Last Saturday morning I turned on my television at around 8:30, or so. Except for two channels all that was available to view were info-mercials, paid programming. I hate info-mercials. Regular commercials are bad enough, but to sit through a half hour of someone shilling a certain product, I mean does anybody really watch these things, despite how cute Christy Brinkley looks while working out? I don't, I can tell you that.
On the two channels that were not playing info-mercials, one was a special showing how Corona beer was made at their super factory in Oaxaca, Mexico, where I used to call all of time as a long distance operator for AT&T. The other was the sit-com, "How I met Your Mother," which quite frankly sucks.
I'm sorry, that may not be true. Actually, the small portion I did see examined Canadian beavers and what could be done with them, a segment that was both informative and lascivious.
To tell you the truth I'm kind of sit-comed out, and I blame this on Charlie Sheen. I mean "Two and a Half Men," was clever, funny, and enjoyable, for a long, long time. It had April Blowby and Melanie Lynskey as recurring cast members for a while, which was reason enough to watch, but they've moved on, as did Charlie. And now the show features Kelso, and the cute chubby kid, has grown skinny and tall. How much can one person take! I can't handle this kind of change! I need stability, damn it!
And I could care less about "Anger Management," Sheen's new show, even though the lovely Selma Blair works on it. I'm Sheened out. I just don't care how many girls his character, or Sheen himself, screws, which seems to be a major part of his persona. It's not interesting to me anymore, if it ever was.
I watched the beer show.
My teeth hurt.
There's a full moon going on, and you know what that means... werewolves! Skid Row werewolves, the worse kind.
Freaking werewolves.
Herkimer, my invisible bit me the other day because I accidentally sat on him. I don't blame him, I guess, but the God damn cat is invisible for Christ's sake, so you never know where it is... these things just can't be helped.
I was told the other day that sometime this month someone from SRHT management is going to come over to inspect all of our boxes, which means some stranger is going to come in my box and look around. I don't know what they expect to see, but I'm not dusting!
Speaking of depression, I walked to the downtown VA clinic Monday to attend the Depression Group they have there. I got there and couldn't find the meeting. Apparently they had moved it to another room and no one told me. Did they do this on purpose, I wondered, just to get rid of me?
This depressed me. I thought about going home and committing Seppuku, the Japanese form of ritualized suicide by disembowelment, but then thought better of it, as I don't have any swords, it would hurt too much, and missing the Depression Group wasn't all that big a deal anyway.
My microwave oven is slowly dying. All I can use it for now is to heat water to make coffee.
I need to buy a new microwave oven.
The desert rain frog fills my dreams:
It won't go away.
It's my understanding that we are all filled, or soon will be filled with man made nanoparticles. This upsets me and I don't understand why it has to be. I already live in one of the most polluted, smoggy cities in the country, why must I be filled with nanoparticles as well. This certainly can't be very healthy.
The giant agricultural company Monsanto wants us all to eat genetically altered food that will turn us into the walking dead (that's how it all started, you know).
I live in an area of Los Angeles where on any given night more than 4,000 homeless people, many of them mental ill, or suffer from substance abuse problems, don't have a place to sleep at night. Some of the Missions down here that are designed to help the homeless now charge them rent to stay inside at night. It's hard to come up with rent money when you're homeless and unemployed. The temperature at night now averages around 48 degrees.
The police patrol the area ubiquitously, like lice on a Bactrian camel.
Society shuns these people although it helped to create them. Because of policies initiated in Washington D.C. the country slid into a full blown recession, creating conditions that make becoming homeless easier than it ever had been, then politicians in the very same Congress that started this mess and allowed it to happen call us (as I include myself) lazy and shiftless and would deny us welfare payments to help us get back on our feet, all the while giving away billions of dollars in oil and gas subsides. Banks get billions in subsides too. Other industries as well.
Whose the real plague on society?
We no longer live in democracy.
We live in a Corporatocracy.
Republicans rig House elections by gerrymandering. Republicans in states like Pennsylvania are trying to rig the general elections so that even if the Democratic candidate wins the majority of popular votes, the Republican candidate will still get the most electoral votes.
We need to do away with the Electoral College. It is time.
Today the sequestration has launched in a misguided effort to reduce government spending and the deficit by 85 billion dollars this year, even though the deficit is down 50 percent as a share of gross domestic product just since President Bush's fiscal year 2009 deficit and is falling at the fastest rate since the end of World War II:
Bloomberg News commissioned a survey asking Americans whether they believed the budget deficit was growing or shrinking, just six percent answered the question correctly. Ninety-four percent had no clue. And 62 percent actually thought it was getting bigger.
If the deficit fell any faster we'd go into a recession... another recession.
In our still recovering economy we need to increase spending as a stimulus measure, not decrease spending which will depress the economy. Three year old children know this yet the Obama administration allows the Republicans to frame the debate and does whatever the Republicans says the real problem is. I don't know why.
