Reviews by Hubie Goode: Are We Really in the Dawn of a New Age? Pt. 2

Are We Really in
the Dawn of a New Age? Pt. 2

As I said in our last installment, the “new ideas” of the new century found their way into the educational system of America. How did this happen? Well, there are many in causes, of course, but the single most prominent one came on the scene in a then current day educator named John Dewey. He, more than anyone, was responsible for major transformations in the way education was done and the attitudes toward it.

Known as “America’s foremost philosopher and educator”, he was responsible for refashioning the educational system here in America and moving it past the static perceptions of the past (his past anyway) and he redefined everything. The nature of truth, the responsibilities of a teacher and also the capacities of the human personality, were all changed forever. His pervasive influence changed the future of America and then also effected the way students were taught in most other countries as well.

A “genius” of his day, his ideas lasted through a fifty year period where he performed his capacities as a seminal thinker, voluminous writer and OCD type organizer. He became a leader in the world of “new thought”. The idea “the way the world thinks” can be ascribed solely to this man, John Dewey, for he more than anyone made education what it is today.

In the overall scope of things, his life was relatively unexciting, for he wasn’t a war hero or a great leader of a nation, nor was he the inventor of some life changing item or miracle drug. No, he was just one of the many who lived an ordinary life in his day, but he did do one thing. He won a war that happened behind the scenes, one of ideas and thoughts, and introduced these ideas to the youngest of the up and coming generations for the majority of his fifty year span of influence. He won a battle for the mind of mankind.

Indeed, for Joseph Stalin said it best: “Get them when they are young.” In this respect, Dewey did exactly what is needed when waging a war for the world itself, he won over the way mankind thinks. The struggle for tomorrow is not going to be one of tanks and submarines and legions of armies, for those battles are merely the result of earlier battles waged within the minds of the men who ordered them in an attack or in defense of some closely ascribed to thought that had existed previously. Millions throughout history have found their final resting place far out at sea, or on some desert dune, or in a deep Asian jungle simply because someone else, someone in a far more powerful position than they, failed at intellectual or moral persuasion.

Remember this when the coming Antichrist hits the world scene in the not too distant future, the opening salvos of any war are the public announcement that the earlier spiritual, intellectual and mental battles have all been lost. John Dewey was a chief contender in history in the battle for the mind. But unfortunately, he too, was on the wrong side of the battle.

Born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, he was a shy and bookish young man. In 1875 he attended the University of Vermont and soon became enamoured with philosophy and social thought. He didn’t see philosophy though, from a classical point of view. As a rule, philosophy addresses certain questions and points of view on life and then directs answers to those questions according to specific schools of thought. Dewey didn’t see things as being so parochial in their application, instead he saw philosophy as a sort of swirling maelstrom of ideas, issues and concerns that was ever changing. For him there was no thought or idea that could be foundational, nothing could ever be settled. There was NO one truth.

While in University, Dewey was greatly influenced by Hegel. Initially influencing Dewey in the area of idealism, Hegel was also a major influence on other well known historical figures such as, Karl Marx, and Kierkegaard and others who would become influential in a later age. Therefore, Hegel can indeed be counted as one of the major influences of today’s western thought.

Dewey received from Hegel a sense of the ideal and the concept that reality was not a fixed and hard rule. For him reality was an emergence, a development and not a fixed thing that is unalterable. As a result, reading anything by Dewey can be an exhausting exercise as his many ideas are often fluid and hard to pin down. He would often deny a given proposition and then also refuse to admit the opposite of the same proposition. For Dewey, reality and answers were something in between the two extremes, but also something NOT between the two extremes. As a result, truth for him was not a static proposition, but a result of measured social fulfillment.

As Aristotle spun in his grave over this sort of thing, his then contemporary followers found Dewey somewhat hard to categorize. Although a philosopher, he was not the father of any school of thought, although one might argue for the school of confusion. He was an educator, but not one who taught any kind of static truth. He was an administrator who was more concerned with outcomes rather than mechanics. Therefore, terms such as provisional, experiment and unpredictable were linchpins of his thinking and methods. Most of his written material could be quoted for both sides of any argument, for he found the grey areas to be what the whole was really about and all things were adaptable to whatever reinterpretation was appropriate for the day or the hour.

Surprisingly, Dewey made his education by being involved with specifics, as he taught science and algebra on the high school level before attending John Hopkins University. Graduating in 1884, with a doctorate, he presented his thesis and dissertation on Immanuel Kant. Kant, a proponent of moral relativism, as you may recall, was famously quoted on his view of life as: “Eventually, we all die.”

Dewey became increasingly dissatisfied with philosophy and its inherent unpractical use for the every day man. He attempted to make it relevant to every day life and as a result, his views on economics, politics, and social views became more and more radical.

Ten years later in 1894, he became chairman of the Department of Education, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Chicago. There he took great part in social welfare activities, becoming a benefactor for Jane Addams’ Hull Hose. There he involved himself in the economic and social problems of a major urban area, and cemented his conviction that philosophy must be practical. He then founded the Dewey School, and wrote important books on education, the likes of The School and Society and also, The Child and Curriculum.

Graduating, as it were, from his work in Chicago, he was offered a chair at Columbia University in New York. Once in this influential position, he gained prominent influence for his positions in education and philosophy until he retired in 1930. The Columbia Teacher’s College soon became a training center for teachers from around the world. This resulted in Dewey’s ideas being spread all around the earth.

New York was then as it is now, the journalistic and media center of the nation. This gave Dewey the opportunity to write volumes of columns that put forth his political and social views in magazines and newspapers that came from an important media nerve center. He also traveled the world, lecturing in places such as Tokyo, Peking, Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where he would find education centers to spread his radical ideas which were considered at the time a radical ethos.

Dewey accomplished so much, that a published bibliography was over 150 pages long. So diverse were his writings, that his influence made an impact in every field of intellectual inquiry. Dewey’s writings were not so much indefatigable as literary pieces as they were, much like the speeches of Adolph Hitler, a call to the deep inner aspirations of his fellow man.

Therefore, as a cheerleader presenter and speaker that could capture the zeitgeist of his audience, Dewey became thought of as a man of all knowledge. He was considered a supreme intellect who could provide all the answers relevant to the modern world. For many years Dewey was considered the prime educator of the world, a concept he kept in motion through his many writings that flooded the world of the intellectual reader.

So, having outlined all this, what shall we say are the ideas that we today hold to be infallible truths and ways of education and thought which can be followed directly back to the influence of John Dewey, influences we take today for granted that actually had their birth in the mind of one lone man?

More on this in our next installment.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Are We Really in the Dawn of a New Age?

Are We Really in
the Dawn of a New Age?

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a prevailing question kicking around the western world, namely, had our existence entered a new age? There was this palpable sense of wonder and potential that all of mankind had entered into a new and abundant breadth of vision. All of nature seemed to be flowering into something it wasn’t before, leaving behind the dark ages and entering into a euphoric optimism about the new “fabulous century”.

This new attitude of mankind grew from many streams of influence, these streams were believed to be genuine and world changing by the great thinkers and every day man on the street alike. The influence that those of that time observed appeared significant and world changing and in truth, there was some accuracy in that idea. But few of those influences in the course of history have provided those changes as they were believed to provide, or would provide.

The influences were many, and in the nineteenth century the west was moving from a feudalistic attitude and practice to the great change in culture called the Industrial Revolution. Knights and catapults were replaced by steam engines and the classes that streamed to work on rail roads across America. The horseless carriage, the machinery and the primary machinery to make secondary machines, all seemed to make enough of a bright promise that centuries of old ways of doing things were tossed aside like so much chum. Modern machinery turned the back breaking work of thousands into a simple one man operation on a machine. Naturally, of course, to see this was to anticipate that a time of unprecedented leisure was coming upon the world. Contemplation would now be the work of mankind as now machines were here to do the work of many.

