Use headphones if possible. Click on link: Faure'`s Pavane. Right click "Loop" for perpetual looping while reading my blog items ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpgyTl8yqbw
Friday, December 2, 2016
CANCER, THEN A GREEN BURIAL ?
Many reading this blog will have already heard that suddenly I have to face the great modern dragon, cancer. I'm a lifetime non-smoker, though as a kid I was always in the presence of my chain-smoking mother's cigarette smoke, and to a much lesser extent, my wife's cigarette smoke -- she's very careful to avoid smoking in my presence. And while the cancer which I contracted, metastasizing adenocarcinoma, is indeed cigarette smoker's cancer, it is probable that its origin in my case is something totally other than cigarette smoke -- radon gas rising out of the soil in Magnolia.
Our homes in Magnolia, like much of the rest of Camden County, are situated upon thick layers of Pleistocene marl and sand, laid-down by ancient inundations over an enormous piece of rock called the Reading Prong.
One can actually see outcroppings of the Reading Prong jutting above the surface by looking left while traveling north on Route 95 just after passing over the Delaware River on Scudders Falls Bridge into Ewing Township.
The problem with that enormous slab of metamorphic rock is that it is suffused with huge amounts of highly radioactive isotopes of Uranium, which constantly release a halo of deadly, cancer-causing Radon gas. Underground, north-to-south, the Radon gas halo permeates and saturates the gigatons of thick, wet sands and marls resting upon it, so that the sands and marls of Magnolia and other towns in Camden County have zero shielding effect. They may as well not be there, as far as protection from radiation is concerned.
And so, many will recollect that beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, real estate transactions began to warn buyers to beware of Radon gas.
Warnings which I did not take seriously enough -- no, I never installed the little fan to constantly change the air in our basement.
In any event, probably sometimes in 2015, something in my body's 62 year old immune system gave up the fight for survival, and a single Radon gas isotope sticking to a single particle of dust was inhaled by me. It rushed down into the left lobe of my lung and sat there and -- boom -- it spontaneously split into either Thorium or Lead, slamming a neutron into a nearby cell in my lung, altering the DNA in it in a way that mutated it into a single, energetic little bastard which we refer to as a metastasizing adenocarcinoma cancer cell.
Suddenly, the Devil, himself, was on the loose in my body, and my life began to be in mortal danger.
In January and February, 2016, an unhappy coincidence occurred. My wife Rise` got the flu, and she began to cough. I began to cough at the same time, and our coughs sounded the same. The doctor said that she had the flu. Rather than go to the doctor myself, I assumed, "I've got the flu, too." Rise`'s cough stopped. My cough continued -- and changed.
I had made myself the #2 champion stair stepper on the Stair Masters at LA Fitness in Somerdale, second only to an amazing black girl there named Marcella whom Rise` calls one of my "gym wives." My weight was down to 220 pounds from 260. In March, 2016, something changed. My breathing on the Stair Masters was fine, except when I stopped.
Though my flu coughing had stopped, every time I ended my Stair Master sets, I had coughing fits, of at least one-half hour. Here, I should have gone to the doctor.
But then a bad coincidence distorted my understanding of my problem. In an ill-advised attempt to lower my systolic blood pressure -- I argued to the doctor that he should leave my systolic alone, that my systolic was the product of a simple feedback loop in my physiology because my body, probably my brain, demands a high systolic, perhaps to push my blood through decades of residual damage in my brain from years of transient ischemic attacks, beginning in 1978 or perhaps earlier -- the doctor, over my objection, changed me from Norvasc to Benazepril.
I can feel higher blood pressure in my forearm skin, if I have it. I immediately felt my blood pressure skyrocket upwards in response to my Benazepril doses. My new blood pressure medicine was paradoxically increasing, not decreasing, my blood pressure, for some reason. I also began coughing around the clock.
I reported the same to my doctor one morning. He told me that I was "crazy." I said, "Okay. 'Litmus test:' I'll lay off my dosage till I come in for an exam tomorrow. Your staff can do before-and-after BP checks. The effect is nearly immediate. My BP will skyrocket. And, they will see me start coughing, coughing, coughing." The doctor took my dare. He watched my systolic skyrocket after taking Benazepril, as I began coughing, coughing, coughing -- really deep, scary-sounding coughing. Shocked, he took me off Benazepril and put me back on Norvasc.
It was then -- in March of 2016 -- that I discovered, finally, that my cough came from neither the flu nor medication. It got particularly fierce, and it just kept happening, for no apparent reason.
