From our Chicago friend and colleague John Katsantonis, moved to reflect on a week that brought us the deaths of three famous people:

Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson all died this week. Talk about a hat trick of pop icons!!!???!!!!

It seems ironic that Death can sometimes appear to be the Ultimate Reality of Life. but honestly, it’s not: LIFE is the Ultimate Reality of Life. And yes, for some reason these deaths DO all come in threes. But now we’ve hit it, so…”at ease,” everyone.

(Not that anyone was stressed, I’m sure.)

Michael Jackson, for all his fame and wealth and talent and magic, suffered quite a bit in this lifetime. He was, in his own way, a True Innocent. He was never allowed his childhood, if you think about it. He had to be not just a star, but a SuperStar, right from the get-go. The family pressures alone must have been staggering.

He’s like a modern-day Citizen Kane, searching for that “Rosebud” sled. And now, he’s at Peace. Rough way to get it, but…all we can hope is that he didn’t suffer at all, at the end.

Farah had SUCH a rough go of it, these past few years…perhaps needless to say, I’ve paid closer attention to her situation than I might ordinarily have, in earlier year.

Ed McMahon had a pretty good run, having left the building at age 86, though it certainly was rough to lose Mister Carson even though they were not exceptionally close, socially…and Ed was among the first to get thwacked by the real estate crash.

Knowing a couple of guys in TOTO who worked with Jacko, I know they’re pretty shocked about his passing. It’s a shame that poopoo gets in the way of art and goodness, sometimes. All the “kid” stuff easily could be accounted-for by knowing what Michael went through when the Jackson 5 hit huge….it’s easy, when you know what to look for, when abuse issues surface.

Fortunately, God knows our hearts, so whatever The Media or The Public or The World may have thought doesn’t matter. So let’s celebrate Life a bit, this weekend…

I’m quite curious RE: Lisa Marie’s reaction to all this. I expect that she feels rather odd, given the replication of her ex-hubby’s departure and her dad’s.

Also, did you ever see a made-for-TV film on Nixon meeting Elvis, when Presley went to the White House to volunteer for the war against drugs (ironically enough) and Nixon made him an honorary FBI agent?

There’s a classic moment: Elvis is riding in a D.C. cab, the driver’s got the radio on, and the first Jackson 5 single —- pretty sure it was “I Want You Back” —- spins.

“What-the-hell is THIS?” asks Elvis.

“I dunno,” says the cabbie.

Priceless.

The California Supreme Court just ruled that Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in that state, is valid.

The high court also ruled that the roughly 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place prior to Nov. 4, 2008, are valid. In other words, the same-sex marriage ban cannot apply retroactively.

This ruling splits it down the middle and will enfuriate all sides for one reason or another.

It also means that some lesbians and gays in California are more equal than others. They are married, but the rest are legally prohibited from doing so because the majority doesn’t like the idea.

This absolutely insane situation violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If some lesbians and gays can have legally recognized same-sex marriages in California, then all of them can, too.

In addition, this ruling sets a chilling precedent. Don’t like a group? Wipe away their civil rights via ballot initiative!

• Title: The Spear of Destiny
• Author: Trevor Ravenscroft
• Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
• Pub. Date: June 1987
• ISBN-13: 9780877285472
• Pages: 400
• Edition Number: 2
• Rating **** (out of 5 possible)

In order to explain the otherwise unfathomable rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, mainstream historians devised the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Hitler and his henchmen, so the theory goes, appeared so ordinary and mundane that no one could spot their real intentions or their murderous deeds until it was too late. 

The author of this book has a different take on topic. He maintains that Hitler was the reincarnation of an evil political minister from 1,000 years earlier and was motivated by revenge for being castrated.  (Hitler had only one descended testicle. Make of that what you will.)

The central theme of Ravenscroft’s book is Hitler’s strange fixation on an ancient Roman spear, which some believe was the weapon a Roman soldier named Longinus used to pierce the side of Jesus, ending his suffering on the cross. The spear of Longinus came to be known as the Spear of Destiny because the legend surrounding the weapon stated that whatever nation possessed the spear would control the fate of the world.

