For  South America, at least…(not here)

A Diary was posted earlier on asking questions on subjects like “What is the Universe?”, etc. My response was a little lengthier than the typical “comment”, so I wanted to reframe the question below.

For awhile…

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I have actually given this question a bit of thought, and come to reject conventional thinking about the problem, which is why all the so-called accepted answers just lead off into more unresolved questions, and/or reverting to Centuries-old myth-making.

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Recall that Albert Einstein proved that Time itself was not linear, but in fact curved and flexible. This makes me think that we have to abandon conventional “linear” thinking about the Universe itself.

Recall also, that matter never disappears..but it is simply transformed into something else. For example, water evaporates and appears to be all gone, but really the matter itself still exists (just in a different form).

So therefore these questions about when did the Universe begin, how was it “created”, and such, are all moot, and not the correct approach to the analysis.  

The Universe always was and always will be….only the form is changing, and it is changing constantly, (expansion, contraction, etc.).

The matter will never either go away or be “created”, only the form will change.  

As for human beings, we are just one more mutation of matter, and an unpleasant one at that. I think human beings are destined to go the way of the Dinosaur — with all the Wars, the mass-violence, the mass-poverty, and all the Environmental damage borne of our own making.

As comedian George Carlin once said, Planet Earth does not need saving.  Planet Earth is going to be just fine.  It’s human beings that are f**cked.

There is no God.

There is no Universe.

There is no linear Time.

There is no Justice.

There is no Heaven.

There is no “Afterlife”.

There is however an unlimited supply of matter and mutation.

And there surely is Hell, for we see it all around us each and every day

of our tragic lives — and Hell always wins (just ask Dick Cheney, the dead Kennedys, or an oil-soaked pelican).

Now you know the truth, and can put down The Holy Babble, for it is written.

Here’s something that we can all do.

Sign the petition for Alan Grayson’s new The War is Making YOU Poor Act.

See Alan Grayson: http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

Sign The Petition!!

Something good actually happened tonight. I can’t remember the last time in the past 10 years that I could really say that.

One of the Warren Commission accessories to the murder of John Kennedy, Arlen Specter, was finally defeated in his reelection for the U.S. Senate. Arlen Specter was the man who fabricated the whole “magic bullet theory” of the multiple gunshot wounds to John Kennedy and Governor Connally, in order to protect the real killers from public exposure and prosecution.

Background: John Kennedy was struck in the throat (front), and in the back (rear), and then in the head near his right temple (front). Governor Connally was struck in his ribs, and also in his right wrist, and also in his left thigh. The bullet cited the Warren Commission to have caused all of these wounds simultaneously, except for Kennedy’s head shot, was taken from a neighboring hospital stretcher and found in totally undeformed condition (with no bloodstains and no fragments missing).

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This is Arlen Specter in 1964 fabricating the trajectory and the physics of multiple wounds sustained in two adult bodies in order to publish the lie that there was just a “lone gunman” in the assassination of President Kennedy. This became known as the “magic bullet” theory.

But the real facts were, of course, much different.

Here we see the proof that John Kennedy had been already struck in the throat (from the front) by a bullet, and yet Governor Connally at this point was totally unharmed and not hit at all, and still holding onto his hat.

Several frames later (and over 1 full second later), Governor Connally had still not yet been shot by any bullet at all, and he was still comfortably holding onto to his hat. Connally’s wounds could therefore not possibly have come from the same bullet that had hit Kennedy in the throat. Yet thanks to Arlen Specter (and also Gerald Ford who fabricated the position of Kennedy’s back wound in the report) “Official U.S. History” lies to us and states that it did.

Arlen Specter was defeated tonight. He was defeated by a Democratic Party challenger Joe Sestak coming from the left.

Of course, Establishment loving President Obama provided both robo-calls and TV advertisment support on behalf of this Warren Commission Kennedy Assassination accessory, Arlen Specter –who George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had also campaigned for in 2004– and not the true Democrat in the race, Joe Sestak.

Obama even stated in his TV ad that he loved Arlen Specter, while he also actively campaigned on behalf other status-quo, pro-Corporate Establishment figures like Blanche Lincoln, and opposed the more progressive Democrat Bill Halter. Despite Obama’s help, Blanche Lincoln is locked in a tight contest tonight that is still unresolved and will require a “runoff”.

• So the Establishment loses tonight.
• The Warren Commission loses tonight.
• WarHawk and Robert Gates fan, President Obama loses tonight.
• And a better Democrat defeated an imposter.

From the article: Obama Supreme Court Nominee Endorses Indefinite Detention:

Elena Kagan told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) last year she backed the Obama Administration’s policy of “indefinite detention.”

