Hymnody is one of the great consolations of religion and a favorite old hymn we used to sing often in our small church in Little Oklahoma had the refrain “Farther along we'll know more about it, farther along we'll understand why… we’ll understand it all by and by.” My dear brothers and sisters, given the year we have just passed through we are going to have to rely on that promise of farther along for understanding because we sure aren’t going to get a satisfactory answer from any of our leaders to the evils of this world and why the wicked prosper. For those looking for a positive note on which to end this year the choices are pretty lean and with little prospect of the next year bringing any great improvement since government (Caesar), welfare, and prisons will most certainly continue to be America’s growth industries.

Looking back over this past year it has been one filled with disasters and corruption which showed an uncaring, inept and corrupt government at its very worst. Throughout this year there has been an unrelenting barrage of bad news hammering ordinary Americans who seem to have no voice or choice in a thoroughly corrupt and thoroughly inept government so completely out of touch with the grim realities ordinary Americans are facing and whose only real function seems to be to blatantly unashamedly take care of its own while selling out and betraying America and rewarding the wicked that actually choose the politicians and keep them in power.

Apart from the Bible we have no idea how the escalation of violence in the Middle East is going to play out, just how far this most recent war between Israel and its Muslim enemies will go, what may happen due to the religious hatreds to be found around the world including those in Africa and between Pakistan and India, we do not know what the powerful in the shadows of this evil world system led of Satan will determine to be in their interests despite the worldwide suffering they cause for their advantage in power and wealth.

As economic conditions worsen here in America an escalation of barbarism is only to be expected as even the most honest must provide bread for their families. It’s part of our history when those that robbed banks became folk heroes during economic hard times like the Great Depression; and despite the best efforts of honest people there was no mistaking the theme of the America I was born into “Crime does not pay” was being replaced by “Only chumps play by the rules,” and in my own lifetime I have seen Norman Rockwell’s America give way to a loss of hope for the future and growing desperation with a concomitant breakdown of morality, law and order. Short of the miraculous intervention of God on behalf of America I don’t see a return to the standards of morality and behavior, the hopes and ideals America represented at the time from which the Greatest Generation came to save the world.

But no matter the era in which we live, for those of us whose hope and trust is in God we will not be disappointed and we wait in expectation that we will know all about it and all will be explained farther along, all by and by. I believe God will fulfill all that he has promised for those of us who remain faithful to the end, but for those whose only hope is in men they are doomed to disappointment.

The greatest blessing of my life is to have had loving people who lived the love of God and proved this by their lives and I have been the blessed beneficiary of such unconditional sacrificial love for me of those that felt no sense of sacrifice by their deeds of love. Every one of these dear loved ones and friends now await my arrival, and when my work is done and God calls me home what a time of rejoicing that will be!

And now this year’s work of The American Poet-Weedpatch Gazette for 2008 draws to a close and next month will go to publication so as to be available in book form. I wait with curious interest and anticipation rather than fear to see what the next year may bring, anticipating continuing the work of writing and to see if I might be agreeably surprised and men may yet do better for each other and our planet than they have thus far.

You have to wonder whether Barack Hussein Obama is beginning to have a case of “buyer’s remorse?” Notwithstanding the more obvious threat to his life by his being a Negro in his considerably unique position inviting assassination, in my opinion the Sword of Damocles has never been suspended over any monarch by so thin a hair and “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” so fraught with meaning or so many barbarians multiplying right here in America ready to turn to anarchy as economic conditions worsen. This is hardly the time for politicians of any stripe asking We the People to trust them to make things better all the while lavishing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on their crony thieves without any vestige of accountability. But I will say to give the Devil his due, the Evil One keeps things interesting.

The seeming lunacy of it all is that at the same time the more civilized among nations are working with things like the Large Hadron Collider trying to gain understanding of the stuff of the universe and reaching out to the stars, while the civilized build and maintain a space station and are searching for knowledge in so many ways Stone Age battles of religious hatreds and killings continue apace as they have ever done in Darkest Africa with the Muslim barbarians using machetes to hack their victims to death, the religious wars go high tech elsewhere with rockets and bombs in the Middle East though the Taliban seem to prefer beheading people in the name of Allah while the barbarians in Mexico throw people to lions or behead them in order to strike fear into those attempting to disrupt the drug business and its cartels.

In stark contrast to the barbarians in Mexico, Africa, and Muslim nations is the work of civilized nations and people and so well exemplified by the following:

Aiming to grasp mysterious dark matter: European satellite Gaia may reveal how dark matter is distributed in space. By Clara Moskowitz, Space.com. Updated 9:45 a.m. PT, Mon., Dec. 29, 2008. For the past quarter century, dark matter has been a mystery we've just had to live with. But the time may be getting close when science can finally unveil what this befuddling stuff is that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Dark matter can't be seen. Nobody even knows what it is. But it must be there, because without it galaxies would fly apart. Upcoming experiments on Earth such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Switzerland, and a new spacecraft called Gaia set to launch in 2011, could be the key to closing the case on one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science. A disturbing truth is accepted by most astronomers: There is a lot more stuff in the universe than what we can see. Scientists now think visible matter — all the planets, stars, and galaxies that shine down on us — represents only about 4 percent of the mass-energy budget of the universe, while dark matter and its even more esoteric cousin, dark energy, make up the rest. "There is no consensus actually at all as to what dark matter is," said Gerard Gilmore, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who wrote a recent essay for the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science about the search for dark matter. A leading hypothesis posits that dark matter is composed of some kind of exotic particle, yet to be detected, that doesn't interact with light, so we can't see it. One such theorized class of particles is called WIMPs (Weakly interacting massive particles), which are thought to be neutral in charge and weigh more than 100 times the mass of a proton.

Atom smasher: The newly-opened LHC, a 17-mile-long underground ring in which sprays of protons speed around and crash into each other, could be the first experiment to detect WIMPS. The particle accelerator officially went online in September 2008, but was halted shortly after due to a fault with its construction — it's due to go back online in the summer of 2009. Since the LHC is the largest and most powerful atom smasher ever built, its collisions could produce the extremely high energies needed to create the elusive particles. In fact, the LHC will likely create a host of never-before-seen particles, opening up a realm of the universe that physicists have been eager to explore. "The assumption is, there will be whole families of new types of particles," Gilmore said in a podcast interview with a reporter from Science. "The challenge then is to say, well OK, we now then have a new set of ingredients in our recipe for how nature is put together, but what is the recipe that uses this set of ingredients? I.e., what mix of these particles does nature actually use to create the universe, and how?" That's where Gaia comes in. The European Space Agency satellite is designed to measure positions and speeds of about 1 billion nearby stars with unprecedented precision. Its vision is so sharp it should be able to discern the equivalent of a shirt button on the surface of the moon as seen from Earth, Gilmore said. By establishing where things are in our galaxy, the spacecraft will help scientists measure the weight and distribution of mass in the Milky Way in much greater detail than ever before. These measurements are vital for models that attempt to describe how the pull of dark matter has shaped our galaxy. "What Gaia will do is measure the distances of stuff and measure how they're moving in three dimensions around space to much better precision than we've had before, which will allow us to weigh things on all sorts of scales down to the smallest scales we can find," Gilmore said. "They will tell us to exquisite precision how the dark matter is distributed in space, which is the recipe we need to determine its properties."

While I view America very possibly being the Babylon of Revelation you would hardly think Igor Panarin might reach the same conclusion outside the Bible. The WSJ: By Andrew Osborn. December 29, 2008. MOSCOW – “For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media. In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. ‘It's a record,’ says Prof. Panarin. ‘But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.’ Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations. But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories…”

It’s one thing for those that would like to relegate me to the aluminum foil hat folks because I believe many of the prophecies of the Bible that point to America no longer being a world power while Russia and China become key players as the nations gather themselves for war around Israel in the End Times. But like it or not someone like Panarin is a thoroughgoing pragmatist without any metaphysical or Biblical interpretations attaching to his assessment.

