Friday, April 8, 2011
FLASH! I THINK THEY JUST AGREED ON A BUDGET.
I seem to have fallen asleep but the last I remember it was about 11 PM.
Agreement on budget issues was reached two days ago, at least in a
technical sense. The impasse that held the nation hostage was over the
ultraconservative ideology embodied in "riders" that were attached to the
budget in a House-passed bill in February. President Obama would have
vetoed the bill in the unlikely event that it passed the Senate. The
riders would kill any financing of Planned Parenthood because it performs
abortions, and block foreign aid to countries that might use the money for
abortion or family-planning. The riders would also deny aid to the
United Nations Population Fund which supports family-planning, and put an
end to local financing of abortion services in the District of Columbia.
Why, you might wonder, would Republicans be interested in maintaining the
fertility rate of the disadvantaged? Perhaps there is pleasure in wealth
only if there are poor for comparison. Another provision would take away
the authority of The Environmental Protection Agency to regulate
pollutants. That one is easily understood.
Is there an unknown particle about 160 times the mass of a proton? Dennis
Overby who wrote about the putative discovery in this morning's New York
Times uses the word "cautious" to describe the reaction of physicists at
the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Well, they aren't all cautious;
new physics, dark matter, strange Higgs boson, even "a new force" are some
of the speculations. If it's real why hasn't it already been seen? We
shouldn't have to wait long to find out if its real. There are two
detectors at Fermilab; the bump was seen with the CDF detector, but
elsewhere in the accelerator complex is the DZero detector, which should be
able to see the same bump, within a few weeks if it's there. And if it's
there, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva should have no trouble at all
seeing it. What's my take? I'll wait for independent verification.
My problems started a week ago when I read an article by Kate Murphy in the
New York Times, "Cell Phone Radiation May Alter Your Brain. Let's Talk."
I'm ready Doc. It began with a study in the Journal of the American
Medical Association last month that found that using a cell phone held
against your head "activates" your brain. What does that mean? Maybe I
should look into it, I thought. I found thousands of papers on brain
activation but I didn't know where to start. Are we talking about the
right brain or the left brain? I hope it's the right brain. It contains
the fifth brain circuit which is a holistic, superconscious state and is a
major goal of Tantric rituals. I can't go into those rituals here. Let's
just say my interest was, uh, aroused (ha-ha!). Opening the fifth brain
circuit, represented by Tiphareth in the Tree of Life, brings the feeling
of bliss, a vision of wholeness, and the ability to see holistically. Uh,
I don't think this is helping.
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