The More Things Change...

Barack Obama this week stated that he was not going to raise taxes on the wealthy, something that he made as a campaign promise while on the electoral trail. It seems that this is the second campaign promise which he decline to implement. The first was of course his statement that he was going to remove the troops from Iraq and bring them back home. Well, unless Afghanistan has been recently annexed to the United States it appears he has changed his policy again.

On December 1st the Supreme Court will finally ask President Elect Obama to show the world his birth certificate. It appears that you can get this far in the run for President with out doing this at the outset. People that have to get their drivers license have to cough up their birth certificate but not Presidential candidates like Mr. Obama. He may very well not be our next president after all. For more on this please check out the weblog of Dr. Kate. My only compunction that I have with President Obama is his Christian stance at least to the extent that it seem has no respect for the religion. Yet the legal implications of his place of birth is a firestorm that the main stream media is avoiding.

http://www.texasdarlin.wordpress.com/the-trojan-candidate/
I have also posted a Politico Pastachios internet radio blogcast of this subject below, it is a very interesting show.

Frankly I viewed the birth certificate posted at www.fightsmears.com and it seems legitimate to me. You can get see it directly at the following link. http://fightthesmears.com/articles/5/birthcertificate

This is claimed to be a forgery by a Dr. Polarik. Unfortunately, this testimony is as suspicious as they claim Barack's Obama's certificate appears, you decide.

This radioblogtalk radio station (privately run) debates the issue, you decide.


Barack Obama says that he is a Christian and as such he probably would be willing to renounce his dad as a burn in hell apostate who renounced the faith only to accept Islam. Michael Jackson recently converted to Islam for Jehovah Witness. It seems interesting that Michael Jackson was asked to take an Arabic/Islamic name as did Barack's dad but that the faithful Christian Barack Hussein Obama is willing to keep the name not only of his apostate dad but that of the supposed Shiite mayrter who founded the religion.

I would like to ask the lawyer Mr. Barack Obama exactly how obscure is chapter one of Romans, Romans (1:27) where it clearly states from St. Paul the apostle to the gentiles that homosexuality is perverse and grounds for Gods punishment? It seems strange that since both he and his wife are attorneys that there would any obscure passages in any text especially in a text that has enumerated each and every chapter and verse.

The Rich Are Different Than You And I, They Have The Government In Their Pocket

It is quite amazing how the banking industry is getting it self bailed out with tax payers money when in fact their entire ploy was to but Americans in debt and sit back and collect interest while we work all day to pay off these debts. They even went so far as to raise their rates for all their services including ATM fees. Citibank's ATM fees used to be as much as $3.00 which was just unbelievable, up until recently their share price per stock was just a little over $3.00 and that seemed like poetic justice.

One of the things that become clear is that all through out the time that their economic philosophy was being pursued for the last three to five years these bankers were living 'high off the hog' even though their service was no good. They lived well beyond their means in terms of what it is that they actually produced. Yet, although they came up with nothing but a failing way of doing business they still get their financial compensation. That leads me to suspect that we really live is a class structured society, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer because despite the fact that they have failed they get all their money back plus profits. I cannot understand how the banking industry gets this pass and even the auto industry is ignored under the same argument.

Do we live in a society where the wealthy are maintained as such regardless of the financial reality? Aren't we just supporting the same class of people despite the fact that they should be coming down due to their greed and false philosophical beliefs? I have often compared this to the use of drugs in national sports. If the player is truly drug tested and found guilty of using an illegal substance he would be benched for a while giving the oppurtunity for another athlete take his place and show what he could do. We tend to find that there are a lot of great players just waiting for their shot instead of just a few 'superstar' athletes the whole team is suppose to depend on.

Take for example the World Trade Towers Tragedy, the man that owned the towers was compensated through his insurance not once but twice as the attacks were registered as two separate acts. However, the homeowners of hurricane Katrina had to wrestle their insurance companies as to whether their home collapse due to rain or wind.

Clearly we live in a double standard and clearly we are not a government of the people, for the people by the people. Nor apparently are we a nation of laws, since the deregulation of the credit market was virtually unsupervised, not to mention Enron, Global Crossings, and these other huge corporations that went without any supervision to the detriment of their customers and shareholders and to the chagrin of the American people in the face of America's detractors like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Nothing of the American philosophy is working and it is due truly to the secular way of life. As long as the American people keep going left of Christianity this kind of debacle will maintain. There are good reasons for saying so. Without that kind of Christian consciousness and an awareness of God the American people get very self centered. They began to act in a way that shows no regard for their fellow man and the 'big picture'. The economic crisis we face today is based on greed and stupidity. I enjoy listening to all the brain child Harvard educated economist talk their nuance, cryptic, thoughts over the radio like alchemists and astrologers. People who the entire country revere and hold as austere and venerable Sherpas to the great financial summit. They were all suppose to be so smart, whoops, it was the very simple and down to earth common sense speaking Paul Krugman who won the Noble Prize for Economics in the midst of all this. Remember the title of his book, "The Great Unraveling"? Most of the guest and the commentator on Bloombergs "On The Money" hosted by Tom Keen could not mask how little they esteemed his school of economics when he won. These people like their pristine ideas more than they like to deal with reality. Economics is about as real as a social science gets and yet all their 'animal spirits' and cauldrons of derivatives seem to obscure the bread and butter functioning of a real economy. In fact half the time when intellectuals on this show use the word "economy" they are rarely if ever referring to labor, production or wages but to theories and philosophies. When they do discuss wages it is always another abstract factor that should be kept as low as possible to maximize profits. None, to my knowledge predicated the current financial catastrophe.

What does it mean to have three separate markets crumble at the same time, the housing, the credit and automobile? It means that maybe we should get Christ back into our lives and live more under His tutelage because I can tell just from spending some time in the American arena people are at the height of arrogance these days. People believe that they can pursue any end whether it be true or not because they do not know the difference between the truth and a marketing campaign. Americans' today are beyond haughty but are surprised when the entire system doesn't work. I remember financial crisis, everyone was walking around looking into the faces of every passer by to conjure up a sense hope, the buzz word every where you went was 'confidence, confidence'. It was both sad and crazy when you expect the country to sit on a two legged stool and have 'confidence'.

Do you remember the crazy amount of credit cards offers that you got in the mail. Most of the credit card offers we all got were treated as junk mail, since when is any financial offer to be treated as junk mail? College students were given charge cards and credit cards the minute they stepped through the door of the institution, which is pretty cruel considering they were already taken on a huge financial burden namely their tuition.

The solution to everything in America now in order to make the absurd legal, is to simply rewrite the laws and definitions. The new laws and guidelines like exempting homosexuality from the DSM are rooted in no valid philosophical reasoning. How come depression, schizophrenia, dissociate personalities and sociopaths all be diagnosable psychiatric conditions but two men engaging in the absurd anti-conducive, anti-productive behavior of ejaculating into the anus of another man be seen as normal? If the definition of crazy is performing the same behavior over again and expecting a different result certainly the nilhism of a homosexual partnership which can produce nothing falls into this catagory. Perform the same action and expect a different result, you are going to get nowwhere. Two men sleeping with each other, you are going to produce nothing, going nowhere.

Why do we even take a homosexual at his word that he is fine, we wouldn't for a smiling depressive person or a socio-path? Someone who is gay, whose main diagnosable symptom is that he consistently out of pride refuse to admit that he is suffering? This notion that with a stroke of pen anything can be made sane, rationale or valid is evience in the banking deregulation and the legitimazation of homosexuality of the two most likely share the same ideological or philosophical root.

What Does This Have To Do With National Security?

I have alwasy been a proponet of the idea that education should be under the banner of NSA, that's right a matter of national security. It is possible to inculcate into the general population false beliefs or to lull them into passivity. When in fact 'The Price Of Democracy Is Vigalence'.

How could Barack Obama not have to produce a birth certificate as a prerequisite for even entering the presidential race, how was he able to serve in the Senate all these years without one? I firmly believe that this is a matter of national security, people have to do their jobs. Yet we have become a such a conscised, 'the end justifies the means' society. More concerned with keeping our jobs than doing our jobs, so afraid to suffer and for many that means suffering lower profit margins rather than going without food, that I would not be surprised if there is a national conspiracy being conducted by the Democratic party and supported by all 'the good people' so that we can just put this entire subject of the Barack Obama birth certificate behind us and get on to the more pressing issue of eating the good foods that we love in a fat and prosperous economy, regardless of how fraudulent and tenuous it is, or for that matter our democracy.