This hope of an easier future for mankind was one of the perspectives that made ignoring the sweatshops and other exploitations of labor which became common place in those days all the more comfortable. Idealism was now the linchpin of popular thought (what was cool) and the false parachute of the poor was an assumption that all their troubles would soon be over anyhow as mechanisms became the “servant android” of society. Hope found in the “well to do”, feasted upon the patience of those who were downtrodden and exploited.

These times were also generally peaceful days, and it was a “knee jerk” response, if you will, to glorify the growth of industry as the prime provider of those good times. The Civil War had brought about some of the worst carnage and in-fighting ever seen in America, and in many places of the world at that time, and it was all quickly forgotten as it was sublimated to the collective consciousness of the society at large. It was, instead, relegated to the realm of the heroic and seen as a precursor that brought about the new industrial age, and therefore, it was not so much a tragedy in retrospect as much as it was a necessary evil.

Let’s be honest, every election year we are reminded of the forgetfulness of the populace at large, as we vote for one party and then the next as we are disappointed again and again with promises of change while we still talk about the war and the economy and jobs and such, only to vote for whomever once again promises change. This is also a historical fact as each generation often forgets the horrors that came before it from failed policy and the inherent flawed traits of mankind which consistently fail to live up to the ideals set forth. This makes it possible to repeat the mistakes of former societies and nations as people insist that ideas and policy are progress and not the death trap that past societies experienced with the exact same proponents. Homosexuality and abortion being prime examples.

The world of the twentieth century was one filled with anticipation due to the philosophies that had become popular at that time. The early 1900’s saw Darwin’s ideas become popular, and evolution was well on its way to capturing the imagination of academia and the thoughts of the common man. There was a grand social belief that all of society had begun to rise up from the gross and animalistic life of the last several hundred years and mankind was now flowering into the sublime and even perhaps, the angelic. Anyone could deceive themselves into believing that natural selection could, and indeed had, selected them. Natural man could see himself as the new custodian of history as each person looked around himself and said in his own heart, look at what great things man has done.

Social Darwinism was gaining fast ground as it convinced the populace that no problem was beyond their reach to solve. Humanity had a potential within it that could do anything if given enough time. Naysayers and pessimists were left behind as it was stipulated that nature itself had made it possible for progress and fulfillment to be accomplished beyond all of mankind’s wildest dreams.

At about this same time, the Christian religion was being discarded as a litmus for corrective theology and found itself to be inadequate to stem the rising red tide of humanism. The strong preaching of cardinal Christian doctrine relating to original sin would have indeed proffered much, but unfortunately, Christianity at large had abdicated its role and began to cooperate with the golden apple promises of the humanists. Teaching on cleansing through the Blood of Christ was now seen as more and more anachronistic in favor of salvation through restructuring of the society as a whole. Some of this change was seen by the common populace as a natural changing of the guards in much the same way we traded steam engines for the old horse and wooden trailer. Education and inspiration were now all that was needed to bring mankind into a new world, man was no longer a shamed sinner in need of a savior, all he needed was the improved works of his own hands and the potential of his mind. The parallel between machines of the day and clay images of yesterday suffered a grand cognitive dissonance.

This is not to say that the attitude of the religious establishment at that time was not all that understandable, for there had been significant revivals of religion in the past. Those revivals however, were never characterized by intellectual or theological content. Many people were brought to the knowledge of Christ, but they were delivered there by simple preachers with a simple Gospel for the common people. The era just before the turn of the twentieth century brought about an earnest faith within those saved, but it did not provide a broad view of God and the World and the relationship they shared. The common people of the time had great revivals but the ranks of academia of those days were negligibly involved.

As a result, the great missing link in Western thought is the Christian viewpoint. Today’s populace considers economics, government, education and thousands of other things with hardly a glance at what God himself would say on the matter. Unfortunately, the lack of a focus upon that question, “What does God say about this?”, has lead to some frightful disasters or “weeds” as it were in the garden of promise that was foreseen for the twentieth century. It has brought into existence the greatest intellectual confusion, moral myopia, and flat out carnage that has ever been seen by man. We hardly need to be reminded that science without God had produced a world where one country with the right weapons of mass destruction can bring about a war that could decimate the Earth many, many times over.

Also at this time, the ideas of Karl Marx, and his promise of a new philosophy, new thinking and a new future were taking root. These new thoughts also promised a new society to contain this increase in knowledge, an increase that would have boggled the minds of western Europe only a few hundred years before.

How was it that these new ideas were so readily and speedily ushered into our social agendas in such a short amount of time? Emergent ideas usually took a very long time to make their ascendancy in years past. But suddenly, comparatively over night, liberalism, humanism, and a new fluid way of thinking took foothold.

Simply put, these ideas found their way into the forefront of the American Educational system. These complex set of new ideas, thoughts, notions, philosophies and ways of thinking moved into what was at that time the world’s greatest instrument for the dissemination of ideas, the American public school system.

I’ll talk more about how this all happened in the next installment.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Get Some Sleep, Please!

Get Some Sleep, Please!

Due to Big Pharm’s grip on all our lives, prescription tranquilizers have become an epidemic. Tranquilizer addiction has skyrocketed and it usually comes about by following the doctor’s orders. How do you know when you’ve had enough? There will be a need for more and more pills, obviously, and you could have blackouts when things get too heavy and out of control. You may also have increased sensitivity to them when you drink alcohol. Maybe you also get prescriptions from two or more doctors for the same tranquilizer. It can be a never ending downward spiral.

Preventing this sort of thing can go a long way in stopping the hell that is tranquilizer addiction. When you first get a prescription, question your doctor about it. If the medication is for some sort of physical symptom, question why this is appropriate. If the treatment is for insomnia, question your doctor about alternative methods of diet and exercise that you can try first. I do realize that it is not in the doctor’s best interest to give advice on non-prescription health care, for they are trained early on to treat anything with drugs, but remember it’s YOUR well being that should prevail here.

Don’t exceed the prescribed dosage on a tranquilizer if you find yourself wanting more or not getting the effect you need. Doctor’s aren’t monsters who just want to push pills, they are people too, and most will be cautious, despite their medical school training, to not get you involved with addiction.

Sleep problems can indeed be dealt with, even though for a few rare souls it may seem they have not had a good night’s sleep in ages. Be aware that you are not the only one with these sorts of problems. Most people have some sort of sleep problem and there are many studies and an entire industry that has produced data on these problems.

Occasional insomniacs often add to their own troubles by believing that their difficulty is a serious disorder. If you miss a night or two a month, this is usually due to some other stress or anxiety related to events during the day, in fact, sometimes overworking yourself, mentally or physically, can keep you running long into the night instead of causing you to collapse in bed when you get home.

In order for missing sleep to be considered a chronic problem, it needs to be affecting your ability to operate during the day. Just ask yourself, “If you were getting enough sleep, what would you be able to accomplish differently during the day?” It’s important to listen to your body and get up when it doesn’t want to sleep anymore, it may indeed have gotten enough brain and body rest during a nights sleep and if you demand that you stay in bed too long you’ll confuse your own cycles. The sleep cycle may actually start all over again and you’ll not be able to get up in a little while with a fresh head for the day, simply because you insisted on “sleeping in”.

When I was in college, living in the dorm was tough on my studies, for the bed was right there beside my desk. I literally had to go out on campus and find an empty classroom to do all my study work so that my mind and body would not be confused as to the functions it was to perform in both cases. Your bedroom and bed are for the good night’s sleep you need, and they should be for nothing else - well, you know, not everything... but we’re talking about REAL sleep here.

Keep the telephones and noisy things in other rooms, even the TV and computer if you need to. Keep room temperature around 68 degrees and also make sure your mattress isn’t sagging or moving around on you, and also that your clothes are really your sleeping clothes and not something else. Additionally, check that morning light or street light doesn’t confuse your eyes.

