Mike Pence Running Interference

There are times this weekend when I have felt physically ill.  I think any Black household ought to feel physically ill knowing there is a hung jury in South Carolina where this one white juror can't decide whether he has "reasonable doubt" about the police shooting of an unarmed black man, who was running away and shot eight times in the back.  Then evidence was planted by his dead body.  This jury was already eleven whites to one Black to begin with.  I wonder if that's common in southern cities to short change Blacks in jury representations.  We hear the "reasonable doubt" doctrine with police shootings where if there was one twitch of anxiety involving a suspect, the law enforcement officer is allowed to shoot him dead.  So in such a state even if a guy is unarmed and running away it's OK to shoot him.  Then in Los Angeles there is the case where a Black man was shot in skid row I believe in early March of 2015.  They say the suspect was going for the officer's gun.  I don't think he was, but if there is one twitch (as in twitchy finger) of doubt that he was "going for his gun" then "shadow of a doubt" goes to the officer just as tie goes to dealer in black jack.  When there is no evidence pointing to one person or the other "Tie goes to the officer".  

Mike Pence is doing what he does best- - running interference for Trump on all of the Sunday talk shows.  Someone joked that Pence would deserve a Heisman trophy if he were a football player.  The question arises how David Petrayas, or however you spell it, could be made Secretary of State when he gave classified secrets to his mistress after the stink Trump made about Hillary and classified information.  This is just another of the many hypocricies of Donald Trump.  We hear about the 35% terrif Trump is going to slap on foreign goods and yet Trump has foreign laborers making products in his business empire.  We still have no assurance this Republican congress will go along with any terrif.   In the world of political promises business is pressured to stay in the United States and workers keep their jobs.  In the real world Trump seems not to care about any domestic pride or "Made in America" because he hires illegal foreign workers.   He calls it "being smart with the law" or something.  People still want to know if Trump is going to build that Wall with Mexico.  Suppose the wall gets built?  What's to strop a truck with a battering ram borrowed from a US police department, to just knock a hole in that beautiful wall and let all of the people come through?  David Petrayas has diplomatic experience he informs us.  So maybe he wouldn't make such a bad candidate after all.  I hear that Petrayas doesn't vote, which means he didn't vote for Trump last time.  

We hear about the terms Form and Function and we assume that Form always comes first and then function.  That is- there is some invention and then we figure out how this invention will be useful in the market place.  Often it's only the form of an idea we have and we try to come up with a practical purpose or function for it.  It could even be a mathematical formula.  People are born and then they want to know why they were born and what is their reason for being here.  But as I have said before, from God's point of view, if you believe in God, form FOLLOWS function.  Let me give some apt examples.  The electoral college was invented so that small states would have more rights than large states.  This is not some "accident" that happened as an unforseen RESULT of the electoral college but the REASON why the electoral college is the way it is.  What happened this year was precicely the way the electoral college was DESIGNED TO WORK.  (Selah)   Then we have the second amendment.  If we were to take the second amendment literally there would be NO infringements of "the right to bear arms".  So you could have machine guns and rocket launchers.  Or at least you could have fifty calabre "cop killer" solid bodied bullets.  But as Thom Hartman pointed out the second amendment was designed for slave catching Southern militias.  It was a way of keeping more power for the state.  We want a well regulated STATE militia.   We could talk about the Roman Catholic Church.  Often we hear that it's all form and no substance.  Or it "retains a form but the spirit has gone out of it".  Well- - it seems to me the whole thing of Priests, Bishops, and Cardinals is precisely designed for all of that pomp and wealth and to wall out the little people.  The laiety or common people weren't even allowed to read the Bible directly.  It was feared they might discover some Rights that they didn't know they had as Christians and "Lao Decia" or rule of the people was considered dangerous.

Rhapsody in Black is doing December of 1970 and I don’t specifically remember any of these songs they’re playing as being popular then.   Maybe it’s my imagination but it seems they are tending to do more recent years than they used to.  When I arrived here about two Bill was watching a thing on cooking salmon.  Right now it’s just minutes past three.   This is later and “I’ll Be There” is the first song I recognize and “I’m Not My Brother’s Keeper” is vaguely familiar.  OK later (insertion) they’re playing “One less egg to fry”, which is from early 1971.  I’ve noticed as of late the elastic on the white socks I do have has been stretching out of shape at least on some socks.  I guess I can throw the worst ones out.   Some people at the party tonight will be inviting as many as ten guests.  Then the room should be packed.  