Truely Religion: St. Bartholomew Day Massacre

What then are we to say about the modern way of life? What are we to say about the desires of so many of us that are content to live without God in our lives? The things that we say and the means by which we address them. I like so many of us, know a significant number of people who are openly gay, remorseless and not confounded in any way by their lifestyle, many of whom say they are Catholic. I am told of Catholics who have children out of wedlock and go anyway to have them baptised by the priest who when asks of the woman's husband has no problem telling him "Oh father, we don't live like that anymore." There are thoose who maintain that this perception of modern conveniences are more than convienent but paramount. Leading one to believe that not only is it okay to have children out of wedlock but to have children through artificial insemination is fine as well, not knowing their biological father is fine and abortion when necessary is fine. What has become of us? We have cultivated our desire to stay away from God through these means but then maintain to others that we maintain a 'spirituality' about us. I listen to a radio station that plays Gospel music every weekday mornings but on weekend mornings they play the pop love songs. On weekday mornings there is gospel but in the afternoon filthy talk from a investigative talk show host who tries to unravel all the sordid details of the wayward. These kind of compromises nod in the direction of God but ultimately escape any obligation to His word, this seems to be the way that we live today.


One thing I can say about God that perhaps the Protestants will disagree, He certainly works in mysterious ways. Or perhaps they seem mysterious because we have lost sight of the fact that He does not work for us, we work for Him and to His own means. The fact that I pray and pay tithes does not preclude me from being a fool, which almost through vocation I am. Today being wise is equated with keeping your income, saving money, never having to spend any of your own. I know people who work in the computer industry who do not feel even a pinch of obligation in paying for software created through the hard work and intellect of others, they go through all kind of means to 'get it for free' because they are so smart. Not as smart as the guy who can actually wrote the code and produce something every one else becomes dependant on but they are clever and wise because they got it without paying for it. However, were they to go to work and not get paid for their time I am sure they would feel cheated or sold a record that everyone was dancing to but did not recieve royalties I am certain would upset them. However here I am being a fool and a 'punk' for mentioning something like software piracy because everyone does it and if you are not a punk all these things contract and metabolize away deep within the unconscious mind, the body and therefore you never have to confront what you are doing or admit that what you are doing is stealing. These people are not religious in the first place and so as they read this they cry out "Jesus Christ!" in exasperation of my idiocy. Why they call on Christ and not Buddha or some other divine figure would seem self incriminating but at length I do not know. Except for the fact that, as they say they are not religious all these actions immaterial as they are simply 'go away' getting absorbed again into the depth of the unconscious never to come to light again.

I have difficulty with the sense that other people should know 'better'. So I walk around like a moral whipping terrorist chastising people for taking the name of the Lord in vain and telling people that they ought to simply do their job instead of cutting corners. My only problem is ofcourse that I personally find it impossible to have faith and feel good at the same time and so I cannot adequately persuade other people who are secularist to live the way I do as a Christian. The Catholic faith has a utilizes a profound logical that perhaps one should trust as a matter of faith, but it cannot keep me from destroying myself. I live with people who are not Christians and when I look around it is only the Christian who appear to be suffering. I remember a Pastor of a Baptist church who said on the podium but in no unveiled manner directed at me, that I would be a homosexual if it were not for the fear of God. Yes, I probably would have a 'gay affair', I would do a lot of things if it were not forbidden in the Bible. I am sure a young girl would be a fascinating tryst to have as well, perhaps some boys. I am sure I would smoke marijuana until the cows come home and they don't here in New York and drink (a lot more) if I could afford to lose any more brain cells. I would screw like a bastard (given the oppurtunity), I would eat until I died in my own fat, I would kill anyone I could get my hands on who I felt had it coming. In other words I would be a Muslim, oh wait, they can't drink.

Living with faith is tough and often disquieting, in fact I would like not to do it. That is the reality of the matter that if I had my choice as I am sure millions of other Christians may attest I would rather live with complete assurance on a finite number of 'sure' things but we do not have any 'sure' things, not any of us. We are told to put our trust in money yet it seems obvious that anything I have to save cannot in anyway provide security for me nevertheless that is exactly what we call it, insurance, security and trusts. We stare at the Dow Jones as barometer of our confidence in the system that man devised. This doesn't seem to make anyone suspicious or weary at all.

Two things as Catholics that differentiate us from Protestants(and their prosperity gospel) and that distinguish us from the Jehovah Witnesses(with their anti-Trintarian stance). One is that we as Catholics keep a crucifix, neither Protestants or Jehovah Witnesses use the crucifix in their rendition of Christianity. The Protestants take Christ down from the cross with the notion that he has risen but if that is the case why venerate an instrument of capital punishment and horrendous torture? The Jehovah Witnesses do not put Christ on a cross because they say it is historically inaccurate and that the cross is a curse. Well it is a curse and that is because He has become a curse for us(Galatians 3:13), as far as keeping him on the cross He is the serpent(Homosapian) raised up to be a healing for us(John 3:14).

The second concerns prosperity here on earth, with the Protestants similar to the Jews when they do well or prosper it is because God has caused them to prosper. Yet even though the reach into the Old Testament regarding these matters often and trust only scriputre originally written in Hebrew many of them solemenly believe that the Jews are going to hell as anti-christs. It is one thing to go through the Old Testament through to the New Testament but when you justify your behavior based on the Old Testament when it is convient it seems a bit venial. I remember the Protestant Pastor Creflo Dollar say over the radio one morning,"I thank God for the faithful but we also need the able." He seems possessed of that "can do" spirit where faith is only a wonderful but abstract addendum, so much for through 'faith alone'. So many people believe that Christianity is an idelogoy, something of the mind whihc is another reason for keeping Christ on the Cross, a clear reminder that it is not. Wait here, allow me to digress a little and compose a short list of the worldly saying that are anti-Christian.

• "Seeing is believing"
• "No news is good news"(The Gospel is the 'Good News')
• "In the flesh" (Romans 8:8)
• "I don't want to set the world on fire..." (The Inkspots ca.1940 Jazz Ensemble)(Luke 12:49)

St. James tells us that faith without works is dead(James 2;21) and so the heritical teachings of Martin Luther of "Fide Sola" or faith alone cannot be correct it is almost as if he did not read James at all. Further, when we consult the Bible what else are we consulting, yes the Holy Word of God but it is through the Apostles and the Prophets, if one is willing to abide by what they wrote as authoritative then why would one not be subject to their oral authority and that of their successors? Further how can you believe that fatih comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of God but profess the Bible to be paramount and the people inspired to write it? Because in fact you would not trust what you heard but rather would insist to read it yourself, that is the essence of scripture, that it is read. Subsequently you only trust yourself as the pastor mearly reiterates what you have already investigated. I find it hard to believe that if even Isaiah was standing before them without a Bible they would take him seriously. Further, why would one accept the word of the previous more so than the current if they be truly a believer? Is it because the authority lays far away in the distant past and thus one can appear to be obedient just so long as they are not confronted by any one person in particular to be obedient to? Are we to suppose that Judas Iscariot is a greater apostle than Matthias who replaced him(Acts 1:25), is the Gospel of St. John false because it was written in Greek and not Hebrew?

The fact that at least Old Testament writings must be written in Hebrew and not Greek is a litmus test for many Protestants as to the validity and the authenticity of the scripture is striking considering that the Jews themselves given the scripture they had were confounded by elements of the faith around them such as Jesus the Christ coming form Nazerath, scripture did not help them even identify Christ in their midst. Jesus is ironically the central player in a faith that could not be identified when He arrived by even some of the most learned theological scholars of the day. The Jews had scripture and still did not accept Jesus so why now follow the Jews, they did not recognize the Messiah in the first place or denied Him. The Jehovah Witnesses as well who decry St. Augustine as not a good enough student of ancient Greek(through his own admission) to interpret the Bible to the height of its potential accuracy. Yet they print out Bibles in which their own interpreters remain anonymous under the guise that they did not want to seem presumptuous, in what way, to whom, who whether God or man would mistakenly give them credit for writing the Bible?

