Church you’re dealing with an entity whose number one, if not sole obsession in life is to Propagate Itself.

They have found life on Mars or close to it. They’ve found ice, and hence water, and now they say that the soil on Mars can be used to grow things like asparagus. This will be important information if we ever colonize the planet. There will also be gravity to creating that won’t be a problem. But these discoveries about Mars by the Phoenix lander- - gnaw at the very vitals of Christianity. Their whole theology has been based on one of ignorance. First it was the flat earth with heaven above and hell below. By the time of Dante people has gotten used to the idea that the world might be round. But by God the earth was still the center of the Universe! When this was aptly disproven by Galileo in the early 1600’s, the devout said “Yeah but one unshakable truth is that there is no life on other planets”. This is a key belief for the Christian because of the whole story about Adam and Eve and original sin and the redemption on the cross by Jesus “once and for all time” to redeem mankind. Any life on another planet is something Christian theologians just don’t have any room for because it just poses too many questions which they can’t answer. Galileo once said “All truths are easy to understand, once they are discovered”. I would say that these are words to live by.

This morning it’s overcast. We had Cheerios and pancakes for breakfast, and ham. I went out to the bakery for a large coffee. I had an extra orange juice.

One of the things that has “Never happened before” is having an African-American President. Seeing “Obama” in a list of US Presidents will be a trippy experience. Of course in order for Obama to properly sell himself to the public, he has to make sure he’s “White” enough. Ralph Nader criticized him for copping out in this respect the other day. But what surprised me was the reactions of Thom Hartman and Randy Rhodes, who went after Ralph Nader for making the remarks. If truth cannot survive in today’s political market place then something is dreadfully wrong. Obama could go down in history as the first white president with an unusual name. He’s shown he’s not hesitant to throw other people or ideas “under the bus”, which make him feel uncomfortable, including this new guns ruling. Jesus taught “Once salt loses its saltiness it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot by men.” We have never even had a Jewish president, perhaps a Black president is too much to ask for.

Marlena still wants that operation on John Black’s brain using the computer disk that Ralph had before it was stolen. There are a few language holes in John’s current vocabulary. The other day Roman introduced John saying “I’d like you to meet a world champion pugilist”. After some brief words Roman said “He has to be going” and John turned to the pugilist and said, “Oh, and good luck with your pugeling”.

We have a heads up on the Days of our Lives show. They are going to Flush the Plot for summer. As you know John has been in this altered “state” for months now living in Stephano’s mansion while Stephano exists as a mental vegetable thanks to that drug Marlena gave him. Now Marlena has that disk that Philip stole before he mysteriously decided to give it back to her. I predict John is going to have that operation tomorrow and by the end of Monday’s show he’ll be back to his old self. It took months to reprogram his mind the first time around but everything is speeded up for the summer. And just after this the body of Morgan’s father will be discovered and John Black will confess to killing him but he’ll get off on an insanity or mental technicality and Roman won’t even press charges. But Philip’s actions at framing John will be found out and he’ll go to prison. Meanwhile Lucas will be found out because Clowie will slip up and have to finger Lucas. But with Philip in prison Clowie will leave the series and go back to Austria to try and patch things up with Brady. Meanwhile Lucas and Sammy will get back together and Elvis Jr. will be given the boot and possibly pay Stephano a visit in the hospital telling him everything that’s happened, though he can’t hear. Meanwhile all charges against Lucas will be dropped paving the way for a summer of romance between Lucas and Sammy and also John and Marlena. Remember I told you ahead of time.

The Supreme Court has announced its two final decisions for the year. Yesterdays was that the mandated death penalty for the rape of a child that one state had was deemed excessive punishment. My question is who the hell are those judges who would put a price or limit on the life long suffering of a child? This ruling is a grevious violation of state’s rights, as is today’s ruling. Today the court issued their “long awaited” decision on the D C hand guns ban. They struck down the Washington DC gun ban saying it violated the second amendment. They might as well just poll Justice Kennedy for all these “swing” rulings, because the rest of them are set in concrete, voting predictably. I watched Rush Limbaugh, Thom Hartman and Randy Rhodes. Randy is against the guns decision as am I. I think a city should have the right to rule itself a “non violence” area. Also I think the spirit of the 2nd. Amendment was to further states rights and to say what the national government could not do. Rush Limbaugh has reversed himself on the idea of divine rights. Now he is for them. Remember that when it came to animal rights Rush was against them because “Rights are things that are contracted out between two parties”. Nowhere in the Bible does it state where or how God negotiated with man to determine which rights he would or would not have. Rush says self defense is a right. We also know that the courts have recently said that if you think you are in danger or feel threatened, you can start shooting, regardless as to whether the objective facts support the reality of the threat. I got to thinking about this one and I suppose under this ruling if a dog (or other wild beast) attacks a man for seemingly “no reason” if “in the animal’s mind” it felt threatened then the attack is ruled as justified.

This and the previous two paragraphs is typed June 26, 2008. I had two dreams last night. The first was another of these hospital dreams where I was scheduled to have some sort of brain surgery but was drugged so that I couldn’t talk coherently. In the second I was walking through my old apartment courtyard just looking at which tenants lived where – and none, of course that I knew. The south end was arranged just a little differently. I took the bus that started off as Western headed south bound. But somewhere along the line Gilbert was the name of the street. But we rounded a corner and turned right and went down to the ocean. It was where the San Gabriel River empties into the ocean and it was all built up with boardwalk and fish and chips and fish bait places. I had met one woman resembling Gail, who originally liked me but then got chummy with another man, who stopped off in this lockers area. I remember something about “I know the man is deficient in calcium and Omega 3 fish oil”.

Otherwise in the news it’s been the same old flapping of gums talking about stuff that’s days old news. But I’ll take one more look. Yesterday I was looking at a lot of anti Obama videos narrated by Sean Hannity. There is no word on the FISA bill senate vote yet. They said it would be soon and that the bill would sale through.