If you find yourself lying awake at night TRYING to go to sleep, this can be a frustrating waste of time. You then train yourself to use the bed to TRY to sleep instead of actually doing the sleep. When it comes morning time, if you haven’t slept well, and two hours after getting up your body wants to fall asleep THEN, you have to get tough. You have to treat it like an unruly child and literally tell your body that it blew it’s chance to sleep and now it has to go to work, and wrestle that feeling to the ground. This can be accentuated with a cup of coffee, I suppose, but caffeine can be a sleep interrupter also. Therefore, if you have to do this sort of thing, make sure it is early in the morning and limit coffee to one cup a day. Trust me, the caffeine build up in your system can become a never ending spiral addiction as well. It’s better that you have NO coffee, or NO caffeine at all, as this is one of those blood acid problems, but I do realize that Starbucks didn’t get rich off of a populace that DOESN’T drink coffee.

Stick to a regular bedtime schedule. Go to bed and get up at the same time each day. Some insomniacs believe they will be able to “catch up” on sleep. This is fantasy. Trying to do this disrupts your biological rhythms. There are also those who say that the body needs to be asleep between the hours of 10pm and 2am in order for the brain to produce certain health benefits which can only be done in the REM sleep that takes place after a few hours of conscious brain inactivity. Don’t quote me on this however, it’s just something I have heard on the fly here and there.

Sleeping pills are a real problem, and most users don’t realize what a huge problem they can become. Doctor prescribed sedatives can be quite useful when there is a current emotional or physical upset that is causing the problem. They can become addictive however, for other qualities they posses. For instance, the relaxing euphoria that they can produce before they actually put one to sleep. Your quality of sleep will actually worsen as you use more and more of them due to the diminishing returns so prevalent in this sort of thing.

If you absolutely need to use pills, you must go into this with the knowledge that your body is going to fight you when you have to stop using them. One should only use them for a week or two, and then stop cold turkey. The following nights will be disturbed, it will happen, but it’s necessary for breaking the cycle that has begun. And it MUST be broken when it is still young. There is no need to relate to you the many celebrities who have been addicted to pain killers and tranquilizers who have either had to do rehab or have died with 10 or more prescriptions in their medicine cabinets. This is not just a celebrity problem, it happens all over the world to people you will never hear about.

Exercise early in the day to help get the blood moving and train your mind and body to be up and active at this time. To exercise at night is to train your body to be active when it should be shutting down. You might not think all this training is all that important, but if you have insomnia or some other sleep disorder, can you afford to ignore the process?

Watch the coffee, tea and soft drink intake during the day, and this includes chocolate and sweet stuff, for it can mix caffeine and sugar in nasty ways inside your bloodstream and wake you up in the middle of the night for something caffeineated or sweet. Those too, are addictions.

Hypnotics, drugs made to get you to sleep and help you stay asleep, stay in your blood stream for a goodly amount of time. After a week of taking a sleeping pill, the accumulation in your blood will be around six times what it was on the first night you took a pill. Be aware of any diminishing hand and eye coordination and also watch the drowsy driving, you may not even be immediately aware that you are driving under the influence.

They can also interfere with other drugs you may be taking, and that can cause unforeseen side effects. Not everyone is the same physiologically, and some drugs effect one person different than another person. The trick is to find the correct combination for your body before all the testing and guessing as to how to give you the best care, does damage or gets you killed, this is simply the way drug prescribing is done. Mass produced drugs cannot take into account the individual needs of every person, therefore, it’s actually better to do all that you can to live without them, for drugs can and do cause death all too many times. This is, of course, against the Hippocratic oath, but it is also a result of our flawed reality.

For some examples, just consider that respiratory problems, impaired liver function and simply old age can be a high risk if you take something along the lines of Dalmane or a type of barbiturate. Barbiturates and something called chloral hydrate both pass through a woman’s placenta and can cause birth defects to unborn children.

Help your doctor out, do everything you can to avoid the need for drugs, and get a good night’s sleep for once.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Car Dealership Hell

Car Dealership Hell

Over the last ten years or so, it has been my privilege to work for not one, but two automobile dealerships in the same capacity. Once on a while you can find a dealership that is interested in someone doing their “in house” advertising, that is creation of their ads for print and radio, right there on the property itself. As a graphic designer I have done this twice in two different states and have been exposed to some of the most interesting inside information and bizarre behavior that one would never guess was even possible of mature, working adults.

First of all, you must put away all assumptions on which you have been raised about what happens in a car dealership day in and day out. This also includes some of you who already suspect much of what I am about to tell you. Selling is a tough enough job for anyone, as it involves going for another person’s wallet on a consistent basis to earn a living. I do indeed feel for the person who has to do this every day. Some people are good at it, I suppose, and they find no problem with the exercise, and it’s important that they feel this way, for it is integral to their success.

I myself, however, have never felt that this sort of thing was a good idea and I doubt I ever will. That probably goes a long way to answering the question as to why I have never been able to make any money at this sort of selling. I have, to be sure, done several jobs in the past such as retail, and for quite a few years in my younger days I was a framer. I enjoyed that sort of work, for I could actually help out customers who needed assistance and I didn’t feel there was anything improper going on behind the scenes. This doesn’t hold true for auto dealerships and I have long spouted off about the many things I have been witness to as I toiled away in the little side office with the glass wall window and the two little seats that had no salesman to occupy them.

About twelve years ago in a small town in the south I had my first assignment while I also worked for a major newspaper in the area. This was my first exposure to the incongruity of image to that of reality put forth by public advertising performed by major auto makers which is broadcast all over the country. While toiling away at the little in house computer, I had a front row seat for things rarely seen and rarely felt. There was of course, the usual standing around of salesman all day. They stand around the showroom floor of the dealership for about 10 hours a day, and they work usually six days a week. Always in dress shirt and tie, they endeavor to make the best impression on practically anyone who enters the car lot, or the showroom. But that is pretty much where it all ends.

One particularly slow day at the first dealership, and there are many many slow days, four salesman where so board with the lack of business that they lined up on the road, a nice sized four lane highway about twenty yards from the show room floor, and if anyone even thought to slow down to turn into the car lot, they all reached for the car door handle at the same time. The car was still moving, engine was still running and the embarrassed driver was red faced and frightened. The idea, of course, was to greet the customer first and get his attention, for once a salesman has gotten your attention and talked to you, NO ONE ELSE CAN! They would slap and punch each other aside as they jockeyed for the door handle even before the driver came to a complete stop. I remember watching this one day from my little office in the corner and seeing grown men in their forties, some older, get into a literal fist fight out in the lot over the possession of a customer. I kid you not.

After watching this sort of behavior, I once got a chance to chat with the manager of the dealership and I asked him about some of the things that go on there, for they sure didn’t seem to match up with the commercials on TV. A prime example of laugh out loud fantasy would be those Honda ads where the salesman informs you that it’s his job to be helpful. I chuckle as I write that, for it is by no stretch of the imagination a car salesman’s job to be helpful.

I was informed by the manager, with practically no emotion or concern in his voice that many car dealerships prefer to hire ex-convicts as salesman, and much of the habits they form in prison follow them into the working world. I found that to be logical and also a bit alarming, having bought a few cars from dealerships myself. Yes, I found out, I probably somewhere and somehow did business with an ex-prisoner. But why, I asked, are they hired with open arms? I was told they are more productive. Really? I asked. Ex-convicts make more productive salesman? Oh yes, I was told with a wink and a nod, they don’t mind at all!

Got that folks? Ex-convicts don’t mind at all.

After my stint there, I didn’t think too much more about this as I had signed it all off to small town America placed almost invisibly along side the open stretches of highway between the major towns of our nation, where there is nothing to do and no place to go except church on Sunday. Surely, I thought, this can’t be the way things are, like say, inside a dealership in a major metropolitan city. Surely, I knew, that if I were only to see a dealership from the inside, in say, the second largest city in America, I would indeed find modern and sophisticated personages happy and busy at the work of promoting a major auto brand that everyone knew and loved all over our glorious land, the home of the brave, the land of the free.

Heh.

My second auto dealership was just such the venue from which I was now going to find out just how different things must be. As before, I joined a major car brand dealership to handle their in-house advertising and in the meantime, unbeknownst to them, I was now going to get the inside scoop on things, hopefully from a mature and progressive point of view. There was a young man, about the age of twenty two, let’s call him Tony, who began a job selling cars in this particular dealership about the same time I had arrived. His office was next to the one they gave me for the computer generated ads and I was able to “pick his brains” on many things during the short time he stayed there.

