Rows of Houses

When I was growing up just outside of Alexandria, VA, we lived in a community called Wellington Heights where the houses were close to each other but not that close...  still, I remember my father saying that he did not want to live in a community where he could reached out the bedroom window and touch the house next door.  Now, this was an exaggeration but I have driven through communities where this is the norm...  like the photo on the left...  and most of these houses are fairly large, there is precious little room to go outside and be alone unless you construct a privacy fence in between the houses on your left and right as well as the one behind you...  obviously there is a road in front of you otherwise you would have to be air-dropped onto your property.

Some say this is still a good example of THE AMERICAN DREAM and expected by those who want to live in this type of environment...  I do not.  And, this is why I decided to remain in the South and earn less money than I could by moving up North, so that I could have a little elbow room wherever I wanted to live.  I have always had at least an acre of land surrounding my house in a variety of configurations some of which were appealing while others were not.

However, if you like this type of CLOSENESS, then this is what you should try and find yourself and even down here in the South you can find communities where houses and homes are placed side by side with space in between where only one person can walk at a time.  And the property values are so high because many people want to live like that...   you might as well stay in the city and pay rent for an apartment than have to maintain a house and cannot go get your mail in your underwear without a neighbor calling the police and reporting you for indecent exposure.

It's All Good

 There are one or two, maybe three phrases that I did not hear until I moved over to TN and a couple of them really frost my tail pipes...

I don't care to do that

Bless her little heart

It's all good

The first one really means I don't mind doing that...  and, the second one is said when you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt for being stupid...  and the third one is said, when you really don't give a shit about being pissed off anymore.

As long as I might live, I cannot ever imagine that I will ever stopped getting pissed off at something or someone...  it is just in my nature...  including getting pissed off at myself...  I mean, I can't really bitch about anyone or anything unless I am willing to bitch at myself...

AND...  it will NEVER BE frigging ALL GOOD...  that shit just ain't possible.

Somewhat Interesting

Yesterday, I had my monthly IVIG treatment and part of my premeds is taking steroids which keep me from sleeping unless I take Benadryl which I always do and did last night and had no problems falling to sleep but unfortunately and unlike previous times, I woke up after 4-5 hours of sleep and just knew that my sleeping time was over.  That took place about 2:30 am this morning, give or take, and I have been screwing around on the internet, cleaning up files, and searching out free online storage because of a recent corrupt flash drive that has or had all my recent files...  PISSER...  but, what can you do?

Well, I refuse to pay for online storage and that attitude might be a death wish for me regarding future lost files...  but, I also know that I can send myself an email with attachments and use that email service as storage.  But, emails are easily hacked.  So, I have looked in DROPBOX which offers 2 Gigs for free and let CHROME select and save my very complicated password...

Actually, I had gotten DROPBOX right after it first came out (for some reason) and I was given 6 Gigs of free storage so they must have reduced the storage amounts over the years.  Mainly, I was storing photos there and I am not sure if I really need to keep too many of them, so I will replace them with other documents that I want/need to save for a variety of reasons.

I did not grow up with the INTERNET or the WWW and do not know it like someone who is 25-30 let's say...  but, I am learning, even though my learning curve is slow.

Interestingly, my mother FORCED ME like most mothers have a fancy of doing, to take a typing course in summer school...  Her thoughts were that I will always need typing and the idle mind is the devil's workshop...  At 73 years of age, that typing course was the single most important course that I ever took in my entire life so far...  THANKS MOM...

Using CRISPR

Can we reprogram existing life at will?

To synthetic biologists, the answer is yes. The central code for biology is simple. DNA letters, in groups of three, are translated into amino acids—Lego blocks that make proteins. Proteins build our bodies, regulate our metabolism, and allow us to function as living beings. Designing custom proteins often means you can redesign small aspects of life—for example, getting a bacteria to pump out life-saving drugs like insulin.

All life on Earth follows this rule: a combination of 64 DNA triplet codes, or “codons,” are translated into 20 amino acids.

But wait. The math doesn’t add up. Why wouldn’t 64 dedicated codons make 64 amino acids? The reason is redundancy. Life evolved so that multiple codons often make the same amino acid.

So what if we tap into those redundant “extra” codons of all living beings, and instead insert our own code?

A team at the University of Cambridge recently did just that. In a technological tour de force, they used CRISPR to replace over 18,000 codons with synthetic amino acids that don’t exist anywhere in the natural world. The result is a bacteria that’s virtually resistant to all viral infections—because it lacks the normal protein “door handles” that viruses need to infect the cell.

