New Discovery Advances Particle Theory

Leading physicists, today, observed two new sub-atomic particles for the first time, thereby bringing scientists one step (or is it two steps?) closer to developing a unified theory of everything. The discovery sheds new light on the subjects of dark matter and dark energy, and raises the probability that intelligent life will one day be found somewhere in the known universe.

Dr. Algernon Sensen Brenner, acting as spokesperson for the privately-funded research group Challengers of Consensus Reality, suggested that identification of the elementary particles, dubbed morons and intellectons, could revolutionize mankind’s understanding of particle theory and quantum mechanics.

Researchers speculated that morons might actually be the dark matter and dark energy—both of which exist in theory—long sought after by physicists, but this couldn't be immediately confirmed. They agreed that more research is needed.

Dr. Brenner affirmed that the CCR group’s discovery of morons and intellectons followed closely on the heels of its discovery, a week ago, of a larger particle, called a percepton. “Perceptons occur spontaneously,“ he said, “whenever an intellecton collides with a cluster of morons. These collisions occur less frequently than one would expect, even though morons are prevalent throughout the multiverse.”

In explaining the phenomenon, Dr. Brenner stated that negatively charged morons group together in clusters, and that they outnumber positively charged intellectons ten-to-one. They make elusive targets for intellectons because they travel faster than light speed, despite being incredibly dense. “The only way a collision between an intellecton and a cluster of morons can occur,” Dr. Brenner said, “is if they meet head-on.”

To put the speed of morons in perspective, imagine a race from the sun to Earth. If the race were to begin right now, morons crossed the finish line six minutes ago, tachyons arrived four minute later, and light will arrive in eight minutes.

No wonder intellectons have such a tough time connecting.

Investment Insanity

Today’s money market speculators make the moneychangers of old look like righteous citizens. The same can be said for other speculators, as well, including energy traders and those who dabble in real estate, stock markets, commodities, and precious metals. Speculation, a primary driver of inflation, guarantees that everyone ends up paying more for everything.

When markets shift from favoring buyers (low demand = low prices) to favoring sellers (high demand = high prices), speculators smell opportunity. Their rush to cash in introduces a false dynamic into the marketplace, distorting something’s value out of all proportion to what it’s actually worth.

Throughout the 1970’s, Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother bought up vast quantities of silver, eventually cornering the silver market. Their actions drove silver prices from less than $5 an ounce to over $54 an ounce before the market collapsed in March of 1980, sending prices plummeting into the $10 range. The Hunts lost money (proving that even the greediest speculators sometimes fail), as did many other speculators, but there were some winners, too.

The lessons to be learned, here, are that speculating is risky business, and that for every winner there must be one or more losers. Winning is a relative term having approximately the same relationship to losing as hot has to cold.

The problem with speculating is that it creates nothing, adds nothing to the economy. It doesn’t create wealth, it only manipulates wealth by taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. It’s a game rich people play in order to take money away from people who merely aspire to be rich.

The Savings & Loan scandal of the ‘80’s, the Enron energy scandal of the ‘90’s, and the dotcom bust on the Millennium threshold all came about because people played fast and loose with their ethics. But then, greed always trumps good sense, doesn’t it?

Now, there’s another market crisis looming on the horizon. For twenty years real estate values have responded to market forces in the same way that gasoline responds to an open flame. Eventually, though, there’ll be a market correction, and the real estate inferno will burn itself out.

I think that day is closer at hand than anyone wants to admit.

Things that go "BOOM"!

The Fourth of July celebration is a great American tradition in which patriotic Americans blow their fingers off, set fire to their neighbors’ houses, drink themselves stupid (or stupider), and terrorize their pets. This year’s July Fourth celebration was exceptional, setting several fireworks display milestones.

NASA, a first-time participant, won first place in two categories with a rocket dubbed Discovery, which easily captured blue ribbons for Biggest Rocket and Most Spectacular Rocket Launch.

North Korea, also a first-time participant, took first place in the category Most Impressive Explosion with its Taepodong-2 missile, and won honorable mention for most entries in the Short Range and Medium Range contests, but the smaller rockets otherwise generally failed to impress because so many of them fizzled.

Once again, Fort Vancouver won top honors for Largest Fireworks Display West of the Mississippi, and Sellwood was runner-up in a new category appropriately dubbed Neighborhood that Sounds Most Like a War Zone.

