THE CLEAR AND ON-GOING NATIONAL POLICE STATE

Just now I was looking at George Washington’s blog and it’s talking about the “continuity of government” that we all suspect has been a reality for some time. This means that it doesn’t matter who is president at any one time but the same militaristic police state exists regardless. They say they have not suspended the “emergency powers” enacted just after 9 – 11 – 01. This isn’t any real surprise in light of yesterday’s passage of that senate rider to an arms bill where you can be picked up and held indefinitely for any reason. I was beginning to think it was all a roomer but I had Bill Press on before six this morning and he was talking about it, and Randy Rhodes mentioned it again on her show today. One Black guy called yesterday to muse how it’s strange that local governments that are so strapped for money for vital human services, seem to have all the money in the world when it comes to para-military law enforcement. It’s like the defense industry in the ‘nineties decided to hedge their bets and sell their surplus products to civil law enforcement. They had the inventor of this military grade pepper spray. It isn’t just a “food product” any more than heroin is just a flower. He said that the cops are misusing his product and don’t employ the proper “decontamination procedures” after administering it. I guess it’s widely known that the US imprisons more of its population per capita than any other nation of the world. This is due to the privitazations and merchandizing of the “prison industry”. None of this is really news. But it’s interesting that President Obama has failed to weigh in on this whole “occupy” movement around the country. It creates just a little “doubt” in my mind, you know. Last night they cleared out Philadelphia and Los Angeles with initially minor reports of incidents and “no injuries to either protestor or cop”. But now we are hearing of some unpleasentries in Los Angeles with the police. Someone has suggested that they should send in social workers with medical care rather than police in riot gear to these events. Of course the “occupy” movements made the decision not to turn away those with physical or mental health issues, but rather to follow Jesus’ example and minister to the poor.

The Dow Jones Industrials rose 489 points today and all of the major NYSE indexes are up over four percent in just one day. Those five central banks got together to “stabilize” the economic melt down in Europe by being more liberal with loan terms. I don’t think worrying needlessly about the huge volume of this debt is fruitful. It won’t go away whether you worry about it or not. I am looking forward to the time when all of this “austerity” economics is a thing of the past. They said private debt in this country has Dropped fifty percent on GNP since 2007. This means that we are now free of fifty percent of GNP debt- - as an amount, and also this is a smaller percentage of a smaller GNP figure since the GNP has dropped, actually making the drop bigger. There are indications that China will not be able to undercut us as easily in the future because as I may have said, they somehow put through a minimum wage hike in China industry. As such I would expect the trade balance to improve. Oil and gold remain high and I find the persistent high figures in both perplexing. Market conditions dictate that commodities should be dropping. However the Republicans want to make sure that unemployment coverage is not extended and the payroll tax cut is not extended. I mean in their minds they haven’t lost the battle yet, the economy could still falter.

On ABC network news they announced that more companies hired more people this past month - - - well at the fastest pace in a year. The stock market made “the average investor” four thousand dollars today. This means if I had taken every penny I had when I moved in here and invested it in the market I’d have about $85.00 just today. That isn’t bad for a day’s work. China today just lowered their interest rates meaning that people in China will more easily be able to afford US products. John Hinkley has been getting these “leaves” from whatever asylum he is in, and spending time with his mother or whatever in Virginia, and his attorneys have been pressing for even longer leaves, like 24 days at a time. However US agents followed him when he asked for money to go to the movies. Instead he went to the public library and voraciously read as many books as he could get on President Reagan and also looked up assasenation techniques on the internet. He recently made an entry in his journal to the effect that “Nobody knows the real John Hinkley”. Speaking of insane- - a monsterous crime has been uncovered by ABC news concerning the drugging of children in the foster care system. These children are thirteen times as drugged as regular kids, which is bad enough. But the caretakers claim that the children will be taken away from them if they don’t medicate their children and keep giving them more and more. It just takes your breath away to see these kids showing baggies full of pills, and counting out medication after medication, seven, eight, nine, whatever, of different pills they have been given. These are wild things like psycho-tropic drugs sometimes given to toddlers. There are anti depressants such as Abilify. Often these kids have really bad reactions should they have “come down” from these drugs. Often they are given five different kinds of pills at once, which would be dangerous even for an adult. I hope this story doesn’t get buried because it’s too important. Scientists have absolutely no idea what these strong psycho-tropic medications do to developing young brains. Fortunately many of the children have gotten off these drugs and managed to their lives together, sometimes getting adopted.

Many hear generalities about the Christian right and would like a specific name that I might describe as a "typical one of then". I'll give you a name: John MacArthur. John MacArthur has screwy theology. He is a “hyper-Calvinist” meaning that he doesn’t believe in the universality of Christ’s calling but believes certain people are doomed never even to have the gospel available to them. But he has referred to Catholicism as Satanic and he has repuliated the theologies of Joel Olsteen, Billy Graham, Robert Schuller, and even Rick Warren here in Orange County. He says he is against “seeker friendly churches”. Of course those that talk about “grace” the most believe the least in it. He doesn’t believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and in general calls himself a dispensationalist. He says he rejects any teaching which claims that “The Law” is not for the Christian Church. This is in response to some extreme “new covenant” Baptists out there and hyper-Paulinists who believe that the promises of the OT are no longer Israel’s to claim but that every last one of them is to be claimed by the Church. The article said nothing about his married and family life. He said he has been pastor right where he is since February 9^th 1969. He is against psychology calling it useless and unnecessary for the cure of any psychological or personal problem. Yet he is one of the foremost Christian writers and teachers of all time. Keep that in mind.