But that’s just the beginning of engineering life’s superpowers. Until now, scientists have only been able to slip one designer amino acid into a living organism. The new work opens the door to hacking multiple existing codons at once, copyediting at least three synthetic amino acids at the same time. And when it’s 3 out of 20, that’s enough to fundamentally rewrite life as it exists on Earth.

We’ve long thought that “liberating a subset of…codons for reassignment could improve the robustness and versatility of genetic-code expansion technology,” wrote Drs. Delilah Jewel and Abhishek Chatterjee at Boston College, who were not involved in the study. “This work elegantly transforms that dream into a reality.”  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

K I S S Theory

KISS...

Keep

It

Simple

Stupid

What I have found over my lifetime is that:

• if something is simple describe it with complex words and concepts
• If something is complex describe it with simple words and concepts

and...  when you think about it, that is exactly what has been or is going on right now in both your professional and personal lives.  Anyone in a leadership role will use these principles all the time whether or not they are even conscious that they are using them at all...  especially people of faith.

This actually started out as a marketing concept by some clever Harvard graduate but it is nothing more than a spin of Occam's Razor...

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose an event has two possible explanations. The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation....

Or, another way to say it is KISS...

It seems that we are creatures of habit and our habit is to look at life simplistically because doing so any other way causes our brain to hurt after a bit of time.

C H O I C E

I remember someone telling me that another person told them that
whatever it was that they did was done because this other person made them do it...

My first blush reaction and comment to this statement was THAT'S BULLSHIT FRED...

Of course, Fred was not his real name....  at least, not at the time.

NO ONE MAKES US DO ANYTHING...  not even if they have a loaded firearm pointed at our heads...  We make the choice to respond/react or do nothing.  

But, if we did not do that, we would have been killed is the rebuttal, and yes that is true, but we all die eventually.  If we die, we will miss out on all sorts of things...  and, yes, that is true too.  But, we did not have the choice of whether to be born or not either...  and, had we had that choice, we may have decided not to be born...

We chose to be active

We choose to be lazy

We choose to overeat

We choose to drink alcohol

We choose to drive our cars fast

We choose to violate the law

We choose to have an extramarital affair

We choose to pay our taxes

We choose to be liberal

We choose to adversely react to our whiteness or blackness

AND...  to a certain extent, we choose when and how we want to die.

Not all choices that we make are good one and not all of them are bad ones either...  and, from each choice we should learn a lesson otherwise we remain emotionally, mentally, and physically stagnant.  

AND...  many of us make the choice to remain stagnant rather than try to convince ourselves that we should change...  No one can force us to change, they can only create the environment that allows us to change on our own.

Religion and Brains

Religion and neurology often seem at odds; an extension of the questionable chasm separating spirituality and science. Indeed, in attempting to explain religious faith, neuroscientists have often sought to highlight subtle differences in brain structure that might confirm a deficiency here or reduction there.

A new, preregistered study out of the Netherlands, published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, sought to test prominent hypotheses in the literature relating brain structure to religious experience by way of a high-powered (i.e., having a large sample size), methodologically robust study on religiosity and structural brain differences.

The need for this, according to the authors, stems from myriad methodological inconsistencies in previous research, including small sample sizes, improperly validated testing tasks, and conceptual confusion regarding the structures being measured.

Thus, while the authors readily admit that brain connectivity measures may provide a more nuanced and accurate picture of the brain-religion relation, their primary aim was to “establish the (absence of the) relation between religiosity and structural brain differences at a level of methodological and statistical rigor that we hope will set a new standard for future studies.”

In other words: to dispel notions of the most basic and simplistic relations between brain structure and religious experience, paving the way for more sophisticated approaches.

Three theories were put to test.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

American Insanity

Where to begin?

1. Prices are starting to creep up
2. Immigration is highest its ever been
3. Taxes are increasing
4. National Debt is increasing 
5. Military is decreasing
6. Police are retiring or quitting
7. Crime in cities is increasing
8. Employers cannot fill jobs
9. Educators say whites are bad
10. Conservative voice being censored
11. Covid leaked from a lab in China
12. Quality of life decreasing
13. Abortion rates increasing
14. Divorces are increasing
15. Americans lead the world in the purchase of illegal drugs
16. Police Departments are being defunded
17. WOKENESS is illogically stupid
18. Boys want to be girls
19. USA is no longer a role model/leader
20. USA is DIVIDED permanently

We should apologize for being Americans

We should apologize for being White

We should apologize for being Wealthy

We should apologize for being Successful

We should apologize for being White Males

We should apologize for being Religious

We should apologize for having Freedoms

We should apologize for our Constitution

We should apologize for being Conservative

We should apologize for everything the other side does not like

Write WHITE Write

 

So...  here I am...  a white man...  in a white man's land...  and, the black man is telling me that I am BAD and that all my values are wrong and oppressive...  and that only he, the black man, deserves to be in control of America...

