the defeatists!

Nobody ever said it would be easy, no one ever said it was gonna be this hard...

...'Nough said.

Well, this is one hell of an idea...

You know, when your life starts to resemble those commercials for Windows 7 -- I thought of this crap, it's my idea -- you can be forgiven for contemplating suicide. Anyway, one of the things that Crusader AXE actually has a pretty good idea about is...nuclear weapons. I spent 23 years in the Army, with Nukes as a significant part of my raison d'etre, as they say in Lubbock. (Channeling the late Molly Ivins, whom we really need right now!) Given that my sense of humor has been not black so much as obsidian probably since I was about six, I dealt with the subject ironically. Even when I was teaching it at the Army's Intelligence Center and School; even when I was teaching things like how to target for use. When just BSing with my students, I said I preferred Nukes to Chemical Weapons because I thought they were cleaner, if employed as an air burst.

Now, I was born 59 years ago; atmospheric nuclear testing was pretty common in a lot of places. It was also pretty common in the Ocean...Bikini Atoll comes to mind, but there was a lot of it going on. Hell, Las Vegas used the Atmospheric Testing at the Nevada Test Site as a way of attracting tourists. The cast and crew of The Conquerer, a John Wayne-Rita Hayworth extravaganza about Genghis Khan dreamed up by Howard Hughes on opium were in Utah when one messy surface shot tossed tons of debris into the sky --debris that came down, downwind, in the form of fallout. Cancer and mysterious death followed over the decades.

Anyway, we haven't done that lately. Still, as I contemplated the on-going Gulf of Mexico disaster, I wondered if anyone was talking about using Nukes to stop the BP leak. At a mile deep, a small Nuke in the 2-10 kiloton range would not break the surface and could seal the leak by turning the seabed into seared, greenish rock. Now, there would be a deep burst of underwater radiation, which in itself would be a somewhat lesser problem than we might think. After all, water is a pretty good shielding material -- a mile worth of it would reduce the amount of any atmospheric radiation from a small Nuke to the negligible range. There would be a problem with radioactive water -- the ionizing radiation would definitely produce water with radioactive charges, and there would be a lot of alpha radiation emitting water as well as beta and gamma emitters.

Well, it's a helluva great idea, isn't it? Seal off our environmental mega-disaster with a mere environmental conundrum -- we're not sure what the long term effects might be, although we have a lot of scientific research available on it. What the hell, ehh? What could possibly go wrong? How hard could it be? Well, being a huge fan of the law of unintended consequences, I decided that this was a really bad idea and that nobody in a position of power would do such a thing. I pushed it aside...unlike the folks in the Microsoft Commercials, I'd didn't "tell Microsoft!" Nobody is that goddamn dumb, I thought...

Well, unfortunately this scenario has been embraced -- by the Soviet Union. And now, by the guys bankrolling the energy business. According to Bloomberg, as quoted on The Raw Story,

As the latest effort to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico meets with failure, the idea of nuking the immediate area to seal the oil underground is gaining steam among some energy experts and researchers.One prominent energy expert known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008 says sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is "probably the only thing we can do" to stop the leak.Matt Simmons, founder of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, also says that there is evidence of a second oil leak about five to seven miles from the initial leak that BP has focused on fixing. That second leak, he says, is so large that the initial one is "minor" in comparison.

I hadn't heard speculation about the various superplumes of oil being caused by other leaks before, but let's just skip that until we can stop existentially screaming about this one. The article goes on cite an editorial in Komsomoloskaya Pravda that said the Soviets had done it for oil and gas wells starting in the 60s. Well, mainly gas wells. And, they didn't do it a lot. And it didn't always work -- only worked about 80% of the time. To put out gas fires...no mile deep underwater blows. So, it was exactly the same, ONLY IT WASN"T! So, given the whole, what the hell, double down on bad ideas approach to energy that we've been sucked into the last ten years, why not?

Now, we have the Soviets, the Russians, and an environmental disaster. The entire Soviet Union was a monstrous environmental disaster, and remains one today.