Of course, the “Big One” is expected to hit the west coast and make the deserts ocean front property and Yellowstone could cut loose at any time and change the landscape of America horrifically at any time as well: Scientists eye swarm of Yellowstone quakes. Were the more than 250 tremors a sign of something bigger to come? By Mead Gruver. The Associated Press: Updated 6:25 p.m. PT, Mon., Dec. 29, 2008. CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah. "They're certainly not normal," Smith said. "We haven't had earthquakes in this energy or extent in many years." Smith directs the Yellowstone Seismic Network, which operates seismic stations around the park. He said the quakes have ranged in strength from barely detectable to one of magnitude 3.8 that happened Saturday. A magnitude 4 quake is capable of producing moderate damage. "This is an active volcanic and tectonic area, and these are the kinds of things we have to pay attention to," Smith said. "We might be seeing something precursory.”Could it develop into a bigger fault or something related to hydrothermal activity? We don't know. That's what we're there to do, to monitor it for public safety…"

This most recent flare-up now going on between Israel and Hamas prompted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say the operation "is liable to continue for some time, perhaps more than can be foreseen at the present time." Olmert doesn’t know because he can’t foretell the future, but neither Satan nor men are going to have the last word in the affairs of this world; God is. And this last word has to do with that tiny little nation of Israel that many have already labeled the most serious threat existing to world peace. Of course those saying this are primarily the Muslim enemies of Israel, but there are others without a religious agenda like Russia and China that simply see Israel as an obstacle to their plans of empire because of its big brother America protecting it.

It seems to me more attention should be paid by Israel’s Muslim enemies in the U. N. to the one man they should damn rather than hold in regard for the miracle of the modern state of Israel even existing: Adolph Hitler. Had it not been for Hitler as a latter day Pharaoh of the Exodus there would be no Israel rising like a Phoenix and yet there are many Muslims that express admiration for Hitler choosing to ignore his most unintended consequence of all. The enemies of Israel would do well to study the errors of Hitler’s attempts to destroy Jews and take heed to them. They might learn God is faithful in his promise to Abraham and there were the prophecies of the Bible that Israel would once more become a nation; however the birth pangs of modern Israel were so severe as to be unimaginable and had God not intervened by keeping his own word to Abraham modern Israel could never have survived its new birth.

The Israelis have had enough of Muslims in Gaza firing rockets into Israel and have begun taking out Hamas strongholds. The larger problem such a thing presents is each time this happens the world wonders if it will escalate into the “Big One” of the Biblical prophecy concerning the End of the Age with Armageddon and all the woes contained in Revelation. The fact is we simply do not know; once action is taken such as that going on at present there is no way to anticipate the outcome and there are usually unintended consequences, especially when dealing with religious hatreds such as those of fanatical Muslims that are particularly virulent against Jews as a people and Israel as a nation together with America as Israel’s ally.

It is naive to the point of near maliciousness for fools like Jimmy Carter or any others to pat themselves on the back as though they could possibly “broker” a peace with an enemy as implacable in their hatred of Jews as the Muslims. I won’t dignify this with the usually pc “Muslim extremist” label, since the religion of Islam does not make any such distinction. But the sheer ego of those who believe they can settle religious hatreds of centuries peaceably speaks more of fools than the slightest degree of wisdom, let alone the failure of such fools to acknowledge God will determine the outcome not men though fools like Carter and the present Bush think they know the mind of God and speak for him.

We can’t discount the potential for nuclear war between India and Pakistan, whether by accident or design. Neither can we discount the possibility of human error in launching nuclear missiles. And what with so much uncertainty brought about by deteriorating financial conditions in America and worldwide, the history of JFK, RFK, 9/11 and so much more like the ease with which the thieves in Congress lavish hundreds of billions of dollars upon the thieves that put then in office there has to be more than the inventions of men at work in the dangers we are facing. And just who were all those complicit in Bernard Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme and will this generate even more distrust and hatred for Jews and Israel?

What seems to remain as certain at the end of this year as the beginning; there is no level playing field for honest, ordinary Americans. These continue to be the sheep the children of the Devil continue to fleece, the rich becoming obscenely richer and the poor becoming more desperately poor. But it would be an enormous error to believe money would solve the problems like those of 9/11 and what is happening right now in the Middle East between Jews and Muslims. There are those that apparently believe they can strike a deal with the Devil and come out a winner. It isn’t going to happen.

The one thing people might consider doing if they are not already doing so is to read and study their Bibles, discover for yourself those things that ring true to your own heart and find comfort and hope in these things. And you may find it’s a real comfort when you come to the last chapter of the book and read there will be no more curse and God causes all things to come out right in the end. Of course, the comfort comes from taking God at his word, letting his spirit speak to you and believing him.

When David was old and in failing health his counselors became alarmed and decided slipping a comely young virgin between his sheets was just the right medicine the king needed to perk him up (get heat) and back to work. Not a few men would agree with this homeopathic approach to such a remedy for the king and applaud the wisdom of his counselors. Of course, while the ancients did have some aphrodisiacs they may not have had anything as successful as Viagra and if impotence was the problem even a comely young virgin was not going to benefit David.

Report: CIA Uses Little Blue Pills to Entice Afghan Warlords. The growing Taliban insurgency has forced the CIA to get creative in how they obtain certain information from Afghan warlords and tribal leaders. Friday, December 26, 2008: “In an effort to win over fickle warlords and chieftains in Afghanistan and get information from them, CIA officials are handing out Viagra pills in exchange for their cooperation, the Washington Post reports...” I don’t doubt the ACLU would consider it a form of torture if the pills were suddenly withdrawn for lack of cooperation with the CIA.

The candid honesty with which the Bible narrative recounts not only the triumphs but the failings of those like Abraham, Moses, and David is one of the things that commend the book to me in many instances. And the veracity of many of the stories of the Bible is further proven by accounts of sex that would fall considerably short of moral approval by many today. But then most evangelicals would point to the “New Covenant” and say we are under a new dispensation of God dealing with people now than under the Old Covenant, that with the arrival of Jesus on the scene and all that followed there should be a more sensitive conscience to the wrongs that seemed to have been acceptable under the rules of Old Testament days.

Personally I’m more than grateful people are no longer being stoned to death for Sabbath-breaking among other things, and even Christians have left off burning heretics and drowning witches. These have to be real pluses on the side of the New Covenant. But while the conditions for women were bettered by the New Covenant and harems like those of Solomon among other things were discouraged even though serial monogamy has taken the place of these, some things for women just resisted change and they continued to be treated as the inferiors to men even in the churches, and in my opinion this isn’t likely to change this side of heaven. But neither can it be said women have always been on their best behavior when demanding men act like dancing bears, performing for the amusement of women. And though often thwarted in their purpose the worst offenders among women here in America making such demands of men should be grateful they were not born into a Muslim culture.

In defense of women Jesus was quick to point out that while in the hereafter there is no marrying, there is neither male nor female but the children of God become as angels, that divorce here in the world was approved of Moses only because of the hardness of men’s hearts, but in the beginning God intended a man and a woman to become one and joined for life. Some men replied to Jesus’ pronouncement concluding it was better in that case not to marry at all if you couldn’t get rid of a woman by divorcing her which led to Jesus further pointing out to marry or not should be a matter of the leading of God’s spirit and Paul later wrote it was better to marry than burn with lust.

However, the ideal of God’s intention for men and women in marriage does not seem to have lasted long after The Fall according to the Biblical record. But the curse of God pertaining to sex coming down especially hard on women it has always served the distaff side well to remember the proverb “Beauty fades; virtue remains,” though Solomon voiced his despair over of the lack of virtuous women going so far as to say “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”, and while Jewish and Muslim men have prayers dedicated to thanking God for not making them women not a few Christian men have harbored the same thought.

Ecclesiastes 7:25-29: I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her. Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account: Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found. Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

The love for my daughters filled my heart with the closest thing to holiness I know of since my two little girls, Diana and Karen, were the very personification of angels in my life and the inspiration for my being the best man I could be. But how does it come that so many of the daughters of men do not fulfill the expectations of virtue, failing so miserably in this in so many cases as to elicit the dour condemnation of women by Solomon in Proverbs and the Preacher in Ecclesiastes? Certainly the inventions of men militate against women in many instances, men too often treating women as chattel or with contempt, but as the Good News Bible has verse 29: God made us plain and simple, but we have made ourselves very complicated. To understand this one only has to understand how lawyers evolved crediting my suspicion the Devil among others things is a lawyer.