In any case it is a convenince which makes it impossible to take up any discrepancies with their version of the Bible. My dad God rest his soul used to say "This world is world of convenince" and he could not be more right. When I am looking for the convenience, when I am conducting my actions as to how convenient one thing is over another to decide what action I am going to take then I can indeed admit the use of this basis of decision making that I am living in the world and not in the word. When we have these glaring discrepancies from not only the faith but from common honesty then we can also assure ourselves that we are acting falsely. Not only is this a hard and incriminating realization it is a challenge and a struggle to live correctly, according to the Word of God and not to our own legitimizing and rationales. We say things, myself included that are false to ourselves and to others, we behave, myself included, especially piously towards those things that affect us not and less so for those things that affect us directly. The Catholic Church is clearly against abortion, homosexuality on the other hand well that takes time, that takes council. The Protestants talk of praising God but poverty itself is an anathema to their practice, seldom do they go without or see any virtue in 'selling their possessions' and only then following Jesus.

It is interesting, the Santa Clausification of Christ of which Cornell West speaks, his attenuation to the way in which we water down the gospel to make it 'comfortable' was created by Thomas Nast a fierce anti-Catholic. It is hardly possible that St. Nicholas of himself would have become the central figure of Christmas were it not for Nast's characterization of the man. Protestants are not the only ones engaged in distorting the Word of God, diluting it to ineffectiveness so to speak. To soothe parishoners even priest fail to remember certain passages like when Christ says that he has come to cast fire on the earth, that he comes with a sword and not peace, or even Matthew 15:26 when Jesus told the Canaanite woman that it was not right to throw the children's bread to the dogs, I have heard Catholic priest claim,"Oh, He was just kidding. It was a joke." imagine that.

Yet still we must know that Santa Claus was a real person in fact the uncanonized St. Nicholas who was known to give gifts to those that came in contact with him was actually well remembered figure by Pope John Paul II. The actual Santa Clausification or fictionalization of this real person was carried out by political cartoonist Thomas Nast as well through the poet and Columbia University professor Clement Clarke Moore who was attributed to be the author of the originally anomalously published, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" or "The Night Before Christmas".

But what of the True Church?

When we look at the lives of the Saints like that of St. Bartholomew we see terrible suffering. It is quite a difficult thing to look at the lives of the saint's and see something for ourselves that we want. However, In Catholicism there is a great premium but on martyrdom (which the Protestants do not have but would like for the purpose of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.) Yet when a Catholic looks at how other Catholics can sometimes interpret the faith they would have one imagine that Catholicism is a wonderful and divine history of love. Just to look at the many wars of religion that have existed between the Protestants and the Catholics though luckily not here in the United States (which is in part as a religious safe haven it had come into existence the way we know it today) we can see that to actually be a practicing Catholic one cannot live in an Ivory tower of pollyannish purity. The St. Bartholomew Day's massacre of 1572 was more than a week long of horrible butchery much like the Rwanda tragedy between the Hutu and the Tutsi in 1994, where Calvinist Huguenots at least 2000 in Paris and another 3000 in the French Provinces were slaughtered by the Catholics for fear that they would do it to them. To which the then Pope, Pope Gregory XVIII had cast commemorative coins to celebrate, calling the murder of the Huguenot Admiral Coligny an act of divine retribution, he commissioned art work from the painter Giorgio Vasari to paint three murals which hung in the Sala Regin, and order a Te Deum to be sung and thereafter designated September 11th 1572 as a joint commemoration of the battle of Lepanto and the massacre of the Huguenots.

St. Bartholomew himself of course died a martyr, he was flayed alive and then crucified, reportedly upside down.

Then there is of course the sex scandal that took place in the Catholic Church. It is not to condemn the Church that I publish this here but to note the challenge to the faithful that exist when one tries to reminisce on the Church as a pure and unblemished white cotton fabric which it is not. The children who were preyed upon lived with this terrible knowledge about the Church for years in silence. It is only fitting that we share this sense of shame for the Church with them and the reality is that the only thing that was lost or should have been soiled was this notion that many Catholics would like to have that the Catholic Church is in fact pristine and spotless. As soon as we do away with that we can see these children as psychological martyrs every bit as grotesque to us as the visible Crucifixion of Christ on the cross.

Which of us are free from the truth? We all know to be humble and subservient to our superiors but how difficult is it to practice our faith really? We could look at Christ on the Cross or St. Bartholomew, or any of the martyred saints. Do we really practice in full knowledge or in a blissful ignorance? I am sure that in all of this I will be painted the devil and the 'good' Catholics who serve at the mass every day will be the saints because none of this is usually in their minds and still yet they would prefer not to know. Also make no mistake I am not advocating a moral relativism or suggesting that you should by any means eat from this tree, the Church is right in what it teaches and obedience is superior to any knowledge of good and evil. In fact I am sure it a blessing really the things we do not know and in fact choose to forget, yet let it be known that every Sunday just like the last supper of Christ, where we brake bread with Jesus we brake bread with Judas as well.

Tale of two America's:The One You Think You Know and The One You Are Desperately Avoiding

There is the practice of trying to discern the truth in all things that I know I practice and has been a recurrent theme in my life as it is a matter of my nature to do so. It is for the benefit of man and a component of his necessities that he cling to God for the same self evaluation of his own behavior. How else will he know if he is decieving himself with out the aid of the truth and the stability of the Other?

Pride and self-deception runs amok in the United States. When we look at the fiscial fiascos of Enron and World Com, Arther Anderson. When we look at Bear Sterns, Wachovia, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When we look at the atom bomb, the subsequent American policy of mutually assured destruction. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to the current missle shield controversy which has set the Russians to saber rattling again with the prospect of a second cold war however improbable. All on the unfounded fears of Albert Einstien who prompted FDR to build the bomb in the first place. A tough decision which perhaps both men felt an uncontested obligation to make save ofcourse if they had a trust in God. There is still the reality of how much better off the world would be without nuclear weapons, actually only used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and at the end of World War II. How much wiser we would be if we had never developed them now seems clear. There is the catastrophic failure on August 1, 2007 of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading failures, the question is, 'Exactly what link on the chain of American ethical responsibilty does the collapse of this bridge reside'. It started with someone taking a bribe but where will it end? The child sex abuse scandal of the Catholic Church in America. The absurdity of homosexual marriages and the absurd denial until now of the future liabitly to our enviornment of simply dumping tons of carbon into the air from combustion engines and factories, year after year. What were we telling ourselves, that it was just all disappearing somewhere in the stratosphere? What were we doing mass producing both cars and lawyers? Cars are going to dump carbon into the atmosphere and lawyers need someone to sue in order to make a living. Where was our science, reason and rationale in these places? Where was our wisdom?

All of these epsidoes in American history have places where they could have been stopped had someone with character acted accordingly. The American Catholic Bishop who could have stopped the pedophile priest, not pass him on to another unsuspecting parish, why could this action not have been taken? A Federal Reserve that stand up to congress, A CIA that stands up to the President of the United States and an FDA that stands up to the pharmacutical companies that they are dependant on or fold all together to at least expose the fallacy that they have any power at all when it comes to the guarenting the safety of pharmacuticals.

Edwin Blacks 2004 book entitled "War on the Weak" explored an agency that did stand up. At the turn of the twentith century pockets of eugenist in America petitioned the United States Census Bureau to recategorize certain human beings then catorgorized in the 1880s by the US Census Bureau as "the defective, the dependent and the deliquent" . With the 'defectives' being the mentally ill, the elderly and infirm representing the 'dependent' and prisoners representing the 'deliquent'. The Eugenics Record Office in 1916 at this time headed by none other than Alexander Grahm Bell, was granted access to the Census Bureaus records and procedures when Harry Laughlin a ERA executive proposed to create a survey of those in state custodial and chariable care. He was given the title "special agent of the Bureau of the Census" for the purpose and wanted to recatagorize these people as 'socially inadequate'. 'Socially inadequate" people by Laughlins definition were those who "entail a drag upon those members of the community who have sufficient insight, initiative, competenc, physicl strength and social instincts to enable them to live effective lives..."

The Census Bureau to its credit refused to classify people in this way and albeit standing up to the then popular but non governmental agency of the Eugenics Record Office was no doubt a lot easier than what pressures the Federal Reserve, the CIA and the FDA have to face, it is still to their credit that they did not submit under pressure. For instance think of the creep between being a catagorized as a 'defective' to someone being catagorized as 'socially inadequate', i.e. unfit to live amongst society. What about in today's political climate where one can be classified as a criminal and go to prison or a 'military combatant' and go to Guantanmo or a hidden CIA prison in another country. There is currently the reclassifications of homosexuals as well adjusted oppossed to psychologically ill by the American Psychological Association or Pluto no longer being classified as a planet. Ones life and status and value can change according to a new principal of accounting.