As usual, it was the organized fireworks displays that attracted the largest nighttime crowds. The ultra-short range, sub-miniature multiple-warhead rockets equipped with symmetrical air burst technology were crowd pleasers, never failing to elicit the properly respectful “oohs” and “ahhhs” from reverential attendees – especially during times of rapid deployment.

Unfortunately, the Fourth of July celebration, as we know it, may be about to undergo a radical transformation. Thanks to ineptitude and malfeasance in high places, Americans might soon be forced to abandon their holiday tribute to independence and freedom and, instead, spend their time fighting to defend these things they once took for granted.

Technology Pros and Cons

Does technology solve problems, or does it create them? The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle, though probably a smidgen closer to the creative end of whatever equation one uses to determine the problem solution/problem creation ratio of applied technology.

No one can argue that technology doesn’t solve problems. We see the positive aspects of technology all around us, working hard to extend life, to increase productivity, to improve on old technology, to create new products and new technologies, and to simplify our existence by bringing a myriad of labor saving devices to consumer markets.

What few people seem to see—or even think about—is the dark side of technology, the side with unintended consequences that diminish positive gains. An old maxim states that everything has a price, and it applies as much to technology as to anything else.

Medical technology cures diseases and saves lives. It also causes drug resistant strains of bacteria and virus mutations, abets global overpopulation, and contributes to rising healthcare costs.

Better living through chemistry adds to air and water pollution and helps generate waste material for landfills.

The internal combustion engine made possible relatively cheap, convenient personal transportation systems. It also gave us environmental pollution, global climate change, strip malls, suburban sprawl and a dependency most people find hard to break.

Production technology, with its emphasis on mechanization and automation, speeds production processes, but at the same time displaces human workers who then suffer the effects of unemployment, poverty, homelessness and increasing crime.

Despite its potential to produce time-and-labor saving benefits to ease mankind’s burden, technology has, in many ways, delivered the opposite. Many people working in our high-tech society find themselves working harder than ever, with less available leisure time.

Technology—and the science behind it—still offers the best hope for human advancement, providing humans are willing to abandon the arrogant mindset of “we do it because we can” and adopt a wiser, more responsible mindset that says, “We do it because we must.”

Congressional Pay Raises Trump Stagnant Minimum Wage

In each of the following years, Congressmen gave themselves a pay raise:

1998 – $3100

2000 – $4600

2001 – $3800

2002 – $4900

2003 – $4700

2004 – $3400

2005 – $3100

2006 – $3300

The same Congressmen who have had no problem taking an automatic pay increase every year for seven consecutive years have also had no problem in blocking an increase in the minimum wage – for nine years running. Shameless hypocrites!

Purchasing power of the federal minimum wage, currently $5.15 an hour, is the lowest it’s been in more than half a century. Shameful, that people who work for a living in the world’s richest country can’t make a living.

Critics of a higher minimum wage, mostly well-heeled Republicans and near-sighted Libertarians, argue that if someone isn’t satisfied with a low-paying job, they need only go get a better one. Unfortunately, it’s not always quite that simple. Hidden factors come into play.

These same critics also argue that raising the minimum wage would result in the loss of many minimum-wage jobs. It’s a specious argument. If people lost their jobs solely on the basis of pay increases, wouldn’t there be an increasing number of unemployed Congressmen? Of corporate CEOs? Of people at all levels of corporate and government hierarchy?

People of privilege—and here I’m talking about people who had the good fortune to have loving, nurturing, educated parents, good role models, unfettered access to education, an unlimited number of opportunities, and more than a few lucky breaks—have no true understanding of what it means to be marginalized.

They don’t understand (or, if they do, they don’t acknowledge) how difficult it can be for someone who was born into a cycle of poverty to escape that poverty. Those who lack job skills and financial resources, and have no way of acquiring either, tend to remain mired in poverty. For them, poverty is a prison without exits. All too often, poverty is an inherited condition that passes from one generation to the next.

Often, minimum wage jobs come without healthcare benefits, meaning that Public Health and Human Services agencies often subsidize healthcare for minimum-wage earners, which is tantamount to taxpayers subsidizing the minimum-wage-paying employer’s bottom line. The same can be said for food and housing programs, too.

Lacking discretionary income, wage slaves at the low end of the economic ladder find that ordinary life events have disastrous consequences. A car breakdown, work missed because of illness or injury, or any number of other unplanned expenses or work interruptions can have catastrophic repercussions, further disenfranchising the already disenfranchised.