He did, as many salesmen seem to do all over America, stand around a lot, for hours at a time. We were located on the major thoroughfare in the area, so therefore there was no big highway to go stand out on. Most of the day, for everyone, was spent in the confines of the dealership showroom floor. In fact, if one of the salesman did indeed get someone to sell to, they had to walk a block down the street to a small fenced in lot that had a discouragingly small amount of inventory. The idea being that one had to sell what they had on the small lot, not acquiesce to customers who wanted something the dealership could not put in storage.

Tony stood around for ten hours a day, just like the salesmen at the other dealership I had been at. He was required to be on duty on Saturdays even if he was ill, in fact they told him to get another job if he couldn’t make a Saturday, no matter what the reason. One day he had a couple of customers come in whom he managed to land while others were either busy or looking the wrong way. They were a couple of young men who were from a local church, one was an assistant to a pastor, I believe he told me, and the other was a young man who was on a work furlough from prison who was trying to put his life back together. Well, they were nice enough, he told me, and he did his best to try and give them good service, which I do believe was his true intention. The pastor’s assistant, however, knew his way around a car sale better than Tony did, who was called a “greenie” by the salesmen, and dickered a bit too much for the young man. Seeing this, the assistant manager decided to take charge of a sales situation that was taking way to long for Tony to complete and systematically got into a loud and nasty shouting match right on the sales room floor with the pastor’s assistant, finally telling him to get the f**k out of his dealership right in front of anyone who was within the next block to hear.

After all, it’s his job to be helpful.

The assistant manager was all smiles after this, patting Tony on the back and telling him not to worry about it, despite the fact that the man had just blown Tony’s first sale. You have to understand, he told Tony, customers are stupid and they have to be shown who’s boss. Yes, you read that right, customers are stupid. This was not the first time I had heard this in dealing with the inside workings of car dealerships, but I had no idea it could be so widespread.

Yes, they do indeed believe you and I are stupid. And that’s the word they use. Additionally, they believe that much of what they have to do to sell cars is the customer’s fault. If only you and I weren’t so afraid of commitment, they tell me, then they wouldn’t have to shove you off the cliff, so to speak, when buying a car. You should thank car salesman for their abuse, and there is really no other way to put this, their “trickery” when selling you a car. It’s your own fault!

Tony didn’t make very many friends working at the dealership - he wasn’t allowed to. Older and more larcenous salesman made him a target and even used to call him “fugly” to his face. For anyone who doesn’t know, the term “fugly” is a derisive term composed of two other words, one of them being the word “ugly”. One day, Tony casually spoke with a customer who was milling around the showroom floor, he didn’t know another salesman had already approached the person, and he only spoke with them for a moment. Later that day, while he was standing around again, the larger and more aggressive salesman who was only moments before, laughing and chatting with another salesman, suddenly saw Tony standing outside on the sidewalk and charged out there after him. His pushed his chest into Tony’s much like football players who “bump” each other after a stellar play, and put his face right into Tony’s face and yelled, “What the f**k is wrong with you, fugly????? You never talk to another man’s customer!!!!” Was there a fist fight? No, but then, since this man was an ex-prisoner, it was perhaps best.

Tony was constantly dogged by this man the whole time he was there and had to take up the practice of standing around on the opposite side of the dealership from wherever the man was. I could see him moving around from outside of my office in direct tandem relationship to wherever the other man was, if the man moved left, Tony moved right, and visa versa. A wonderful way to spend ten hours a day.

Tony landed another customer one day and was in the middle of doing the four square and the “going back and forth to see the manager” in brokering the deal. The customer was there at the dealership all day, as is the plan, and they spent way too much time for my taste sitting in the office Tony had, all by themselves. Getting up for a break, I went into the break room the dealership had only to see Tony and another salesman sitting there watching soap operas on the TV set in the break room. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was going over the deal he was trying to make with the manager. Really? I said with a bit of surprise, eyeballing the TV set with General Hospital on the broadcast. Yes, he told me, if the customer is here until about 4pm, then they will be more ready to make a deal that the manager will give his okay on. “Weren’t they here early this morning like about 8 or 9am?” I asked him. Yes that’s true, he told me, but the manager won’t let him do this any other way, and besides, their keys are on the roof anyway.

“Their keys are on the roof?” I asked. “Yes, I had to take their car to be judged for the trade-in and I was told to throw their keys on the roof in case they tried to leave too soon.” This is done to stall you at all costs I am told, never never, give them your whole ring of keys. Never!

Tony’s customer eventually bought the car, but could not take delivery for the next week. In the meantime, Tony could not wait to leave. He told me that as soon as the customer picked up their car he would give them the keys and keep on walking, so disgusted was he with the crap he had to put up with. In the meantime, another salesman wrote down the customer’s name on a piece of paper, sideways in a notebook and brought it to Tony. “Look,” he said, showing the name written on a page in a notebook. “I talked to your customer first, so I want you to go tell the manager this and get him to give me half of the commission.” Not wanting to make any more enemies, Tony went and told the manager what the salesman had done. The manager laughed openly at him, but still refused to comply and told Tony not to give in. This made no difference, he was then accused for the rest of the week of trying to screw the salesman out of HIS money. So Tony had to avoid this man also when standing around the same showroom floor for ten hours a day, six days a week. Every time the salesman would confront him about it, the other salesman, the one who pushed Tony around on the sidewalk, would start visibly chuckling to himself. I told Tony to watch this when it happens, for it is a sign of inside knowledge old salesman are aware of and to stand firm to get his money, for he was indeed being scammed.

Tony’s customer got his car and Tony did indeed leave with them, in fact I believe he left without his commission on the sale, but I am not sure of that. Before that however, I was privy to the paperwork Tony did on the sale and he showed me how the customer was actually paying over $6,000 dollars more on the life of the financing they received than they were even aware of. I am not a financial person, and my understanding of this was a bit foggy, but according to Tony, there were so many hidden fees within the small print of the paperwork that they added up to about $6,000 dollars that was hidden from the customer’s immediate knowledge. I found that incredible! He showed me a hidden finance fee of 40% on window tinting which the customer didn’t know about because it was included in the whole financial numbers. I didn’t understand this, but he told me there were many other hidden things like this that the finance manager had done. He warned me never to get financing from the dealer. No matter the great deal they want to give you. I knew someone who had once been the finance manager at a car dealership and I asked him about this at a later time. He giggled like a school girl at the mention of it. “Yes,” he told me. “Stuff like that happens all the time.”

Here are some other things I learned about buying a car from an auto dealership. There is such a thing as an informal warranty. When too many of the same new model of cars have shown the same mechanical problem, the manufacturer will inform the car dealerships that it will cover the cost of repairs beyond the standard warranty. These warranties, however, are never publicized. Buyers need to write to the center for auto safety to find out about these things, and discover which components of the car are likely to fail and qualify for these repair warranties. If the part is covered and the service manager won’t fix it, you’ll need to either have a factory’s regional office representative mediate the matter, or take them to small claims court. Documentation is always needed.

Keep an eye on dealerships in your area that you may think you’ll do business with in the future. Go and look around one when you are not going to buy anything. You just want a feel for the personnel, and how they operate. When they approach you, and believe me, they will after standing around all day, just tell them you are window shopping and you’ll come and get them if you need anything. If they don’t insult you right there, then that’s a good sign. But good luck on that, this is not retail, they are not there to just be helpful. Don’t let them intimidate you or engage in any random banter.

Go to the service area also and just hang out a few minutes. Notice if things are being run smoothly, if the manager there and working, are customers treated with respect. Make sure you know for sure. Look at the service lot, notice the license plate frames. In a good dealership you’ll see plates from competing dealerships.

Don’t go out on the highway for a dealership, the salesmen know they have just one chance to make a sale, they could get violent. Multi-franchise dealerships can add to the overall trauma you experience in car buying, too many people are involved and this will cause a lot of confusion.