It has to strike the reader of the potential creep between being classifed as 'socially inadequate' by the United States Census Bureau and the role of mass sterialization, which is what the Eugenics Record Office wanted to do, or mass termination, which is what the Nazi party in the early 1940's in fact did do, as the Germans took the American Eugenics program for themselves and took it a step further. However, the U.S. Census Bureau said no and that in it self was a significant act.

A Tale of Two Women

Most of us are familiar with the famous poem written by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty entitled "The New Colossus", "..."Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

However how many of us are familiar with the words of another famous woman, Margret Sanger, negative euginst and founder of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics.
"The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in trun are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterialization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded."*

The first is written by a poet, the second by a social activist who founded Planned Parenthood. There is this reality, that when today we speak of 'birth-control' it was then regarded as a method of controling specific populations of people, controlling the people who in fact wanted to have children, through involuntarily sterilization. Margret Sanger proposals smacks eerily of concentration camps. It is a demand for control that human beings do not ordinarily have, it is the control of others when perhaps with a complete lack of 'self-control' and certainly with no control on those like Sanger from a God above. They renounce God and try to control life on earth themselves.

The notion that America is a great 'melting' pot is also not a part of actual American philosophy that term was coined by British playwright Israel Zangwill in the early twentith century.*

The America that many of us believes in is mostly fabled stories concocted by playwrights and poets. The actual American sentiment is found in people like Margert Sanger and Harry Laughlin not Emma Lazarus and Israel Zangwill.

Some of the things that we endevor upon to make 'this world a better place' are extremely negative and misguided. In our pride where we think that we are doing good in the world we are doing terrible mischief. We have to admit God first and foremost in our lives to prevent the ever recurring delusion that we are greater than all others or Him for that matter. Today we sit here and bask in the dew of foolishness with the looming possiblity that whole sections of the United States may eventually be uninhabitable due to torrential winds and flooding a result of global warming. We live with a credit crisis lead by the fiscially elite most of whom went to our best schools but with a 'say anything' policy that eventually leads to a $200 bilion dollar burden on the American tax payer even when we are told that there may not be any funding for social security. We have bridges that collapse because someone is not doing their job or taking a bribe, bridges to nowhere but again stemming from public funds and wars which are at best inconclusive not only as to how, when or 'if' they end with a debatable victory and no spoils of war but also exactly how and why they started in the first place,and with whom. Most Americans probably couldn't tell you in a sound bite why, five, six years after it started why we went to war with Iraq to anyone's satisfaction including their own. Blow back and surprises which baffle the day to day citizen seem to fall from behind a veil of intrigue of special intrests groups and self created organizations who march on coining a mission for themselves and think that they are serving mankind when in fact they are only serving their pride.

Yes Virginia, There is a Conscience Clause.

In an interview with Thomas J. McKenna from the San Diego based group Catholic Action for Faith and Family Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, newly appointed Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura discussed how the respect for the Holy Eucharist has eroded and his commitment through Cannon law to the policy of denying those who are publicly engaged in grave sins from partaking in the Eucharist. He turns our attention to Cannons 915 and 916 of Church law. He also discusses the misappropriation of civil liberties philosophy that declares access to the Eucharist a 'right' that cannot be denied.

All of this is well and good it still remains to see how the Church will enforce this policy if implemented. It is often the case that these kind of hard lines are made amongst the strong adherent of such policies, strictly between preacher and choir, rather than amongst those that might challenge such a untenable position be they members of the Church or not. However, this is an impractical stragety at disciplining the lay Catholics for the practical reason that it is only en forcible and probably will only be enforced upon prominent members of the Church, those in the public eye.

Of course that is no doubt the intention of the Cannon in the first place but what about those Catholics both lay and clergy who privately and often not so privately support abortion? Presumably the Church will not have to subject these people to the same act of excommunication because they are not public figures. However, in today's world where it is easier to propel oneself into the public arena via video, overnight celebrity or ... blogging the question arise whether the Church will take steps to identify these people and then deny them the Eucharist as well. Then there are all the divorcees who are by Church law excommunicated and are not to take communion. These people are publicly known to be divorced as a statement of such a fact must be published. Will the Church try to have them identified and deny them the Eucharist as well. What about the pedophile priest and the homosexuals who are dispensing the Eucharist, can they also be denied the Host? All these people will have to made known to the the Priest and lay people administering the Eucharist in order for them to take action. What will the Church do, have them wear a scarlet letter "A" for Pro-choice advocate, a scarlet letter "D" for divorcee or a scarlet let "P" and "H" for pedophile and homosexual? While one can respect the Archbishops ire over those who form a misalliance between liberal philosophy of atheists like Thomas Paine and Catholic theology, denying nominal Catholics the Holy Eucharist is a misstep.

The Archbishops uses Cannon law 915 and 916 to deny those from taking Communion if they are unworthy out of a deference to their own welfare, 1 Corinthians 27, "Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. (29)For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgement to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. The passage continues however, (31) "But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. (32) But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world." Thus in all actuality the Archbishop is only fore bearing their discipline. The Archbishop enters into erroneous theological territory when he attempts to use the Eucharist as an embargoed commodity exported from the Vatican subject to doctrinal compliance.

On the other hand, the left that is, reason is applied to to take exception to the truth. In a letter I recently wrote to a Pro-Choice Internet publication I challenged the the use of their euphemism in order to put their defense of abortion, a civil liberties issue, in an amicable light.

"It is often the case that naturally subordinated social groups like women tend to exhibit the exact traits that relegated them to the secondary social status they culturally and traditionally inhabit. In this instance your unscrupulous and disingenuous employment of euphemism such as “family planning clinics”,” Reproductive rights advocates” and certainly “Pro-choice advocates” incriminate women as being either blindly selfish hedonist or ideological invalids for the sole purpose of preserving their secular independent lifestyles over the actual life of even their own children. It lends the impression that personal autonomy is more important than the child they conceive but isn’t that to be expected of women? It is interesting to note as stated in the Roe.v.Wade decision that the AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion appointed in May 1857 called “the attention of the clergy of all denominations to the perverted views of morality entertained by a large class of females—aye, and men also, on this important question.”

It seems that organizations like yours are perfectly Pro-choice as long as the choice is yours alone. When a health care provider wants to make a choice based on his values, belief and conscience you are against it, how can you justify Pro-choice for a few? For myself the reason why abortion should be illegal is not just that it is a herodian act against the will of God but that as a matter of private choice those who want to have an abortion ought to do so without the endorsement of the citizens of the State who do not agree with this procedure. All people like myself is asking for is the Pro-choice to say “No!” to abortion, rather than falsely implying to the world that we here in the State of New York or elsewhere agree with this lie. The etymological root to the word abortion is aboriri, a miscarriage, women are not having a miscarriage, they are forcing a miscarriage. "

The Church and Secular Liberals seem to be taking their combat to the wide open front of the human conscience. The underlying premise, spoken correctly by both atheist Austin Dacey author of The Secular Conscience and the Archbishop response in the Catholic Action for Faith and Family interview to Catholics who appeal to their conscience in mitigating their Pro-abortion stance and 'right' to take communion. "Conscience is not some sort of subjective reality" says the Archbishop, "where I make up for myself what is right and good. Rather, it is an objective reality where I conform my own thinking to what is true."

