There was a major
shooting rampage in Santa Monica today just a few miles from where the
President was scheduled to be - - and they rerouted his motorcade. Apparently it is a thirty year old Lebonese
from a “reclusive family”. He initially
killed two people in a house, which then was set on fire, and later they found
the two bodies. The shooter then
hijacked a car with a woman driving, but on impulse he shot another woman in a
car. He hijacked another vehicle and
ended up at a bus stop at Cloverdale and Olympic. He got out of an RV (large “bus” vehicle according
to the Spanish speaking witness) He
began shooting up that street corner. A
blue bus was just pulling up and the shooter shot up the bus shattering windows
and such. He graved one woman with a
little girl, on the shoulder. The little
girl was uninjured. From there he went
on to Santa Monica City College, a two year college of 34,000 students. He went to the campus library packed with
students studying for finals. Students
fled and were panicked one of the doors would not open. At this point Law Enforcement arrived and in
a gun battle with the suspect, the officers killed the suspect, and they
covered up his body. But the police also
arrested another “person of interest’ putting him in handcuffs. It seems there was a total of at least six,
perhaps more, wounded. One person
died. I was watching this saga unfold
instead of my soap opera, which was already preempted by something else
anyhow. There seems to be no connection
with the Presidential visit to California, but the proximity is surely enough
to get this whole incident on the National Network news.
They shut down the
San Onofre nuclear plant here in south Orange County this morning. This nuclear reactor had been in opporation
for fifty years or so. At least since I
was around twelve. It was shut down
permanently because there were malfunctions at the plant in January 2012 and
the plant was shut down, and I guess they figured it was a hopeless cause. We no doubt have a lot higher nuclear safety
regulations than they do in Japan. I
imagine the plant’s closing will drive up the local costs of electricity. They used to always brag about how cheap and
efficient nuclear generated electric power was.
President Obama’s
administration is on the verge of giving final approval to the Canadian
pipeline to Texas. A final decision will
be made in two months. Much to the
consternation of responsible environmentalists everywhere- - the President once
again has betrayed his progressive political base. It could be and has been argued that this
Obama administration is just like having a third George Bush Presidential
term. We need to review the basic facts
once again. The United States will not
get a drop of this oil. It’s all going to China. The Canadian government apparently is suing
the oil company. They could not get the
shorter rout to the Pacific Ocean because British Columbia has provincial sovereignty
and barred the instelation of the pipeline through its territory. The pipeline will generate a lot of short
term employment but only 35 permanent jobs, we are informed today. That isn’t much. We need to talk about the environmental
specifics. This is not oil - - it’s
tar. Tar normally will not flow through
any pipe - - but it has been treated with a lot of toxic chemicals so it
will. We have a pretty good idea how to
clean up an oil spill. But a spill of
this stuff can’t be cleaned up at all.
Apparently the Kalamazoo river was poisoned for years because of a spill
of this stuff there. And there is a city
in Arkansas that was devastated with another spill. The oil companies have gotten the media to do
an ongoing news black-out of this incident.
Of course I heard today that cops were convinced to bash the heads of
homeless people, because Corporations wanted the cops to take action when the
police weren’t going to. I’m not
normally a fan of industrial sabotage- - but you wouldn’t find me objecting if
we learned that environmentalists had sabotaged this project before it even got
off the ground.
This may sound
like a commercial. But people ought to
get Soda Stream. This is the thing you
hook on a faucet or something that carbonates water to the desired level of fizziness. And they offer you fifty different flavors of
soda flavors, and all of them are without the dreaded fructose. I guess you add your own sugar. Of course this device will cut soda costs
dramatically. And there will no longer
be the frequents to the 7 – 11 to get cold sodas- - and then all of the
resultant clutter of cans and bottles.
The thing is we should all be ecologically responsible. The carbon level for this planet can’t safely
go above 350 parts per million or something.
Just the other day it surpassed four hundred. Even if the oil companies did nothing but use
old known reserves- - this would result in too much global warming for the
planet to sustain. And this is before
building the Canadian pipeline. And
frankly we really ought to do something about getting our cattle off grain and
back on to grass, which is natural for them to eat anyhow. And also the meat will be healthier for us
and raise our cholesterol less.