AND...  I wonder who the hell are you...  to tell me that???  How dare you compare me to those other white people that you HATE...  How dare you tell me that I am oppressive and that all my white values are wrong...  just because GOD wanted you to be black...

The fact that I am white and you are black has nothing to do with the fact that we are both AMERICANS and are living under the control of those who are wealthy and neither you nor I are to blame for the fact that most of the millionaires and billionaires in this country are white...  it is because of our quality of life desires that these people are wealthy.  If we had not purchased what they were selling, they would not be wealthy...  so, we should hold ourselves accountable not them.

I am 73 years of age...  Caucasian...  lower middle class...  well educated...  a Vietnam Veteran... and retired after working 45 years under the supervisions of intellectual assholes who cared more about power than progress.  I live in the South because it is cheaper to live here, and the weather is moderate.  I do not believe in wars, but I believe in the first and second amendments, and in a females RIGHT TO CHOOSE.  I think marijuana should be Federally legalized and I think all States should embrace lotteries.  I believe slavery was more horrific than what we did to Native Americans but that is the past with which we must live...  It is what made us who we are today...  and, while there are still bad apples in the basket, they are getting harder and harder to find.

We should be teaching UNITY in our schools, not division and we should be teaching young minds to reach out and become smarter and more intellectual than we were or are right now. We should be against tyranny, Marxism, Communism, and Socialism and for a free market enterprise system that creates economic growth but not wealth or income disparities for Americans.  We should be in favor of protecting mother earth but our movements in that direction should be slow, consistent, and methodical and should not follow political party lines to pacify financial donors.

We should have a strong military and should have the best educational system in the world from K-PhD, and if we are not smart enough to cause that to happen then no one should be considered a true doctor of education.

We should be free of color as that is enormously counterproductive and we should allow unfettered access of entry into this country...  If they want to come here they should be allowed.  But, they should learn to speak ENGLISH.  And, all operating manuals should be in ENGLISH as well.  However, if an American want to open a foreign store in the USA where only a certain language is spoken, then that person should be allowed to do this.  Similarly, if a foreign person wants to start a foreign language Television Station or Cable Channel where only a specific language is spoken, then they should be allowed to do this as well.

THIS ALLOWED AND ENCOURAGED DIVERSITY IS WHAT MAKES THIS COUNTRY GREAT...

Parallel Universes

Our universe is unimaginably big. Hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of galaxies spin through space, each containing billions or trillions of stars. Some researchers studying models of the universe speculate that the universe's diameter could be 7 billion light-years across. Others think it could be infinite.

But is it all that's out there? Science fiction loves the idea of a parallel universe, and the thought that we might be living just one of an infinite number of possible lives. Multiverses aren't reserved for "Star Trek," "Spiderman" and "Doctor Who," though. Real scientific theory explores, and in some cases supports, the case for universes outside, parallel to, or distant from but mirroring our own.

Multiverses and parallel worlds are often argued in the context of other major scientific concepts like the Big Bang, string theory and quantum mechanics.

Around 13.7 billion years ago, everything we know of was an infinitesimal singularity. Then, according to the Big Bang theory, it burst into action, inflating faster than the speed of light in all directions for a tiny fraction of a second. Before 10^-32 seconds had passed, the universe had exploded outward to 10^26 times its original size in a process called cosmic inflation. 

And that's all before the actual expansion of matter that we usually think of as the Big Bang itself, which was a consequence of all this inflation: As the inflation slowed, a flood of matter and radiation appeared, creating the classic Big Bang fireball, and began to form the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies that populate the vastness of space that surrounds us.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE,,,

Taking Breaks

In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning.

The researchers found that during rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions, suggesting rest strengthened memories.

“Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in Cell Reports.

“Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke.”

