Spring Comes to Southern California

Welcome to the sunshine of Southern California, which has returned the last three or four days.  Now all of the golden poppies are covering the hillsides out in the desert and the traffic is all lines up to see them.  People from Colorado come to see our poppies.  The rain is gone and we only have one more storm coming our way in a couple of days.  I haven't felt like posting a blog because my readership numbers are in the low single digits.  It's like I'm not feeling the energy from you people so I'm not writing anything.  We all know what's in the news and it's pretty bad.  Trump vetoed that bill passed by both houses of Congress that overturned the "state of emergency" decree of our President.  The bill cleared the US senate 59 to 41 or something with twelve Republican votes crossing over to vote for the bill.  The US House passed a resolution to make the Muller report public when it comes out.  However this measure was blocked in the US Senate.  We keep hearing that Muller is going to release his report any week now, and the weeks keep on flying by.  Then we have those two Mosque attacks in New Zealand.  President Trump has refused to condemn White suprenicy, in fact he says that White suprenicy is not even a problem.  Instead President Trump has taken to attacking John Me Cain who's been dead for six months or something.  He takes exception to the fact that Mc Cain reported to the FBI that there was collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Of course we have all of the democratic candidates coming out for President.  I'm sticking with Bernie Sanders for now.  It's time we had a Jewish president.  That will be the next religious barrier to fall.  As for Beto Ororke it seems he has narrowly raised more money than Sanders has.  People are attacking Beto now as a recipient of White privilege.  People also don't think he is specific enough on the issues.  That congress lady from New York has finally entered the race.  Joe Biden is thinking of entering the race but he still hasn't made up his mind and won't till April.   Of course the first debate will be in June and I still don't know how they're going to accomodate all twenty democrats.  When you see them facing off against each other you see their relative strengths.  I may or may not add to this posting.  People are more interested in Facebook and Twitter and Instigram now.   The Rude Pundit still uses Blogspot..com and I guess I need to check him out this morning.

.  I told Bill after nine that Paul would be picking me up soon to buy shoes and we decided that Bill could ride with us.  It was just a few minutes later at a quarter after nine when Paul called up and asked if I wanted to get shoes.  He said that he was out front right then. It took Bill a few minutes to get ready.  We dropped Bill off at the 99 cent store on Lincoln.  They have shut Stater Brothers down.  That’s a little strange.  We went across to Big Five Sporting.  Paul was very intent on what sort of shoes I should buy.  I was thinking maybe of Hush Puppies but Paul said they probably didn’t have them.  We looked at all the various hiking boots they had both high top and low top.  I started off with a low top.  I ended up trying on four different pairs.  It would have been more but they only had twelves and not 11 ½,   I was worried the shoes might be loose.  One pair I tried was a higher top.  I asked to try on the first paid I had tried but Paul gave me the second pair I tried.  The first pair I tried was more of a neutral gray and not a brown.  It turns out that the paid I ended up getting was only nineteen dollars and something.  We went over to get Bill.  By now it was after ten.  I don’t know how long Bill had been waiting but they didn’t have either the donuts or the tick crème he wanted.  After dropping me off they went on to Katella and Magnolia and looked at that 99 cent store.  My floor was cluttered with a lot of stuff.  Bill had given me cookies from his canister.  I’ve been coughing more the last two days.  Bill and Paul saw butteries flying north from Mexico in the sky but I never saw them at all.

Joel Olsteen can talk about the Life of Christ but it's the way that the theologians have "framed" the life of Christ that is the problem.  Clearly there are indications of division within the Church and some anti Rome bias even in the Bible.  In an epistle of Peter which is obviously bogus, Peter speaks of "Those of us here in Babylon greet you".   Babylon is of course Rome, where Peter was supposed to have taught.  In Revelation there is talk of a city built on Seven Hills that is the abode of the Antichrist, obviously Rome.  There is the injunction "Call no man on earth Father", which is what those in the Roman church called their Popes.  There is the anti Marcion line from Peter again saying that "Some of Paul's letters are hard to understand but people twist those like they twist the rest of Scripture.  The word "rest" means "remainder".   Since the Marcion cannon didn't come out till the mid second century, this book was written AFTER that point.  (Selah) The allusion is to Paul's condemnation of the Old Testament Law.  There is even the line put in Jesus' mouth of "Do not think I have come to destroy the OT law but to fulfill it".   This is all part of that "Prophecy" stuff we mentioned in other postings.  People liked having Paul's letters in a cannon of scripture but they took exception to certain things Paul said that showed he might be influenced by Marcionism.  My feeling is that some "Teacher" dominated Rome at some point in the first centure and that teacher was not Paul.  However it could have been Jesus himself, if you buy the fact, like the Moslems do that Jesus escaped the crusifixion because his father was a Roman.  "The Church" of Revelation consisted of a circle of seven churches in western Turkey.  There is a fixation in the book of Revelation about the twelve tribes of Israel.  The Jesus of the mid 2nd century wasn't Jewish enough and they had to "Jewish him up".