You choose the salesperson, don’t let them choose you. Ask them about themselves, how long they have worked, where they have worked, and if you may have references from former customers. If this works and you aren’t reviled and insulted, you may have a good thing going. Just to note, in the high pressure of a salesroom, everyone is a target even if they are in the same ethnic group as you are. I once got a message on the phone for one of two African-Americans who worked for dealership #2 and I didn’t know who anyone was at first, so I asked the only African-American on the floor if he was this man Raymond, for whom I had a message, and I was snapped at and told “NO, I am the OTHER one!” So even the brothers didn’t get along and the customers were treated with no favoritism.

Remember, they believe that you and I are stupid, and therefore deserve what we get. So educate yourself first. Get as much information as possible on the car you want before you even sit down with a salesman. Collect brochures and read magazine articles on the auto you want. Don’t let them try to fool you with their impressive knowledge of the car, as this is just a device to take control of the sale and establish authority in the transaction. You have to be knowledgeable and strong willed, and ready to leave at any moment. Know the competition too, if you mention that you are wavering between them and the competition they will, of course, knock them and be very convincing if you are uninformed. This isn’t a friendly exchange folks, don’t be fooled. Big money is on the table when it comes to you as a customer and they are armed to the teeth with ways of getting your money.

If you don’t know what you want, you will be sold what the salesman wants to unload. The most expensive model, with the most extravagant items, and all those hidden finance charges. You will have to eventually take a test drive of the car you want in order for the salesman to get you to take mental ownership of the car, he will glowingly praise the car in the meantime and try to get you to have fun while driving - NEVER GIVE HIM YOUR KEYS. Make absolute sure you give the salesman a single copy of your auto key if they truly need it, be prepared for this. Be prepared to walk (and be insulted as you walk away) if you need to. At this point in the sale, the salesman can take on an attitude not unlike a serpent with forbidden fruit for you to try. “Go ahead, it won’t really hurt.” he’ll imply.

Don’t buy when you are tired, if you are there for any length of time, just leave. Don’t let them sit in the break room and watch TV on you. They want you to wear out and believe that you will be primed to take whatever they promise you, even if they don’t have it, under the condition of being tired. There are no such things as idle questions either, any question is a probe to get to know what they can say back to you to make the sale. If they ask you what you do for a living, tell them you drive a cargo ship from here to the planet Jupiter, and without batting an eye they will tell you they have a cousin who does that too! Avoid probing questions if you can.

Remember those hidden finance charges? Options are where the dealer makes his money. So say for instance the dealer tells you that ALL cars come with power windows. But you don’t want power windows. At this point they will tell you it has to be a special order and it could take months. Walk out at this point if he doesn’t “work something out”. They magically will, they need the sale.

Standard options are listed in the manufacturer’s brochure. Cars for the lot may be ordered without a standard option like say, carpeting. You’ll be told that it is extra if you don’t know any better, and you’ll be charged for it too. Know what you are doing people!

Turning you over is a wearing down tactic. If they feel that you are not going their way or responding in the way they want you to, they will go on a break and let another salesperson talk to you. This can happen four or five times until you actually get frustrated and either buy a car or you are told to get the f**k out. If your salesman leaves for a break, then you leave too. There is a Starbucks every five hundred feet in America. I mean it! Be tough!

When you do finally buy the car, insist on itemization of what you have been charged and look closely for incongruence in the finance price and the final price. Many people are just too confused and tired after a day at the dealership to really watch the fine print. Check the car over and make sure everything is working and is just like you dealt for. Sometimes a car can be dented in transit and the dealer will park the car against a wall to hide the dent. Balloons in the back seat can be fun, but they also can hide interior damages. Remember, when you drive a car off the lot, it’s YOURS, there is no return policy and you just lost about $3,000 dollars just for making it a sudden used car the moment you hit the tarmac. Really! The value drops about $3,000 dollars the moment you drive away.

Laugh at those commercials you see on TV folks, they are NOTHING close to the reality of the auto dealership’s attitude toward you. Buy a good used car and have a mechanic look it over before you buy. The value is worth the work. And don’t even get me started on leasing. Avoid it if you can.

Oh and one last thing. There are NEVER any "sales". Those Veteran's day sales and Fourth of July sales are all smokescreens. Most of the time the "sale" is bargained and dickered away. Nothing really special every happens price wise on those days, they are just advertising.

Good luck to you, I hope this helps. And to those of you who have different experiences than what I have outlined, well... lucky you. ;-)

Reviews by Hubie Goode: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Tony Heath • Ledger
Dr. Parnassus • Christopher Plummer
Percy • Verne Troyer
Valentina • Lily Cole
Mr. Nick • Tom Waits
Imaginarium Tony 1 • Johnny Depp
Imaginarium Tony 2 • Jude Law
Imaginarium Tony 3 • Colin Farrell

Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Gilliam and Charles McKeown. Running time: 122 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violent images, some sensuality, language and smoking).

Anyone who knows Monty Python and Pink Floyd understands the free wheeling imagination of the British. I, myself, rather enjoy unhinged imagination and the ability of CGI to bring off realistic looking fantasy that until now belonged to printed works from Frazetta, to the guy who did the album covers of YES albums. When I saw the previews for this film I thought that perhaps I was in for one of those “drug induced” or Fantasia type experiences. And, yes, that does happen, but it is hardly the star of the film. In fact, the story line is about a different subject all together and the CGI fantasy actually seems to be only incidentally there, at least in the literary sense.

The story itself, is crazy and incomprehensible on its highest aspirations and on its lowest points is the most hum drum and ordinary concept I’ve seen in a long time. Old school in its fairy tale type simplicity, it would perhaps have worked better as a small off Broadway play with only a few more seats than are required for legit theater. Dr. Parnassus made a deal with the Devil to live forever and enters a contest to gain souls by the use of his imagination, the imagination is of course a weird “other world religion” type thing by which souls can be acquired. The Devil has his own means, and down through the 2000 years they have been sparring they have also made a deal for the possession of Parnassus’ Daughter, Valentina. Once she turns sixteen, she belongs to the Devil. Dirty old man!

The CGI is great to see, and a huge accomplishment in taking you away from the ordinary story, but it really doesn’t deserve to have the movie named after it, since it is itself an incidental element. “Parnassus duels with the Devil”, is the more likely title. And this main story is a bit of a drag at times, I know because I kept looking at my watch when the movie isn’t inside the imagination of Parnassus.

Basically Parnassus runs a traveling show that appears under bridges and freeway exit ramps, seemingly for the entertainment of whomever walks by. It is of course a ruse, only meant to gain souls in the private duel of main characters. Visitors come up on stage and enter a mirror, like Alice through the looking glass, and enter their own world of imagination. A nice idea, if only the story had taken place there instead of the streets of the downtrodden and homeless in England.

In a frustrating display of how the movie itself never really gets finished explaining its own rules and directions; towards the end of the film we finally find out how the imagination trips are produced, but until then we have no idea, two of the show's characters save a man hanging from a bridge by the neck. He seems to be dead, but keeps a flute in his throat that keeps his windpipe from being crushed, in fact it seems to be something he requires like a super powered power belt in order to do what he does. Really??? Who is this guy? What makes him special in this film? We don’t know, we do learn however that Satan doesn’t like him, and is looking for a way to get him out of the way. But we don’t know why.

Heath Ledger is Tony, the guy they save, and he does a fine enough job in the role of the guy outside of the Imaginarium, but he passed while filming and is replaced inside of the Imaginarium by three other actors, who even the characters in the film are shocked to see that this is not the same person, even though he is.... (HUH?) Why, in the context of the film is this? Why does Tony need to appear as someone else in the Imagination sections? We don’t know. We never know, and it seems like that would be a great plot point to exploit, but it isn’t dealt with at all. The only thing we can say is that the actor died, and that point breaks the fourth wall and steps outside of the movie. Suddenly it’s not a movie anymore, but a memoriam.