Dampening our Christmas Spirit

I turned on Chris Matthews and watched that show from about nine thirty to 10:15 or so.   He was mentioning how Donald Trump is basically a demagogue.  I remember when Judy used to think he was a demagogue.  He’d have all the people raise their right arms in salute in an almost Sieg Hail fashion.  They showed all the clips of Trump’s berading of the media.  He’s like an old fashioned “mob rule” type guy and he’s exactly the type of candidate the Electoral College was put in to try and screen out and assure such a “man of mob rule” would never come to power.  Maybe I’m not the only one who ran into a wall in trying to present the case against Donald Trump at their holiday gatherings.  I think liberals in general and Bernie Sanders supporters in particular ran into a buzz saw of media apathy, who only reported anything about Bernie Sanders when something bad happened.  They said that 37% plan to make politics a part of their family gathering this year.  Maybe you have all the points even mapped out in your mind.  Or maybe you wanted to talk about your accomplishments this year, and somehow that never occurred either.  Suddenly the obvious is now invisable.  People used to cringe at the very mention of a Trump presidency.  But they now suffer from "nose deafness" to mix a metaphor.   The stench no longer is noticable.  Mitt Romney thought Trump was a phoney, a fraud.  He spoke of Trump University being a fraud and a rip-off.   Curtis Mayfield says in a song that we’re all going to hell anyhow as of December of 1970.  Maybe he’s right.  The whole country is going to hell.  A lot of us thought the prospects of democratic Hillary coming in January would brighten our Christmas spirits and give us something to hope in for the new year.  Maybe you’re one of those people who have been victims of theft or violence or natural disaster this Christmas.  That dampens your spirits.  I mean when you have the Secretary of Defense being nicknamed “Mad Dog” with all these controversial quotations of his- - you really have to wonder where the country is headed.  Trump berates Hillary for her ties to Goldman Sachs and yet Trump nominates a Secretary of the Treasure from Goldman Sachs.  Could Trump get more hypocritical if he tried?  He says he’s going to slap on a 35% terrif if a company takes its business to Mexico and yet the opposite happens and Trump rewards the squeaky wheel and pads the profits of the already very wealthy and leaves the average taxpayer the responsibility to take up the slack.  Right now the Christmas party is going on here but I’m just not in the mood.  Bill has arrangements to eat in his room but I guess I’ll go down about five thirty and see what kind of food they have left over if everybody isn’t getting bored by an hour long video or something.  

This is Saturday December 3, 2016 and the family gathering wasn’t as good this year.  I got picked up at ten to eleven and we went down to Marie Calendar.  It had been cold in this room and I was amazed at how warm it had become outside, and it was warm in the car.  Elizabeth, Judy’s care-giver was in the car accompanying us today.  We conversed some.  When we got to the restaurant the rest of our party had not yet arrived.  Tim ran into traffic on the way to Mom’s.  I hardly said anything to Marie all day.  I asked Tim about the three E mails I sent him lately and he acknowledged receiving them but other than that had nothing to say about any of them.  That kind of took the air out of my balloon.  Wendy was unable to make it.  I bet you we would have talked about politics if Wendy was around.  There was absolutely no talk about politics except right as we were about to leave I asked Tim what he thought about the Carrier air conditioning thing.  The exchange was very brief.  We had garlic toast instead of the usual corn bread.   Coffee service was good and I had three full cups, which was a bit more than intended.  We talked about Mom’s health a lot and her stay at the hospital.  I ordered a “house salad” at a steep discount with my Ortega chicken sandwich.  They didn’t have zucchini and she told me I must have been thinking of some other restaurant.  “We’ve never sold zucchini here”.  Then why do I have such a distinct memory of reading it?  So I had the fries.  The salad filled me up so much I was unable to eat the second half sandwich so we put it in a box and took it home.  Tim says he had some meeting in Riverside at three.  (?)  He went to Mom’s place and we follow them there but we didn’t stay.  We started to park but then Elizabeth said she wasn’t really curious about seeing it so we left.  We had also talked about Judy’s health while she was in the hospital.  Now it seems that Judy had some physical therapy scheduled.  They took me home.  I also had two bran muffins with me and the Ortega burger and a green salad that Mom couldn’t eat.   When I got home I noticed almost immediately that a brand new package of socks had been stolen.  There were two packs of socks in the closet and now there was only one.  Naturally I opened it up and put those socks in the drawer before they got stolen too.  Then I noticed that my shirt had been buttoned wrong all day and nobody commented about it.  Maybe they were trying to save me from embarrassment.  We got here at two and I figured we wouldn’t get back until at least four.  I don’t feel in the Christmas spirit like going to the party tonight if they’re going to steal people’s stuff.  The thing if I had a funny preminission early this morning that something of mine would get stolen today.   Then I tried to push the thought out of my head.  

Will Businesses Now Hold the Trump Administration Hostage?