Taking time off work to look for a better-paying job is rarely an option. When income is already stretched to the limits and ends still don’t meet, every missed work hour is missed income, the effects of which usually take weeks – if not months – to overcome. You can’t possibly get ahead if you can’t get caught up.

Below-poverty wages invite increased crime and violence, compound problems associated with illicit drugs, contribute to slumification and neighborhood blight, add to the ranks of the homeless, and drive up costs of healthcare and other social services.

Full-time workers and part-time workers who would otherwise be available for full-time work deserve better than starvation wages. They deserve the dignity of a living wage.

The U.S., once a bastion of democratic principles, economic opportunities, social progress and capitalist ideals, has systematically stacked the deck in favor of the wealthy, the politically powerful. In its quest for global dominance, America has ceded the moral high ground, surrendered its ethics, forfeited its integrity and sacrificed the respect of its allies – all in service to its new highest ideal, greed.

America can – and must – do better in the way it treats the least of its citizens. It starts with a minimum wage sufficiently high enough to lift minimum-wage employees out of poverty. In a land of plenty there is enough to go around.

When the tides of fortune come rushing in, they should lift all the boats in the harbor, not just the yachts.

Capitalism vs. Communism

Comparing democracy to communism is a lot like comparing apples to rutabagas. Democracy is a form of government and communism is an economic system. One does not equate to the other. A true democracy could, in fact, govern over a communist economy if that’s what a majority of the citizens wanted.

Capitalism and communism are comparable in that each is an economic system that provides a means for the production, distribution and exchange of goods and services. The only significant differences involve ownership, management ability and effectiveness. The goals—if not always the results—of each are much the same.

Under capitalism, the means of production, distribution and exchange are privately owned for the sake of private profits. Individuals (sole proprietors), partnerships, joint ventures, investor-owned corporations and employee-owned companies are just a few of the entities that qualify as privately owned businesses.

In the capitalist business model, government regulates and taxes businesses until such time that the largest, wealthiest, most powerful corporations seize control of the government. Then, everything the government does is for the betterment of the corporations, at the expense of ordinary citizens. Sort of like – no, exactly like – what’s going on in the U.S., today.

Capitalist business managers are very good at managing businesses, but as government leaders, they really suck.

The communist business model differs in that government owns – on behalf of the people (yeah, right!) – all of the businesses. This arrangement, of course, reveals communism’s greatest weakness. Politicians can barely run a government; as business managers, they really suck.

A deeper analysis of the two systems turns up more similarities than dissimilarities. Each system extracts, imports or co-opts natural resources, converts those resources into consumable goods or services, and provides a means to market those goods and services to consumers.

In the final analysis, the only real difference is one of ownership. Or, is it just one of semantics?

Business owns the government! Government owns the business! What the hell’s the difference? The results are always the same. In the end, scum always forms at the top. And that really sucks.

Space Travel

In order to travel into outer space one must have a worthy vehicle suited to the purpose. Whether you call it a space ship, a rocket ship, a star ship, a flying saucer or a Borg hypercube, it must sustain a habitable environment and have a means of propulsion.

And so it is when venturing into inner space, except that the requisite vehicle is entirely different. Inner space travel requires mind-altering substances, typically derived from psychotropic plants and fungi, such as psilocybin, amanita muscaria, datura, salvia divinorum, mescaline, peyote, marijuana, harmaline, MDMA, DMT, LSD, and ayahuasca, among others. Sensory deprivation also accomplishes similar results.

Other worlds and other dimensions exist outside the range of our normal perceptions. Telescopes and microscopes reveal this to be true by bringing those distant worlds into focus. Now, science is on the threshold of making it possible for us to visit those worlds. And in the meantime, the shamans of our world journey inward in search of knowledge and wisdom, just as they have done for thousands of years.

Explorations into inner space may, in fact, lead one closer to the core of Universal Mind, perhaps to the very centers of Multiversal Intelligence and Cosmic Consciousness. Think of these things collectively as the CIA (Cosmic Intelligence Access), whose primary function (unlike its Earth-bound namesake) is not to gather intelligence but to disseminate it.

For sure, if venturing into outer space were as affordable and as accessible to the masses as are hallucinogenic drugs and the ventures into inner space they make possible, you can bet that space travel—outer space travel—would be illegal, too.

The powers that be are always threatened by changes in the status quo.