I went down to Dr. Levy’s class and it was not yet twenty to five when I got in there and took about the only empty chair. A few others came in and other chairs for them were found. We had a very lengthly check in starting with Bruce. Dr. Levy did finish his race but didn’t tell us his time or anything else about it. We are having our annual Christmas dinner with his class and last menu was so popular we are doing it again this year with lasagna, pizza, and ham, with various pies for desert. Dr. Levy has for this year promised to bring in “virgin” cocktails such as pina collates, and banana daquaris and also eggnog. Along about 5:30 I said a lot of us need to take our medication. I went up and found Donnie on the east wing upstairs and had mine. Then I went for a cigarette break and talked with others on the patio. Bill returned to this room without saying where he had been. When I got back down to the class they were talking about politics and Dr. Levy and I instantly clashed when he said that he likes Romney and that Gingrich isn’t that bad because “all of the negative news about him is out there in the media already”. The same thing could be said for Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold, but I wouldn’t hire them, either. I tried to remind Dr. Levy of a few economic and pragmatic realities. But soon after the topic was changed to other things. Headed back here Federico finally nabbed me for a haircut, and was opening up the room, which was filled with computer equipment. A conversation ensued with Rose about having our Christmas party upstairs, which made no sense to either me or Rose. Rose mentioned that this building was constructed under dubious conditions and there is evidence of structural weakness for 300 people to be up here, and I said I was inclined to agree, and Federico just said, “I don’t know; I just work here”. I got “the usual” and signed my name, and thankfully won’t be billed till next month, which is tomorrow. I was happy with the haircut. When I got back here I brewed coffee and gave Bill some.

For our final Opus Magnum paragraph I would like to discuss this practice both in fiction and worse in non fiction, of fabricating the “Past” out of thin air, creating an “alternate reality” to known history that we all lived through. You see it in statements to the effect that I can’t balance a check book, or I have a money spending problem, or that I have “always had an addictive personality”. These things are completely false. But you see it in American history saying “America was established as a Christian nation”. The facts on this are clear. It says in the Constitution body plainly that “No religious test shall ever be required of any federal office holder”, probably written by James Madison himself. The very idea of being born with “Inalienable Rights” is an utterly alien one in Christianity, as people like Gene Scott will be glad to inform you of. They say that the founders were devout Christians. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were non Christian deists. George Washington utterly refused to discuss religion at all with anybody. It was also Washington who said “It is my hope that the United States will always be in the forefront of liberality”. But of course if you look for the Historical Jesus you soon come to the realization that nobody ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century, despite an impressive number of philosophers and historians during the period. But Christians are asked to swallow a whole narrative where a whole Christian Church structure founded by a guy named Paul was established, and the Jews were the evil Lex Luther entity who was obsessed with destroying it at every turn. Certainly you see this “alternative reality” played out in the campaign and as I pointed out to Dr. Levy just now, American has not seen such low tax rates as these since the ‘twenties, like in the time of Calvin Coolege. But in fiction it’s easy to lose all rationality as a writer, I guess, if the demand for “product” is too great. For instance on Days of our Lives a woman’s eggs get lost after she developed a furtility problem with her husband. And yet her forty year old “son” would have been Born- - before Maggie and Mickey ever met and either one suspected they even had a furtility problem. Now they are bringing back Susan Banks to the show, who departed in early 1998. It seems the “baby” that she had in 1997 is now a 35 year old man and is the son of Stephano Di Mira who “took the baby away from her”, which is a scene they must have played off camera because I never saw it happen. Politicians like to reconstruct their own pasts saying that they were “always” hard core conservatives, when their actual histories revel they were anything but. We are regailed by constant Hollywood movies about those “savage” Indian tribes who were always attacking peaceful White people. We somehow want to airbrush all the slaves and auction blocks and the bull whips from American history photos. I imagine were you to talk to Larry Elder he’d say that there was never a time when Blacks were actually denied rights. One old documentary I saw had pointed out that some history book had the words “But as for Sambo, it is believed that he suffered less than any other racial group from the economic troubles of the pre civil war South. Now today you hear that before the Civil War that Black families had a lot more cohesion and unity. But clearly children could be taken away from parents by their masters at will. The entire saga of Labor Unions and their epic struggle to establish themselves has been all but air brushed from the history books. Of course now they want to eliminate smoking scenes from old movies as not “politically correct”. I guess they have even run studies that students today don’t even know what World War II was about. And of course you have statements like how President Obama, being born in Kenya, was naturally influenced by his father to dislike British Colonialism, which of course is an un-American trait to have- - i.e. to dislike British Colonialism. According to Dr. Levy the reason why oil prices are so high is because President Obama closed down all of the oil wells in the Gulf after the BP spill. They say that he who controls how History is presented to posterity, in truth controls the culture. We know what they do in other countries and yet in imitating their behavior we give them “flattery” I would prefer we not give them. We don’t need to do what they do in China regardless of what Michelle Bachman thinks. The very idea of America being a place of higher standards in every area among the world’s nations- - is a concept fast being lost. So we are told that greed and political corruption and control by lobbyist rule, is all we can look forward to now. And also that somehow to threaten lobbyists is somehow “contrary to the sacred conservative principles on which this nation was founded”. Those on the right don’t know what is sacred and what is profane, and don’t care they don’t know.