MORNING
By 8:00AM I’m back from breakfast and the least productive club meeting of all time. We got nothing done, if you exclude looking at the prettier waitresses. Tourists beware, the average age of waitresses in Florida seems to be late thirties. We discussed religion, that’s how humdrum today has been. Interesting point, Agt. M thinks that schools should not be teaching children only the scientific side of evolution. I agree, to the extent that those who want other things taught pay for it themselves. We may go chasing women at the beach later. It’s a perfect winter day.
I opted to stay put and read. I decided to get up to date on what’s new in the robot department. Not much, but I notice the prices of robot components, when adjusted, are climbing far less than the price of human labor. No wonder employers are preferring robots. It looks like one of those legendary vicious circles, where the pay goes down, so only less skilled laborers will do the job. So poorer workmanship takes longer and the product winds up costing even more. But it is not the first time American business has wasted more money than something is worth to get efficient.
MicroSoft has taken that precise idiocy to a new pinnacle. You know why I don’t want to die? I want to live long enough to see that corporation bite the dust. Seeing them bankrupt is on my bucket list. Imagine where the computer world would be today if MicroSoft had not spend thirty years crushing all the good startups. Only MicroSoft would disable the “cancel” button and call it progress. I still have not seen it, but I got ten bucks says Win 10 is another piece of tablet junk.
NOON
Okay. I promised a look at American food, mainly as an eye-opener to any citizens of the world out there who still think America is the place you want to be. There is no place where, at an affordable cost, that you can buy food that is not full of chemicals anywhere left in America. This food is produced on factory farms by massive corporations who are completing a plan put in place forty years ago to completely control the American food supply system.
See this graphic? It is the label from either a cheeseburger or similar sandwich from the convenience store last evening. Sorry if it is blurry, but this is a snapshot. Of course, it has bread, beef, and pickles, but also the following pile of ingredients that you probably didn’t bargain for:
Ferrous sufate Calcium sulfate Calcium propionate
Folic acid Sodium stearoyl laclate Dextrose
HF corn syrup Calcium iodate Sodium erythorbate
Soybean oil Calcium dioxide Carrageenan
Monoglycerides Cornstarch Adipic acid
Diglicerides Soy flour Sorbic acid
Soy fiber Calcium phosphates Carotenal colors
Datem Ammonium sulfate Polysorbate 80
Guar gum FD&C Yellow #5
(Dang, sorry for the hodge-podge above, but anybody who's ever tried to post a text table knows what a pack of idiots the creators of HTML really were. The dolts could not even type, but yuppers, they is programmers, duh-hunk.)
What is Datem? It is an acryonym for Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono-diglycerides, an emulsifier that is derived from , soy, palm, or canola oil. Probably canola, since like the American government subsidizes corn to make it so cheap that farmers won’t grow anything else, the Canadian government backs canola (because the plant ripens fast enough to avoid losing crops to their early frosts). Yeah, now what’s an emulsifier? It’s a substance that prevents oil and water from separating.
There is little question as to whether it continues to do so after you ingest it.
AFTERNOON
There’s a railway between Barstow and Provo? Wait, the route is a different color, which could mean anything with Amtrak. I’ll take the stagecoach. I can’t leave until the last Jimbos bingo show, which is this upcoming Saturday. Why? Because I fancy traveling to new areas on weekends and my first free time is in December. Weekends tend to have things l like, fr’instance Karaoke. It’s that money sitting there on my dresser. That holiday money is sitting there, taunting me, saying, “Go find something, already!”
So I’m looking. All I did was confuse myself again over Lake Worth, Lakeland, Lake City, and Lake Wales. Damn you, Florida, off with your balls. I get lost in one of those downs dern near every trip I make up north. I should spend a weekend up in Winter Haven. It’s only a few hours train ride and they call it Winter Haven on purpose. So nice people like me will visit there, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll wait until the get the sidecar running and decide on that one.
The train fare is normally twice the cost of gasoline on the batbike as a rule of thumb. The train is nearly twice as fast due to bad Florida traffic, but how do you get around up there? It is false that you can get around the USA by train. If you look at the map, you can see places like Wyoming have no passenger service at all. I’d still like to know why the line between Jacksonville and New Orleans is “suspended”. What does that mean, train-wise?
Then there’s the weird Amtrak train site, where you have to tell them the passengers ages before they let you see the departure times. Duh, like maybe the train leaves at a different time if you are under 18? Must be the same programmers as Obamacare. And a last minute cancellation means I’m off to the movies. See you later.