Hitler fervently believed this legend. When he came to power in 1933, the spear was in a museum in Vienna. According to Ravenscroft, one of Hilter’s primary motivations for expanding German territory prior to World War Two was to possess the spear, which came about in 1938 with Germany’s takeover of Austria.

Ravenscroft also explores Hitler’s occult beliefs and practices, an area mainstream historians either don’t know about or, if they do, they avoid discussing because they don’t want to seem weird. Hitler was very strange, and Ravenscorft’s explanations of the man’s beliefs and practices help our understanding to a certain extent.

Too bad Ravenscroft either did not know about energy or did not choose to reveal further details about it. One of Hitler’s most consequential abilities was his skill in using the energy of consciousness while he was speaking. He may have looked and sounded comical, but his evil intent was to manipulate his listeners at the subconscious (emotional) level. He succeeded, with repercussions on world events that echo to this day.

Long out of print and hard to find, thanks to print-on-demand technology this book is now readily available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online and most likely other Internet bookstores, too.

I would give the book 5 stars, but the writing of the edition I own  is terrible and should have been heavily edited before going to print. So it gets 4 stars for fascinating content and a compelling story that takes readers way out of the banality of evil into the full horror of it.

After the defeat of the Third Reich, the United States took possession of the weapon, and has dominated the world’s destiny ever since. If the legend is true, another nation will have to control the spear for that to change. 

Martial arts film star Jackie Chan, quoted in The New York Times, said, “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

This caused a stir among some in the West, but, apparently, not so much in the East. A story at The Daily Beast informs us that many Chinese agree with the essence of Chan’s sentiments about freedom, preferring “Asian values” that prize social cohesion and stability over personal liberty. Chan may also have been trying to curry favor with top Chinese officials so they will reverse their ban on showing his latest film in mainland China.

Freedom happens to be a spiritual birthright that no society, no government, no religion, no organization whatsoever has the right to impede or deny or strip away. God gave all of us the unconditional right to do as we damn well please.

Keep this in mind as well. If we do as we please without regard to others, we will also experience the consequences of their reactions. So, how do we want people to respond to us?

NBC’s ambitious series, Kings, is on hiatus until June, since the five episodes that aired in March-April never garnered the kinds of ratings that a broadcast network calls a success http://budurl.com/648e.

Probably the only reason NBC hasn’t axed Kings outright is the popularity of lead actor Ian McShane, who plays the king, Silas Benjamin. Someone in the C-suite likes McShane, so the suits are trying to help this limping bird finds its wings.

For those who haven’t seen it, Kings is an hour-long drama about a royal family running a nation called Gilboa in a thoroughly modern setting. It has lots of characters, multiple plot lines,  and plenty of palace intrigue: back stabbing, double-dealing, power-brokering, etc.

So far, OK. We like complicated drama with complex characterization. The problem? For starters, there are almost no likeable major characters in this series, and everybody’s motives are depressingly self-centered and neurotic. We get enough of this in real life, thank you.

There is a soldier-hero regular guy called David Shepherd, played by actor Chris Egan, but he’s just another straight white guy so unbiquitous on TV. Can we spell b-o-r-i-n-g? It’s old, old wine in a new bottle.

Even worse, the female characters are relegated to the back seat, as they usually are in any shows that do not focus on shopping and/or sex. Of course, they look terrific doing nothing of any consequence in their designer gowns and suits. All very 1980s Dynasty or Dallas.

Memo to network suits: Audiences these days want something else. This means heroes other than white males. This means characters who are quirky, maybe, but likeable — even admirable — in some significant way.

And it means a dash of the mysterious if not downright mystical. TV shows, movies, books, and other media that are doing well right now tend to have all of these elements. Examples? Medium or Heroes, Knowing, and Twilight are just a few.

Rockin’ Robin

To my Twitter friends. The ultimate Twitter theme song: “Rockin’ Robin.”

Left click on your mouse over the title above to access the mp3 file.

Enjoy! Keep tweeting!

While you’re listening, check out my speculative epic, the Green Stone of Healing(R) series. These novels combine action-adventure, palace intrigue, the paranormal, and romance that lives from lifetime to lifetime as favorite characters reincarnate on their spiritual journeys.