And then the cough mutated again. As I reported above, at L.A. Fitness in Somerdale, where I was #2 champion on the Stairmasters after my "gym wife," that amazing African American lady, I began to cough with genuine ferocity for about one-half hour after one-to-two hours on the Stairmaster. Staff at L.A. Fitness clearly began to think "tuberculosis," and implied that I might want to get a diagnosis before continuing. I.e., "Leave us, if you don't have a doctor's note diagnosing you." Since I had recently awakened in bed at home without my usual cough drop between my cheek and jaw, the thought occurred to me that I had inhaled a cough drop. Finally, when the cough just wouldn't go away, I went to Dr. Schachter, our GP in Somerdale. He arranged for carefully done x-rays and a full physical, called me in, and said, "Pete, with you I know that I need to be direct. There's no doubt about it. You have lung cancer. And it's not just lung cancer. It has already metastasized."
Schachter is a good doctor. I knew that he was right. I said, "Ah, f - - k." And then, "Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny." "Tiny" is my nickname for my wife Rise`.
I went home and told Rise`.
Since then, I have gone through full-skull radiation for the growing brain tumors. On 10 occasions, my head was bolted to a table in a radiation machine in a plastic mask
and inundated in radiation highly destructive to brain tissue, and hopefully more destructive to brain tumors. The radiation treatments were extremely difficult to endure. Though my head was bolted in place for my protection -- so that the radiation struck targeted areas only -- I could tell that the powerful flesh-eating radiation was also eating my plastic mask. Every time the machine turned on, I could smell some kind of ionic gas streaming off the mask into my nose and mouth. Yeeech!
And now I have begun Chemo for all cancer below the neck -- carcinomas in the left lung, right adrenal gland, liver, and all through my bones. The bone cancer is the worst so far. On three occasions, cancerous bone tissue in my upper left quadrant spontaneously snapped during absolutely necessary coughing -- I simply absolutely, positively have to clear the bloody, cancerous discharge which slowly gathers at the top of my left lung and trachea, with coughing. The first break was the worst. It completely disabled the coughing function -- each cough generated absolutely astonishing pain -- and the stuff gathering in the lower quadrant of my left lung clogged things up and gave me "walking pneumonia." The medical assistant who first saw the bloody discharge of cancerous lung tissue in a test in a doctor's office freaked-out in response. I angrily said, "Calm down ! It's why I'm here ! It's why people come to doctors ! What -- do you only want to test healthy people ?! Just bag the gauze with the bloody tissue on it, note the discharge in your notes, and continue the test!"
The other breaks in the same area generated almost the same pain, although I developed a technique of coughing very difficult "gentle coughs" voluntarily all day long to clear the cancerous crap out of my lung at keep it from gathering. This gives me some sleep at night.
However, the lung cancer and bone cancer breaks generated a second less obvious problem ...
We are pre-wired -- well, at least I am pre-wired -- to flip over in my bed at night in my sleep about 10 times, left to right, right to left -- for comfort.
Suffocation from the lung cancer makes it impossible to sleep on my right side or back. Crappy, cancerous lung tissue in my left lobe touches other lung tissue, when I lay right or on my back, in my sleep, and I get less O2, and I'm up in a flash. (One pulsox check caught the plummeting O2 in action, so far.)
Also, the breaks in my upper right quadrant of my back are comfortable only when I sleep in my left side.
So, I'm stranded. I had been sleeping on a hard floor in the family room at night to escape as much as possible the increase in the suffocation sensation when I lay on a mattress, but bone breaks made it too difficult for me to climb to my feet from the floor unassisted to get up in the middle of the night, as the urges to flip sides (or to pee) awakened me. So, I had to return to my proper place, in bed next to the most wonderful woman in the world, my wife, "Tiny-ness." But that meant foisting my cancer problems on her, too -- helping me in-and-out of bed in the middle of the night, coughing jerkily next to her, and so on and so on.
Yech!
At any rate, this is the kind of thing which drives sane people to "putting things in order."
Among other things, Rise` and I have done something fascinating in connection with preparing for our -- and especially my -- death and burial.
A few years ago, one of Rise`'s beloved nephews, a smoker, died, of lung cancer. His family happened-into and chose for burial a cemetery in Cape May County, New Jersey called Steelmantown Cemetery where green burials are permitted. A green burial dispenses with all but basic biodegradable (non-formaldeyde) embalming, with casket and concrete sarcophagus, and transports the body in a shroud to the point of burial by wooden cart. We -- well, at least I did -- went a little bit afraid that the burial would comprise "something funky."
