Standard&Poor's downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ (one level lower) on Friday because Congress increased the "debt ceiling" and refused to make real spending cuts (they "promised"* to cut almost the same amount they raised it, over ten years, meaning net increase in the short term and a balanced budget by the time I'm an old man, or possibly dead, and then only temporarily until debt increases ahead of spending cuts). S&P said that if the US doesn't get its act together they might downgrade the credit rating again in 12 to 18 months. Right now the safest treasuries in the world are from the UK, and you've seen the turmoil they are in.
Why is it called a debt "ceiling" if they can just keep raising it? Why not call it a "debt nebulous thing to distract the public from how they're getting screwed?" My guess is because that name is too long. It's like how "jury of complete and utter morons who are unqualified to make decisions on these matters" is rendered "jury of your peers."
====
In better news, I've written a 300 word footnote to "Why Study History," covering two pages, explaining the term "center of gravity." I estimate the whole thing, when completed, will be between eight and ten-thousand words long, making it the longest Urban Mystic post ever.
*When politicians make promises, they are, in fact, lies.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
25 Things I've Learned from the movie "Paycheck"
In the same vein as 100 Things I've Learned from MLP, here's what I learned from watching the movie Paycheck, starring Ben Affleck. Now, it's not 100 things because I've only seen the last 15 minutes, but I think those were probably the choicest minutes.
1. Ben Affleck has ninja powers
2. When Ben Affleck hits someone they stay hit
3. When Ben Affleck hits someone they go flying
4. Ben Affleck can beat four guys armed with machine guns at the same time
5. Ben Affleck built the most advanced computer lab in the world with a miniature pond and smoke machines and palm trees
6. The World's Slowest Man
7. Ben Affleck's enemy is The World's Slowest Man
8. Ben Affleck hacked a computer using only a quarter
9. The World's Slowest Man walks in slow motion when everyone around him runs
10. Ben Affleck can see the future
11. Shooting a liquid nitrogen tank causes an explosion that can destroy a whole giant building
12. Ben Affleck destroyed an entire airport with two marbles
13. In Ben Affleck's world bullets explode in a shower of sparks whenever they hit anything except liquid nitrogen tanks, which they go through like tissue paper
14. In Ben Affleck's world when someone shoots themself in the foot they go flying and do a backflip
15. In Ben Affleck's world robot arms that build computers know Kung Fu and can beat up a whole lot of armed guards and give their weapons to Ben Affleck
16. Ben Affleck can lift two man-sized bags of dirt as if they were empty
17. Ben Affleck did a ninja move where he jumped feet first at a man's legs and knocked him through a window that was placed in the middle of a room for some reason
18. If you hit a bullet nothing will happen; if Ben Affleck hits a bullet it fires
19. He's Ben Affleck, you can't out act him!
20. You can't out act Ben Affleck
21. If Ben Affleck is in a movie you know he wins
22. Ben Affleck can MacGyver things
23. Ben Affleck has a line on his face
24. An explosion that destroys an entire building will just slowly cook The World's Slowest Man while incinerating the walls around him in a second so he suffers more because he's the villain
25. When someone is secretly getting Ben Affleck out of a secret building where everyone is looking for him and someone asks "is that Ben Affleck?" the person he's with just has to say "no, he didn't make it," and none of the twenty guys looking for him will recognize him and they will let him go even though he's not even wearing a disguise
1. Ben Affleck has ninja powers
2. When Ben Affleck hits someone they stay hit
3. When Ben Affleck hits someone they go flying
4. Ben Affleck can beat four guys armed with machine guns at the same time
5. Ben Affleck built the most advanced computer lab in the world with a miniature pond and smoke machines and palm trees
6. The World's Slowest Man
7. Ben Affleck's enemy is The World's Slowest Man
8. Ben Affleck hacked a computer using only a quarter
9. The World's Slowest Man walks in slow motion when everyone around him runs
10. Ben Affleck can see the future
11. Shooting a liquid nitrogen tank causes an explosion that can destroy a whole giant building
12. Ben Affleck destroyed an entire airport with two marbles
13. In Ben Affleck's world bullets explode in a shower of sparks whenever they hit anything except liquid nitrogen tanks, which they go through like tissue paper
14. In Ben Affleck's world when someone shoots themself in the foot they go flying and do a backflip
15. In Ben Affleck's world robot arms that build computers know Kung Fu and can beat up a whole lot of armed guards and give their weapons to Ben Affleck
16. Ben Affleck can lift two man-sized bags of dirt as if they were empty
17. Ben Affleck did a ninja move where he jumped feet first at a man's legs and knocked him through a window that was placed in the middle of a room for some reason
18. If you hit a bullet nothing will happen; if Ben Affleck hits a bullet it fires
19. He's Ben Affleck, you can't out act him!
20. You can't out act Ben Affleck
21. If Ben Affleck is in a movie you know he wins
22. Ben Affleck can MacGyver things
23. Ben Affleck has a line on his face
24. An explosion that destroys an entire building will just slowly cook The World's Slowest Man while incinerating the walls around him in a second so he suffers more because he's the villain
25. When someone is secretly getting Ben Affleck out of a secret building where everyone is looking for him and someone asks "is that Ben Affleck?" the person he's with just has to say "no, he didn't make it," and none of the twenty guys looking for him will recognize him and they will let him go even though he's not even wearing a disguise
Saturday, July 23, 2011
In Soviet Union FDA Regulates You
You can't take stem cells out of your own body, culture them, and put them back in your own body to treat previously untreatable diseases because the FDA says your own cells are a drug and now they have the power to regulate your own body.