Read the published books online for free!

Sign up for my occasional free newsletter to download a free ebook (.pdf) on emotional and spiritual healing.

Buy the series paperbacks at any online bookstore or from BookLocker!

The Vision

Fallout

The Scorpions Strike

Buy the ebooks (.pdf files)! 

The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously overturned the state’s 1998 ban on same-sex marriage.

The decision makes clear that any religious organization is free to accept or reject requests to be married by same-sex couples. It applies only to legal recognition of same-sex marriages under the state’s civil law.

The court ruled that banning same-sex couples from marrying violated their civil rights under Iowa’s equal protection laws.

The same applies to the odious federal Defense of Marriage Act passed in 1996. It bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, so even though three states now permit same-sex couples to wed, they are still single under federal law.

This denies same-sex couples a while host of federal benefits, and also violates their rights under thre U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment equal protection clause.

Three down, 47 to go….

Tonight’s “Earth Hour” asks people to spend 60 minutes in darkness as a way of showing support for the environment. No electricity on a mass scale supposedly reduces pollution from generating plants by cutting back on power demand, if only temporarily.

Is this truly the best approach to raising environmental awareness? After all, it sends the same negative message floated for decades by those who have always opposed anything to help curb pollution. Saving the planet means we all have to sacrifice and go without. We can’t have the benefits of electric power without pollution, or a clean environment and plentiful electricity.

Who says this is the case? This is a false choice. We have never really thrown our creative and financial resources behind developing non-polluting ways of generating power. We have given it lip-service for decades but little else.

So cut the lights for an hour tonight and feel ever so virtuous. But it won’t really do anything substantial to solve the problem and it will reinforce the false belief that the only way to aid the environment is through deprivation and sacrifice in lieu of investment and innovation.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against the publisher of his autobiography, The Courage to Survive.

The suit alleges Phoenix Books and Audio, Inc., failed to live up to its part of the contract signed in 2007.

That kind of thing happens. The small publisher that acquired rights to the first four books in the Green Stone of Healing(R) series folded in 2007 without ever having published more than the first book and without having paid the author any of the royalties or accounted for any book sales.

Let’s hope Rep. Kucinich takes his book to a different publisher that does it justice. He may well win his case, but never see a penny in compensation. Winning in civil court doesn’t always amount to a big payday for plaintiffs.

Cable comic Jon Stewart’s smackdown of CNBC money show host Jim Cramer is now the stuff of legends.

But as Stewart was at pains to point out, he wasn’t singling out Cramer for his wrath. Stewart wanted to know why the entire business-financial news media were MIA during the decade-long run-up to this financial implosion.

Here’s part of the answer. Most journalists have forgotten, or never learned, how to do real investigative legwork. They don’t know how to dig up a paper trail. In addition, they are mesmerized by access to the top officials or top executives and don’t want to bother with those they consider low-level “nobodies.”

It’s those so-called nobodies and those documents, however, that can bring mischief to light and provide reporters/television show hosts with the questions they should be asking.

This point is well illustrated by the film The Pelican Brief. The reporter who covers the Supreme Court, Gray Grantham, did not rely exclusively on interviews with bigwigs. One of his best White House sources was a man who shined the floors and cleaned the carpets. Grantham was also willing to meet with and listen to an unknown law school student in pursuit of what turns out to be the story of the year.

Not many DC journalists today would be so open-minded or resourceful. To be fair, they are being squeezed ever tighter by layoffs and cutbacks in resources to do their jobs.

So they stick to pursuing the trivial and inane to fill airtime or newshole and make their deadlines. And more and more their audiences tune them out or stop subscribing because what they’re getting is worthless trash. Without the audiences, advertisers leave, leading to more newsroom cutbacks.

The only way to stop the vicious cycle is to start doing real journalism, covering stories that are so important people can’t wait to get to the news.

Don’t expect the media conglomerate bean counters to get that message any time before their empires crumble from total irrelevance. It’s really bad when a cable comedy show host is the one taking journalists to task.