This willing to "dance within the shadows" of objective reality is a continuance of the post modernist deconstruction era, a retort to the promises of The Enlightenment, that permits an anti-intellectual or pseudo intellectual air where thoughts, words, education and human knowledge are deployed for the sole intent of defending or attempting to legitimize ones demands and preferences. Homosexuality, abortion, the prevailing attitude that "I can believe thus and at the same time act contrarily..." , the persuasion of the masses that it is the Church that is antagonist against human life and Pro-abortion crowd that are "people-persons" or pro-people, for the crowd. When in fact our Christian freedoms are rest on the basis of one death, while their 'freedom to choose', right to privacy is propped upon a thousand deaths of innocents a day. What is true is that the religion, the binding to God or binding of ones actions to adhere to the wisdom, i.e. the discipline of the Catholic faith is deceptively depicted as an oppressive power grab by an egomaniacal heierchial administration. Your friends on the other hand are the ones who permit you to do whatever you want... so long as it does not affect them. Drunks on the Bowery pile up and are stepped over until their wives or the in fact the drunks themselves decided to make a change, consolidate and admit that they have a problem and when I say 'they' I mean 'we'. The recently deceased great comedic actor Bernie Mac would in his weekly television series face the camera and directly talk to his television viewers. Invariably he start off with the address, "Amearica" in a comedic southern drawl, but he hit a note and quite frankly many of us were happy to be address and brought into counsel about the dilemmas he faced and by extension we as his 'neighbors' faced as well. It was Terrance that said "I am human, nothing human is alien to me." The plight with the homosexual position is that it tries to assert that homosexuals are a different species, a variant form of human beings. When in fact there are no alternative life styles, there are no alternatives to life. As a man you get a job, get a a wife and have kids. What are the alternatives? No, certainly we do not all have that or have yet obtained that but certainly as Americans we have been misguided by nihilist liberal ideology that we do not need it.

Thus for instance my trouble with homosexuality as a legitimized norm stems from the very premise that it is an acceptable form of being, that these are a people, like the drunks on the Bowery, who do not have a problem but the fallacy is that this train of thought is their exact overwrought psychological defense, they are 'gay' never venturing into the convoluted bowels of the subconscious mind that requires us all to address the reality not of what we think but of what we feel. I call on homosexual to accept themselves for who they are not to token their exclusive other directness towards the goal of having others accept them. If you are a man outwardly, inwardly act accordingly, if you are a woman outwardly, inwardly act accordingly, jihad until you get it 'straighten out'.

The celebrity Star Jones, surgically had her stomach staple, left the television show she co-hosted because she would have preferred to deny the fact and married a homosexual man who soon left her. Star Jones story is an example of the "do-it-yourself", put together from the 'outside', self assembled life of the modern secularist.We staple our stomaches because we are too spiritually weak to control our consumption by the same measure homosexual men in the fall after the pride in a cyclical and natural tendency towards equilibrium subject themselves to abuse by others in order to rectify the imbalance, we are out of our minds, beside ourselves. We have been unable to be poor in spirit, to humble our hearts and contend with life's frustrations, the differences between reality and the fanciful 'alternative lifestyle'. It would make sense that the psychologically immature would be sexually disoriented as their command of an object related readiness can come into question, the mind needs objects in order to operate. There is a natural mind- body relationship which makes the opposite sex important. Men akin to the maneges of the brain are the mind and the wife the 'ol ball and chain' the body that keeps us grounded. The live wires that we have become, ungrounded, moving in migratory economic patterns with no social cohesiveness have made it difficult to satiate our emotional and psychological needs. This in my opinion has lead some men to construe an economically adaptive lifestyle by conforming themselves into becoming the automatons corporate elitist would prefer over flesh and blood God fearing human beings. The labor of undocumented aliens are welcomed for instance but separating them from their American born children was perhaps an unforeseen dilemma, if only they were drones. Many of us undocumented or otherwise have no medical coverage but all the while we are asked to 'donate' blood, blood is free but health care is not. It could be argued that since we 'give' blood we should be be able to see a physician, yet that is to venture into my own embargo. He who has given His blood and not only His blood but His body did not ask to be repaid because He cannot be repaid for what He gave, it was a gift.

The Eucharist is the body of Christ given to us, his own flesh sacrificed for us to help us 'soften our hearts', we soften our hearts so we can change them, maneuver them, grow. How is it that we surgically alter our physical bodies to suit our 'inner selves' but can not do the opposite, alter our inner selves to suit the body that God gave us? It is because there are those amongst us who would try to live their lives without God, subsequently that is how they end up, homosexuality is a consequence of trying to live without God.

The legitimization of homosexuality abandons those who like depressives and schizophrenics are left in the mire of the maladaptive psychological medicines. The homosexuals in claiming that they do not have a problem in a dissociative clamoring for social acceptance have abandoned these people and they have abandoned America by refusing to be counted amongst the disturbed and disordered as evidence of the psychological malady that is the natural result of our obedience to economic primacy. If the American Psychiatric Association reversed its position on the health status of homosexuals tommorrow there would be a huge camp of people who would have to be openly declared psychological aberrants, along with the huge number of people in psychactric care who are taking medication for their depression and the schizoid disorders. We would have to admit that their is a nation wide psychological epidemic in America and the cause of it like global warming has to be the way that we are living, it would have to be attributed to the idolatrous pursuit of money.

None the less it would appear that we will now be called on to defend our choices and stances openly once we ratified that the conscience is an can be objectively scrutinized. In liberal California, Ecuador and Spain where they are engaging in a deCatholicization of the State, Catholic values are being marginalized. It will be interesting to see if where the dividing line will stand when it comes to the exercise of ones conscience. This will be a real challenge for law in America.

Recently President Bush tried to push through a law that would allow health care providers to refuse to service those people they felt opposed their conscience. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt stated, "People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong. Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience."

In his previous draft abortion would have been extended even to contraceptive devised that prevent the fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall, these contraceptives are known are abortifacients, which work by causing early term abortions. (http://www.goodmorals.org/smith4.htm)

Whether this conscience clause will compel people to thrash out sound reasons for their actions comes into question since the motives for their actions are often quite distinct from political stances, such as the case of abortion, a matter of privacy and woman's political Independence from men. Now the case has been made that the conscience is an open arena that operates on objective principals not closeted or 'private' beliefs. So how can abortion remain a privacy issue if the legitimacy of what is deemed private comes into question?

According Cecile Richards, president of the New York-based Planned Parenthood Federation of America, "Women's ability to manage their own health care is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology." Exactly what she means by 'health care" when it comes to contraceptives is not clear.

Margaret Sanger, atheist, anti-Catholic and negative eugenics support or who thought it was best to eliminate the unfit, including minorities is the founder of Planned Parenthood as early as 1921 under the title The American Birth Control League. That this woman's movement and Pro-abortion position is a continence of negative eugenics philosophy where by the unfit are euthanized or the numbers reduced is questionable. It is ironic that whatever Mrs. Sangers goal was it probably did not included the 'browning" of America that has taken place with the anticipated increase of non-whites in America over that of Caucasians by 2050.

Render Unto Caesar

Unfortunately, it seems that attacks by Barack Obama's rivals have a tendency of drawing even Barack Obama's detractors to his aid. This is what happened when John McCain says that Obama is 'playing the race card' based on a speech Obama gave describing how Republican engineers of fear would contrast his visage from those notable Americans who today have the honor of being commerated on the U.S. currency.

John McCain feels that Senator Obama is portraying him as racist through these comments. Yet his portrayal of Barrack Obama being the equivalent of white women, somehow inferior and certainly not a man is to be tolerated. It is to be tolerated why? In the add run by the McCain campaign the juxtaposition of Barack Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton claiming that the Senator has more celebrity than substantial leadership qualities may seem to some that he denies Barack Obama has any depth, any intrinsic personal dialogue, that he is devoid of thought and subsequently devoid of a soul. In effect an inference can be drawn saying that Barack like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are vapid, psychologically underdeveloped girls, whose judgement is questionable. If the implication from McCain's campagin advertisement is to suggest that these celebrities are simply ingenue to be dismissed and treated with disrespect where did that notion come from, is it inherent in the girls or the misogynistic men who groom them? When one sees the pictures of these girls one has to keep in mind that pornography is not only legal but promoted by major American corporations. What is troubling about McCain's advertisement was frankly how positive it was "Barack Obama is the greatest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?" One has to construe celebrity to be incompatible with leadership which in itself takes some convincing. What's more, McCain's attacks Barack's allegeded vacuousness by hurling his own vain and incomplete charges against him. "Barack is famous, how can he be President at the same time?" Again there is this sense that celeberties are inherently insubstantial, Dr. Phil (Dr. Phillip C. McGraw. PH.D) cofounder and president of a litigation consulting firm and host of his popular television show can relate to people who are not rich, white and famous. Danica McKellar co-star of the hit television sitcom "The Wonder Years" is also a gifted mathematican and author of the book "Math Dosen't Suck" which encourages middle aged girls to maintain an affection for the subject. There doesn't have to be this William Caufield condemnation about all celebrites.