As the recent storms have moved through the Kern River Valley I awakened this morning to snow all about my little cottage. I’m grateful I have warmth and shelter, that I don’t have to leave my “nest” due to any urgency to do much of anything but to sit here and write with the resident cat warming both herself and my lap as I type around her. This at least is not complicated. But as this year draws to a close there are many complications consuming our nation now and on the immediate horizon.

Since I have it so cozy some might wonder why I would even bother inviting controversy by writing as I do, especially when it comes to women, why for example I would go into the subject in such depth by writing such a controversial book like “Birds With Broken Wings”? My only answer to that is that I continue to find women a fascinating subject of study and even contemplation. But when it comes to companionship Walt Kelly had Mouse telling Snavely “Somethin’ ‘bout me gits wimmen to fightin’” to which Snavely replies, “They is easy riled.” Probably my being a man has a lot to do with my own experience with women mirroring Snavely’s observation about them.

Yet the power of a woman’s beauty and sex has brought many a powerful man down even as with Biblical accounts of such things as Samson and Delilah among others. But the Man of Sin in the end of the age will have no weakness for women to exploit; he will care nothing for the crying of even the most virtuous of women with the most civilizing influence meant to soften the hardness of men, and in some way this strikes me as one of the most chilling of this monster’s evil characteristics.

While living on the corner of Cottonwood and Padre in southeast Bakersfield during the time of the late 30s and early 40s when my grandparents had their small church there, each Christmas grandad as the preacher would be given toys by some of the Bakersfield merchants like Mr. Owen to distribute to children in our dirt poor Little Oklahoma community. The children would often come barefoot in the cold of a Christmas morning to receive the only toy they were likely to get, but their gratitude and that of their parents was as close to the real meaning of Christmas as anything I have ever experienced.

It can be a mean awakening to reality at this time of year when all those goodies are paraded endlessly across TV screens and children are asking mommy and daddy “Where’s mine?” To the surprise of those that have never punched a clock for a living it takes a job in order for ordinary people to have money to keep a roof over their head and do any shopping. It seems this fundamental of economics was not taught in the Ivy League schools, or in any of the universities. After all, according to the universities there really is a Utopian America where no one has to get grease or dirt under their fingernails to earn a living, but all will have “careers” that do not require grunt labor any longer. Well, except for the jobs Americans won’t do. At that, the drones on Caesar’s payroll in one fashion or another are beginning to outnumber the productive worker bees and that situation is one that is generally self-correcting when those not on Caesar’s payroll can no longer buy bread, let alone Christmas presents.

What is becoming specifically prominent day after day is the dirty deals, persons and associations made to advance Obama means his brand of “transparency” makes that of Bush’s an open book by comparison. And I don’t hear of anything substantive being offered to secure our borders and deal with millions of illegal aliens and the drug wars of Mexico with the attendant violence spilling over into America as the tunnels from a totally corrupt and barbaric Mexico continue to worm their way under our borders. Our own Governor Schwarzenegger knows how bad the situation is, but he also knows “Mexifornia” is doomed unless the situation can be turned around to where Mexico and its invading hoards of illegal aliens is not the occupying force here in my native state and bankrupting us with demands for goods and services that legitimate American citizens are being hard pressed to provide for themselves while the criminals from Mexico that have sneaked across our borders illegally get these for free at taxpayer expense!

It’s the day before Christmas and I don’t enjoy playing the role of the Grinch, but among all the empty suits and skirts on TV with the matching empty heads of fools both politicians and pundits somberly pronouncing to We the People about the economy “It’s going to get worse before it gets better” all the evidence points to it getting worse but just exactly where is the evidence for their prognosis of things getting better? Do these pompous, obscenely overpaid asses have some inside information about a coming “better” and how this is going to happen to which they alone are privy? Perhaps some of these fools actually believe their messiah Obama is going to perform some act of legerdemain and make things all better, but the specifics of such a thing apart from Marxist socialism and globalization are as prominent by their absence now as they were during the election campaign and the evil obscenity of unnumbered billions of taxpayer dollars being given by thieves in Congress to the thieves that put them there with no hope of any accountability for the money is beyond words.

I used to tell students one of the great values of a good education was the fact that it was something no one could ever take away from you. I practiced what I preached by getting an exceptionally good education. Further, even at my age my mind is clear and as a writer continuing to meet the various challenges of a writer and author such an occupation demands my mind will likely remain clear. It is with that clear mind I believe there is a special spirit to the Christmas season, a spirit of hope for those of goodwill. But for those that believe they can mock God and get away with it, Christmas is only a dollar sign when not openly mocked. However, it seems the dollar got a lot smaller this Christmas and this has everything to do with a diminishing number of those of goodwill.

Very early on Caesar Bush made it clear he had need of no other counselor than God; but I have never blamed God for the decisions of Bush and resented his saying such a thing impugning God. But if Obama continues to act as though he is beyond reproach and the reach of legitimate criticism perhaps he has no need of any other counselor than Satan, though I doubt such an announcement to be forthcoming from the next president. But if the Devil is in the details, he is making his presence known not only by the election of Obama but by the details leading up to the inauguration. As far as I am concerned Barack Hussein Obama shows the work of the Devil throughout and is not to be trusted, but for Rick Warren to be any part to this is to invite my distrust of him.

While some religious leaders would have you believe God is somewhat less than the perfect parent and given to sometimes spoiling a few of his favorite children with excessive largesse such as fame and fortune, as Jesus declared the real prophets of God do not wear soft clothing and live in kings’ palaces. Riches profit not in the day of wrath, the love of money remains the root of every kind of evil, and for the children of God the battle is against the world, the flesh, and the Devil. For some the battle includes resisting the Devil’s promises of fame and fortune, a promise Jesus did not question the Evil One could deliver on but would require turning away from God to worship the Devil, an offer Jesus refused but one many others have accepted.

I cringe at the many “churches” and their leaders aping Hollywood productions and I’ve never lost my suspicion of those that preach some variation of the “prosperity gospel” believing as I do Jesus had it right about distrusting wealth and the wealthy, and believing the Scripture that the righteous enter into eternal life through much tribulation since their lives in this world are often a living hell on earth. So while I don’t doubt God I do doubt many of the claims of men about God, especially by TV evangelists and the leaders of mega churches. And for those making more than just a considerably good living off religion Rick Warren’s declaration during a December 21 speech that he loves everybody including perverts, Muslims et al. because “God commands him to love” that is certainly far off the mark, missing it so far as to fall into the literal definition of sin as “missing the mark.” Not only that, I found his statement offensive because it sounded so downright just plain condescendingly and patronizingly “lame,” the kind of thing you would expect only of a politician rather that someone purporting to be a man of God.

Quite remarkable really, the way Satan was so successful in causing his MSM to make Barack Hussein Obama virtually untouchable by any criticism, a rock star and “great speaker” despite the agonizingly and embarrassingly blatant evidence to the contrary, but appeared to be asleep at the switch when Warren gave his speech about “loving everybody.” Attempts at dramatic pauses for effect in all the wrong places, the wrong use of his eyes and facial expressions intended to elicit trust but inviting just the opposite, a hardly concealed lack of conviction for what he was saying, the very hypocrisy of his speech was what came through loud and clear.

You can’t make someone care; you can’t make someone love; only the spirit of God in a person’s life can do such a thing. So, in my opinion, Mr. Warren’s claim that he loves everybody because he is commanded to do so of God is downright fraudulent. In short: I don’t trust Mr. Warren! Love the sinner but hate the sin? Not only is this religious cliché shallowly glib but it is unscriptural as well. While God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked nevertheless they will not only die in their sins but die judged and condemned of God. But the hypocrisy of preaching one message from the Bible from a church pulpit and “tailoring” a different message for popular consumption for those outside the church is contemptible!