That said, the clown running the bank seems to imply that BP is in charge -- which has been the implication for a while in the press -- and therefore not thinking about this because they don't want to use NUKES. The bastards! Actually, why couldn't they use photon beams? Oh, they don't have any photon beams...lasers, phasers and photon beams! Why not? So, the US government should do this, and one thing we have is nuclear weapons.

Well, he is right on that. British Petroleum probably doesn't have any NUKES sitting around it's warehouses. But, the Navy does...what could possibly go wrong? Well, that's one helluva question. I have difficulty picturing a Democratic President short of Andrew Jackson, who's not available, agreeing to blow a weapon in the Gulf, although this one has enough intellectual honesty to probably at least think about it. I'd probably trust the Navy, EPA and DOE on the feasibility of this more than the Soviets 45 years ago although I'm not sure how the people of the Gulf, Mexico, and everyone affected by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico would feel about trusting an American president who blew a nuke on the seabed. The giant mutant shrimp might be interesting; maybe the next disaster to overtake New Orleans would be in the form of a huge radioactive dinosaur...

Let me just suggest if we are going to depend on nuclear weapons as the preferred choice to stop ruptured oil wells at this depth, we probably need a better plan than one I came up with while reading Aristotle and musing about bad ideas that was then validated by the Soviet Union.

Sometimes the blind pig finds a goddamn truffle...

Seriously, I was screwing around looking for some guitar tabs and a link to Plan 9 from Outer Space to torment the assorted Defeatists and Malcontents when I discovered this...The Internet Archive.
Links to tons of material including things like this concert by the Derek Trucks Band with Susan Tedeschi. With download capability. Tons of material, including films, books, broadsheets and tons of other things. There are some drawbacks, of course -- copyrighted material is in scant supply. But, if you want to scan a collection of Lincoln's sayings and speeches, well, check this... Or want to watch a cheesy film with a gal with bazookas, try this, The Outlaw by auteur Howard Hughes.

A liberal arts education prepares you to get angry at the oddest things...

I’m working on a screenplay now called “Grand Theft Pundit,” about gangs of outlaw columnists dealing drugs, running guns and saying rude things on “Morning Joe.”The role of me was going to be played by the late Suzanne Pleshette or Adrienne Barbeau, assuming there is a difference. -- David Brooks

But, angry in a coherent way. I haven't tossed a lot of Dulcinea Dowd's stuff up lately because I've been utterly pissed off by the world in general. It's more fun to make the Defeatists a music blog. The Bros don't care, on the rare occasions they regain consciousness from the stench of bicycle shorts and baby diapers. El S is fixing the webs, Agi is teaching his daughter the Lydian mode on his acoustic guitar, and Mr Fun is going to Phillies Games, even when he's not. Holier is long since gone off to a self-imposed metaphysical ashram, and Captain Capitulation is channeling Leibnitz. Me, I'm still on my own road, headed toward another point of view...

However, the oil gusher in the gulf is exciting some interesting things. The top kill method is interesting...although I'm a fan of pumping old tennis balls and tampons into the damn hole. Where's the goddamn Glormar Explorer when you need it? What this country needs is more secretive billionaires who dislike bathing and cutting their nails to serve it better. Anyway, my personal beacon of hope at the Times pointed this out -- we're being fucked over repeatedly by things we've never heard of and with acronyms that make no goddamn sense at all. And, when they do make sense, they make no sense -- I'm wondering how many Department of the Interior regulators and officials lost their jobs and , oh, I don't know, WENT TO JAIL over the orgies and snorting meth off the microwave thing. As Dulcinea points out in her lead ...

It’s unnerving, disorienting. A particularly noxious blend of helplessness, fear and fury that washes over you when you realize the country has again been dragged into a costly and scary maelstrom revolving around acronyms you’ve never heard of.

Our economy went in the ditch while traders got rich peddling C.D.O.’s and C.D.S.’s. Even many bankers — much less average Americans who lost their shirts — were gobsmacked by the acronyms, and scrambled to figure out how collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps worked.

And now a gazillion gallons of oil have poisoned the Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to unethical employees at a once-obscure agency known as M.M.S. — the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service.