The Obama administration does not tell the American people that the deficit is shrinking when they should be shouting it from the roof of the White House.
As we have learned the sequestration will harm the country in many, many ways, all needlessly.
Because of lower levels of funding demanded by the sequestration the nation faces greater risks of wild fires and pest infestation. There will be nation wide food shortages. There will be less services for the mentally ill, homeless, and substance addicted who live here on the streets of Skid Row. 600,000 women and children may be thrown off the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women & Infants. 7,400 fewer patients could get HIV medications. Many will die due to sequestration. No Head Start for 70,000, no child care for 30,000 children. Soldiers may be sent into combat situations in Afghanistan without the proper training... on and on.
The Republicans keep trying to blame the President for the sequestration, even though they all voted for it. The sequestration is a response to the House Republicans holding the nation's debt ceiling hostage. That's it. End of story. The Republicans are responsible for this.
And the Republicans could have ended it if they had wished, but they didn't wish to.
Anyone who did this to their own country should be called what they are... traitors. They are destroying the country from within, which is the only way this country can be destroyed.
My country is still at war in Afghanistan. I don't know why. Our soldiers are still being maimed and killed there. I don't know why. To keep military and private contractors happy, I suppose.
I keep hearing these ads on the radio trying to entice our young people into joining the National Guard so they can serve their communities by putting out wild fires, and such. They don't seem to mention Afghanistan, or that once you sign up, baammm! Like a slingshot you'll be sent over there, or that if you're a woman you'll have a one in four chance of being raped by your fellow soldiers. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/us/female-veterans-face-limbo-in-lives-on-the-street.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130228&_r=0 )
I swear to the God that does not exist that if I had a child who was thinking about joining the military service I'd chain them up in the basement for the duration rather than let them throw their life away. Unpatriotic? The war itself is unpatriotic. The United States doesn't think enough of the war to initiate a draft.
If you want to help your community and put out fires... join the Fire Department.
Unexpected meteors are exploding in the sky's above us, and asteroids are whizzing by our planet too close for comfort.
A comet is expected to slam into Mars next year.
Five billion years from now as our Sun dies, it will turn into a Red Giant, expand and engulf the Earth. This will really be inconvenient.
And as if we didn't have enough to worry about already... the universe may be unstable.
God damn it!
Last year as you know we may have finally discovered the Higgs Boson, sometimes called the God Particle, as it is responsible for giving everything mass, which is very important to have. Without mass, you ain't got no body.
Here's the post I wrote about it back then:
Well that discovery has allowed scientists to make calculations that weren't previously possible. And what some have discovered is well... a little unsettling.
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said Feb. 18th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
From the article in LiveScience by Clara Moskowitz:
First of all, the Higgs boson is related to the Higgs field, an energy field pervading space that is thought to imbue many particles with mass. Just as swimmers get wet moving through a swimming pool, the thinking goes, particles get mass moving through the Higgs field.
The Higgs field has a certain potential energy related to the way it interacts with itself. Just as a field of grass has hills and valleys — maximums and minimums — the Higgs field can have potential energy minimums and maximums, as well, explained Tim Barklow, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.
But if the universe's Higgs field tunneled to a new potential energy minimum, it could become much stronger, causing the universe's particles to gain mass. Any change in the mass of fundamental particles like the proton and electron would have drastic repercussions. Atoms, planets, stars and galaxies would no longer hold together as they do now if their fundamental constituents were altered.
The Higgs field has a certain potential energy related to the way it interacts with itself. Just as a field of grass has hills and valleys — maximums and minimums — the Higgs field can have potential energy minimums and maximums, as well, explained Tim Barklow, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.
But if the universe's Higgs field tunneled to a new potential energy minimum, it could become much stronger, causing the universe's particles to gain mass. Any change in the mass of fundamental particles like the proton and electron would have drastic repercussions. Atoms, planets, stars and galaxies would no longer hold together as they do now if their fundamental constituents were altered.
Geeez, this is all I freaking need!
The likelihood of whether or not this eventuality comes to pass depends on a number of properties, including the mass of the Higgs boson. That wasn't known until just recently, when the Large Hadron Collider produced a never-before-seen particle that looks to be the Higgs. This particle's mass is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton.
The vacuum instability of the universe also depends on the mass of the top quark, a relative of the ingredients of the protons and neutrons that make up all the atoms in the universe.
Both the Higgs mass and the top quark mass turn out to be just what's needed to create a fundamental instability in the Higgs field, and therefore to doom our universe.
The vacuum instability of the universe also depends on the mass of the top quark, a relative of the ingredients of the protons and neutrons that make up all the atoms in the universe.
Both the Higgs mass and the top quark mass turn out to be just what's needed to create a fundamental instability in the Higgs field, and therefore to doom our universe.
Well if that don't beat all!
There's also the possibility that a new universe will manifest itself within our universe at some point and begin to expand, and we all know what that means... well it can't mean anything good, that's for sure.
Man, I've got to find my Depression Group.
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