Certainly there are Scriptures telling us we should love one another, that the children of God are to be recognized and distinguished by their love for one another, but we are also told to try the spirits whether they be of God because false prophets abound. And if anyone including Mr. Warren says they love everybody because God commands this it is nothing more than mere pulpit rhetoric in the class of the politician in “The Hunt for Red October” saying when he isn’t kissing babies he is stealing their lollipops, or the kind of love that falls into the category of “But will you still love me in the morning?” No, that kind of “love everybody” theme is used most often as a ruse of the Devil and his perverts and comes too cheaply to be of God, let alone commanded of God.

Of course the invitation to be a player, one of the big bugs at a presidential inauguration and offer up the invocation just in case God might be interested in listening is pretty heady stuff, and it is easy for many to rationalize away their principles in the face of such an “opportunity” for the “greater good.” Obama’s sinister motives unlike his satanically obscured background seem plain enough in this attempt to allay conservative fears and divert attention from his 20 years with Jeremiah Wright, his relations with Chicago gutter politicians, radical Muslims, Bill Ayers, Acorn and so on by cozying up to evangelicals, but just what this greater good consists of for Rick Warren seems to me to be pretty much Rick Warren.

“Warren said he prays for the same things for Obama that he prays for himself: integrity, humility and generosity.” I strongly suspect Warren is facing a tough hurdle on both integrity and humility. However, the generosity is easy when you’re rich. “Obama defended his choice (of Warren) on Thursday, saying that he has also invited Joseph Lowery, a Methodist minister and civil rights leader who supports same-sex marriage and gay rights, to deliver the benediction.” And so Obama attempts to cover all his bases with “inclusiveness” for the sake of power and wealth which is only to be expected of a politician. Warren on the other hand should only be expected to cover the home base of truth as God declares it and as is to be expected of any true shepherd and prophet of God and never compromise the truth of God to accommodate the Devil and his crowd for the praise of men.

Though men try to circumvent God’s own rules of inclusiveness for his children and many are the inventions of men in the attempt, the fact remains the family of God is one that you must be born into by the spirit of God and the Parable of the Tares among others refute the inventions and various creeds of men to the contrary. We read in the Bible God commands we shall love him with all our heart, but that our obedience to God is the measure of our love; that obedience is above any kind of religious sacrifice as the prophet Samuel made abundantly clear to King Saul, and as the Apostle Paul wrote without such obedience as evidence of our love for God “though we give our bodies to be burned and have not love it profits nothing.”

As Jesus put it, to love God and our neighbor as our self is all the law and the prophets. It is no different in any family where the disobedience of a child not only breaks the hearts of mothers and fathers but proves the lack of love on the part of such a disobedient child. And as with earthly parents the basis of the heartbreak for God in such a lack of love on the part of the disobedient child is what the child is doing to himself following a path of self-destruction rather than the tyranny of a despot demanding the obedience of subjects and slaves to satisfy their ego and sense of self-importance.

My assessment of the situation regarding Mr. Warren will strike many as being most uncharitable to say the least. It gives me no pleasure to write of such a thing and I wish I could believe better of him. But anytime someone purporting to represent God cozies up to any politician offering smooth and honeyed words in an attempt to justify themselves for doing so they immediately earn my distrust.

It’s appropriate to this special time of the year we call the Christmas season that does seem to have a spiritual dimension of goodness to it unlike any other and prompts me to share something that occurred while I was recently in the hospital. I’ve read everything the Bible has to say about angels including their being ministering spirits, that some people have entertained angels unawares. But I’m skeptical of most of the stories people tell and write about such creatures and don’t place much credence in books written about angels since most are simply trading on the gullibility of people to make money from such books.

“More than 450 years have passed. By now, Albrecht Durer's hundreds of masterful portraits, pen and silver point sketches, water-colours, charcoals, woodcuts, and copper engravings hang in every great museum in the world, but the odds are great that you, like most people, are familiar with only one of Albrecht Durer's works. More than merely being familiar with it, you very well may have a reproduction hanging in your home or office. One day, to pay homage to Albert for all that he had sacrificed, Albrecht Durer painstakingly drew his brother's abused hands with palms together and thin fingers stretched skyward. He called his powerful drawing simply ‘Hands,’ but the entire world almost immediately opened their hearts to his great masterpiece and renamed his tribute of love ‘The Praying Hands.’ “

There was a picture of The Praying Hands in my hospital room where I was placed in acute care and wondering along with some of the staff if I was going to come out of the situation alive and I took comfort in looking at the picture. But one night long after visiting hours and all was dark and quiet I was almost asleep when a beautiful young Indian woman dressed in a Sari came into my room. She paused to look down at me with a warm smile then walked over to the picture of The Praying Hands. Touching it reverently she moved her own hands over the picture and seemed to be talking to it as though praying, then turning around and with that same beautiful smile came over to my bed in the semi-darkness and touched my hands. I said a quiet “Thank you” to her but her warm, beautiful smile was her only reply. She then turned back to the picture and once more placed her hands reverently on it while speaking as though in a prayer and then came over to me and gently stroked my hands again, smiled that beautiful warm smile and quietly went out of the room. The following day I asked everyone I could about the beautiful young Indian woman that had been at the hospital and had come into my room after visiting hours but no one recalled such a person being anywhere in the hospital.

I’ve experienced enough of the paranormal and being delivered from several life-threatening circumstances in which I should have died by accident or been killed by others to relieve me of the burden of thoroughgoing skepticism when it comes to spiritual matters. Was this young woman an angel sent by God to reassure and comfort me? I don’t know, but why not? And why should angels most often be represented as blue eyed, golden haired Caucasians; why not a dark skinned, dark eyed Indian angel with dark hair dressed in a Sari? Whatever one’s thoughts about angels Albrecht Durer’s Praying Hands reach around the world, and not just among Christians. But it was this experience among other factors that prompted the following Letter to the Editors of the Kern Valley Sun and The Courier.

December 11, 2008

Since first moving here to the Kern River Valley with my maternal grandparents John and Lorene Caldwell in 1948 to live on a mining claim that became Boulder Gulch Campground when the lake went in you can easily imagine the many changes I have witnessed over the passing years. One of the best of such changes has been the marvelous hospital we have every reason to be very proud of. Having just spent three weeks there in acute care I can testify to the quality of the staff throughout, each one of them evidencing genuine concern for me personally and doing everything they could to facilitate and encourage my recovery. More than just a hospital, we are blessed with something staffed by such wonderful and caring health care professionals that in my opinion none better could be found than those we have right here in our valley. My heartfelt thanks to all of you at the hospital and were so kind to me and encouraged me so much during a very difficult time.

Samuel D. G. Heath, Ph. D.

I did not mention my beautiful Indian visitor in my letter because it was the marvelous staff at the hospital that deserved my thanks and I had a responsibility to let those good people know how much I appreciated them. Nor did I want any mention of possible “angels” to detract from the point and make me appear as some kind of kook which some undoubtedly would have made of me and blunting the real intent of my letter of thanks.

Yes, to speak of Satan, demons or angels as real beings does often fall to kooks. Religious programming on TV is filled with the charlatanism of the various claims of seeing and speaking with angels, of miracles galore in a kind of “can you top this” slug fest of angel manifestations in people’s lives with the participants trying to outdo one another with such stories and I understand the kind of hysteria that can be generated in such a setting whether in a church or some religious TV broadcast with the stories becoming increasingly improbable as people get carried away in the “spirit” of such a thing. For example I have always liked Mickey Rooney but I’ll never forget his story while a guest on some religious broadcast of having seen Jesus as a golden-haired busboy in a restaurant, and I take many such stories by professional religionists about either angels or demons with a tad more than the traditional grain of salt. I believe Satan, demons and angels are real, I just have my doubts concerning many of the people telling stories about these beings.

It is unfortunate to say the least that there are so many charlatans in the religion business. You see, for those of us who believe in God we resent having such scoundrels cheapen and profane the things of God, and this includes angels. Whether I was visited by an angel in the hospital isn’t really the major factor; what counted was her being angelic to me. Were I to eventually discover she was only a mere mortal would in no wise lessen her qualifications as having been an angel to me when I needed one, and I believe God understood that and sent me the angel I needed whether from heaven or not.