People like Spears, Lohan and Hilton may be better known for their exploits than their respective professions but there also seems to be hidden animosity coming from men like McCain and Jesse Jackson who would prefer to perceive Barack Obama as a homosexual minstrel by equating his success with the celebrity of these white women rather than acknowledging that he is running a successful campaign. It is quite possible that there is some psychosexual attraction they have towards Obama which I was here to fore not willing to concede as the fount of Reverand Jacksons off air condemnation of Senator Obama. Barack Obama needs to get votes to win an election, how can his popularity impede that goal? It is like claiming that Barack Obama's success is not success. It is somewhat interesting to note that Senator Barack Obama is leaps and bounds ahead of Senator McCain in campaign contribution thwarting the significance of McCain's best known political accomplishment, campaign finance reform.

What is it that these 'celebrities' are providing that we as fans are not pining after? Lindsy Lohan, the Spears sisters, Vanessa Williams and virtual every American female beauty winner that we have today can not claim to be the chaste girl next door type nor does it seem likely at this point that they would stand a chance of winning any of those contest if they could, but chastity as recognized by the Catholic faith is a communal chore, are we as men playing our part? There is a dangerous portrayal of how women are to be perceived and in particular, young, white, blond females. Senator McCain, known for his off colored jokes sends the message to American males that young blond women are thrift to be exploited. It states that it is okay to kill, hurt and maimed these kind of women because they are silly and not 'real', suitable only for sexual gratification and trophy wives or trivial retail posts.

John McCain dismisses Britney's reality even though we as a nation watched her suffer a nervous break down on national television, even though she is the mother of two children and living a lifestyle very similar to millions of struggling mom's. If Britney Spears were a poor Black women struggling with two kids as a single mom he would not have said those things, we as a society would have empathized with her plight and difficulties, instead because she is a young white blond female and successful artist she is treated as the scum of the earth by men like McCain and LA police commissioner Bill Braxton who trot them out for ridicule and disdain rather than showing them any compassion or giving them any manly comfort and support.

Paris Hilton has held her own as a young woman with a successful reality show which critics hailed as one of the most entertaining yet it is said of women like Paris that they have become famous for nothing. A claim asserted against Anna Nicole Smith for whom this could not be the case nor was she famous for being famous but was in fact one of the most popular nude centerfolds for Playboy magazine not a feat accessible to many women although they would feign to have no interest to be posted in the publication. Anna Nicole Smith was also a model for Guess jeans and spokes person for Trimspa diet products. She subsequently, used her attractiveness to fetch a rich husband, billionaire Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, and inherited hundreds of millions of dollars at his death, a sexual coup many woman would deem a success. She was not famous for nothing, she was famous because she was sweet, seductive and sexually alluring. Anna Nicole Smith was the desire of many men and in fact quite successfully used her charm and attractiveness to navigate her way to what would have been a blissful plateau many would envy and perhaps did because most could not stop speaking evil about her even after she died. Even though she had a real life with very real public joys and sufferings like the birth of one child and at the same time the lost of another people kept talking about her as if she were insubstantial as if she were not really living. Although many thought they knew all about her the fact of the matter is that most probably did not even know her real name, Vicke Lynn Marshall. Anna Nicole Smith like Norma Jean's Marylin Monroe pseudonym, was only her stage name. All she did was smile and look beautiful and people hated her.

Why is it okay to say that certain people are insubstantial, that they are less real than others? What makes Senator McCain more fit to 'lead' than Barrack Obama, would it be the time that he spent as a prisoner by the Vietnamese? There is a hidden sentiment that I have and I am not sure that others share that when we speak of heroes we are speaking of one or two things, those who go for a goal and against all odds win like Elie Manning of the New York Giants, who despite the terrible things said about him persevered and won the Super Bowl and those who like the mythical pagan priestess Hero, in a bout of hysteria do not prevail in the contest with themselves or others and lose or forfeit their life. John McCain does not fall into either category. He got his arms broke and they were not set for five years and so he cannot comb his own hair as a consequence but who did he save, what war did he win, what bunker did he charge? If everybody who fought in Vietnam got shot down the way he did America would have never won the Vietnam war... oh, wait.

When General Wesley Clarke brought to the attention of the American people that Senator McCain's record does not entitle him to inherit the United States Presidency he spoke the truth, many of the American service personal that later went on to be President were like President Grant and Eisenhower, Generals. President Kennedy who was a lieutenant actually saved some one's life and Senator Kerry also made real contributions to the fight but neither men rested on their laurels over their war experience, neither really touted themselves as 'war heroes'. As far as actors are concerned they fared pretty well in politics themselves with Ronald Regan and Arnold Schwarzenegger ascending to the highest office in the country and the their state respectively . Why doesn't McCain use images of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Regan with the monkey in his campaign? It is in this respect that when the rap artist Ludicrous says that McCain ought to be paralyzed before he sits in a chair (presumably in the White house) I take it to mean he might as well further extend his credentials as war veteran which in part he exploits for his own presidential ambitions. The exaggerated piety that men like Senator McCain pay to the American military service only obfuscate the reality of both the missions that the soldiers are sent on and the suffering of the wounded who return. They try to render their service and activities as beyond critic and examination, when in fact we know now that there are quiet a bit of domestic disturbances and other disturbances in the armed forces as exist in any community of people.

It is not that it is not honorable to serve ones country, by all accounts it is, yet when one holds the suffering of military personal to be more exalted than that of other people, like Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, it reveals an artificial perception about life, one that people like Senator McCain and Senator Hillary Clinton had which is why she lapsed into a fictional account of the real world in her Bosnia landing story that she perhaps imagines one needs to be a part of in order to be eligible for the presidency. Somehow she felt her real life experiences too inadequate to satisfy the role of President of the United States. It is an eligibility she subconsciously signals to the American people that she does not possess and in fact very few people do, except presidents like Eisenhower and Grant. Senator McCain in his own way lives in this fictional account of what it takes by dismissing Senator's Obama credentials, accomplishments and successes, which admittedly the press fails to enumerate. Men like Eisenhower and Grant were not 'hard talkers' like McCain and Clinton, they were genuinely compassionate and affectionate men who understood that having a big heart is more important when leading people than a big mouth. Hard talkers talk hard because they do not fully understand people, they do not really like people and they do not know people.

Senator McCain does not know Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, he like millions of other people assume their television persona, two dimensional as images are constitute all that they are, he is wrong and he is wrong about Barrack Obamas statement about the U.S. currency because he in a racist arrogance, racist because he feels the need to submerge Barack into the role of a servant 'boy' who like a Roman soldier conquering the Greek countryside and it's inhabitants he can sodomize and exploit at his whim and leisure, considers him a mere boy with no capacity for depth. Barrack Obama unlike any other person in the United States probably does look at the United States currency in a way that none of us in this country can. When Barrack Obama looks at U.S. currency today he alone can genuinely contemplate his face on a specific denomination as something more than a pipe dream. The fact of the matter is that his election alone would be a pivotal turning point in American history. He has the opportunity to be a pivotal American figure like Washington(War of Independence), Lincoln (Civil War), Grant(Civil War) and Benjamin Franklin (Founding Father) if Barrack Obama's becomes president and has a successful term he unlike millions of other people in this country has the opportunity to have not only his visage on the currency but his face added to Mount Rushmore. No, it is not likely but right now for Barrack Obama, it is possible. Perhaps no one else in America at this time can say that, not McCain because his election in itself would not be pivotal and not Senator Clinton because she is no longer in the race.

The theory of life that states when someone is real, as Wade county was told they had no claim in adopting in the Roe.V.Wade landmark Supreme Court decision resulted in the legalization of abortion, the Justices did not confirm who is alive and when they are to be deemed so but rather avoided the situation all together by having the State refrain from making the conscience of millions a public matter. That is why Roe.V.Wade is a contention of privacy not murder. People matter when they are matter, naturally their thoughts their feelings their souls have no matter so can not matter but to which they can make a liberal appeal which leads to murder. This is the Terry Schivo question, when are we no longer alive? When is it that we can be deemed dead? The dead we are free to kill and the living have a claim to their conscience which is immaterial. Meaning and value,the substance of thought, the substance of things hoped for have a jumbled role and play in the United States. A theory of life should not be adopted by the State, although ' The State' is not matter. A theory of life should not be adopted by the living at all, for that would be a vanity, a hypothesis of being which is impossible. When do people count? Why are some to be dismissed as 'punks' as worthless, who has given people like Senator McCain the right to judge? Is it because he has been in a war, because he has provided this service to United States?That is barter that is not respect, love and dignity, of course he will be given his say. That is more than the aborted fetuses have been given but because he is pro-life does not give him the liberty to slander those of us who are living, everyday, day to day. His own life was held in the balance by his captives, was that because he had some value to them at the time or was it out of an intrinsic respect for life held by the Vietcong?

