Hitting the Four Thousand Mark

We have lost four hundred thousand troops in Iraq in the five years of the war. Chuck Hagel tells us that we've lost nine hundred troops since the surge began. There are 29,000 wounded. They say that Iraqis have lost at least 80,000 into the hundreds of thousands. We don't know. Now we hear the roomer that either Hillary or Obama would not discontinue the war. One Christian conservative said, "It would be like trying to termanate the orbit of a sattelite". Presumably we are in for "as long as it takes". I guess the question is just how long "long" is. They say in gang warfare you don't just knock the person out in a fight, you have to stomp all over their head and kick their teeth in so they'll remember it. Is George Bush looking for the day when we have so inilated the native population that no voice dare dissent? Of course there was Mc Cain's gaff last week where he said that Iran is becomming a staging place for Al Qaida. Of course he didn't just say it once but four times and people are saying it must be deliberate. They say Mc Cain really knows that Al Qaida is not Shiite, and he's not just having another of his "senior moments". The error is deliberate to "conflate" the issue in the mind of the American public. Now there is talk of an October surprise. The feeling goes that we need something to ignite the intrest of the neo cons just before Election Day and nothing would do that like starting a war with Iran just before election day. The image of Nixon in 1960 is pointed to because the Bay of Pigs invasion was already planned, but Eisenhaur held off, and perhaps if they had gone ahead and "taken Cuba" it would have put Nixon over the top on election day. They are also saying that Joseph Lieberman has the job of Vice President pretty much in the bag. They say he'll attract the centerists, the "Reagan democrats" as well as the "Zionist Christians" and Jewish people. Personally I think Mc Cain will pick some nobody because he doesn't want to take the spot light off of himself. Several years ago they said he'd be 73 on election day. But now they are pegging his age at 71. He would still be the oldest man ever to be elected President for the first time. People say that he's flip-flopped on so many issues, legalizing torture being the latest one, that people aren't sure what the "real" Mc Cain stands for. They say that he thought of becomming a Democrat in 2001 to caucus with the democrats in congress but that Jeffers guy beat him to it. Of course John Kerry says that running as Kerry's vice president was clearly an idea from the Mc Cain Camp.

People are saying they don't like Hillary because she "parses" words. She lies a lot and also wedges certain groups against other groups and hopes to come out on top. She would be a very polarizing figure as President. Now Bill Richardson has endorsed Obama and James Carvile is calling Richardson a "Judas". It would seem to me that Richardson would be the person to shore up the Latino vote in the southwest. It will sure be interesting to see how all of this plays out. Nevertheless it's always been my belief that is Hillary ever chose to run for President, she would win. And whoever is President in January of 2009 is going to have an economic mess on their hands. You can't find the tides of the economy. History has shown that we have little more influence over this than we do over the weather. You can't control just when people just decide to stop spending any more than you can controle when birds all decide to fly south for the winter. When the economy flies south it's "gone". Some have said that massive monitary bail outs of the economy are like "trying to push a string". It just won't go. It will coil up. This indeed will be President Bush's great come-uppance. There will be no repeats of the fall 1992 recovery this time around.

I suppose this next paragraph could be called the perils of in-breeding. We know it's a bad idea for dogs, or the clans in West Virginia and Arkansas. But it's also a bad idea for plants. There used to be hundreds of species of apples comonly grown in America a hundred & fifty years ago. Now there are fifteen or twenty or something. They say the number of apple varieties has dropped 86% in a very short time. This is true for all other types of seeds that are planted and grown for food or beauty, and so they have build that fortress type place on an island off the northern shore of Norway just a few hundred miles from the north pole. They say it's so well insilated even if the power goes out for 25 years the seeds will still be usable. It's kind of a doomsday store house. But it doesn't require an asteroid of nuclear winter to bring on doomsday, just the normal process of global warming ought to do it. The thing is we have so in-bred our vegetables that food (like British royalty) is more succeptable to certain diseases which spread like wild-fire through a crop with on counter-vening genes in other species to resist the pestelance. The danger here is obvious. That same person from the Christian right I previously quoted from states that nutrition has dropped drastically with modern food production, and a lot has to do with depleted nutriants in the soil. We need to switch off the species we grow for the over-all "genetic health" of our food supply.

Today is March 24th. or the 32nd. anniversary of my becoming a Christian. One line I've frequently heard quoted at me is "He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it". Why should that one be any less a lie than all the other things I've been told. I'd like to point to the example of Joan of Arc. Sometimes when you watch a movie for a second time different things jump out at you. Joan's army was winning battle after battle but then the Brittish forces sued for Peace and Charles was annointed King of France and rested on his (or rather Joan's) laurals. Joan was kept around as a well respected figure-head. But the news of Peace was like a dagger to her heart because she was so conscious of the Lord's will not having been completed. And in the end the fact that British forces were not wiped out proved to be Joan's undoing because her trial was in Burgandy, which was sort of a capitulating vassle privince of the British, and the Churchmen who tried her were British puppets, and she was denied the right of every Catholic to appeal to Rome, to the Pope. In my prophecy book I was doing a homily on the number "three" and I made reference to this one Jewish King, perhaps it was Hezekiah, who was told to symbolically thrust his arrow into the ground to symbolize the enemy. He struck the ground three times. Then the prophet, perhaps Elijah, said to the King "You have done wrongly, for now you shall only achieve three victories. If you had struck the ground six or seven times your troops would have won the final victory. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon has a teaching that the reason why Jesus failed is because he had to complete the ministry of John the Baptist, who was cut off before his time, so Jesus had to continue with his ministry of repentance and redemption, rather than his own ministry, which was the conquest of the earth. It's something to think about. You've heard the expression, "for want of a nail, the battle was lost". At another point in the movie Joan got upset because the troops were retreating and not continuing to storm the fortress. "The troops are tired". But Joan said, "The other side is even more exausted than you all are and now is the time to strike". I think with a war or a campaign or anything the secret is to give it your last ounce of strength, and when you think you are completely spent, give it some more. This is how the decisive battles in life are won.