It has been a peculiar year and some would even say a spooky one given so much weirdness to it and given the presidential election and all that has surrounded that together with the realistic fear for the safety of the Obama’s, the many financial uncertainties worldwide and how things will appear at the end of this year: Hope or despair?

But there is little to give hope to ordinary working Americans, we the Great Unwashed faced with such seeming lunacy in government where there appears to be no distinction between fantasy and reality and nearly unimaginably enormous sums of money are showered on the rich while the poor continue to suffer, but being promised forty acres and a mule down the road a piece, I’m reminded that fewer and fewer educated people I was meeting over the past few years knew of that encyclopedic set of The Great Books or even knew not a single woman was represented in that first edition, something that certainly got my attention way back when.

Given what must have happened between Eve and the Serpent in The Garden resulting in The Fall and the curse of God falling especially hard on women it is understandable why the Canon of Scripture does not allow of any woman author as the weaker vessel. But why exclude women from that first edition of The Great Books of the Western World? In my very well studied opinion, this too is a result of the part Eve had in The Fall.

For the first time in American history the President and First Lady will be Negroes, but Michelle Obama does not only face the difficulties presented by her being a Negro, but the same difficulties all women have faced throughout history; that of the lesser value the world accords women, and one only has to look to the U. N. to see the proof of this. So it was that by the criteria of Mortimer Adler and the committee making the decision to exclude women from that first edition of the Great Books no woman was deemed worthy of inclusion in that vaunted library supposed to represent the best minds of Western Civilization in the King of Disciplines: Philosophy. I’m now going to reach back to previous comments in The American Poet & The Weedpatch Gazette for some background to this present column:

While the universe abounds in mysteries there are many of them right here on our own planet, and while I very much appreciate the great SciFi plots, stories, films, and studies in Psi one of several great mysteries caught my attention over fifty years ago when the first edition of The Great Books of The Western World came out and I noted not one woman was included in the 54 volumes! It was then I realized something of great significance was at the basis of this glaring, and what had to be purposeful exclusion of women from philosophy.

On April 21, 2002 I wrote a column about the recent find in England of a 370-year-old book entitled “Woman’s Worth” proclaiming women to “excel men in virtues and rare endowments of the minde, and I think we shall finde that herein also women doe farre outstrip men.” I added this remark: “I can only hope Mortimer Adler will read this book before any new edition of the GBWW is offered.”

Well, Adler may not have heeded my advice, but bowing to enormous pressure Austen, Cather, Elliot, and Woolf were added to the second edition of The Great Books. But if you read the history of this enormous undertaking of producing this magnificent set of books, if you read Mortimer Adler’s opinions of what constitutes the values he and the committee felt justified the inclusion of the various writers represented in this monumental literary achievement, you quickly realize the opinion of the men involved had not changed from the publication of the first edition to that of the second.

However, until women are included in The Great Conversation based on equal value to men, so long will Wisdom fail to be a part of any kind of attempts at peace in the world. The fact is that the barbarism of men makes wars, and the civilizing influence of women makes homes. The sop to women on the part of the committee and Adler adding Austen, Cather, Elliot, and Woolf to the second edition of the Great Books does not go nearly far enough in honoring the “compatibility of differences,” and it is not seen at the United Nations, nor is it seen in America as the kind of relationship that honors and dignifies the compatibility of differences, nor is it much discussed in the circles of women who have attained positions of power in politics, an occupation Sam Clemens considered so dirty he did not want women given the franchise thereby soiling themselves by stooping to the level of “negroes and men” as he wrote at the time. And few would dispute politics does not encourage women to be ladies, nor does it encourage men to be gentlemen.

In “To Kill A Mockingbird” Harper Lee has Scout describing her attitude about becoming a lady in the following words when her aunt comes to visit with this express mission of transforming Scout in mind, “I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away.”

Harper Lee anticipated the new President of Harvard: Harvard names woman as president. Drew Gilpin Faust ends Lawrence Summers' stormy 5-year tenure. The Associated Press, CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Harvard University on Sunday named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers and his tumultuous five-year tenure. The seven-member Harvard Corporation elected Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as the university’s 28th president… Faust, 59, recognized the significance of her appointment. “I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago,”… But she also added, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.”… In Faust, Harvard not only has its first female leader, but a president who has candidly discussed her feminist ideals in a memoir, “Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections.” … Born Catherine Gilpin in the Jim Crow era, to a privileged family in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Faust wrote that a conversation at age 9 with the family’s black handyman and driver inspired her to send a letter to President Eisenhower pleading for desegregation. She then began to question the rigid Southern conventions where girls wore “scratchy organdy dresses… I was the rebel who did not just march for civil rights and against the Vietnam War but who fought endlessly with my mother, refusing to accept her insistence that ’this is a man’s world, sweetie, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be,’ “…

From my column of January 25, 2005: So Harvard’s President Summers doesn’t think women have the brains for math and science. I wonder if he knows the barbarism of men makes wars; the civilizing influence of women makes homes? Suppose L. H. Summers had said women did not possess the higher faculties of mental processes required to be included in the King of Disciplines: Philosophy. Suppose he had said, “Women do not possess the mental requirements to be included in The Great Conversation!”

Why didn’t Harvard’s president call attention to the fact that women have failed to make their way into the most exclusive “Men’s Club” of all, the King of Disciplines: Philosophy? Since this omission of women from the King of Disciplines is the thorniest of all issues among all nations, it is not one that anyone of prominence wants to address since it is Philosophy that shapes and defines nations, that guides the very destiny of nations. Even so, over the years I have come to realize that even among those of great prominence in the universities some have failed to note this Missing Half of Philosophy: Women!

Had Summers even been aware of this, it is not something to which he would have wanted to call attention. In my own experience of addressing this issue, invariably women have acted as though I were insulting them by calling this exclusion of women from the King of Disciplines to their attention. This despite the fact that it accounts for the failure of women to achieve the status of equal value to men resulting in their subjugation to things like the woman hating religion of Islam and their exclusion from leadership roles, an exclusion so sorely reflected in the U.N.

But consider this: If Summers were aware of this omission of women from the King of Disciplines, and yet felt he could safely broach his opinion of the omission of women from the fields of math and science while ignoring the larger omission of their exclusion from Philosophy, it would speak volumes of his actual opinion concerning the higher mental processes accorded men as opposed to women.

A few, short years ago when I began to publicize the fact that women had confused “equal rights” for “equal value” and could not hope to be accepted on the basis of equal value to men until they had earned their place in the King of Disciplines, Philosophy, this generated heated responses from some prominent women. But there were others who understood and agreed.

Whatever, it would have been well for Summers to frame his remarks concerning his opinion of why so few women achieve prominence in math and science within the larger context of their omission from the King of Disciplines. But men are notorious for their failure to address this issue. Why? I long ago came to the conclusion that even should men be aware of this, men in general do not want to invite women into this most exclusive of all male domains, the one discipline that more than any other emphasizes male dominance throughout the world and directs the course of history and nations, and as a result Philosophy remains far and away the most exclusive “Men’s Club” of all; and one against which women cannot bring suit claiming “discrimination.”

Both Nelle Harper Lee and Drew Gilpin Faust are products of quality southern families. Both resented the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary and scratchy organdy dresses. But while Harper Lee is noted for “The novel of the century” in addressing the problems besetting women expected to confine themselves to their “proper place,” I somehow doubt Drew Gilpin Faust is going to come up to that mark…

Returning to the present time I wonder how Mrs. Obama felt about her husband’s choice of L. H. Summers given his attitude toward women. November 24, 2008: NEW YORK – “Today President-elect Barack Obama announced his intention to name Lawrence H. Summers as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council. Following the announcement, Dr. Summers noted that he will be stepping down from his part-time role at the D. E. Shaw group.  ‘As citizens, we're delighted that President-elect Barack Obama has selected Larry Summers to head the National Economic Council,’ said Max Stone, a managing director of D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. and a member of the firm's executive committee. ‘Larry is an enormously gifted economist, and has already made major contributions to this country as a public servant, ... ‘ “

To go all the way back to Genesis in an attempt to understand why it is a “man’s world,” why women and children have been made to bear the brunt of suffering in this world and women especially being the prey and victims of monsters in the guise of human beings has been one of the mysteries I continue to seek understanding about. But it won’t do for those who dismiss the evil supernatural connection with Satan in this to attempt any other explanation for it.