I personally have no intention of voting for Senator Obama, however, I do believe in rendering onto Caesar's that which is Caesars and Barack Obama is fully justified in expressing the portent of change a successful presidency with him in the White House would mean for this country. He does not look like the other faces on the dollar and we cannot play the race card retrospectively, because in the era of the other 'dead presidents' a President Obama was fiction. We can not keep up the same tired gambits of soundbite such as 'race card', Senator Obama had a thought about his presidency in relations to the United States currency which was profound, but Senator McCain chose the low road or could not interpret it's significance, that does not bode well for the future if McCain wins the election.

What's On Your Resume?

Being a someone who has difficulty with reality anyway, I take a great interest in the disparity between the major corporations and their television commercials which can be quite comforting. It is interesting to note that many of these companies have such legal entanglements that their chances of being hired through their own human resources departments are rather slim.

In Doug Hammerstrums brilliant essay "The Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment". He reminds us that the Fourteenth Amendment was a vestige of the the Civil War, it was meant to establish the legitimacy of former slaves as American citizens. However during this time corporations as we know them today were being formed and their savvy lawyers 'hijacked' this amendment to have their employers budding enterprises recognized as persons under the law. Hammerstrum states that of the 150 cases involving the fourteenth amendment brought before the Supreme Court 135 involved business entities. Read Hammerstrums essay, http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/fourteenth_amendment_hammerstrom.pdf

All of which makes the Dennis Haysbert tie in kind of interesting.



Take for example AllState, the commercials which employs the admirable skills of the great actor Dennis Haysbert, Mr. Haysbert in character, informs the public that they are "In good hands, with AllState". He is a very convincing actor who persuades me to believe that AllState is indeed the company to turn to if I need insurance. He is much more convincing than the damn reptile over at the other company. However, the fact of the matter is that AllState is being sued in three states for using what policy holders deemed an unfair business model. It is not that the company didn't pay the homeowners who held the policy but the policy which was provided left them under insured to rebuild their homes to their specifications or match the improvements they made to their homes. More troubling, AllState was fined for simply dropping insurance policies of homeowners in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina as well, the California Department of Insurance fined Allstate after the Oakland fires in 1991 because their policy holders were under insured.

The case for keeping people under insured is based on the buisness practice of insurance companies like AllState to not disclose to prospective policy holders how much it actually costs to insure their homes. That kind of up front honesty leads most potential buyers to walk away from the sales offer without purchasing a policy.



Then there is Wachovia formerly A.G. Edwards whose headquarters in Missouri was recently raided by state regulators seeking information on Wachovias sales practices and an internal investigation of the marketing of auction-rated securities. Well, some of us may have lied on a credit card application but certainly nothing like this! We are certainly not the only ones in debt yet today we as consumers are chided for the irresponsible accruement of credit card debt we have and young men and women across the country are recruited into special financial literacy courses to sit at the feet of some mercantile guru who explains to them that the problem with the current economy is that their parents were incompetent and lax, however he fails at the same time to remind them that no one is beating down our door to investigate our check books and Quicken files. Yet when we see the commercials for this bank one gets the impression that this is a well order financial institution.

Frankly, I think these people are a bad influence on your kids. Banks like Washington Mutual for instance directly target younger Americans under the pretense of almost not being a bank or being different than other banks. They are not a bank for old people like your parents they are a modern Millennial bank where things are done differently but is that true? Maybe parents should not have their children associate with a 'bad crowd' like banks and bankers, "But, mommy these are my friends (my teachers and great influences)!" "Well, honey, uh, who is this WaMu anyway, generally it's not a good idea to trust people who nick name themselves." "Oh mom, you don't understand!" Come on let's face it Washington Mutual is just one commercial shy of using the animated camel.


There's of course Bear Sterns which we no longer have to worry about but what about UBS the Swiss Bank which had to fire 7000 employees and is currently under a federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly helping their rich clients avoid paying federal income tax (a subversive and unpatriotic act) through illegitimate tax shelters. Meanwhile we are all asked to spend, not save our federal income tax returns at the local retailer, rather than having the federal government coaxes creditors to forgive chunks of our unrecoverable debt. I take a personal interest in the UBS collapse since I was one of the grand jurors (yanked away from my very pressing blogging responsibilities) to indict this bank on these charges. It is also interesting to hear that they are no longer providing off-shore banking services for Americans, what do you make of that? Fortunately I do not have any off shore account. Well, if you getting the impression that some of us poor folks are enjoying this your right! Forty dollars a day and all the white collar criminals you can put away, not bad !



I would be remiss not to bring up Merck Pharmaceuticals who although not a financial provider is a major corporation that would be deemed a practical sociopath if it were a real legal person. At this point not only would Merck qualify as a felon but would have to cop to a string of negligible homicide charges on an employment application. They would need to attach reams and reams of legal documentations to their application for employment or just bring it in on a flash drive. In addition to the 9000 lawsuits still pending against them for the pain killer medication Vioxx which had a 'killer-cure' for pain liable as it was for the deaths of several people who took this FDA approved medication. Additionally, the corporation is now facing another lawsuit over Fosamax an osteoporosis medication for withholding information that it could kill jaw bone tissues. The only product that has done well on the market is Guardasil which was the controversial HPV vaccine. A vaccine that was meant to prevent the contraction of the Human Papillomavirus which is acquired through vaginal contact. Somehow it was deemed necessary to administered the vaccine to girls who are supposedly too young to contract any sexually transmitted disease. Yeah Merck! This company most go down as one of the most public relations challenged corporations of all time. If Merck was an actually person as stated by law, would you really want to hire this person?

A service economy rank with bad service.

We here in the States have actually transformed our economy from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. The irony being most haven't the proper character to provide decent service. So many Americans have grown up with our self-indoctrinated profit driven ethos that the ends not only justfy the means they justify the purpose. To be kind, considerate and conscientious is to be weak and agitates the fears of the collective tribe.To be mean, irrational, proud and uncompromising is the mainstream American way of life. This conciseness has abrogated meaning; the interpreted experience, from the daily lives of many youths and it is these youths who serve us.

Detestable, deplorable behavior is engineered and instilled in many of the youth today through the media which includes the video games, commercials, and recorded music and videos. However, it also comes through talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. As well as Oprah Winfrey and all the "soft school" secularist that promote this life as purpose philosophy. Does her Angel Network include Lucifer and if not why can't she expressly define what portion of Christianity she is exploiting? The use of the media to soften values and beliefs took place even back in the days when television was deemed harmless, take Three's Company for instance two women and one man simply "living togther" and how homosexuality was introduced as just a cover for the main character Jack to stay in the apartment. Then there was the 1970's sitcom One Day at a Time which portrayed single mothers to the general public as a noble struggle although to this day divorce for Catholics leads to excommunication, in effect, separating them from the body of Christ. Single mothers, once considered a source of shame are now portrayed as more noble than married (hetero) mothers because to be a single mother, like the life of a convict, is such a harder life, it's 'more real'. However, rarely if ever do we chastise these two groups anymore for thier share of the responsibility of getting into these predicaments in the first place, when you do that you are consider a religious bigot. Not to mention shows like Alice and Laverence and Shirley. Single women taking care of themselves and not a family. It seems at first silly to debate this right? After all these are all just television sitcoms but that is just the point, they are not family sitcoms, the family and long standing values have slowly but deliberately been eroded from our standards and expectation up until what we have now, gay "marriages".