And it goes from there. Enjoy...Gail Collins and David Brooks have an ongoing dialogue, and frankly, I've avoided it because Brooks perturbs me. He's too smart and too well grounded in, what do they call it, oh yeah, reality to really mean the things he says and writes. However, today's piece makes me think I've been skipping something. Beginning by talking about Lost -- which I never watched, never will watch, and have no interest in at all, Ms Collins talks about how all the characters were dead and it was like St Elsewhere and a snow globe. Brooks said he's still trying to figure out how Adrienne "Swamp Thing" Barbeau and Susan Pleschette were different, which led inevitably to a discussion of the BP nonsense. Brooks and Collins don't get our current spate of righteous indignation demands from the punditocracy. He points out that unless the president has a degree in underwater engineering he hasn't told us about, the president needs to keep doing what he's doing. However, Brooks has taken on the Rand Paul approach, which I find interesting...accidents happen, risk is inherent in human activities, and when a risk filled enterprise goes tits up, we should react somewhat more appropriately than running around screaming at fate and coming up with wild draconian measures...Collins and Brooks disagree about the role of government oversight going forward, but they do so with good sense and humor. Collins steps into Dowd's dream with this insight --"Obama must have known, when he took office, that there was some agency somewhere — probably tucked away in the governmental attic — that was going to hand him a disaster. If you’d asked him to guess, I bet he’d never have fingered the Minerals Management Service..." and Crusader AXE has to agree. This is so Bush administration...obviously, the 2000-2008 really screwed over the government. Collins raises the issue of what to do going forward, and Brooks points out very well how we're basically screwed by the nature of risk, reality and the economy. "The fact that an industry with inherent riskiness sometimes produces catastrophes hasn’t really changed my view of the industry. Less offshore drilling just means more oil tankers, a more environmentally risky mode of getting our energy." Well, since about once a quarter I throw up Yeats' centre will not hold thing, I guess I can't argue with this...

Sometimes, as Chief Dan George said in Little Big Man...

"The magic works. Sometimes it doesn't." One of our saner readers, or at least, one who's reading this blog on the same planet with the Defeatists -- although sometimes I think Captain Capitualtion is from Mesron, where he and Alf used to hang out and eat cats together --pointed out in my post trashing Gibson for showing the Judas Priest video of Diamonds and Rust, I screwed up in posting a Dr John and Mavis Staples non-cover of Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying. He's right, totally different songs. Better song, I think but not the same. I was going to post the original band, Gerry and the Pacemakers, but at the advanced age of a few of the Defeatists and our merry band of malcontents over at Area 51, a band called the Pacemakers is into heavily Alanis Morrisette territory. And, ever since I got to see the TAMI show and saw the guy trying to cover Chuck Berry when Chuck had already gone into masturbatory self-tribute band mode, he doesn't get an AXE post. Until I recover. Gain Control Again, so to speak...which sounds like a song.

Anyway, if you need to hear a dreadful version of Don't Let the Sun, here you go. One cover I've been looking for a video of is Rikki Lee Jones cover of Gloria that she recorded at Red Rocks. It's amazing, lesbian sub-text and all; Rikki Lee points out in her intro that this song was something incredible. It was -- I first heard it in 1965 by a band at a high school dance. Up to that time, I was more into country; hated the Beatles -- really liked classic rockabilly with the accent on 'billy. Still do -- Faron Young, Carl Smith, Johnny Cash, Webb Pierce. I wish I could find some of those old records that we had...Johnny Horton's Honky Tonk Man album was excellent and would still be today. But that dance with a lousy, pimply faced bunch of dorks with Fender Guitars and Amps made me re-think my ways. I'd like to think music still does it...and Gloria was one of the ones that hit me. The lyrics were racy, for Syracuse at Catholic HS dance in 1965, but that wasn't what did it...the break, that lousy, simplistic little blues run, with the reverb turned up to 15 on a 12 setting amp. That was it. Rethink the world...As she says, she was twelve when it came out, and she's never forgotten it, so she'll never grow old...

