An April the Fourth Meditation

Well, tonight I guess is Passover.  And after four AM tomorrow will be a total eclipse of the moon which lasts but four minutes that begins after three.  From that thing I watched Christmas eve we know that a bloodied moon in the sign of the virgin is of special significance, of a Virgin’s son paying a price in blood.  Every time I do these signs like I do in Federation stuff or stuff like this I refer to the physical star constellations, and not the more abstract Horoscope signs.   These eclipse “nodes” of the moon run in nine year cycles- - and the odds of a full moon on Good Friday are only about one in seven.  Of course that NBC thing talks about Jesus being a “man who is dangerous to the system of power” and was silenced because of that.  How nice it would be that for every dead of noble life that suffered a martyr’s death- - that God would reap his retribution just like he did with the Jewish Sanhedrin.  I’m tempted to use the cliché phrase “But that stuff only happens in the movies”.   Let’s take another man who died on April fourth - - Martin Luther King.  The people who saw him shot pointed to a location up higher than where the government concluded the shots were coming from.  I didn’t used to be a believer in a conspiracy on this one, but I’m being forced to change my mind looking at all the evidence- - and how James Earl Ray’s guilty plea was forced, and when he wanted to retract it, the powers that be wouldn’t let him.  It would seem that it IS possible to change history by the death of one or two men.  Of course Bobby Kennedy is the other obvious case in this area.  In the case of Jesus- - - most everyone agrees that the whole Jewish temple system was corrupt and perhaps was destined to go down anyhow.  I know of no record of anyone ever trying to restore the system of Jewish temple sacrifice like the Jews “enjoyed” for hundreds of years.  When you think about it, it’s a little strange, since it was the corner stone of their religion.  It’s also an excellent selling point to witness with to Jewish people trying to convert them to Christianity.  Frankly I’m surprised this approach doesn’t work more often than it does.  According to that movie I saw last Christmas Eve – the New Testament references quoting from the book of Joel about signs in the heavens and the moon turning to blood- - were fulfilled upon Christ’s death.  We’l all like to have our resurrection moments.  I’m so paranoid- - I’m almost expecting more bad news around the next corner.  I would like a break for a while of “no more bad news”.   Even with the Iran deal I’m scared spitless that the whole thing is going to go away- - someone will do or say something that will blow the whole thing up.  I say this because - "God" just doesn't seem to be the sort of person who will let President Obama have any victories.  I get fatalistic like this.
MY FEARS ARE NOT WITHOUT FOUNDATION - JUST READ THIS A groundbreaking framework agreement today between the international community and Iran has caused most to breathe a sigh of relief, as it seemingly forestalls the calls from hawks, non-stop for decades, to attack Iran. But has the war been prevented? Not necessarily. Israeli officials, griping about the deal even before it was made, have dialed up that criticism more, and having failed to sabotage the negotiations through lobbying the US Congress, they may look to “veto” the deal by starting a war and assuming everyone will back them. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz is talking up that option in particular today, saying Israel may have “no choice” but to use the military option to counter the “threat” of the deal. Steinitz bragged that the 1981 Israeli attack on a nuclear reactor in Iraq was done entirely without US permission or cooperation, saying US efforts at diplomacy would not stop an Israeli war. Even the US isn’t immune to this sort of warmongering talk, with Defense Secretary Ash Carter declaring just days ago that the US could sign a “final” deal with Iran and then attack them anyhow if it thought it would benefit them.

There is bad news to go around not just for me but to the general public.  The number of jobs added was only 125,000 jobs and the January and February job numbers were revised downward.  This is less than half the rate of expansion from what we’ve been seeing lately.  Yesterday oil prices went down because of the good news on Iran, but now people on the right consider falling oil prices a “destabilizing factor” on the international scene.  Unemployment overall was 5.5%.  However for Latinos it was over six percent and for Blacks it was over ten percent.  White people had four percent and something while Asians were only unemployed at the rate of 3.2% How do they do it?  People are scrambling around to find a reason for the economic slowdown, which is more apparent now.  The mining industry lost thirty thousand jobs.  A lot of oil rig jobs have ended.  April first was a major down day for the markets.

Gov Jerry Brown still allows unlimited fracking in this state though fracking uses huge amounts of water and pollutes the ground water table with its waste.  Agriculture uses about 75% of the available water and urban dwellers are being forced to cut back though they use only twenty percent of the water.  It’s absurd.  We spend all this money on water saving appliances and fittings but what we save is a drop in the bucket of what’s wasted by the frackers.  Jerry Brown is still in the control of Big Petroleum.

There was this SETI scientist.  SETI means the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, which is more significant than just life.  Apparently there is a “slide whistle” radio brief transmission - - where the frequency of the transmission rapidly lowers, almost like a Doppler effect.  They have experienced eleven instances of this in the past couple of years or so.  Due to our computer development we are more able to efficiently search for radio transmissions from space than we ever were before.  Now there at least hundreds of planets discovered, perhaps lots more.  They were concentrating on the thousand or so nearest stars - - they said.  The guy wasn’t real optimistic about ever discovering ET intelligence in his lifetime.

The bad news wasn’t over yet.  The TV came on with that vertical streaked picture again.  But this time it wasn’t just for a few seconds but for a few minutes, which had me worried it could be permanent.  It’s hard to find stations with no station indicator visable and you’ve lost your bearings but I finally found DL and then the picture came in.  But it was a bad day for the happiness of the people of Salem.  Somehow Clyde Weston and Kate figured out that Victor was faking his psychological depression, but don’t ask me how.  He was acting angrily over the fact that his grandson or whatever was being cheated on by that son of a whore.  Will obviously got his sexual morals from Sammy.  But somehow a news reporter learned about it and told everybody.  He also mentioned the blood donation thing, which few knew.  John Black finally saw the light where Paul is concerned and threw him out and told him to leave Salem, and was sorry that he’d ever been so nice to him.  After this I went for coffee.  But then [name withheld] ushered us into the hall because he and Sarah were hiding Easter eggs.  Then he invited us all back out moving the coffee line.  We were served outside and I had one cup of coffee and one piece of stale chocolate cake.  I felt too preoccupied and depressed to participate in an Easter egg hunt, though I could have used a five dollar prize or whatever they had.  The whole thing seemed to be over before you knew it.  The search was confined to the courtyard, which would have made the search easier.   Now Sarah is inviting us to the Friday sing-along.  Maybe if I went I’d snap out of my lethargic state of depression.