It’s interesting how we use words such as Form and Substance.   Liberals are saying that this getting of Carrier Air Conditioners to remain in the United States in Indiana is all Form and no Substance.  Substance can be used to refer to three entirely different things if you think about it.  First there is the substance of perception.  Can we see and feel and taste something.  Our personal perceptions of an object are called “substance”.  There is another kind of substance, which some might call materiality.  This refers to things like weight and mass and its gravitational field.  This is the “substance” of Einstein’s universe and Einstein’s universe is literally shaped by this form of ether wave involvement.  But there is a third thing we refer to as substance or “materiality” as the court system refers to it.  This is the substance meaning the causing of Events to happen or the effects said events have on other events.  This is what is known as a stream of causality.  We respect people, perhaps even Donald Trump with the ability to “make things happen” or get things done.  Get events done.  As such this type of substance is the most important one to a lot of people, particularly those in the law enforcement and legal professions.  We say “I will make A happen” and “A” happens.  We call this being useful.  Useful people get things done.  Useful people make things happen.  As to the charge that Carrier Air Conditioning is holding the country hostage,  I am not ready to fully embrace this line of left-wing logic just yet.  Give it time.  The line of reasoning goes that if it becomes generally known that all you have to do is to say “We want Donald Trump to meet our tax demands and other corporate favors and if he doesn’t we’re moving to Viet Nam”, and then the Trump administration sees it’s unleashed a monster.  It’s kind of like a hostage situation.  These corporations now hold the nation hostage.  If you don’t meet our demands for safe passage to Costa Rico with a hundred thousand dollars cash we’re blowing up this building and all of the hostages with it”.   Trump has no experience either in politics or in law enforcement.  And I question his expertise in psychology to be able to pull off something like a successful deal.  Trump’s strength hasn’t been so much in “making a good deal” but like Mitt Romney, it’s been in surrounding himself with the “right people” who do his thinking for him and who know the tax and corporate laws well, and is skillful at manipulating them.  But the government is based on a whole different premise rather than “making a profit” or “soaking the system for all it’s worth”.   Willy Brown knew how to manipulate the law to get dangerous felons off from serving any hard time.  We need a different sort of man for president.  We need a man who is FAIR and is a REPRESENTATIVE of all the people.  “The People” are one thing Donald Trump seems to have forgotten completely about.  There are tax laws that are supposed to be fair to ALL of the people.  And you don’t cheat the poor out of their meager savings to add to the already fat wallets of the rich.  This is something Donald Trump seems completely unaware of.  Hence liberals want to democratize corporations with profit sharing plans and different sorts of responsibility chains of command than the old top down pyramid system.  It’s more of an interactive egalitarian exchange.  We don’t know what will happen to the economy with Trump at the helm.  If he going to “Make prosperity happen” the way he made the Currier thing happen.  Or will Trump be exposed as the Emperor who has no clothes?  Only time will tell.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE FARM  (Monday)  I weighed all of my options.  I had $3.35 in my account and the instant Nestcafe seemed to be the best option.  I paid for it with my debit card from Ben.  Bill gave me a cigarette.  Before dinner Mario gave me a long white short.   I realize I could have bought cigarettes if I’d done the twenty cent in change thing with a dollar coffee in the morning.   Sylvia brought over a tan blanket for me to put on my bed.  It’s if anything going to be colder tonight.  Larry gave me a short.   Right now I have Eye Witness news on.  We are in “Sunset” but probably won’t be typing this on Thursday.  We are still without heat.  It’s anyone’s guess whether tomorrow Augustine will get the heat going.  “Rogue I” is the latest Star Wars and it takes place between “Revenge of the Sith” and “A New Hope” or episodes three and four.    Did they name a car after it?   Last night Kansas City played the Broncos and I had the game on only a minute or so.  “Eye on LA” featured Union Station and a train ride from Los Angeles to Santa Barbra, and after this a simulated Pan Am flight of forty years ago when Pan Am was in its hay day.   That’s what they said.  Sixty Minutes had this Italian leader who wants to make a Mackavellian grab for more governmental power in Italy.  Then they had a double segment on Alzheimers and these families in the mountains of Columbia with a dominant Alzheimers gene.  They can easily test anyone for that gene now but normal Alzheimers comes from a different gene.  They are testing for plaque on the brain.  Then it was NCIS LA and I dozed off despite having drunk instant coffee.  Bill says to hide that tan blanket or Nora will take it.  I got up at a quarter to six.  I got my medication from Ida this morning and April last night at about 7:35 when I checked.   I had the Rude Pundit on the Stephanie Miller show.  We had Raison Bran for breakfast.  I greedily went to the counter for my bowl from Rico and I crossed the room for milk and juice while my table mates just waited patiently.  We had scrambled eggs and an English muffin and butter and jelly.  The coffee was pretty good and served in a white cup.  I poured myself seconds from the pot in the kitchen.  We’re on the white bar now.   Bill I s back to having meals in his room after seeing down in the dining room a couple of times.