Still,when I think of rock and roll, I think of covers. If the song can only be done by the originals, it's not rock and roll. Odd way of looking at it perhaps, but rock and roll is supposed to be played in bars, and skating rinks, and high school dances. Why do the Stones always try to find a club or two to play in unannounced on every tour? Why do Bruce and the E Street Band show up to "sit in" with the various lights of Jooisey? Because that's rock and roll.


Like to point out that if you listen to it, you'll be on Yahoo Music on the Link to Rikki's version of Gloria. I would use Lala, but Apple has decided to core that, and I've not figured out if they're intending to keep the Lala ability to add music. If I can find a similar free service that I can figure out, a challenge for a Luddite called AXE, well, I will. And if anyone has a video of RL Jones doing Gloria, I'd appreciate a copy. Oh, Gloria...Notice Patti Smith shaved her underarms for this song!!

Dear God...

Words, usually inadequate, utterly fail me...

What the hell? Pachibel's Canon on Kazoo?

Remember the Jimi Hendrix Coke/Pepsi commercial where the young Jimi could have opted for an accordian instead of the Strat? Great commercial, funny content. But then, you get people who have to try...Let me begin by admitting that I am a Gibson guy. I've owned a bunch of them over the years, as well as Epiphones and during the days when Ibanez was ripping them off, I even had one of their Hummingbirds. Today, I have only one Gibson, a Songwriter and two Epiphones -- a cherry red Casino and a gorgeous cherry-burst Les Paul Ultra 2. So, I am a denizen of their website, and if you are interested in music and are interested in learning, hearing and just saying "wow" at times, it's a great place to go. They're more eclectic than Crusader AXE with some of my music postings.

Well, that said, they have a new feature that I thought could be fun, but they've already run out of steam. Called "The Daily Throwdown," their blogger throws up something by, oh, Chet Atkins and then something similar, ideally the same song, by Martin Barre. I pick those two because they are radically different in style, texture and everything else, but their playing on Bouree is just plain cool. Compare, contrast and argue as to who nailed it better. Jimmy Page versus Clapton in the ES 333 days for Eric; how about Derek Trucks versus Lee Roy Parnell? Get the idea...here's one that makes sense, Scotty More versus James Burton

However, when you compare artists, you have to have some common ground. Comparing Piss Christ to The Last Supper ain't gonna work -- not just different mediums, eras, and times but different worlds. I believe that there is a line between interpretation and simply transposing. If I chose to do Gloria like Ricky Lee Jones does it instead of harsher and slammier like Them did it, I'm still doing the same song. But, if I sing Morrison's lyrics to Leonard Cohen's music, I'm just screwing them both. And myself. If I have something that radical to say, maybe I ought to write my own goddamn song.

So, Joan Baez got some perspective on here relationship with Bob Dylan in the 60s during the time around the Rolling Thunder Review, and she wrote Diamonds and Rust. Incredible song...profound things about love, loss and acceptance. There are people I'd like to hear cover it sometime -- Elvis Costello, Dianna Krall, Susan Tedeschi, KD Lang. The Indigo Girls could have fun with it. I'm sure there are an infinite number of people who could cover it and have something to say through their interpretation. You know who would be wonderful?-- Marianne Faithful accompanied by Mark Knopfler! Emmylou with Ry Cooder...lots of opportunities. Emmylou with Robbie Robinson and Levon Helm...

And then, there's Judas Priest. Shit. You can take lyrics from a song and sing it with a totally different structure, tone and intent, but that doesn't make it the song. Baez song defines lost love and could have been; it is a masterpiece. Judas Priest's version is interesting to their fans, boring and repetitious to Baez purists and musicians who resist metal and to my mind, just plain silly. The video is belligerent posturing and creepiness. It's like playing Heartbreak Hotel on a dulcimer -- you can do it, but why the hell do you want to? It's possible to do something worthwhile and true to yourself if the song is as universal as this one...for example, this...

At last, something to vote for in California...

