A bit of science fiction

After reading obsessively about the end of our planet because of the current Presidential campaign I thought I would talk about something more realistic, positive, and hopeful.

So apparently according to various sources there is a large mega structure being built around star KIC 8462852. First of all, how many of us can actually pull up the star charts and actually point this out? Well for the rest of us, we are stuck reading the multitude of articles on this topic trying to figure out what all this means. So here is my guess

An actual civilization has past the stage we are in and actually evolved and began space exploration. Now it takes years just to get to Mars so it probably took them 10,000 years to fully colonize their own solar system. And as they did more and more they were able to improve on space travel so eventually they began interstellar exploration. By comparison we, as “civilized” humans have been around 12,000 years give or take so this alien civilization was around about 25,000 years when they took the first viable interstellar journeys. And at this point they still haven’t found how to travel at light speed, but they have their theories.

The next 25,000 years were spent colonizing the closest solar system to their own. Just like we discovered the idea of the Dyson sphere they also were very aware of the concept and were working on finding a star that was devoid of planets or large asteroid belts that would interfere with the building of one. Yet they also know that  some small planets etc that are uninhabited are needed for the raw materials.  Eventually they calculated that KIC 8462852, which took them only another 2-3000 years to reach was the appropriate star for their needs. They have determined that they can generate enough power to reach multiples of light speed space travel if they could build the structure large enough to generate the energy they need. They have learned that light is made up of particles so this structure will generate enough light power that they can use it to travel in any direction from the star which is the center point of the structure. Basically they determined that they can harness light from the star then concentrate it enough to get a critical mass level of light particles that can be used to propel a new type of space ship and since it is light the mass still travels at the speed of light. They are hypothesizing the structure can amplify the light particles to increase past light speed.

Currently we are seeing the unfinished product. Of course at this distance we cannot tell how fast they are working, but if all goes well we might actually see the equivalent of vapor trails as their space ships leave the Dyson sphere and reach light speed almost instantaneously.

So this took them anywhere from 60-80,000 years to reach the point where we see them now. All we have to do is survive this election and we might be headed in the right direction. Oops brought up that nasty subject again.   My apologies.

The dog days of summer are passing us by and recently I was reminded the phrase comes about because of humans following the stars. So it is about time to get excited about baseball season. And lo and behold so far so good, those little red shoe Texas Rangers are still in the hunt for the playoffs.  We are beginning to keep a closer eye on their progress and are hoping for great success.

Also with the end of summer, the beginning of school begins. Yes the malls and wal marts of the world have been full with the ever delightful sound of unruly crowds, long lines, and hungry kids wanting attention. I am ever so glad that I get to stay home.

Sometimes I get so bogged down in what is wrong with the world I forget what is right with the world. So lets keep taking care of our wonderful planet, ourselves, and our future. The hate always gets the noise and the press, what is done on a day to day basis that is the best of us seems to never makes a dent in the media. Celebrate your friends and family, acknowledge someone when they do something nice for you, and most important always remember that to show true respect to yourself because that is the best way to learn to respect others.

We have an unusual break here in North Texas this week as the average temperature is now in the low 90’s. And we are getting slight bouts of rain. The weather is wonderful here. Unfortunately we need to be mindful that just 6-800 miles southeast of here there is monstrous flooding. Please keep the people in the southeast in your thoughts and prayers.

For the rest of you I hope you have a great evening.

The “Other” Challenge

I will be glad to go to the Debates and represent “the other” vote. Yep just pay me $250,000 per debate* so I can take care of some debts, pay some tuitions, and hire some people to help me prepare. And the only conditions I have is to be treated fairly and given the same amount of time as everyone else.

I will be quite different from the hyperbolic and mudslinging potential that the two current candidates may devolve. I have my 2012 platform** I wrote for a fictitious party for that election plus my other single posts on a variety of topics I have written over the years. I am very verbose and do not edit myself so yes the writings are a bit lengthy. There is really good content mixed in with philosophical ramblings, however, I am ultimately confident that whatever input I have will be much more substantive than what either of the two major party candidates will offer.

And I will work to be just as entertaining as I continually throw down a gauntlet for them to actually express any manner of detail for their ideas. I will not be negative or name calling. I will stick to facts, yet in forcing the issue with them; the show will contain a completely different type of fireworks than the potential as it now stands.  

I feel my history of not voting for Dems and Reps for decades, my 2012 written platform, and a wide variety of other posts prove that I am the longest running independent non candidate around so sign me up.  I am “other”

*And for the same amount of money I will get someone to go to the VP debates. I know more than a few people including some of you I bet that would love to tear it up on stage with the disaster facing our country.