Well, in today’s ignorant and illiterate America you don’t expect to find the Harvard Classics or The Great Books, or even an encyclopedia or dictionary in all that many homes. We have TV and computers instead, with failing schools, ignorance and illiteracy growing exponentially.

When Saul decided obedience to God could be temporized and failed to utterly destroy the Amalekites even sparing Agag, the prophet Samuel confronted him with the condemnation of God for disobedience and commanded Saul to bring him the Amalekite king and Samuel “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal” Good thing for Caesar Bush he wasn’t in Agag’s shoes. They didn’t settle for “throwing shoes” as a form of insult back in those days.

A godless generation does not lie awake at night worrying about whether God keeps a “Book of Lies” in which every word men speak is recorded and for which they will be held accountable according to Scripture. Quoting from the Psalm “I said in my haste all men are liars…” during my preaching days I would tell folks that unlike the Psalmist I hadn’t been hasty, I had taken quite some time to think it over and still came to the same conclusion. However, most would agree there is a huge difference between lies told to do harm, to deceive and take advantage and that of the fisherman about the size of the one that got away and little Scout’s observation in TKM about polite lies one must tell when forced to do so and those that are told for the sake of the civilized not coming to blows, a form of lying often referred to as proper “etiquette.”

But shortly after publishing my book “Birds With Broken Wings” I received a note from a reader thanking me for my “refreshing candor” in describing some of the relationships I had with various women, especially a prostitute with whom I had fallen in love. As this year comes to a close I can’t help but think that rather than politicians lying some refreshing candor is certainly in order, but it seems they just can’t get past the fact it is they who are the prostitutes though such an accusation gives the honest working girl a bad name.

No one expects politicians to do other than lie to get elected and continue lying to stay elected, it is the primary reason no one of noble character seeks to become a politician. Nor do we expect politicians to make restitution when caught out in their lies since the species covers each other’s backsides. Ah, but those who profess to be our “friends” after they have lied about us for their own advantage, that is an entirely different thing. None of us wants such a false friend, especially not one that believes simply because the passage of time over the years has seemed to conceal their lies they are now safe from such lies catching up with them. There are several of these people I have known for years and while maintaining civil discourse with them I will never again trust them. Some things are quite beyond “kiss and make up,” especially when the guilty continue to act like they have escaped the consequences of their lies though if they should look back they might find their crooked paths strewn with the victims of their lies.

Few would mistake the hypocrisy in embarrassingly overly effusive praise for someone, which is easily recognized as nothing more than the most insincere form of flattery. So how is it that some seem to think they can get away with this kind of thing with God? Well, God does keep a Book of Lies and we should be careful and deliberate in watching what we say when our words may not only be untrue, but may seriously affect the innocent victims of such lies. As a crowd politicians are sold out to the Devil who is the father of lies and liars but we expect more of those who call us a “friend,” though they have lied about us and made no attempt to confess and make restitution. As with the infamy of infidelity in defiling the marriage bed such betrayers of love and trust are never to be trusted again, and even the forgiveness of God for sins is based on true repentance, confession of our sins and making restitution though we can depend on our genuine, real and unfeigned love for others to deliver us from the wrath of God.

But to return to the issue of refreshing candor, I engage in moments of whimsy as most know and one thought came to me recalling that comment about my Birds book: What would a day of politicians telling only the truth be like? Peace in our time or worldwide nuclear holocaust? I rather suspect the latter. Why? Because of the enormity of the lies by our leaders to which We the People and the entire world have been subjected for so many decades. Do I expect anything better from this new administration? No, I reserve such naiveté for the fairytales that do no harm.

Here in the Kern River Valley we received a winter blast bringing much snow and the usual power outages that seem to accompany even the mildest of spring showers and virtually guaranteed with anything stronger, something that has much to do with the old wiring and outdated equipment throughout our area though Edison isn’t real quick to admit this. I only bother to mention this storm because of my recent illness and having to cope with recovering from it together with the caprice of Mother Nature. But my sleep schedule has been somewhat askew of late so I was fully awake when I first lost power here in the darkness of the wee hours of Monday morning. Then when the power came back on, thank goodness, a message on the TV screen declared my Dish had lost the satellite signal.

I’m finally getting warm again under my electric blanket which is functioning once more and staring at the TV screen but nothing is happening. Suddenly it occurs to me that snow was in the forecast. Was it possible… oh no! But yes, it was more than possible. I knew in my bones snow had covered the Dish antenna and there would be no TV until it was brushed off. And it’s now 4 a.m. And there is no one to do the brushing off of snow but me, the resident cat though generally of a good disposition being of no help under such circumstances.

So, the long and short of the story is that forsaking the warmth of my bed I am outside at that early hour of the morning darkness in the freezing cold standing in the snow while using a broom to brush off the antennae on the roof so I can keep up with the local news and what is happening in a world seeming anxious to self-immolate and discussing the situation with God, who has always proven to be a ready listener to my many conversations with him, this time the topic being my gratitude that despite the many setbacks I’m still a considerable man made in the image of God that Satan and his servants must reckon with and still quite capable of taking care of myself and dealing with the hard tasks of living and taking on the Devil and his crowd, giving them back some of the hell the Evil One and his servants thrive on giving God’s children. And for any of the wicked emissaries of the Devil that make the mistake of thinking this oldster might be easy pickings, there is always my angelic Beretta ready at hand to counter such fools.

Now before anyone objects to my dignifying and personifying my Beretta with the term angelic, while I believe in angels there is something to be said for being handy with a gun and having one quickly ready to use while the angels of the Lord might be otherwise occupied. It’s the Devil’s work to see to it that bad things happen to good people and I am a firm believer in good people being prepared rather than being sitting ducks making it easier for the Evil One to do his dirty work.

Now I’m not suggesting a gun is an appropriate stocking stuffer for Christmas, the very seriousness of such a thing not lending itself to humor. But it is the season when angels usually get a lot of attention and many people seem unaware the Bible declares the children of God enjoy a status above that of angels. In the powerful Epistle of Jude we read: “Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.”

But I am not an angel, I am much more than such a being; I am a son of God made in the very image of God! And having this status I will rail against the Evil One and do battle against him, knowing as the Scripture has it our battle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness in high places, against Satan who has dominion over the earth for the time being before God calls an end to this age in judgment. And as to angels, the saints are going to judge these according to the Bible:

I Corinthians 6:1-10: Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life? If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church. I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren? But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers. Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren. Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Now that list of who isn’t going to make it to heaven ought to get most people’s attention, but I especially like the part where Paul would have the lowest esteemed, literally meaning those not considered among the power brokers found even in churches, pass judgment on the affairs of this life. Well, too many churches seem to operate in the same fashion as Congress and I have no illusions things are going to be set right this side of heaven. But in the meantime, so long as I can still dust the snow off my Dish antennae at 4 a.m. I can still wage battle against the Evil One and his wicked servants and fully intend to do so.

Some of the many “certainties” of youth often have a way of becoming the questions of old age, and we oldsters should be complimented rather than criticized for our admissions of “I’m no longer so sure about that” when expressing our doubts about some things we may have once preached as gospel only to realize so many of these amounted to no more than solemn trifles even when true. I remind myself one of the hallmarks of wisdom is the ability to change our minds when we are open to new data and ideas and at 73 I’ve had a considerable amount of time to both learn and unlearn, to think some things over and change my mind about some things.