Gilliam, the producer and director, still has the Monty Python wit and charm but uses it sparingly and sometimes quite confoundedly; using images like dancing policemen ala “I’m a Lumberjack”, and a huge charwoman who looks like she came from Hansel and Gretle 1920’s story books who calls some small thugs to hide under her long skirts, only to kill them by exploding. I kept waiting to see the static, drug addled cartoon work from Python, but I never did. Some of that might have helped, but the picture holds back, never being as brilliantly funny as it could have been or a dramatically resonant as one would have preferred.

I really wish it could have been much much better, it deserved to be so, but I can’t recommend it. Get the DVD one day, but don’t set your sights too high.

2/5 Stars Too bad, really.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Summer 2010 and the Mahdi Pt. 3

Summer 2010 and the Mahdi
Pt. 3

Continuing Part 3 in this series:

Nimrod, one of Ham’s sons as you will remember, was a rebel who set out to defy God and held in his mind that he would not trust that the world would never be flooded again which is one of the reasons the Tower of Babel was built. He also built in this lower plain, three cities whose names I don’t want to even try to spell, and Babel which is to become Babylon. His building plan also includes four cities in Syria. So, therefore, this man built some of the first cities in this area of Iraq and Syria. He was know in this day as “the Mighty One”, the word being “Gibor” in the Hebrew language. It is used six times when referring to the mighty one, and it means “giant”, essentially.

Remember the Nephelim who were Angels that came down and had relations with the daughters of men, and they bore the “Mighty Men of Old”. Some scholars think that Nimrod was a huge man, and that is what attracted people to him. We DO know that he was a warrior and a hunter and he killed wild animals who were endangering the populace. (Keep in mind that now animals were filled with fear and loathing of man, as directed by God to Noah when he released them from the ark.)

Just in case you have your doubts about this seemingly incredible idea, in the late 1950’s, during road construction in the Euphrates Valley of south-east Turkey, many tombs containing the remains of giants were uncovered. At the sites the leg bones were measured to be 120 cms (47.24 inches). Joe Taylor, Director of Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, was commissioned to sculpt the human femur. This Antediluvian giant stood some 14-16 ft tall.

Genesis 6:4 claims: “There were giants in the earth in those days;” Deuteronomy 3:11 states that the bed of Og, king of Bashan, was 9 cubits by 4 cubits (approximately 14 ft long by 6 ft wide).

In an ancient text of the Jews, we read an astonishing description of some of these gigantic Amorites whom the Israelites conquered. In Buber’s Tanhuma, Devarim 7, the text tells us of a Rabbi Johnanan ben Zakkai’s encounter with the Roman Emperor Hadrian. This event occurred in about A.D. 135, soon after the Roman victory in the Bar Kochba war, when the Jews rebelled against the Romans. The text reads:

“The wicked emperor Hadrian, who conquered Jerusalem, boasted, ‘I have conquered Jerusalem with great power.’ Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai said to him, ‘Do not boast. Had it not been the will of Heaven, you would not have conquered it.’ Rabbi Johanan then took Hadrian into a cave and showed him the bodies of Amorites who were buried there. One of them measured eighteen cubits [approximately 30 feet] in height. He said, ‘When we were deserving, such men were defeated by us, but now, because of our sins, you have defeated us’” (quoted in Judaism, edited by Arthur Hertzberg, p.155-156, George Braziller, New York: 1962).

Continuing on with the giant theme, there was a race of giants before and after the flood who were there to corrupt the “seed”, (as a prevention against the coming Messiah) and we know that King David annihilated this race. The point is though, that when Nimrod picks up the genealogy, there is a gap with Noah in which Noah’s sons are righteous. Remember that Ham had Cush and Cush had Nimrod. Keep something in mind, that all false religions started with Nimrod and his wife. There have been quite a few books that have been written to trace down this lineage of Babylon.

Now keeping this in mind, there is another gap of genealogy and Abraham begins a new line of righteous lineage, through Shem to Heber, and this line would become the nation of Israel. We at this point get two different “seeds” that come from Ishmael and Issac (keeping in mind that Ishmael is half Egyptian). Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations and Issac is the father of the Jewish nations. Jacob and Esau follow the theme of the warring brothers with Jacob maintaining the tribes of Israel and Esau keeping the way of the Palestinian tribes continuing.

Many of today’s people who are living in the “oil states” are the sons of Ishmael, prophets of his day told that he would be a “wild type” one who is set against all his brethren. Now the middle east people who are Arabs are about 95% Muslim. As I have been reminded, the moderates among the Muslim religion are definitely against many of the practices of the fanatics that get all the news press. It is very much against the Muslim religion to kill, as I have been reminded, in fact I have been told that it is like “killing a nation” to kill another person. I have been told this by someone I know who is a confessed Sunni, and I acknowledge his information and thank him for it.

The problem is, war is very much going on in the Arab states, they DO turn on each other and are at war within their own homeland. How can this be? Fanatics WILL kill each other, and those are the facts. Pretty much anyone who is off the deep end will shoot you if you give them a gun, and you don’t need to be of ANY particular religion. These same people often blame Israel for deaths of their own people by their own hand.

Now getting back to Esau a moment, his father blessed him by saying that , "Your dwelling shall be the fatness (a Hebrew word meaning OIL) of the Earth, the dew from heaven (a reference to living outdoors in tents), and by thy sword you shall live. You shall serve your brother, but when your dominion shall come, you will break his yoke from your neck." (Talking about descendants of the Arab nations and Israel.)

Did you know that recently Israel discovered oil? The problem for the Arab states is that Israel found oil lower than the Arabian oil, lower in the ground that is. They were terrified that the oil in Arabia would run downward into Jordan and they would lose all of their oil, in fact they paid Jordan a billion dollars a year to discontinue drilling for oil. They do NOT want the oil of Arabia to shift over into Israel.

We see the internal fighting on the news all the time, the sons of Ishmael struggle against each other and also Israel all the time. These people are the descendants of Esau and Esau is the country area of Edom, the Palestinian territories. This territory also includes some of Israel, but mostly Jordan.

“When you grow restless, you will break the yoke of your brother off of your neck”, is part of the prophesy given to Esau. A Palestinian state would give them this freedom, and this is something they strive to attain in our day and time. They ARE restless and are consistently trying to break the “yoke” of Israeli occupation from around their necks. Now in order for Esau, descendant of Ishmael to have this happen and rise again in the ends days, the following had to occur. 1) The Israelites have to have control of the land (Jordan mostly) 2) The Jews have to rule over them and they become restless 3) Esau has to rise up and break the yoke of Israel off of the neck of his descendants. This is the issue within the Palestinian world today. ( i.e. the Oslow Accords and other agreements)

For Ishmael in the prophecy, the Arabs have to have a series of independent nations surrounding Israel. Back in the early twenties the United States gained rights to Saudi oil with 900,000 dollars worth of gold. They took over and controlled over 160 square miles of land in Saudi Arabia, and this includes some of the eight richest states in the area, like Iraq and Iran. Now the United States had access to this oil from the early 1920’s and this access ran out in 2006. Have they renewed the contracts? It’s difficult to say, especially in this day and time of unrest just what is actually going on between America and the Saudi States.

One of the things that has happened that causes me great concern is that Caesar Chavez in South America, a known United States hater, seized the opportunity and jumped in and made deals with the Arab Nations for those rights to go to him. This is also a man who allows Al Quida agents into his nation, he’s good buddies with Al Quida.

Now jumping ahead to the New Testament, we know that Jesus has 12 disciples and one of them was Judas Escariot. According to Jewish studies, the name Judas is a form of the name Judah. Escariot is a small town in the tribe of Judah, the word Escariot actually means strangulation and some say it was given to him after he hung himself. Judas was called the “Son of Perdition” in John 17 and it also says he went to his own place when he died, which of course would have been Hell.

Now follow me back to part one where we talked about Cain being “of the wicked one” and connect to the Antichrist being called the “Son of Perdition” also in 2 Thessalonians 2 and 3. The seed of the Antichrist is traceable through Cain to Nimrod to Esau to Ishmael. And where will that lead us?

