John Ratcliff's Weblog

I'm tired of seeing that new age blather at the top of my weblog so here is a very short post just to bump the blog. The main thing that happened this past week is that our boat broke down. It has been a horrible month for things breaking down. We put thousands of dollars into repair bills on my BMW, hundreds into our Ford Focus, and more on things around the house like our dryer. Now it is the boat, and that is not a happy thing. Our boat has run reliably ever since we purchased it used many years ago. We have only ever had one problem and that was when the fuel pump went out two years ago. Last weekend we got it out of the water and took it to Midwest Marine. On Tuesday they proclaimed they had 'fixed' it, after putting in a new $500 fuel pump, even though the one they took out was fairly new. Turns out, they did not 'fix' anything. On Friday the repair guy worked on our boat for hours, replacing yet more parts that, to us, looked brand new. He preclaimed...

Wow, buy a couple of physics books and all of the sudden my weblog gets all goofy. Well, I might as well not let up now. Attached is the best description of God (i.e. 'All That Is') that I have ever read in my life. ------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you prefer, you can call the supreme psychic gestalt God, but you should not attempt to objectify him. What you call God is the sum of all consciousness, and yet the whole is more than the sum of Its parts." "[It] is not one individual, but an energy gestalt. (It) is a psychic pyramid of interrelated, ever expanding consciousness, that creates simultaneous and instantaneously, universes and individuals that are given duration, psychic comprehension, intelligence and eternal validity. Its energy is so unbelievable that it does indeed form all universes; and because its energy is within and behind all universes, fields and systems, it is indeed aware of each sparrow that falls, for i...

Well, I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks. Fourth of July has come and gone. After incurring over $2,500 in car repair bills I decided to just buy a new vehicle with a bumper to bumper warranty. We just purchased a brand new Nissan Frontier mid-sized truck. It has the super-crew cab, meaning it has four doors and seats five people comfortably. It generates 265 horsepower and has a 6,500 lb towing capacity. So, surely, it will pull our boat with ease. Ahhh..Our boat.. After spending the aforementioned sum of money on car repairs now our boat is broken. With the help of my friend Marty we put in new spark plugs and wires only to find out the problem was somewhere in the fuel line; either a bad filter or a bad fuel pump. So..we get to use our new truck to pull our boat out of the water and take it to a repair shop; how lovely. When we purchased the truck we gave our ten year old Ford Windstar minivan to my father. We wouldn't have gotten much money for it and...