However, there is also wisdom within the Scriptural context of not removing some of the landmarks which the ancients have set and apart from the Bible which I consider trustworthy in answering the most monumental questions of origins, of life and death, and my faith in God it would be difficult for me to make sense of the way things have gone during this most peculiar year. The Devil seems to be working at fever pitch here of late and certainly brings to mind the cautionary words from I Peter 5:8,9: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”

This year is ending in such disarray at all levels of society especially in a government marked and exposed by such blatantly and openly “in your face” rampant greed and corruption it is impossible to tell the players without a program though I am certain Satan knows his own such as Barack Hussein Obama and has certainly been successful beyond belief in promoting him and keeping the dirty details of Hussein’s life in the shadows, the proper place of evil and works of darkness that hates being exposed to the light.

At that the cast of evildoers seems to be expanding at such a rate on a daily basis as to make it nearly impossible to keep the names of all the execrable bottom feeding scoundrels listed; and the mind reels with the possible number of those that are not even being exposed and flushed out from under their respective rocks despite the trail of slime they leave though to do so might require a flood of Noahic proportion. But I continue to maintain the same position as that of Emerson, that none of truly noble character seeks to become a politician and no one of noble character seeks power and authority over others but would far rather live peaceably and working with their own hands for their daily bread providing things honest in the sight of both God and men.

This year we began to hear of “bailouts” in the billions, then hundreds of billions, and the words “trillions of dollars” began to be bandied about and things seemed to be escalating out of both control and comprehension. After a while we become numb at the mounting bad news involving dollar amounts so huge as to be beyond our comprehension, and the utter lack of accountability concerning taxpayer money seems totally incomprehensible, those in Congress at times reminding of Keystone Kops (sans humor) and conducting Chinese fire drills rather than anything approaching sane fiscal policy on the part of government as astronomical sums of money are being thrown to scoundrels without any accountability attached to the use of this taxpayer money.

Jesus isn’t here to drive the moneychangers from the temple, and Satan is having a real field day throwing America into financial chaos, something that may yet translate into the destruction of that Great City Babylon of Revelation that leaves the merchants of the world howling over who will now buy their toys? Whether or not if the real spirit of the Christmas season should prevail this year I hope that will win the day over the “toys” though the Citizen Kane’s will continue to die too late realizing Rosebud was the only thing of real consequence in their lives.

The ridicule of the rich is not only Scriptural, but affirmed by Emerson who knew the Bible very well and noting the deceitfulness of riches even as the Scriptures warn called attention to the fact over a hundred and sixty years ago “The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?” But the musket worshippers will have their wars for profits and the words of Emerson ring truer today than when he first uttered them.

One of the things that sustains me is my belief love covers a multitude of sins as the Scripture has it and it is the love we have for one another like my loved ones gone on before me that is my only hope of salvation. I know the love of God because I have experienced the love of these precious ones who will be there in heaven to greet me with open hearts and arms, though some of them might wonder what took me so long to arrive? But I’m sure the Lord will have an explanation for my seeming tardiness, perhaps that of an overzealous guardian angel whose patience and abilities I am sure I have taxed and exasperated many times.

But for the enemies of God there is no love to be found among these apart from their love of riches. And in the words of Scripture when their souls are required of them by God in final judgment their riches will perish with them.

Some of you are old enough to recall the expression “Little pitchers have big ears,” a caution to grownups to be careful of what they say when children are present. If you will please bear with me I’m going to allow myself an excursion down Memory Lane to get to one such example of the wisdom of such caution in keeping with the Christmas season.

A trip to downtown Bakersfield back in the late 30s and early 40s was always exciting for Ronnie and me when we were children. The cartoon matinee in one of the theaters for example was only ten cents. For a dime we could watch two hours of glorious cartoons. We especially liked Popeye and I recall the time when grandad was taking us back home in his huge, black, and very regal Buick limousine after a cartoon matinee. Ronnie and I had our heads out the back windows of the car shouting Popeye the sailor man! over and over at the top of our lungs as we drove through the downtown area. For some reason, grandad didn't tell us to pipe down; in fact, he seemed to be laughing about it.

There was always a stop at Owen's Toy Store, that fabulous place of such fantastic wonders! This was the source of electric trains of all descriptions, of our own Lionel, of cap guns, of peashooters and yo-yos. It was Mr. Owen himself who told me that yo-yo came from the Tagalong language and meant: Come, come. There were bicycles and tricycles and tops and marbles of every kind. I really believe grandad enjoyed Owen's nearly as much as Ronnie and I. At least he was always talking with Mr. Owen and picking up various toys and examining them, all the time smiling and laughing. Grandad had once bought me a film pistol at Owen's. A strip of film, mostly cartoons, could be loaded and when you pulled the trigger a light shined through the barrel. The film progressed one frame with each pull of the trigger, and the picture could be projected against a wall or anything you chose. My favorite strip was one of Tarzan.

Nearby was Vest's Pharmacy with its marvelous soda fountain and delicious milkshakes, sundaes, and sandwiches. The beautiful green and white tile façade of the store was always a delight to our eyes. Nearby, two gray, stone pedestal drinking fountains were mounted on the sidewalk. They were equipped with white ceramic balls that had holes in them through which the water spouted when you turned the handles. These were welcome items for shoppers and children during the extremely hot Bakersfield summers.

During the hottest days, the stores would have large blocks of ice sitting on the sidewalks in front of them to cool things off; or at least make you feel cooler by just looking at them. Encased in the clear blocks would be straw hats, skimmers, adorned with red, white, and blue bands. Most of these large blocks of ice came from grandad and Tody's icehouse on 4th and Chester (We always called our grandmother Tody, though I don’t know why).

The trips to downtown held marvelous sights like the magnificent Clock Tower of such intricate stonework. The clock sounded beautiful chimes on the hour. Nearby was the Bakersfield Arch over Union Avenue, and the adjacent large motel built like a Spanish Mission with its towering palms all along the front. There was a drive-in restaurant that had the tail assembly, the empennage, of an airplane sticking out of its roof. This fascinated me and I always wanted to climb up on the roof and examine it up close.

Another restaurant mom would take us to not far from Vest's Pharmacy had electric model trains running on tracks suspended from the ceiling. Ronnie and I were enraptured of the trains running overhead with their clickety-clack, clickety-clack, and the whistles of the diminutive locomotives as we ate. The owner must have really loved model trains. The big city certainly had its attractions for us.

There was a Jewelry store not far from Vest’s Pharmacy with the most amazing toys in its front window. These were intricate, carousel-like and clockwork driven, with tiny figures, usually elves, doing a variety of things such as ringing tiny, silver bells with tiny, gold hammers. Ever so often, a new creation would be displayed. I remember one that had an elf using a gold hammer to work something on a silver anvil. Ronnie and I would watch these mobile works of art with rapt attention, marveling at the amount of movement and detail in these wondrous displays of the watchmaker and jeweler's artistry.

Brundage Lane, Niles, Union and Chester Avenues were almost as familiar to us as Cottonwood and Padre or Weedpatch Highway. Other areas were of excitement and enjoyment to us as well. Like China Grade East of Bakersfield where we could look out over the barren oil fields and hills punctuated with the many pumps, bobbing up and down slowly and rhythmically like huge iron birds sipping black nectar through steel straws.

Trips up the canyon along the river on highway 178 to Isabella and Kernville were really exciting and we had made many such trips before grandad and Tody had acquired the mining claim (now Boulder Gulch Campground). Ronnie and I always gazed with wonder at the tunnel way up the mountainside just before you entered the canyon. Grandad said a mining railway used it. As you drove up the canyon, you could see the tailings from the mine and the trail alongside the mountain that the old donkey engine with its ore cars had followed.

The fantastic granite sides of the canyon with enormous rocks as big as houses, some of them balanced so precariously they looked as though they could fall at any time, were fearfully awesome and fascinating. Tody would find pictures in the rocks, and she would always point to one in particular that she said looked like a lady playing a piano. I dutifully looked, but could never make out the picture.

I had a great love of animals, birds, the outdoors and nature. I loved our visits to the mining claim in the forest. But downtown Bakersfield was always a study in people and architecture, and adventurous and exciting in its own distinctive way. While Ronnie and I had lived in some large cities like San Francisco and Cleveland, there was something about Bakersfield that was just different. And it wasn’t just because of it being more like a hometown to us. It was just somehow different in some indefinable way than other cities we had lived in.