Before we get to
anything else in this file I’d like to talk again on the subject of death. With today’s event in the news the average
person just may be giving a fleeting thought to the topic of death and their
own dying. Some may say to me ‘Yeah, but
any time you get on the subject of death or the afterlife or the nature of the
soul, you just hem and haw and beat around the bush and never come to a point”. Message received. I believe you ought to have a point. And it helps to start with what we know
rather than what we don’t know. So let’s
first talk about what life existentially is.
We and most life in the animal kingdom is made up of “sensient beings”
to use a Capt Piccard term. That means
that we are “self aware”. There is something
else higher forms have in common in that is we are able to draw on our experiences
and remember them and learn from them.
Now last Saturday I broached what experts call the idea of “logical
positivism” in Math in particular. That
is if you don’t have something or some THING to discuss- - then you are just
beating at air. So - - many postulate
the existence of some “world of the dead” as psychics are so fond of
doing. In their world and in Revelation
in the Bible, Time as we know it proceeds unabated. But in my form of cosmological physics - - -
I postulate that there is “something else” besides Time. Much of my whole theory now about the “other
side” comes from this theory (or even “fact”) of this bilateral symmetry of
most subatomic particles. So in other
words - - by the same logic as saying “if you have a TOP then you’ve got to
have a BOTTOM. So I theorize that there is a whole “other
side of the Void” - - or more
specifically that “perceived Zero point” in the Universe. And not just our human perception that’s “deceived”
but all of our scientific instruments are also under this “common deception”
that’s operative. So that’s a lot for ordinary
to swallow, and I wouldn’t believe anybody if they couldn’t. I have likened it to the notion that “the
fish doesn’t know he is wet.” But to a
logical positivist who maintains you can’t talk about things for which there is
no evidence - - then it’s ironic that Born Again Christians base their whole
center of attention on Death saying “We’ll all know when Death comes”. To a logical positivist, this is crazy
talk. It’s just as crazy is saying “I
get my authority to ponthicate the way I do on the basis of a God which only I
can see and relate to”. It’s ironic that
the Born Again community would deny two of the most Key attributes of Life- -
that is sensience or “self awareness” which they practically call a sin. And the idea of learning from an actual Experience
that you had. How strange it is that
Born Again Christians want all of our encounters with “God” to be “non
experiancial”. (Selah) I don’t think I can do that. Now that we’ve summarized what we DON”T know-
- what DO we know. That as a child, time
passes slowly- - and remembering it is kind of like trying to remember the
remote eons of the past. Life is a
logarithmic time-line. That is- - when
you go from two years old to four- - two years- - you have in fact lived Half
of your life. Going from Four to Eight
years of age, you again have half of your life- - this time a four year period-
- so your memory is twice as good now. Then
you go from eight to sixteen, sixteen to thirty-two, and thirty-two to
sixty-four, Lord have mercy! I’m not
THERE yet but I will be before I know it.
And then what? You learn more and
get smarter and smarter recording in your brain memory cells akin to the RAM
brains of a computer. But then someone
pulls the plug and All is lost. So some
could argue that to even speculate about Death - - is pointless because
obviously there is nothing there to talk about.
Maybe. But there is a little
chink or two in this theory. We still
don’t know what power GAVE us this property of “sensience”. And also - - we know that children don’t
remember much of anything before they were three or four. Those first few years are a complete blank
and might as well have happened to someone else. And yet here is the break in this “brain
records all” theory. Because they say
that babies remember things - - traumas or even over sexual excitement in the
womb before you were even born according to Ron Hubbard. And my argument is - - if you can remember all this without a
brain recording (because it doesn’t do that yet) so what’s to stop the dead
from continuing to be aware and remembering their life experiences once they
have gone. Is life knowledge stored in
brain cells or in the psyche or soul of the individual? This is a question worth asking. So then, the soul would be kind of like a
portable hard drive- - so the adage about death is wrong, “You CAN take it with
you”.
No comments:
Post a Comment