Leo
Le Port reminds us that they are lying when the government tells you
"We don't have all of your information right now; we need a FISA ruling
to get it. FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Agency or
something. First of all if you use encrypted E mail you might be tagged
as "suspicious' by the Government is they so desired, and have you
investigated for that. The government has that giant complex in Utah
where they are capable of storing- - - a trillion Terabytes, or one
Quadrillion Gigabytes. This isn't small potatoes. They don't need a
FISA ruling to get your information, they already have it. But somehow
even though they already have it, they rationalize that they don't.
They talked about that
Edward Snowden guy in China and now the people are holding
demonstrations on
his behalf, which makes the United States look bad. John Mc Laughlin and that conservative lady
brunette are defending privacy rights and the other three say the Obama
administration is handeling this surveillance thing properly. Then it was the Syrian war chances. Here Mort Zuckerman and to a lesser extent,
Eleanor Clift were supportive of the President while Pat and John and the
brunette again were against the idea of any aid to the Syrian rebels. Meet
the Press had a good all around discussion of the pertenate facts concerning
both classified information falling into rogue hands, and also of the potential
war with Syria. In terms of that Edward
Snowden guy- - clearly we know now that he didn’t pick Hong Kong by accident
but he was pandering to the People’s Republic just prior to the President’s
meeting with the Chinese leader in an attempt to make this administration look
bad. And as people say, any time there are anti American
demonstrations done on foreign soil, this is not a good thing, if it was
provoked by something an American did or said.
If I were President I might throw him in Guantamano Bay for a while to “cool
his heels’ before charging and peg him an “enemy combatent’ to see if I could
get away with it. This would give the
Justice Department time to formulate the proper charges, and prevent this rogue
agent from flying the coop once again. If
he is not guilty of Treason outright, he most certainly is guilty of espionage against
our own government.
In terms of the
potential war with Syria, we have to keep in mind this isn’t Iraq in 2001,
which was a situation which if ignored completely would result in no harm to
American security. The same could be
said now of Afghanistan. In my opinion we
don’t need to wait any year and a half to pull all of our troops out. Sure perhaps a school we set up will get
bombed, or Al Qaeda will control a few more mountain passes- - in
Afghanistan. But that will be completely
irrelivent on the world scene because the Obama Administration has gutted and
decimated Al Qaeda’s ability to make war- - on anybody. As I told James Fisher this morning- - we
stand constantly in peril of “fighting the last war”. Since Al Qaeda is virtually irrelevant any
more- - then we need to look at what the danger IS in the Mideast right
now. Both John Mc Cain, and Lindsey
Graham point out that we have allies who depend on us in the Mideast, such as
Jordan and Lebanon and Israel, and perhaps even Turkey still. I told James that a year ago when Assad was
much weaker, it would have been easier to take him out thus illustrating “a
stitch in time saves nine’. As long as
we’re going to half to get involved there eventually, it might as well be now,
when our chances of winning will never be better. One possible bright spot could be the
election in Iran yesterday of a “moderate cleric” in Iran. Perhaps he is someone we can either work wish
or engage in ‘friendly perswasion’ to stay out of the Syrian conflict. Hez Ballah has jumped into this conflict with
both feet- - and I wouldn’t hole my breath that Vladimir Putin is going to do
anything productive or that’s in our interest regarding Syria. There are other remarks about Syria that I’ll
past in here at this time when I post this.
But once again I would say that the NBC moderator is a lot more even
handed on this issue than, for instance Chris Matthews. You don’t say “I won’t want to go to war
because I’m just tired of War”. This
whole line of reasoning cheapens the whole meaning and concept of war as “something
we do to pass the time or to make some business profit for our contracting
partners, or perhaps to boost the Presidential standing in the polls”. “Back in my day” as the saying goes- - War
was serious business and to be entered into only for either a direct threat to
the US or its allies or else to prevent some human atrocity such as genocide or
something. Assad is responsible for some
ninety thousand of his own people and that isn’t small potatoes in anyone’s
calculation. Egypt today has given us a
shot in the arm by pulling out its diplomats from Syria and like Mc Cain and
Lindsey is demanding a No Fly Zone. The
imposition of such a zone experts regard as essential for a win as well as “cratering
their runways”. I think the whole idea
about ‘arms falling into the wrong hands” is a case, again, of “being tormented
by fears of the past war” when the picture has changed now.
Breakfast
with the Beatles was on and they had Father’s Day stuff as best they
could. It was a show about men and
dudes, so you had songs like Bungalo Bill, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, or Hey
Jude, or I Want to Be Your Man. By the
way- - Mal Evans isn’t crazy about “Hey Jude” personally, so the song has
always gotten poor Federation air play. However
Stewart Sutcliffe likes “Hey Jude” because it’s about Julian. Mal reminded me that John Lennon positively
loathes “Dear Boy” off of the Ram album.
We are now hearing that there is also some beef against Hugh Mc Cracken
on the Ram Album, which makes this album rather persona non grata. Black Bart likes “Bip Bop” and he wanted to
record it with Richi Valenz but he refused saying he’d never stop to recording
a piece of crap like that. Richi did do a "rocked up" (Revolution style) version of Lennon's "only people' with Sandy Zimmerman on drums and Jim Redman on bass. Returning to
this world - - Peter Torque was on the show and his voice has deepened and “Last
Train to Clarksville” is sung in a deeper register now. The played “in This Generation” a song I used
to have on vinyl, and hopefully still do in Dr. Levy’s garage. They played a track by Danny Harrison I
thought perhaps was the Traveling Willberries.