Thus whereever there is this going against the grain i.e. selfish living , boats against the current and so on the template of a grit filled saga is transpose which ultimately brings us back to our national roots of struggle and independace from England, all obligations and bindings are rent from the base in the name of liberty. Yet when we look at ourselves as Americans we prefer to see ourselves as we believed ourselves to be two or three generations ago and when we go shopping and get that nasty sales person we prefer to displace this reality with the smiling faces we saw in the commercials, that is America not this! The disparity between the way we present ourselves in the media and how we actually behave is so wide one fears taking in too much of it, both the deceptively benign fiction of Stargate Atlantis where the entire crew is really dependant on the 'brillance' of the scientist who can solve every problem himself (and practically in his head) propagating the fiction that intelligence is some kind gift gems of the scientific community have bestowed upon them and they are to be awed and worshiped to the fictious portrayal of reality itself in the 'like it is' police and hospital shows, after the Sean Bell shooting amongst others showed how clumsy the NYPD really can be and so many people are turning to holistic medicine with the real drama being medical insurance, not the steamy personal relationships of two doctors in the broom closet. Not to mention (or fail to mention) the shunted and coercive news reporting which serve their masters and benefactors interest from the dangers of natural remedies, to the isolated aggrandizement of President Robert Mugabe, the actual history of Zimbabwe and the greed of the rebellious Bristish governor Ian Smith totally ignored. Then there are young black boys in a marvelous performance of extemporary exposition would use the word "nigger" no less than four times in a sentance but when talk shows aired their host like children with parents would feel compelled to use the euphamism "N word'. Who was it that they had to answer to that these black boys did not, could it be their parents and liberal white oppurtunist? At root is the philosophy that our evil natures do not have to be corrected. Are only our teeth to be straight these days?

You also meet people who are nicer than you might have expected as well. Yet, the rub of having our economy rest on the backs of sourly, evil teenagers and twenty somethings is a miscalculation of economic intent. The people that are aggressively selling to the kids are soft spoken until the sale is over and the actual vindictiveness of a capitalist aggregation itself reveals that the most selfish traits of a person are more esteemed than good character and with demand up (to use the new handy-dandy universally applied mercantile paradigm for every aspect of life, it cuts, it shreds families, healthcare and jobs but wait there's more!) we behave this way.
We teach people to be selfish and greedy because it is good for the economy.

Hence we develop a completely carnal and extrinsic attitude where self exaltation is ones primary goal. All the while we detour from developing into more psyhologically and spiritually mature human creatures, devolving instead into a mash of egotisical psychopaths. Of all the boasts of manliness I have heard in the last ten years none of it has exalted humility and with good reason, it can't be done. Who will know you are alive and how will you defend your self psychologically with out all the cursing and scratching that makes a man a man. No,everyone has pride as if it were a good thing. Pride, that mental disease which is actually designated as the first of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism is by definition "An undue sense of one's own superiority;" (Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary) but instead we have the homosexual community vaunting this, their chief possession, in the vanguard of thier legtimacy, "WE HAVE PRIDE!" they say, yes and we have Christ.

Global Warming theory itself is an ode to the evils of idolotry where scientist like secular prophets predict the end of the world in the form of polar ice caps melting, placing most of the agrable land under water. Yet even this was held in political contention, something this important and presumably apperant immigrated from a scientific reality to the possibiliity of it all just being a great hoax and languished on the teether of the layman's suspension of disbelief, were we the culprit?

The same convection took place in the market places where the exacerbating of the worst traits in people like selfishness and envy were playfully extolled by the marketers in order to sell to them and now the consumer faces these very character traits in every aspect of the service economy, quality may number one but service is definetly number two.

More Woods Less Community Board 5

With space at a premium it would seem that Community Board 5 idea of turning the Univesity Woods into Condominums would (wood-a subliminal suggestion intimating what side I am on in this debate!) not suit either the tenants nor the community itself. There just is not enough good space for that, it will only end up being cramped high rise quarters. There is also a misguided sense in these ideas slightly veiled behind people's minds that if they start building condominims in the Bronx so close to Manhattan the Bronx would 'move up' in social stature, that the Bronx could be the 'new' Manhattan.

What the Board fails to realize is that there is no sense in imitating Manhattan, just ask Madonna who fled Manhattan for London, was reported to have said... Manhattan has lost most of it's creative 'sizzle'. Many people on this side of the river agree and believe that it is imperative for the Bronx to chart it's own way through time and maintain it's own distinct culture and mind set.

Recently the hospitals have decided to do away with the written consent usually needed by patients entering the emergency rooms of Bronx hospital in order to get a sample of body fluid to conduct an H.I.V test. This was said to be in response to the 'alarming' rate of of H.I.V releated deaths occuring in the Bronx.

However the fact that there seems to be threshold on the acceptable death toll for H.I.V releated deaths that was surpassed by the residents of the Bronx seems to be an unfitting means of the Bronx distinguishing itself. Whenever we think of the Bronx or rather people who do not live in the Bronx think of the Bronx they associate the bourough with, crime, drugs and death and now we have one more plight to be associated with, all the while I am sure people where dying of AIDS in other parts of the city, say, Manhattan for example. Yet it was not when some arbitrary threshold has been passed that action had to be taken.

Meanwhile in the Manhattan they were celebrating sex via the hit televison series Sex In The City, with movie premires where every adoring fan scampered about snatching up the latest Manolo boots (did I spell that right, oh dear...) and sipping wine in sidewalk cafe's discussing their latest affair and the size of their partners genitals, presumably. What they were not doing and what the series as popular as it was failed to do was to remind millions of people that there was an international pandemic taking place which was fatal. Instead we got to take a look inside of the fictious lives of the characters on that show and watch them lead fun and interesting sex filled lives, H.I.V. not included. Certainly, many people must have had the sense from watching that AIDS was a thing of the past or that there was a party out there worth having and not to trouble oneself with the off hand chance of catching this disease. However, that was far from the case but when it came time to remind NYC and the world that SEX sometime equals DEATH, well, once again the Bronx, was available to be dumped on. Meanwhile, the television series 'Desperate Housewives' took off with great acclaim and two more television series are making thier way to the small screen, which will not harm Manhattan in any way, 'Diaries Of A Call Girl' and 'Wife Swapping'.

It is not that testing should not be done, but that Manhattan should lead the way in this and take the brunt of this unpopular wake up call by having this practice begin in their hospitals but then again their is a little matter of civil liberties and privacy, a factor that may give this intiative the ability to 'creep' from a health issue to a legal issue which would never have passed in Manhattan. Having this test take place in the emergency room will keep only the poor from accessing it in the same numbers as before which was something they practiced frequently because it was their best means of getting to see a primary care provider in a reasonable time.

What does this have to do with University Woods? University Woods is one of those places whom non-community members tend to only see the bad side. A dumping ground for dead chickens from Santeria rituals and a somewhat exagerted claim of drug use in that area. Well, I would have those reporters know that Santeria and the Santeros who practice it share in a grand tradition which they are all very blessed to be involved. A tradition steming all the back to Afirca and now practiced by people of all cultural backgrounds and histories. Santeria is even practiced in the Catholic church with which Catholic saints are synchronized with African nature deities, cermonies have even been held in St. Patrick's Cathedral. In fact many of the stories that report of the low quality of life in Bronx are written in ignorance of the realities. The Bronx is famous for the burnt out buildings we used to see in the South Bronx but did any one care to mention most of them were acts of arson perpetrated by the greedy landlords eager to get rid of the tenants and abandon the property while collecting the insurance?

What does that have to do with University Woods? University Woods is a historic site where once Bristish Fort #8 existed preceeding the American War of Independance, it is a lush forested area that takes members of our community out of the busy streets of the harried commericial demands we, as mostly everyone finds themselves prostrated to these days. It connects Cedar Avenue residents to Sedgwick avenue to give them a better view of the majestic Harlem River and a direct route to the generous hospitiality of the Bronx Community College, who allows residents to utilze their athletic field free of charge. Many the neighborhood faithfully take their morning run on campus and a few like myself cut through the woods to get there. Mostly eveyone who actually lives here loves that park for even the brief duration in which it allows you to escape in to commune in solitude with nature. Many of man's most famous teachers from Jesus to Plato used grooves and forested areas for retreat and reflection and Lord knows we need momentary reflection now more than ever. University Woods is what's good about the Bronx especially because it serves no commerial immediacy. It is a spot far away from utilitarianism and the rule of economic primacy which today is the norm. We should not have to (as with a condominium for example) plunge a quarter into a meter for every square inch of space under our feet. University Woods is representative of the increasing strain between the living simply being that without need of any pecuniary justification for their existence and the pay check to pay check fiduciary couriers we are becoming who simply bring the wealth to the wealthiest in the form of our debt.