Once downtown, Ronnie and I would see a few Zoot-suiters and scantily clad women wearing lots of makeup, strange hairdos and hair colors, and Tody would sometimes make disparaging and warning remarks about them. A few of the women would elicit the phrase Painted Hussy from Tody, a phrase with which Ronnie and I had become well acquainted from earliest memory.

Grandad and Tody had taken us to the American Legion Hall for some kind of special Christmas entertainment. It was in the evening and the hall was packed. Some man got up and gave a speech; I guess it was a speech. Then a lady came on stage to sing. She was in some kind of long, flowing, red gown and when she started to sing I leaned over to Ronnie and said in a loud voice, “Dee Dee, I think that's a painted hussy.”

Dee Dee answered in an equally loud voice, “I think she's a painted hussy too.”

Neither of us, of course, had the foggiest notion of what a painted hussy was; but we had heard the expression often enough, and somehow we had gotten the idea that anyone with makeup and a red dress was a painted hussy. The roar of laughter that surrounded us by the occupants of the other seats made the poor lady, a victim of our loudly voiced and somber observation concerning her lack of virtue, halt her song. I can only guess at the embarrassment of grandad and Tody. Little pitchers have big ears.

I believe there is a spirit to the season of Christmas, something Charles Dickens certainly recognized and to which he paid homage. But even as the kindness and hope expressed by the simplicity of “Merry Christmas” said to one another at this season should be something to cheer our hearts there are the enemies of beauty attacking and attempting to mar the spirit of the season.

As 2008 winds down it holds promise of being one of the most interesting in American history and I’m curious as to how this last month of the year is going to play out. Over the past several years apart from my books I have published my various articles and essays for The American Poet and The Weedpatch Gazette in a single volume year by year, and though numbering nineteen volumes now the one for this year promises to be the most interesting simply because of the year 2008 being different in so many ways, the most noteworthy being the election of a Negro president of the United States.

Also noteworthy for 2008 is the truly remarkable kind of blatant greed and corruption now being exposed so openly on a daily basis in our government as so many corrupt politicians are obscenely clamoring like snorting hogs and slavering dogs for their share of extorted taxpayer billions. It’s a scene reminiscent of the senators and generals bidding for the Roman Empire at its most decadent corrupt time in history. The corruption of our government and industries is now so openly and shamelessly flaunted as to be actually quite surreal. But it is quite in keeping with the change that is coming with a Negro president of the U.S., a change that seems to have loosed an infection of corruption running rampant like some doomsday virus as the Devil’s crowd is lining up to line their pockets as the Evil One’s servant Caesar Bush departs and a new Caesar prepares to take over where the old left off.

I have long thought America fit the description of that Great City Babylon of Revelation, and if so its prophesied destruction will herald the end of this world system of evil as God calls it into judgment. The “Parable of the Tares” as Jesus relates has it the angels of God will winnow out all the human weeds (the tares) planted by the Devil and throw them into the fire, separating out and saving the children of God. One thing is certain; a depopulation agenda is in the works by whatever means since the planet cannot support billions of unproductive human weeds. But we must look to the beginning chapters of Genesis to understand how all this was set in motion to fulfill God’s plan for his children despite the many evil devices of Satan and his crowd attempting to thwart God.

The part of the curse in the form of sex due to The Fall came down most harshly on Eve, and I have to believe God was just in this including putting Adam in charge over Eve, though I do not understand how this came about. But the New Testament makes it clear Eve was deceived by the serpent, that creature finding a relationship and access to Eve but not Adam. However, I believe there is a connection here to the curse of Noah called down upon his son Ham and his descendants because of the enormous evil of the sexual perversion of Ham against his own father. That the Hamites should ever after show the results of this curse, even becoming among the most physically ill favored in facial appearance and the most superstitious and barbaric of people throughout human history would more properly be the stuff of some demonic legend did it not prove to be so often true to the facts of history as though there were more than mere mythology at work in this, the implication of Scripture being the Ethiopian would change his appearance if he could and the script for King Kong with a beautiful, blonde and blue-eyed Caucasian young woman as the standard of beauty though hated by the enemies of beauty had it right.

If someone is physically ugly that is not my fault! The rage against Caucasians by those like Jeremiah Wright has more to do with his own self-loathing much as that of sexual perverts for themselves than the injustices for which the blatantly, hate-filled racist Wright damns America, or rather Caucasian America. Yet despite the racial hatred spewed by Wright toward Caucasians who would choose to live in Haiti, Somalia or Watts if they could live in Malibu or Beverly Hills? While an African will make a drum and carve rude pictures of wood a European will create an orchestra, symphonies and operas, and a Rembrandt will paint masterpieces, but to protect the racism of minorities like Jeremiah Wright and others and allow them to vent their racism by law while penalizing that of Caucasians is madness. If all are not protected equally there is no equality despite the number of laws passed; and it is obvious that penalizing one group while excusing another for the same thing is a guarantee of engendering even greater hatreds. The years I taught in the ghetto of Watts and the barrio of East San Jose were made difficult because of the overt hatred directed at me because I am Caucasian, at times such racial hatred toward me putting my life in jeopardy requiring I be armed, and I am all too familiar with the very kind of discriminatory racial hatred particular to races other than Caucasian as well as the hatred of perverts directed at me for being sexually normal and having a normal revulsion for sexual perversion and not being afraid to say so despite the Devil’s crowd with its ACLU and threats of political correctness.

Slavery with its evil handmaiden trade that invariably becomes abusive to the honest man has been a curse to all nations, and if I am correct the seed of America’s destruction was sown in slavery. As Henry Thoreau correctly observed there is no stench to compare with that of goodness tainted, and despite the noblest expressions of our Founding Fathers and the highest sounding words of eloquent speech in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, our Bill of Rights, the fact that slavery was retained for the obvious sake of profits by our nation’s founders tainted all this goodness.

And now because of slavery being such an infamously prominent part of America’s history our nation faces an alarmingly and ominously uncertain future with a Negro president, Barack Hussein Obama, a thing so improbable had the Devil’s MSM and university bred political correctness not deified him early on would never have happened. This is so improbable as to defy anything approaching reality, but on the contrary is the stuff of a mythology no less improbable than the most fanciful imaginable, something that seems to fit the madness of sexual perverts demanding they be allowed to “marry” as though such a mad thing were not an obvious abomination to God and repulsively offensive to civilized and sexually normal people.

As conditions worsen in America the barbarians of the cities will become increasingly brazen with the breakdown of law and order, using guns to take what they want from those unable to protect their property or defend themselves. Our borders will become increasingly porous inviting further invasion of illegal aliens, drugs, human smuggling as America becomes as dangerous and corrupt as Mexico. When the wicked including those in Congress and elsewhere throughout government walk on every side, what can the righteous do?

The religious, racial, and political hatreds worldwide are coming together with such force that were there no Biblical scenario for a coming battle of Armageddon it would still demand attention being paid as a probability. The hatred of Israel by Muslims and others is palpable, just the hatreds between Pakistan and India threatens nuclear war while the curse of trade may bring this about simply for the sake of power and profits by those without a religious animus or agenda.

Dark forces of evil have successfully hidden things like the truth of JFK, RFK, and 9/11. Against all the odds these same dark forces have provided a Negro president for America and a most uncertain future for our nation as unparalleled greed and corruption have taken over our government wholesale.

I continue to believe life and death to be the greatest unsolved mysteries, that Einstein’s famous equation is incomplete without understanding these two greatest mysteries. That they are essentially metaphysical makes them no less real since an unknown and unquantifiable something animates life and that something departs at death. My personal belief is the spirit of God imparts life, and death is the consequence of sin.

With virtually nothing to lose by being candid in my opinions, I have great liberty to share them. And I hope by my doing so others might be encouraged to do the same despite all the Devil throws at us to discourage us from speaking our minds in the midst of a perverse and evil generation that knows not God and like that generation of Noah’s time Jesus spoke of that perished in the flood wants nothing to do with God. “As it was in the days of Noah” has taken on a quite ominous tone here of late to my ear.