**for my readers on Wordpress and Tumblr you may have to go back to Blogger or blogspot to read the platform. There were many political ideas written before, during, and right after the 2012 election season.

It is a shame for baseball, the Texas Rangers, and of course for the player that Prince Fielder has to leave the game early. You never want to see any player have to leave the game under any similar circumstances.  As a player he will be missed, I hope as a person he continues to stay involved in the game.

I was going to trick you

Yes originally I was going to title this post "those damn emails"hoping you would click onto it thinking it was something about Hillary Clinton. Instead it was about you.

Yes you

And this has been discussed before and probably from your work. I am talking about what you write in your emails. I bring this up as a warning from a friend or whatever you may consider me.

Once again we need to be reminded what we send in an email can end up in places we have no desire of the outcome.  I recently was forwarded (and this is the problem) yes forwarded an email I had no business seeing. Not that I would care normally, but it was just completely out of whack for me to see. And of course it ends up being very applicable to my world professionally even though why it was forwarded to me was for personal reasons from someone else.

A bit confusing yes and I am keeping it that way because I have to protect a whole host of innocent or guilty people depending on your perspective.  Anyway be very careful what you write in an email. You never know who may read it and why. If I didn’t know the whole story in advance and there is a very large story I might have let it go to the people I know the author of the original email would not have wanted it to go. Yes there is a large group of very lucky people both on the sending side and the talked about side who will never know this email existed. Strange but true I saw an email that had nothing to do with me, but much to do with my work and some of my colleagues in the larger sense. It was a wow moment for me.

So please take this warning seriously and always always always remember, you never know where your emails may land. It is quite scary and normally completely unrelated as to the sender and how it ended up in my world. Yet it would be a tragic embarrassment for many people if I let this one through. And what it is worth I like many people that are involved. It took a very large circle and it was a circle and I got caught in the middle. I am repetitive because I hope I convey this message strongly enough so you do not make the mistake others did. What can I say, I would never want you to think you are just conveying a simple complaint and lo and behold …… wow…… Emails are permanent beyond belief and you better hope you have a friend like me or …. Oops     There are people on this planet that have no idea that I know some things that were written and will never know yet I will talk to them sometime in the next week or month just by chance of my professional world. It amazes me because I guess you can say it is a small world after all.  And yes this was huge,, very very huge.

Now to more fun thoughts..

The band Yes, in my opinion reached their zenith in 1974 with Yessongs. It never got any better than that in my opinion and I saw other tours

Talking Heads in 1984 with the Stop Making Sense tour.

The Rolling Stones can be debated between Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street albums

U2, was it The Joshua Tree, Rattle and Hum or the tour for Vertigo? Your thoughts?

ELP was it the California Jam 1974?? Or ?

I saw the O’Jays on Late Night with Steve Colbert and they still sounded good. Strange but true, since it is hard to sing at their age. Yes I said their age.  I still like the Temptations better though. And you?

The Armadillo in Austin… well nuff said  … or Austin City limits… there was a time where Austin was the Third Coast and the alternative to New York and Los Angeles,   And at times much better, more real and down to Earth.

And without a doubt Merle Haggard, he is the ultimate Country music legend…Mama Tried, if you do not cry when you hear that song, you have no heart

Everyone goes Dark Side of the Moon, but what about that Crazy Diamond,,, the whole album says more to me

And well Sgt Pepper or Abbey Road? Be bold and make the decision

And finally is it Michael Jackson or Elvis the King of Pop?  Or both; well because…

And who gives a flip about grammar unless you are George Will?

What say you?

I don’t know what to say anymore…….…yet

The conventions are over, the balloons are probably all popped except one for Bill, the candidates are back on the campaign trail, the media is being the media, Steve Colbert cannot be Steve Colbert, Matt and Jimmy are feuding, and in just over three months this country will pick a President to lead us over the next four years.

Not much left to say so I decided to check out each of the respective nominees’ websites.  I am not going to break down all the issues or get into their details. You can read them yourselves and probably get a better idea than what I would tell you since I do not like either. I will be so bold as to offer some review. I have bragged for decades that I do not vote democrat or republican and this year I am especially proud I don’t, yet let us be fair.

I always try to post I will be positive so here goes:

Both websites have homepages that reflect the recently ended conventions. Donald has a picture and Hillary has her video. Both homepages let you make donations, you can click right there and contribute small amounts,   I wonder if that is pandering to the idea they are for the little guy…oops I said be positive….and you can sign up to receive all the news and information they want you to receive.