The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. Dr. Cohen’s team used a highly sensitive scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner’s long, cone-shaped cap.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Sunday Sermon

Sermons do not always fall into the category of a religious talk based upon some passage from the Bible...  sermons can also be nothing but a lecture on a variety of topics with the understanding that lecturing is not criticizing someone or something but more like an opinion based upon whatever:  knowledge, fact, experience.

My lecture today is on STUPIDITY or what one might refer to as the absence of COMMON SENSE...  however, I have discovered over the years that common sense is relative to the individual, the situation, and the location.  Therefore, one could easily say that what is common sense to one is stupidity to another...  even though that statement does not make that much sense either when reflected upon intellectually.

People who like to drive fast in vehicles, just like I used to do, in my opinion are relatively STUPID creatures for a variety of reasons:

1. they are burning more gas than they need to
2. they are causing more unconscious internal stress
3. they are spending more money on gasoline
4. they are endangering themselves and their passengers
5. they are setting bad examples to other drivers
6. they are endangering other motorists
7. they are increasing health care costs if injured
8. they are using valuable medical resources if injured

What is more or less funny and really stupid is when these motorists need to drive fast in towns with stop lights because they may zoom past me but then at the stop light we are together again...  and, I have burned far less fuel.

But, the speeders are not the real issue here as are the tailgaters...  that is to say those that drive right up to your car with only a foot or two in between both vehicles.  When this happens, I tend to reduce my speed and piss the other driver off even more...  odds are that if he does not pull out a firearm and try to shoot my ass, he slams his car into a lower gear and power steers around me, flipping me off in the process.

However, if we are in the city limits somewhere, I catch up to him again at the traffic light and usually look over at him or her and smile.

As I mention at the outset, STUPIDITY is relative and I have discovered that my actions are just as stupid as their actions.

Relax and Renew

 

Sleepy Joe

 

Back Porch Written Reflections

Americans are different from the rest of the world because we live in a Democratic Society with a Democratic Republic form of governments that values FREEDOMS above all else except for maybe GREED and MONEY.

Many people on the LEFT SIDE of our freedom fence are saying that ALL WHITES are bad, evil, and OPPRESS all other races and ethnic groups, especially BLACKS and that this practice MUST STOP,

Many people on the RIGHT SIDE of our freedom fence are saying that we value of freedom, especially our freedom of speech that allows the LEFT to say whatever it is that they want to say.

These two views are so different that we are tearing ourselves apart because of our DIVISION; and, while that concerns me a little, what concerns me more is that our global enemies will take advantage of that divide.

While there are BAD PLAYERS in America on both sides of our Freedom Fence, we should be more concerned about the following:

1. Our quality of education or the lack thereof
2. The care we give our disabled veterans
3. A growing economy with less than 3% inflation
4. An economy that has close to FULL EMPLOYMENT
5. A strong global military presence
6. An open immigration program
7. Equalizing the salary/wage scales
8. Keeping all taxes as low as possible
9. Reducing to the point of eliminating debt
10. Ending our dependence on illegal drugs
11. Becoming and maintaining energy independence
12. Having politicians everyone can trust again
13. Having leaders everyone can trust again 
14. Having managers everyone can trust again
15. Having supervisors everyone can trust again

Released: Jim Morrison's Writings

FROM THE ROLLING STONE...

At some point before his death in July 1971, Jim Morrison handwrote a list, titled “Plan for Book,” that laid out his thoughts on a collection of his poetry, lyrics, and other work. Now, 50 years after his passing and the release of his last album with the Doors, that blueprint is coming to fruition in what promises to be the most exhaustive collection of his writing to date.

To be published June 8th by HarperCollins, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics promises to be something of a Morrison motherlode. At nearly 600 pages long, the book — compiled with the cooperation of his estate — pulls together most of his previously published work, from song lyrics to poetry (“Horse Latitudes,” “The Celebration of the Lizard”), as well as the entirety of the posthumously published writing collections Wilderness and The American Night.

But roughly half the book consists of previously unpublished material, including unrecorded lyrics, handwritten excerpts from 28 recently discovered notebooks, and 160 photos and drawings (including rarely seen family photos). Among the excerpts from Morrison’s notebooks will be his thoughts on his trial in Miami in 1970 (he was found guilty of indecent exposure and open profanity), as well as what are believed to be Morrison’s final writings — the contents of a Paris notebook from shortly before his death, “reproduced in full reading size,” according to the publisher.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Back Porch Reflections

Good Morning America...

It "B" a rainy day here in East Tennessee this morning and my 3 cats are somewhat irritated that I slept in as long as I did this morning.  However, I am up now, they have been given a treat and fed, at least a little, and I am sitting on our back screen-in porch listening to the rain and the bird...

