WHAT A YEAR!

 

2004 is over and I haven’t written any commentary for some time.  There was just so much to do, with books selling like hotcakes and trying to work on a couple of new ones only to have one project abandoned because someone wrote a book on the same subject and it is far better than I could do.  The long saga of my innards is over, the gall bladder that caused it all has gone and I have said a genuinely sad good-bye to Dr. Stuart Wilson of the Medical College of Wisconsin.  I never thought that anything good could have come of my illness, but it allowed me to meet one of the greatest medical minds in the world.

 

Of the politics of last year, there is little to be said.  Kerry never really stood a chance.  He was Roman Catholic in a time when a Catholic probably cannot be elected President.  If he is a conservative, the Protestants (even the evangelicals) will not trust him to refrain from trying hand the country over to the Pope and if he is not, as Kerry is not, then he will lose the votes of conservative Catholics as well as the votes of suspicious non-Catholics.  But that was only a minor cause of his defeat.

 

Kerry was a Senator and Senators do not get elected President if they are running against anyone from another office.  They get knocked over by their voting records.  And Kerry had one thing going against him that doomed him.  He was a Vietnam veteran.  If he had kept that in the background, it might not have killed him, but by making it a central theme of his campaign he alienated every man who had the good sense NOT to have been in Vietnam, and there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are Vietnam veterans.

 

And, of course, he really had nothing to offer the voters.  That Kerry lost was not a surprise.  What is amazing is that he did as well as he did.

 

In my own field of Psionics and Mind Control, research moves on apace.  The equipment continues to get cheaper and more commonplace.  It may be that we can abolish the notion of personal choice and freedom for the masses within our lifetime and do it in such a way that people will feel that they still have both, just as we have already done away with privacy.  I never cease to be amazed at what can be accomplished with a walkie-talkie from a toy store and a flashlight.

 

So now we are in the winter of 2005.  It looks like it is going to be a good year.