We’ll find out next time in part 4. I know some of this seems very brief and perhaps a little confusing, but if I were to write on all these points and be more specific, it would take me all year just to make one simple point about who the Antichrist may be and why the Summer of 2010 could well be an important prophetic time, and this will include the United States involvement. The internet is full of sources to find out greater amounts of minutia on specific points and I encourage you to go ahead an do some studies for yourself. Keep in mind however, pro and con arguments over specifics can be found on anything. See you next time.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Why Nature Isn't God

Why Nature Isn’t God

The concept that life spontaneously appeared from non-life is as old as man’s quest for the nature of his creation. Immediately after the Renaissance of the 1500s, this concept though popular, came under direct attack. Until this period of history the schools of thought were guided by the overreaching philosophy of the times. Science, however, began to make gargantuan strides in the field of discovery of nature and its place in our own human history and it began to make observable discoveries in the investigations of reproduction and the life cycle of living things. Philosophy no longer held sway in the school of measured results from actual performed experiments.

Prior to this period, human origins were directed by two schools of thought, either God or the intuitive, mechanistic mysticism that supposed that merely the movement of matter had in some way created the life that appears upon the Earth. The logical conclusions of empirical thought introduced a third school, and now, no longer was it a matter of Holy writ or biased thinking. Numerous and repeated conclusions began to be drawn as the field of biology investigated life’s origins. They discovered and put forth something now known as the “Law of Biology”, or basically: “life comes from other life”.

This law stipulates that there is something rather special about life, an unusual quality. And this special quality ONLY applies to living things. If you want life, you need OTHER life to get it. Amazingly, and I say that due to the centuries that have passed, this came about as a result of observation. It does make one wonder if indeed there is an intellectual ebb and flow to all of history as surely man had to know this at some time in the past, but lost the impression only to re-discover it again. This was experimental truth, yet despite the obvious logic of it, the school of philosophical thought had lead large numbers of people to believe that life could be spontaneously generated.

The truth of this law is available anywhere you look, in a farm, a park or a laboratory. But do you realize how many of us fail to realize that it is still true? Despite all the magical thinking we are surrounded with, no one has ever produced life from non-life. You and I may read articles somewhere or hear on the news about how life was created in a test tube from chemicals, but although these impressions seem intuitive and possible, they simply aren’t. They are propaganda. No one creates life from non-life.

Naturally of course the experiments that attempt to produce life from non-life fall into two categories. Those that are performed with life and those that are performed without life. When we start with life to create life, we succeed, but that doesn’t count because we know that this is supposed to happen anyway. Succeeding without the use of life is simply an impossibility, because we CAN’T succeed.

Romantic ideas of accidental assembly and inevitable miracles are never true. Modern scientific insight into the nature of biological origins effectively outlaws the idea of self assembly which is needed to create this kind of life form. Certainly, winter can create snowflakes, but in the same way the snowflake cannot survive the summer, nature itself cannot create life. And why is that? It is because Mother Nature herself is “sterile” if you will, perhaps even “impotent”. She loses more than she wins, as the laws of entropy will tell you. What does she lose? She loses information, the information needed to create a whole life form which is tied up in the blue print of that life form’s DNA code.

The greater the complexity of a living object, the more information is needed to describe it. This is an important fact because recent science has shown that the object and it’s describer are separate parts of an overall system, namely our world. We now know that the information contained within the observer’s description of a living thing is important to the entire system. Therefore, any description of something we observe, say for instance your house cat, is as much a part of the overall characteristic of the house cat as is the immediate description of said house cat. So it’s not just whiskers and a tail and a thing that goes meow. The cat is also what you describe it to be, including how Mr. Whiskers makes you feel when he’s around.

This a tough concept to understand but it’s vital if we are to understand correctly the nature of origins of life. It is also fundamental to understanding the laws of the universe. The reason is that each one of these laws is nothing more than our description of how the universe and everything in it behave for US. Our perception of physical reality IS what is real, and the only things we can logically prove to be real are those things which we can observe either directly of indirectly by their effects on objects around them; say for instance something like Dark Matter.

Natural law is ultimately the description of things which we observe, and their behaviors, these are the definitions of what we see the universe to be. Internal information is therefore common to our observation and also to natural law. It ties us directly to physical reality, somewhat like a placenta, if you will. Information is something that intelligence produces and nature loses. Plants, animals and people all had the “code” for what they are to become within them from the beginning and when they finally perish they disassemble into a lesser form with lesser information. Describing the baby in your wife’s tummy will take more work because of it’s current potential and literal makeup to describe than it will take to describe the dust that the baby will ultimately turn into when it is no longer a viable life form. Vast quantities of information were present at the creation of the first life form and science has proven that this information did not originate within nature itself.

So if this is the case, that nature loses information over time, as we see in life and death everyday; the losing being the disintegration from an information state at birth or origin to the non-information state of death is the logical course for any life system to take, and this goes for the overall life system record. But that is NOT what is scientifically observable! Over the fossil record that we can observe, we see life forms increasing in complexity, not narrowing down toward non-information.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that the increase in life form complexity did not arise from a natural process, and it actually cannot. It would be the height of illogical to see a group of life forms losing information individually while at the same time gaining complexity over time. That’s just crazy talk! Nature’s natural biological processes are designed to dissolve life forms, not to add to their complexity, to say otherwise is to think intuitively and not observationally. It’s a day dream. To accept that natural laws explain life on earth instead of merely describing the observational reality is to practice faith, not fact.

Biochemists may indeed work in a lab with special chemicals they find in living cells, but they can’t make the life itself. Bits and pieces of chemicals under a microscope appear to act in ways that mimic life and they are reported as being tiny parts of a living cell. There are those who even report these chemicals as a piece of life’s proteins. But do these fragments qualify as life?

When we hear about the test tube babies, the experiments require the fertilizing of an egg with sperm. The two components however, come from other life. And what about RNA, the template on which life’s protein is assembled, hasn’t this been made to multiply in a test tube? Some claim this is how life started, but once again the chemistry used here is either done from a source that starts with life or non-life. When done with non-life, the chemical structures created have virtually NO information.

When enzymes are used in the RNA experiment that uses the one that starts with life, they contain information that directs which chemical goes where. Thus a string of chemicals CAN grow in length because the code for doing so is present. But when done with a non-life experiment, the biological structures are sterile, much like the cloned sheep, because the strings of chemicals are short and have limited information, one of those limits being the code for reproduction. This code for reproduction is systematically “locked out” of the coded information over and over again, there is NEVER a time when it does not happen. For some higher reason, there is a code within the code that does not allow for this. Hmmmm.

Scientific data seems to indicate that the universe may indeed be about 13 billion years old, and that may or may not include Earth, and it also stipulates that the universe is about 30 billion light years wide. This being the case, it nevertheless does not leave enough time and distance for the universe to have created all of the information needed to create a single living being. Even the simplest structures contain more information than the entire universe.

What about lightning? Can we shoot lightning through gases and create life? Can we make protein this way? Sorry Frankenstein, but lightning can’t create life anymore than dust storms can make sessnas. The special chemicals chosen for electrical discharge within cells are just that, biological chemical discharges of electricity. Functional biomolecules are chemicals organized to live. They contain information from intelligence, not electricity. Intelligence is the horse that pulls the cart, not the other way around.

When reading about the recent disaster in Haiti, you gained much information from the letters of the article you read due to letters that had been arranged into a readable code, namely your language. But if there had been no organization before hand, you would stare at the article without gaining any information much like a westerner seeing a Japanese website that is all text. (Unless, of course, you can read Japanese.) It’s the way chemicals are ordered that creates protiens, if those chemicals are not ordered in a certain way - THERE IS NO LIFE. Life does not consist of chemicals in a molecule, it is “coded” into a molecule from exterior intelligence. Without that preordained code, you have death, or non-life. Needed information exceeds what nature is able to provide from the inorganic universe.