BEST DAY EVER

The bluebird house I built with old deck boards that I sanded down is the home to a couple of unknown birds, as it seems that the bluebirds I saw visiting decided to live somewhere else.

Yesterday, after mowing the yard and showering, I drove the mile and a half down to Weigle's to purchase 2 large French Vanilla Cappuccino coffees in their largest cup possible that I was planning to drink today...  which I am...  and, I got these drinks as refills, so I only had to pay $.98 which included taxes instead of the original $1.50 each.  I put clear boxing tape around the cup so that it will last longer.

BEST DAY EVER

What is great about living in this area, or at least where I live, is the fact that it is INCREDIBLY QUIET all the time.

This morning, there are NO SOUNDS from:

• unmuffled vehicles
• ambulance/police sirens
• lawn mowers, blowers, weed eaters, chainsaws
• loud music from neighbors
• barking dogs or cows
• yelling and angry neighbors

Once in a while I will see a white tailed rabbit scurrying around looking for whatever it is looking for.  The rabbit is lean and not the little fat bundle of joy that you might see at home as pets or at County Fairs.

My Magnolia trees are at least 30 feet tall and blooming but not as voraciously as I had hoped when I planted them 20 years ago as transplants from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  My rather large deck that surrounds my 26 foot round above ground pool was stained two years ago and is still holding up.

The cool morning air is refreshing and a nice break from the high humidity that we have had this previous week, but according to those weather forecasters who are seldom wrong (lol), our rainy days will be ending today and temps returning to normal...  although, no one really knows what normal is anymore.

IT DON"T GIT NO BETTER THAN THIS...

Critical Race Theory

 FROM THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION...  Part 2 of 2

Principles of the CRT Practice

While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Jim Morrison... the Poet

From the official website of Jim Morrison...

“Nothing else can survive a holocaust, but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting. But so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.” – Jim Morrison

I think the self-interview is the essence of creativity. Asking yourself questions and trying to find answers. The writer is just answering a series of unuttered questions.

I guess I see myself as a conscious artist plugging away from day to day, assimilating information.

I think around the fifth or sixth grade I wrote a poem called “The Pony Express.” That was the first I can remember. It was one of those ballad type poems. I never could get it together, though. I always wanted to write, but I always figured it’d be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like, automatic writing. But it just never happened. I wrote a few poems, of course.

Like, “Horse Latitudes” I wrote when I was in high school. I kept a lot of note books through high school and college and then when I left school for some dumb reason — maybe it was wise — I threw them all away. There’s nothing I can think of I’d rather have in my possession right now than those two or three lost notebooks. I was thinking of being hypnotized or taking sodium pentathol to try to remember, because I wrote in those books night after night. But maybe if I’d never thrown them away, I’d never have written anything original — because they were mainly accumulations of things that I’d read or heard, like quotes from books. I think if I’d never gotten rid of them I’d never been free.

The WOKE Left

 I joined the us military so that I could protect the freedoms of the united states so that the woke mob could operate freely and with prejudice or discrimination...

And, I would do it again if asked or if needed...  because I believe in freedom that much...

In other words:

• If the US wants to become Socialistic...  that's fine
• If the US wants to become Marxist...  that's fine
• If the US wants to destroy competition...  that's fine
• If the US wants make the wealthy pay...  that's fine

What freedom means is that we have the freedom to become whatever it is that we want to become as long as a majority of the people in this country feel that way...  and, that is also the one FLAW associated with any DEMOCRACY and that is the fact that a DEMOCRACY can VOTE itself out of being a DEMOCRACY any time it wants to...

The other issues here are, at least for me, I am 73 years old, and will probably only live another 20 years or so.  I am not going to have anymore children nor will I have any grandchildren...  so whatever the WOKE mob wants to do, will not impact me or my family.

And, I am too old to give a shit about other families or the children of other family or their children...

My only real concern and I actually have most of that financially covered is INFLATION...

All I really have to worry about financially, economically, educationally, philosophically, or militarily is my wife and I...  SO...  if our government turns socialistic, all that means to me is that they will take more money away from the wealthy and redistribute it to the poor or people like me...  

My healthcare services may suffer a little because everyone's healthcare is going to be free so the ERs in the hospitals are going to be SLAMMED all the time and no doubt people will die in the hallways while they wait for attention.

IS YOU WOKE MUTHER???