EVENING
Dumb and Dumber To. It’s rapid-fire gags, start to finish. Everybody is twenty years older except the boys. There are no real surprises since the audience is already trained that these guys will muck up everything. The younger women are babes, the plot is predictable, but it keeps you watching. Nothing will go over your head. I’d say it’s worth it.
After, I stopped for a package of organic apples and saw this item. Ezekiel 4:9, I get it, but this angle is new to me—biblical junk food in the health food section. It is selling food based on the diet of this guy living in the desert for two years. I looked at the ingredients and found it was not biblically correct. The original says the bread has another ingredient: the dung that cometh out of man. That’s the twelfth verse, kiddies, you can look it up.
I may have to build my own mouse trap. I can’t find the search criteria to buy the traps, all I get are endless ads for somebody to trap them for me. I used to laugh at this manner of doing business because I saw it thirty years ago in the third world. No matter what you want, all you get is people want to do it for you. That was on the beach in Phuket back when it was paradise. Unsullied by the Club Med crowd. A bungalow was $5 a night. Sigh.
Those were the days, at twenty-something I was one of the oldest people on the beach. The airfare from Seattle was $600 or $700 return. There was electricity from ten to two most days. I am certain that if I had not been to Thailand, I would be far worse off than I could ever be today. True, I'm divorced, but since I married for the right reason, I have no financial regrets. The real Thailand isn't there any more.
ADDENDUM
Continuing to watch several videos concerning abandoning Earth for the cosmos, I was amused by the assumption that complete families would be taken along on the flights. I concur with those who say it complicated the logistics and the children could just be produced at the destination. But those who insist on families are diabolically fanatical about it. Myself, I see little evidence that exceptional parents produce exceptional children.
That last sentence does not apply to country music recording contracts, ha-ha. I’m saying children would be a rather difficult interstellar cargo. And packing all that frozen pizza, well! Besides, it takes a lot of material resources to raise children, although I can name at least two parents who strove to prove otherwise. I further don’t like the way all this research turns a blind eye to human greed.
Even if greed were evenly distributed, there are still far more stupid people than any other group. Combine greed and stupidity and what have you got? Besides Maryland, I mean. I’m saying the worst humans are those who, if they can’t have something, will prevent you from getting it. Oh no, Maryland again. They will destroy out of spite. And there’s no keeping a 15 mile long space ship a secret.
I was also reading to see if the “age of the universe” bunch have made any progress. The answer is no, they have not. Let me explain. The Big Bang theory is a result of calculations, some of which mathematically reverse the red-shift of the stars. This is the Doppler effect of objects rushing away from the viewer causing wavelengths of light seem longer, that is, shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Yeah, I know this stuff, but I’m no expert, and don’t claim to be.
Author’s note: this works on spectrography. Elements burn with characteristic colors which for a characteristic pattern. The same applies to stars, that is, a given star burns at certain colors only, and those colors have wavelengths that form bands on a spectrograph. Rapidly moving sources cause these bands to shift slightly from what they are when stationary. QED.
The basis of the concept is that one can calculate back to a beginning point, a big bang. There are several things wrong with this theory, now listen up because it takes a lot of reading to learn this anywhere else. One is that the furthest objects are still gaining speed, not slowing down as one expects from a long-ago explosion. Take the analogy of a grenade explosion. At first, the fragments speed up, but eventually the force is spent and the fragments slow down and stop.
That means if the pieces are still speeding up, the explosion just took place not that long ago, meaning the universe is young. But the Hubble space telescope has discovered stars that are very old. The rate at which stars “burn” is one of the most accurate measurements ever made. And some of the these stars, discovered starting 1994, appear older than the universe. You can’t have it both ways. Mankind needs a new genius to reconcile this paradox, because Newton and Einstein alone cannot.
Author’s note: for you budding physicists/astronomers, the basis of the problem is called the Hubble constant, the figure used to predict the rate at which the universe is expanding. If you research it, don’t confuse the two Hubbles. One is the astronomer, the other is the telescope.
My own conclusion? I feel there is some undiscovered element in gravity that slows light waves more than predicted, giving an inaccurate reading of the speed of recession. Gravity is still the unknown out there, but sooner or later, somebody will find the unifying factor. That the universe will eventually collapse and start over again, as it always has.
What’s more, mankind will learn, again and again, that it has existed before, many a time. To escape the certain destruction of the universe into itself, man must eventually become a spiritual being. Only spirits can survive the eternal cycle, but the price of survival is the loss of ability to physically communicate with the next wave. Put another way, man becomes his own Gods.
But that’s just me talkin’.
Today’s Togla Treat
Visit Philadelphia - it's culturally enriched.
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