Natural processes destroy the way things are organized, and therefore they annihilate information. Therefore if life evolved on Earth at the mercy of natural processes, then the fossil record would show a decrease in the complexity of natural structures. This isn’t to say life could NOT have evolved, but it does mean that if life DID evolve, then it utilized a process that included all the information needed from the very beginning. If each of the species originated as the result of the previous one, then the constraints imposed by the sheer magnitude of the information contained in just one human cell disallow nature as the energizing agent. If not, then nature becomes a perpetual motion machine and you would see no increase or decrease of information EVER.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Summer 2010 and the Mahdi Pt. 2

Summer 2010 and the Mahdi
Pt. 2

The Greek word for Antichrist is “anti” to oppose or “instead of” and “cristos”, which is the “anointed one.” Therefore, the whole term means “to oppose the anointed one”. So, the Antichrist will be someone who opposes or comes “in place of” the anointed one.

Point number one, “the” Antichrist is coming and also there are many Antichrists in the world. In fact that sort of thing is even true in our own day. There is someone in a foreign nation who claims he is Jesus and also had many followers. These followers mark themselves with the 666 number already, and even refer to this person as the “Antichrist”. I know that sounds contradictory, but that is sort of the way it is supposed to happen, the Antichrist will say he IS Jesus and in doing so, will fulfill his place as the “in stead of” Christ, because he will not be the original. You with me?

Point number two, the Antichrist “spirit” will deny that he is the “Son of God” and that he is related to the Father.

Point number three, which we made last time also: the Antichrist is now working. Remember it was working then and is still working today.

When we first hear of the Antichrist it is in the book of John when he originally coins the phase, but the first symbolic appearance is in Daniel 7 and 8, as a beast with ten horns. The first prophecy about him is in Isaiah 14, where he is referred to as the King of Babylon. The first real identity of him is in 2 Thessalonians 2. Now remember, in the Old Testament, Jesus himself has many scriptures that allude to him without a specific reference. They speak of how he was to be born, how he was to live and also how he was to be a living sacrifice for all mankind. There are lots of them, but one can identify almost 40 major ones that Jesus fulfilled. Jesus has more prophecy about himself than anybody.

The second group of people who have a large number of prophecies are Abraham and Moses, their names are mentioned so often in the whole Bible that they create their own commonality. But who comes in third? Who has the third most predictions concerning him: the Antichrist.

Jesus himself said that though those days be shortened there would be NO flesh saved. He was referring to the days when the Antichrist was here in the flesh making the world his own. Things just aren’t going to get better folks, and it won’t be long now within our lifetime. It matters little what so called positive thinkers and contemporary prophets tell you today, if it goes against the Word of God, it’s not only Antichrist, it’s just plain wrong.

Remember, when Israel was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Roman Empire, there where prophets of their day who were telling the people of Israel that the city would never be destroyed, that God loved Israel too much. Or, in today’s terms, I guess you could say, Israel was “too big to fail”. Heh. But Rome did come, and all the prophets were killed along with 6,000 of the people who were listening to them. Remember, Jesus said the temple WOULD be destroyed and yet these Jewish prophets of 70 A.D., only a short time after the Jesus events take place, were already contradicting him.

Now, symbolism concerning the Antichrist in Daniel 7 talks about a “beast” that has ten horns. Its teeth are like iron, a symbol of using one’s MOUTH to create war and fighting. Its claws are like brass, and in the book of Daniel that is a symbol of the Grecian empire, so this could be a territory that is to be trampled over. The beast devours much flesh with its mouth, killing many people, and “stamps out with his feet” which means he marches into and overpowers many nations, or territories. He has ten horns, which are ten kings or rulers, and in the middle of those ten is a little horn that rises up among those ten, which has a mouth that speaks great things.

Now in Revelation there is another picture of this beast and it says, that the beast has a body like a leopard, a mouth like a lion and feet like a bear. In Daniel chapter 7 you have a description of those creatures, for instance the Lion represented Babylon, the bear represented Medo-Persia, or today’s Iran and the leopard represented Greece. Now leopards are very fast, and just like the days of Alexander when he captured the world before he was 33 years old, the beast will move very fast. The mouth was like a lion and Babylon had authority in its day over the entire Earth, they passed all sorts of laws that controlled everything. And the feet here are like a bear, and the beast’s feet crush and pulverize. Babylon which is Iraq, Persia which is Iran, and Greece which is the modern day territory of Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria. All that territory is what is spoken of in the book of Daniel as he sees one man controlling it all, organizing all of it together under his rule.

I would suggest that this is the reformation of an Islamic Kingdom. For many centuries the Muslims had a system of something called the Caliphs. There was an empire once known as the Ottoman-Turkish empire. Just like we have great empires down through history, and even world powers today. They owned land from southern Russia to west Africa and even Palestine and Israel territories. They existed for about 1,000 years and owned the middle east territories for about 400 years. But the Turkish leaders of those days ended the rule of the Caliph’s. Recently, however, the ruling factions of the middle east are pressing to re-form the rule of the Caliphs and form a Muslim empire.

Saddam Hussien himself felt he was a new kind of Nebuchadnezzar, in fact he spent 100 million to rebuild Babylon. It was his desire to create a territory shaped like the crescent symbol in the Muslim religion. He attacked Kuwait not so much as to get oil, but so as to begin the construction of the “crescent” of power in the Middle East. He was at war with Iran for about 10 years and he wanted to seize all of that land also and march upward and westward to Israel and even into Egypt. This territory he wanted is the same territory we have just spelled out as the area the Antichrist takes over. Now, this didn’t happen with him, because he was not the man for this to happen with, BUT he is not the only one with this idea and it is a very natural “middle east-muslim” concept.

So how do we find this guy, this Antichrist? The whole world will be blind to him when he comes so even those who are looking for him will not see who he really is until he is revealed. No offense to those who believe that Prince Harry of England is the one. But, we can trace who he might be and that’s a great starting point to continue the points of this blog.

Back in Genesis there are two trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Revelation the Tree of Life is a tree that bears twelve types of different fruit every month and will be for the healing of the nations. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a forbidden tree.

Now, after the fall of Adam and Eve there are two sons born to them, Cain and Able. As you know, Cain kills Able and then God raises up Seth. From that point on there are two lineages that are formed. Cain’s lineage comes from Adam and continues forward to Tubal-Cain, seven generations, and then stops. From that point on you don’t hear anything about Cain’s lineage. But when you go from Adam through Seth’s lineage, ending at Enoch, Enoch gets taken up or raptured. Seven generations. We today are 6,000 years from Adam in the Garden of Eden and now live in that 7,000th year time. So don’t be surprised by a taking up of the church at the time of the revealing of the Antichrist.

The entire lineage from Adam to Cain and his lineage and Adam through Seth’s lineage covers the first 1,000 years of human history. In fact, Enoch was taken up in 988 according to the numbers given us in the Bible. Adam lived 930 years, 70 years short of 1,000 years and Enoch was taken up in 988. That’s all done with generational numbers and ages. And, as those of you who know understand, for God a day is like a thousand years and visa versa. Here we are in the seventh day.

In 1 John, when he was referring to the Antichrist and his day, he spoke of Cain who was “of that wicked one”, therefore, you can trace the Antichrist through Cain’s lineage. Now obviously Cain’s lineage continues on, somewhere somehow. But where does it go and where does it end?

The second 1,000 years, of course includes the flood and Noah (who comes from Enoch’s son) who went into the flood with three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. So now we have a lineage being formed from Seth’s righteous side in order for the Messiah to be of that line. Noah’s son Ham had four sons, Cush, Nimrod; who was said to have gotten off of the mountains, and two more sons. Historians tell of how everyone after the flood was living on the mountains so as to avoid the problems of another flood, but Nimrod moved his people off of the mountains. They moved off of the mountains and into the plains of Shinar, which today is Iraq. (Babylonia)

Now all around the mountain called Ararat, where the Ark settled, all that area is mountains, like Armenia and Turkey and such. When those flood waters settled, they settled like any flood waters, they went to the lowest point of land. That being Iraq. Much of the bones of the flood victims settled in the plains of Shinar, or Iraq.

All of this will lead us to the tower of Bable next, but I’ll get to more of that next time. Just stay with me and you’ll see where I am going with this. Until the next installment, remember...

.... you be good. ;-)