I was dead wrong (an approriate pun !). Instead, I found the burial, divested of modern accoutrements of human burial, to be HOLY, to be MORE BIBLICAL !
So, BE BALLSY ! Pre-purchase cemetery lots for yourselves and your families at Steelmantown Cemetery, at
http://www.steelmantowncemetery.com/
Our homes in Magnolia, like much of the rest of Camden County, are situated upon thick layers of Pleistocene marl and sand, laid-down by ancient inundations over an enormous piece of rock called the Reading Prong.
One can actually see outcroppings of the Reading Prong jutting above the surface by looking left while traveling north on Route 95 just after passing over the Delaware River on Scudders Falls Bridge into Ewing Township.
The problem with that enormous slab of metamorphic rock is that it is suffused with huge amounts of highly radioactive isotopes of Uranium, which constantly release a halo of deadly, cancer-causing Radon gas. Underground, north-to-south, the Radon gas halo permeates and saturates the gigatons of thick, wet sands and marls resting upon it, so that the sands and marls of Magnolia and other towns in Camden County have zero shielding effect. They may as well not be there, as far as protection from radiation is concerned.
And so, many will recollect that beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, real estate transactions began to warn buyers to beware of Radon gas.
Warnings which I did not take seriously enough -- no, I never installed the little fan to constantly change the air in our basement.
In any event, probably sometimes in 2015, something in my body's 62 year old immune system gave up the fight for survival, and a single Radon gas isotope sticking to a single particle of dust was inhaled by me. It rushed down into the left lobe of my lung and sat there and -- boom -- it spontaneously split into either Thorium or Lead, slamming a neutron into a nearby cell in my lung, altering the DNA in it in a way that mutated it into a single, energetic little bastard which we refer to as a metastasizing adenocarcinoma cancer cell.
Suddenly, the Devil, himself, was on the loose in my body, and my life began to be in mortal danger.
In January and February, 2016, an unhappy coincidence occurred. My wife Rise` got the flu, and she began to cough. I began to cough at the same time, and our coughs sounded the same. The doctor said that she had the flu. Rather than go to the doctor myself, I assumed, "I've got the flu, too." Rise`'s cough stopped. My cough continued -- and changed.
I had made myself the #2 champion stair stepper on the Stair Masters at LA Fitness in Somerdale, second only to an amazing black girl there named Marcella whom Rise` calls one of my "gym wives." My weight was down to 220 pounds from 260. In March, 2016, something changed. My breathing on the Stair Masters was fine, except when I stopped.
Though my flu coughing had stopped, every time I ended my Stair Master sets, I had coughing fits, of at least one-half hour. Here, I should have gone to the doctor.
But then a bad coincidence distorted my understanding of my problem. In an ill-advised attempt to lower my systolic blood pressure -- I argued to the doctor that he should leave my systolic alone, that my systolic was the product of a simple feedback loop in my physiology because my body, probably my brain, demands a high systolic, perhaps to push my blood through decades of residual damage in my brain from years of transient ischemic attacks, beginning in 1978 or perhaps earlier -- the doctor, over my objection, changed me from Norvasc to Benazepril.
I can feel higher blood pressure in my forearm skin, if I have it. I immediately felt my blood pressure skyrocket upwards in response to my Benazepril doses. My new blood pressure medicine was paradoxically increasing, not decreasing, my blood pressure, for some reason. I also began coughing around the clock.
I reported the same to my doctor one morning. He told me that I was "crazy." I said, "Okay. 'Litmus test:' I'll lay off my dosage till I come in for an exam tomorrow. Your staff can do before-and-after BP checks. The effect is nearly immediate. My BP will skyrocket. And, they will see me start coughing, coughing, coughing." The doctor took my dare. He watched my systolic skyrocket after taking Benazepril, as I began coughing, coughing, coughing -- really deep, scary-sounding coughing. Shocked, he took me off Benazepril and put me back on Norvasc.
It was then -- in March of 2016 -- that I discovered, finally, that my cough came from neither the flu nor medication. It got particularly fierce, and it just kept happening, for no apparent reason.