While the hilarity ensuing from the Republican/Tea-Party/Bircher/Arnold/Let's dig Up RONNIE and Run him Again faction in the state has been fairly constant -- what is it with Carly Fiorini's haircut? If she's bravely running after recovering from Chemo, I'd figure I'd have heard about it. If so, well, there's something I now like about her; however, I really think it's the same fashion sense that took HP and Compaq and made two pretty good companies into disasters. She fucked up HP and she has that haircut -- seriously, if she's supposed to beat Barbara Boxer, she needs to find something else besides her business background and her style...or lack thereof.


Of course, then there's the governor's race. Why anybody would want to be the goddamn governor of California is beyond me...it's a totally no-win situation. Jerry Brown was a sorta kinda ok governor back in the day, but that was in the day when the state had money. When Linda Ronstadt weighed less than Mount Rushmore, her brother was the Tucson Chief of Police and the whole Zen-Jesuit-Lawyer thing was vaguely attractive. Reality has changed. Brown running makes as much sense as an Archies Reunion Tour...but Steve Poizner is an idiot, and Meg Whitman is a version of Carly Fiorini. Only, she has thinning hair and looks like a troll, while Poizner looks like a buzzard. What the fuck? This is California, where body image is supposed to count for something...anyway, the best thing about the governator election is that Arnold and Maria will no longer be in those silly California vacation commercials...or hell, maybe they will.

I have no problem with people who are innovative and create things, and Meg Whitman did take EBay and turn it into something...an internet business that made money for her, the shareholders, the employees and the people selling cracked logoed Howard Johnson souvenir coffee mugs. I would say that she had the first working internet business model that didn't involve porn or prostitutes, but I'd be wrong...EBAY had porn during her watch! You could buy porn on EBAY. Used porn! Wonkette is having problem's trying to figure out why to give a shit, and frankly so do I. This is not Utah, contrary to the whole Prop 8 mess. However, the people for whose votes she is contesting are the sort of folks who worry about this sort of issue. So, while I now have something about Meg Whitman that I actually like, it might be what makes the election go one way...or the other. Although, while I've always noticed the large number of supply-side/lasiez-faire capitalists who are always going to vote Republican or even further to the right, I suspect she already had that part of the her electorate. Of course, I'm a registered Democrat and the last time I officially switched parties to vote for a person it was John McCain when I was up in the Shire of Ectopia, and that turned out badly in 2000 and worse in history. Far worse. So, even though I'd now vote for the squat ugly porno-purveyor over the smug-vulturish-machine guy, I can't.

It's a shame, because if I could switch my registration, I'd have the opportunity to vote for...drum roll, please...the Birther Queen, the dentist-realtor-lawyer DR. Orly Taitz, ESQ. For California Secretary of State...now, since DR Taitz ESQ can't run for President because, unlike Barrack Obama, she isn't a native born American, she could be Secretary of State in a Birther-Tea Party wet-dream of an administration. Frankly, since down ticket positions like the Secretary of State are a. infinitely more important to day-to-day Californian lives and b. nobody really pays attention to them, she has a shot. And, from the AXE sexual attractiveness meter, she is slightly more attractive than Fiorini. Or Whitman.  If the Birthers and Teabagging Tea Partiers really get excited in the primary, well shit, this could get interesting.

Or not. While I think I stay reasonably well informed as a good citizen should,  the way I found out that she was running was again through Wonkette, which celebrated a real meeting of the intellectual core of the Republican right...DR Tits ESQ or rather, sheesh, I'm so embarassed, Dr Taits ESQ spoke at a luncheon along with Michelle "Batshit" Bachmann. Bachmann has now shared the stage with the female, right-Wing Republican versions of Cheech and Chong. Not exactly the estrogen-enriched equivalent of Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Washington meeting for lunch.

Maybe they all play instruments and can go on the road, doing a CSN sort of tour when this election cycle is over. One can hope...

New or late night or something

The Heartbreakers played SNL the other night. Fortunately, they posted their numbers on Facebook, which appears to be for some reason being deserted. Ok. Whatever...Very cool...



Very cool indeed...

It's getting deep...but, shit floats.

I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.--Abraham Lincoln

So much madness, so little time. However, has anyone else noted the similarity between Faber College and the Tea Parties? Niedemeyer and Dick Armey bear a startling resemblance, and who can look at Sarah Palin without recalling the blonde dipshit tugging on Greg Marmalarde's member while wearing rubber gloves, and not envision the Govern-later trying to get one up for the Gipper?