From the article: Shafting progressives:

For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some progressives have favored denial — even though, if the name “Bush” or “McCain” had been attached to the same presidential policies, the same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder.

But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups and individuals who pretend that Obama’s policies merely need a few tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are whistling past a political graveyard.

If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens — and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it’s part of a pattern.

The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist “wisdom” [Neocon/Corporatist]. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf.

One can almost hear those exact same words of absurdity tumbling (or bumbling) out of the mouth of George W. Bush.

On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a Neocon/Corporatist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles.

“During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration’s bogus category of ‘enemy combatant,’ whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right,” University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle noted last month. “Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S. federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Boyle added: “Kagan has said ‘I love the Federalist Society.‘ This is a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the Federalist Society.”

The departing Justice Stevens was a defender of civil liberties. Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the nation’s top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power.

Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise, history will judge us harshly — and it should.

From the article: Kagan Pro-Tribunal, Anti-Justice Record

Kagan opposed legislation designed to prevent terrorists convicted in military tribunals from using civilian courts to challenge their arbitrary convictions.

She even compared Congress’s effort, on a bipartisan basis, to clarify the laws governing the War on Terror to the “fundamentally lawless” actions of a “dictatorship.”

This is going to be a judge with a Cheney-esque, authoritarian, pro-detention, anti-Habeaus Corpus, pro-Torture(?), illegal Worldview.

The United States Income Tax Code is an incomprehensible 400,000 pages in length. But beyond just being astoundingly complex, and an abusively inefficient waste of personal time and human life, it is also a horribly intrusive and unnecessarily invasive way of trying to raise revenue.  

There are simply other means, and other alternative methods for raising revenue that would be so much better than this Income Tax, and that would greatly, greatly simplify all of our lives (and therefore improve them).

In addition, all the Income Tax system does is create a counter-reaction, by the rich, of trying to devise tricks for escaping the payment of the taxes (loopholes).  So this type of a system inevitably drifts towards corruption and inequity to begin with.  The rich will use lawyers, tax shelters, and other tricks and gimmicks to bypass the system, while the middle-class gets stuck with the bills.

Below is an argument made for Tax Reform:

From the Left

From the Right

Markos Moulitsas (DKos) is now calling progressive Congressman Dennis Kucinich “reprehensible” for having the strength of integrity and character to refuse to agree to this hollowed-out, Insurance-Monopoly, bailout-bill (unlike Barack Obama and the Democratic Leadership).   Link:  Markos attacks the progressive Congressman.

Gee, isn’t that what we all wanted from Democrats? The strength not to just cave in all the time like scared sheep, and actually stand up for something? (unlike Markos himself apparently).

Even as we speak, both Howard Dean and Alan Grayson have now also ramped-up the rhetoric for introducing some type of Medicare Buy In (a.k.a. “public option”) as a reconcilliation fix for the existing corrupt Health Care Bill. Alan Grayson has even formally proposed a “public option act” H.R. 4789.

In reality, Obama and Rahm Emanuel really don’t want there to be any “fixes” of any consequence made to their happy Insurance Monopoly bill.  And without Presidential leadership and support, any reconcilliation efforts will quickly fail, and may never even see any formal debate or consideration (as the Democratic Leadership always happily succumbs to the pressures exerted by Rahm Emanuel and Obama — like yet another massive War Funding bill).

Perhaps the best thing that could happen here would be that the Obama Health Care Bill falls short by a vote or two in the House. At that point, instead of a $70 Billion Bailout to Insurance Fat Cats, and IRS fees for defenseless U.S. citizens, the whole process would then have to be rethought.

In the event of Obama and Rahm having failed to shove a Insurance Monopoly bill down our throats, perhaps then a set of individual, stand-alone bills could be brought forward to make some real progress on Health Care Reform. For example:

• A stand alone bill to end the denial of care based on “pre-existing conditions” (even many GOP members support this provision).
• An expansion of Medicare, or Medicare-Buy-In, passed through the reconcilliation process.
• A repeal of the existing Anti-Trust rules that protects the Insurance Monopoly.
• Funding for local, cost-effective Health Care Clinics.
• How about a bill to actually allow the reimportation of cheaper generic drugs from Canada? (Rahm and Obama would be pissed)

The Democratic talking-point here that the Obama’s sell-out bill is “the only way” to ever make forward progress on Health Care, is just like the same faulty logic that we heard before with the crooked Goldman Sachs/Wall-Street bailouts (who by the way are now making big profits, and the CEOs are getting huge bonuses — with that money that we gave them).

Lies don’t equal reform.

And neither does a corrupt system of bailouts, and mandates in the service of a Monopoly.