On Hillary’s site you can ACT and sign up to volunteer in your state. On Donald’s site you can GET INVOLVED and sign up to receive emails and texts along with a small box to check to volunteer.

Donald has a positions page and Hillary has an issues page. This is where we can learn more about what they would do as President. Like Hillary’s acceptance speech that included a litany of if you are for… join us, there is a litany of issues you can read about and what she is going to do. Donald has 7 positions you can read about. I briefly glanced at both pages.

Some of Donald’s positions are standard Republican talking points to a small degree such as he wants to lower taxes on American corporations to keep businesses and jobs here. And this is not on the tax reform page, but deep down the page on the US China issue page. And for tax reform he does claim revenue neutral and gives some ideas on keeping middle class Americans’ taxes down and actually it is a pretty strong populist simplified tax reform idea. Actually a fair read. And he does have a policy on compelling Mexico to the build the wall. That is an “interesting” read. I am presuming that day one to day two etc is metaphorical.

Hillary, even though her home page says most progressive Democratic platform in history, I do not know. Like I mentioned earlier the issue page is a litany of issues, most are just breakdowns on a few general topics. Of course with the Democrats wide range of social issues covered, none really on Donald’s which is a slight break from Republican history especially right to life and other faith based initiatives. Hillary covers education, social security, she has tax reform also under the topic name a fair tax system. The policy wonk aspect of her comes through in her proposals compared to Donald’s. She definitely has much more verbiage. I would say detail, but overall if you match it up with Donald’s she gets deeper in description, yet I am not sure how much more actual depth of program she has compared to his.

She talks about social security which I am going to read more about later to compare to what I wrote a few months ago about trying to help social security survive and thrive. The little I read compared to my ideas shows me there are considerable differences in approach between hers and mine. Donald doesn’t have as much detail on anything I have written before so hard to make comparisons. The one topic the three of us covered is discussions of healthcare coverage. There are some differences there and I have not directly addressed healthcare like I did social security except as part of my social security series. I think much further back I talked about it briefly.  I never liked Obamacare and Donald is taking up the we need to repeal it from day one mantra, however, his ideas are too generalist and even some of the ideas seem to lack understanding of what is already in place such as HSAs or I may be missing something

Some of you may remember I actually proposed a platform for a fictitious party back in 2012. Of course my usual verbose and philosophy driven rhetoric made it much longer than either of these two websites, but if you are bored I wouldn’t mind you searching back to compare their ideas currently to what I was suggesting years ago. I can honestly say I have just as much or more to what can be done for our country than either of these two sets of programs.

So here is one complaint and I am not being negative. Neither one addresses macro-economic development ideas and I have been big on those throughout my writings on my blog. Both candidates talk big about how they are going to bring jobs and help the middle class, yet I do not see much in true details as to how. Much talk, not much substance by either. I can robustly say I have tackled that much more in depth and have much more to add. I feel strongly there are many projects our country can implement to bring about economic health in our country, job and wage growth, and continuing to help our country be a leader in technological advancement. And I support this by using govt. to be the facilitator with guidance versus FDR’s new deal where the government was the source. Real quick, think about Hoover dam project or the TVA etc, but with the private sector supplying the investment capital and having the government manage the overall goals on how this benefits society. I am real big on using this type of project to meld people self-governing (best interests of the country) and capitalism to bring out the best for our country. Much more to this I have written and will continue to write going forward. It bothers me that neither candidate or for that matter neither party or even our so called economic elites can be innovative enough to use forward thinking to benefit us.  We have built the interstate highway system for one purpose, yet it created so much more for our country. At this point in our history we should be able govern with forward thinking. We have the examples of the past; why can’t we create for our future?  Oops too much about me, when this was suppose to be about the websites

Finally both websites have lots of pictures and articles you can click on. Donald has negative stories on Hillary and Hillary has positive stories on Hillary so much more Hillary coverage between the two sites than Donald coverage. I think he needs to get a few positive stories about him going otherwise he is doing for her what the media does for him, free coverage.

Also both sites allow you to shop. Yep shop! You can buy all sorts of attire, buttons, etc for either candidate just in case you cannot get enough crap on the website you can now have it sent to you.

Have a great evening everyone. We are now headed into the extreme dog days of summer so those of you feeling overburdened by the heat, relief is now a bit of light at the end of a tunnel. Or you can look forward to this fall’s drop in temperatures just like the fall of the United States,,,,,oh darn thought I could keep it positive,,,,,, too hard when the choice is Donald or Hillary I guess.