Ok, that's in bad taste. However, I write under the name Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes for the Defeatists. Get it? There might be some serious content in here, and I guess there is a good deal of the time, but I do not profess to lead anyone or to be a serious commentator about anything. I care more than is good for me, but I don't want to be in charge. I want people to think...and I am appalled at what passes for thinking in this country today.

 

The virtual takeover of the Republicans by the Teabaggers (Who may or may not choose to teabag each other publicly or privately that's up to them, and if the Teaparty stands for anything, it's for making limp dicks stand erect...) is really amusing on one level and sad on so many others. The Republicans descended from the Whigs and the Know-Nothings but found a message that resonated with the idea of limiting slavery. They found a spokesman named Abraham "the original Gorilla" Lincoln who won the election of 1860 and reality made a shift. Lincoln had been dubbed that by one of his rivals...whom he made Secretary of War, and of whom he said "Did Stanton say I was a damned fool? Then I dare say I must be one, for Stanton is generally right and he always says what he means. ". Of course, Lincoln represents all that is best in our National mythology...and if he saw what has happened to his party, he'd cry. Of course, being a melancholy type, he cried a lot. Maybe Teddy Roosevelt who along with Robert La Follette and the progressives tore through the corruption and bribery and theft and muck of the late 19th and early 20th Century. No, they'd both stoke out.  Or, there's Dwight Eisenhower who pointed out the dangers of the Military-Industrial complex or there's William F. Buckley bitchslapping the John Birch Society or there's Earl Warren, Republican governor of California leading a Supreme Court that simply by agreeing that the constitution meant what it said, right was right and wrong was wrong...

Nope, instead they're dominated by idiots who say that lower taxes tax them to much; who decry improved health care for all; who often as Medicare or VA recipients of government health care demand that the government keep its hands off their healthcare; who aren't satisfied with the State of Hawaii's often provided proof of Barrack Obama's birth are upset that he hasn't shown them his original because you can't trust the government but no one can forge an original birth certificate. It's ok to go to a Presidential event carrying a .44 Magnum on your hip; it's OK to shout down opponents with all the obscene and vile statements you can come up.

Oh, yeah -- these bastards are for the most part older than AXE, and as my brothers pointed out, I'm old. I don't get in bar fights anymore; I don't call cops pigs; I don't spray paint graffiti or vandalize other people's property. I have better things to do. These people don't.

So, I was amused at first and then just pissed at the Republican party in Maine for their antics not just at their convention but at an example of their approach to democracy. Maine is a caucus state, and in the best tradition of the New England town meetings, the various districts or covens or whatever needed more space to meet. Some met in a school. One group of fine, upstanding Great Americans met in an 8th grade social studies teacher's classroom. They didn't like the decor so they ripped down a historic reproduction of a union poster and replaced it with a partisan bumper sticker advising the "Working People -- VOTE REPUBLICAN!"; and, while they were at it, they figured they'd go through the Teacher's  desk and file or supply drawers where they found Un-American stuff like copies of The Constitution. The ACLU had provided them, and that's enough to make it Un-American.  In their minds.

Now, while Jon Stewart and Lewis Black have put Glenn Beck in his place on his "Nazi-tourettes" the Tea Party are as bad. And, in this case, they're vandals. The "official" Republican Party has apologized, sort of...but frankly, that's not enough. I've always liked Maine -- kind of like Texas only with nicer weather in the summer and moose. Downeasters tend toward common sense, politeness and a desire in general not to intrude or interfere. Valiant, helpful, neighborly -- Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine at Little Round Top. Not blowhards...This is not the sort of behavior that Maine is known for; conservative, sure. But, not stupid.

Well, this is the new way. The behavior of this caucusing group represents the fascist tendencies that we ignore at our peril as a nation built on ideals of liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, the last thrity years have been an absolute debacle for those ideals; and now, the Teabaggers are the sans coulettes of a new reactionary swing. It'll be interesting.

Let's close with some more Lincoln.

Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came... Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.