The FDA started regulating cells taken from one person's body and put into a different person in 2005, but now they have begun regulating your own body. This is Brave New World NWO government trying to take control of every last little aspect of our lives to make us their slaves. This is the pernicious evil of Cass Sunstein and how all he ever wanted was to regulate peoples' lives. And on the heels of this, now the FDA wants to regulate your smart phone pros:
TheSlaveKeyboardist said it best: "The FDA needs to be done away with! Because of the FDA there's more treatments than cures. If there was no FDA cures would be more profitable than treatment, since the fda in effect raises the cost of rx's treatments are research so big pharm can still make a profit. There are cures for things but since they're orphan drugs no one wants to put up the money to get it approved!"
The FDA started regulating cells taken from one person's body and put into a different person in 2005, but now they have begun regulating your own body. This is Brave New World NWO government trying to take control of every last little aspect of our lives to make us their slaves. This is the pernicious evil of Cass Sunstein and how all he ever wanted was to regulate peoples' lives. And on the heels of this, now the FDA wants to regulate your smart phone pros:
TheSlaveKeyboardist said it best: "The FDA needs to be done away with! Because of the FDA there's more treatments than cures. If there was no FDA cures would be more profitable than treatment, since the fda in effect raises the cost of rx's treatments are research so big pharm can still make a profit. There are cures for things but since they're orphan drugs no one wants to put up the money to get it approved!"
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Why Study History (PREVIEW)
(Note: This is a work in progress, started at around 1AM and continuing until my cold abates. The final version will be posted in a day or two. This is the first time I have ever put my history/memory dichotomy into writing since I first began to formulate it about a year ago.)
This is a very important question and I will attempt to give it a very good answer.
We study history to know who we are as a people, to know why we have the values that we have, to know why different people are living in different situations, but there is an even more important reason why we study history.
We study history to know the future.
How is this possible?
Before I answer that question, permit me to veer off in another direction for a moment. What is history? History is one subset of all past events. This might seem incorrect in the popular view of history as being everything that happened in the past, but this view popular view is wrong for at least two reasons.
First, history is a narrative; it is a story whose subject is the past. As such, history cannot exist without the structures in place needed to allow the formation of narratives (language, social structures, etc.), meaning there was a time when events did not pass into history, they were just lost. There is no history of Neanderthal man because there are no narratives surviving from that time, and furthermore, there is strong reason to believe that the necessary conditions for the creation of those narratives had not come into existence yet. This is why history does not begin until, largely, the invention of writing, because writing is a means of preserving that narrative from cultures that have been lost to time (although, there are oral traditions, such as the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala and the Australian Aborigines who do preserve historical narratives from before the invention of writing).
Second, there is a growing trend that is beginning to gain widespread attention, though not yet acceptance, that you cannot separate the subject from the experience. A scientist's role in performing an experiment cannot be separated out from the experiment to produce neutral results. No matter how you try to set something up, you cannot remove the subject. Put another way, all knowledge is subjective. This is where the big split occurs in past events for you, the subject. Events that you have not participated in are history, because they exist for you only as the narrative. Events that you did participate in are for you memory. A boy storming the beaches at Normandy will forever experience those events as memory, whereas I, removed from those events, can only experience them as history.
This is a very important question and I will attempt to give it a very good answer.
We study history to know who we are as a people, to know why we have the values that we have, to know why different people are living in different situations, but there is an even more important reason why we study history.
We study history to know the future.
How is this possible?
Before I answer that question, permit me to veer off in another direction for a moment. What is history? History is one subset of all past events. This might seem incorrect in the popular view of history as being everything that happened in the past, but this view popular view is wrong for at least two reasons.
First, history is a narrative; it is a story whose subject is the past. As such, history cannot exist without the structures in place needed to allow the formation of narratives (language, social structures, etc.), meaning there was a time when events did not pass into history, they were just lost. There is no history of Neanderthal man because there are no narratives surviving from that time, and furthermore, there is strong reason to believe that the necessary conditions for the creation of those narratives had not come into existence yet. This is why history does not begin until, largely, the invention of writing, because writing is a means of preserving that narrative from cultures that have been lost to time (although, there are oral traditions, such as the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala and the Australian Aborigines who do preserve historical narratives from before the invention of writing).
Second, there is a growing trend that is beginning to gain widespread attention, though not yet acceptance, that you cannot separate the subject from the experience. A scientist's role in performing an experiment cannot be separated out from the experiment to produce neutral results. No matter how you try to set something up, you cannot remove the subject. Put another way, all knowledge is subjective. This is where the big split occurs in past events for you, the subject. Events that you have not participated in are history, because they exist for you only as the narrative. Events that you did participate in are for you memory. A boy storming the beaches at Normandy will forever experience those events as memory, whereas I, removed from those events, can only experience them as history.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Don't Take This The Wrong Way
The Amazing Atheist calls Rebecca sexist, and I completely agree. He also congratulates her for getting Richard Dawking to actually comment on her insignificant non-problem mere moment of discomfort. Wonderful, insiteful, very funny video.
Runs 13:50
Runs 13:50
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Absorb into Yourself, All the Rivers of Your Desires
Swami Kriyananda talks about how the joy from worldly desires drain us while the joy of the Self renews us. He also talks about how eternity is never boring because even though it never changes it's always new.
Runs 8:19
Runs 8:19
Friday, July 8, 2011
Why Democrats HATE Space Travel
Reflecting on the last shuttle launch I sit in dissapointment at the whole shuttle program. This is it? This is the best we can do? I came across the following article today from UD. Physicist Rob Sheldon explains that Republicans have been very good to NASA and the space program but Democrats HATE it because they can't get past partisan politics. They would rather turn America communist than explore space, advance science, increase national pride, and bolster international cooperation. He says:
Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.
Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.
Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.
He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.
But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.
As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.
Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.
Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.
Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.
Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.
Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.
He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.
But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.
As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.
Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.
Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.
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