Ringo had both of his sons, Zak, and Jason performing with him on a live
track. Paul Mc Cartney sang “Put it
There”. Somebody in the Federation
ought to put “Enter Sandman” and “Beautiful Boy” on an old style 45 rpm vinyl
single. Because in both cases it’s Des
Rho demons tormenting little boys according to Federation lore. The little boy in “Enter Sandman” is said to
be a little boy named Peter who was born on May 13th 1984 and is an
obscure Stephen King character who assumes real identify. You
know I guess I’m the ONLY person on the planet who does NOT think the Beatles
on Ed Sullavin was a big thing. I
scarcely remember it at all. Peter
Torque rightly mentions that so many Beatle live performances are lacking,
musically.
This
is Sunday June 16, 2013 at almost a quarter to one and Chris Marquardt is on
right now and our photo assignment for the month is the word “green”. Lighting plays a key role in photography in
terms of angle. It was six years ago in
2007 on a Saturday was one of the last times, if not thee last time when all
five members were at patent’s Laguna Hills home and neither of the wives were
with us, and we had a little heart to heart with Dad about his drug dependency
problem. It was in this same era we are
reminded that I was playing a lot of chess games with Marcus Blackwell. Again if I had those interactions to do over
I would be more confrontational than I in actuality was in terms of standing up
to Marcus in some of his loose mouth verbal abuse. Of course it was in late July of 2007 where I
feature a posting of the title “These Are the Good Old Days”, which proved to
be dead onaccurate in terms of prophetic content. We now move up to 2011, which was still a far
better era than now in terms of my monetary situation because I had just gotten
my coffee pot- - and I had been figuring I’d be able to run a surplus of twenty
dollars per month because I’d be making so much money off of selling coffee or
at least not having to buy it. But for
whatever reason, my economical changed has changed markedly since then. I remarked to Dr. Levy that perhaps at times I
set the bar too high for myself in terms of writing things I’d consider “acceptable”. I’ve had to sensor myself in terms of ideas I’ve
had for a posting today, because my blogger numbers are so shot I don’t want to
bore the few readers I have to death.
Apparently my latest two postings didn’t hit it off with the public
anyhow. In the evening it was the usual
ABC game shows. I used two packets of
Swiss Miss during the evening. I was on
computer for “something” and learned that NHL finals game two was in progress
and the score was all tied up one to one between the Blackhawks and the
Bruins. But the game wasn’t being aired
on free TV. But they’ll preempt a soap
opera for two days so they can show the US Open in golf, which nobody is
interested in. FOX TV has completely
rearranged their schedule so by default there was that Nazi thing about “clocks’
and guarding the secrets of the party. I don’t remember what we did at nine. As far as I know Paul Mc Cartney’s 72nd birthday is on
Tuesday the eighteenth rather than Wednesday the 19th as KLOS
said. Tomorrow is the 41st
anniversary of the Watergate break-in. We
may get the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage as soon as tomorrow. We’re kind of running out of Mondays in
June. Morays change. I remember back in group therapy in 1969
people felt free to smoke in the waiting room area and never give it a second
thought and that place always smelled strongly of tobacco smoke.
In
the morning I got up around six and turned on KNX radio. Lamar Alexander gave the Republican response,
and for once I agree with his position on educational aid over and above that
of the democrats, who won’t allow local control. The President gave a Father’s Day
homily. Before breakfast Janet offered
me a Styrofoam cup of coffee and I saved the cup because it’s bigger. We had Rice Krispies for breakfast and then
it was a fried egg and dry toast. Dr.
Levy made it here for about the fifth consecutive week in a row. We did our check in. I tried to minimize my money concerns. Dr. Levy is going to Alaska to visit that
Rabi he liked at Temple but the congregation voted him out. I discussed the letter I had sent to Dr. Levy
which he claims he read, but had virtually nothing in the way of feedback about
it. Dr. Levy gave a lot of people one
dollar and for the first time in excess of a year, he gave me money for
cigarettes, or two dollars, perhaps because I wrote two Opus Magnum
paragraphs. Class ran till almost an
hour in a half or nine thirty. We seemed
to reach a concencus that Monday mornings would be the best time to meet
starting next week, because it wouldn’t conflict with any activities. Joe reminded me yesterday of a multi page Dr.
Levy passed out on poetry writing instructions.
He advised me to write something on “The Truth dawned on me when -
“ and I need to get to that. Vince wrote a poem that Dr. Levy thought was
about either gravity or patience, but I somewhat perterbedly told him that he
was missing the mark and the point of this poem. It was obviously about “the harvest’ in
general and the workers and gathering up of the fruits and the wooden crates
and people getting paid for their work.
If Dr. Levy knows anything about fruit trees he knows you don’t just
wait for the fruit to fall off the branch on its own because by that time the
fruit would be past ripe and beside you probably wouldn’t want to eat fruit
that had been on the ground.