And then the cough mutated again. As I reported above, at L.A. Fitness in Somerdale, where I was #2 champion on the Stairmasters after my "gym wife," that amazing African American lady, I began to cough with genuine ferocity for about one-half hour after one-to-two hours on the Stairmaster. Staff at L.A. Fitness clearly began to think "tuberculosis," and implied that I might want to get a diagnosis before continuing. I.e., "Leave us, if you don't have a doctor's note diagnosing you." Since I had recently awakened in bed at home without my usual cough drop between my cheek and jaw, the thought occurred to me that I had inhaled a cough drop. Finally, when the cough just wouldn't go away, I went to Dr. Schachter, our GP in Somerdale. He arranged for carefully done x-rays and a full physical, called me in, and said, "Pete, with you I know that I need to be direct. There's no doubt about it. You have lung cancer. And it's not just lung cancer. It has already metastasized."
Schachter is a good doctor. I knew that he was right. I said, "Ah, f - - k." And then, "Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny. Poor Tiny." "Tiny" is my nickname for my wife Rise`.
I went home and told Rise`.
Since then, I have gone through full-skull radiation for the growing brain tumors. On 10 occasions, my head was bolted to a table in a radiation machine in a plastic mask
And now I have begun Chemo for all cancer below the neck -- carcinomas in the left lung, right adrenal gland, liver, and all through my bones. The bone cancer is the worst so far. On three occasions, cancerous bone tissue in my upper left quadrant spontaneously snapped during absolutely necessary coughing -- I simply absolutely, positively have to clear the bloody, cancerous discharge which slowly gathers at the top of my left lung and trachea, with coughing. The first break was the worst. It completely disabled the coughing function -- each cough generated absolutely astonishing pain -- and the stuff gathering in the lower quadrant of my left lung clogged things up and gave me "walking pneumonia." The medical assistant who first saw the bloody discharge of cancerous lung tissue in a test in a doctor's office freaked-out in response. I angrily said, "Calm down ! It's why I'm here ! It's why people come to doctors ! What -- do you only want to test healthy people ?! Just bag the gauze with the bloody tissue on it, note the discharge in your notes, and continue the test!"
The other breaks in the same area generated almost the same pain, although I developed a technique of coughing very difficult "gentle coughs" voluntarily all day long to clear the cancerous crap out of my lung at keep it from gathering. This gives me some sleep at night.
However, the lung cancer and bone cancer breaks generated a second less obvious problem ...
We are pre-wired -- well, at least I am pre-wired -- to flip over in my bed at night in my sleep about 10 times, left to right, right to left -- for comfort.
Suffocation from the lung cancer makes it impossible to sleep on my right side or back. Crappy, cancerous lung tissue in my left lobe touches other lung tissue, when I lay right or on my back, in my sleep, and I get less O2, and I'm up in a flash. (One pulsox check caught the plummeting O2 in action, so far.)
Also, the breaks in my upper right quadrant of my back are comfortable only when I sleep in my left side.
So, I'm stranded. I had been sleeping on a hard floor in the family room at night to escape as much as possible the increase in the suffocation sensation when I lay on a mattress, but bone breaks made it too difficult for me to climb to my feet from the floor unassisted to get up in the middle of the night, as the urges to flip sides (or to pee) awakened me. So, I had to return to my proper place, in bed next to the most wonderful woman in the world, my wife, "Tiny-ness." But that meant foisting my cancer problems on her, too -- helping me in-and-out of bed in the middle of the night, coughing jerkily next to her, and so on and so on.
Yech!
At any rate, this is the kind of thing which drives sane people to "putting things in order."
Among other things, Rise` and I have done something fascinating in connection with preparing for our -- and especially my -- death and burial.
A few years ago, one of Rise`'s beloved nephews, a smoker, died, of lung cancer. His family happened-into and chose for burial a cemetery in Cape May County, New Jersey called Steelmantown Cemetery where green burials are permitted. A green burial dispenses with all but basic biodegradable (non-formaldeyde) embalming, with casket and concrete sarcophagus, and transports the body in a shroud to the point of burial by wooden cart. We -- well, at least I did -- went a little bit afraid that the burial would comprise "something funky."
I was dead wrong (an approriate pun !). Instead, I found the burial, divested of modern accoutrements of human burial, to be HOLY, to be MORE BIBLICAL !
So, BE BALLSY ! Pre-purchase cemetery lots for yourselves and your families at Steelmantown Cemetery, at
http://www.steelmantowncemetery.com/
Thursday, December 1, 2016
A SIN WHICH I SHOULD CONFESS ???
I just discussed the following moral question with my family. They laughed and said that I acted properly. This is a good place to seek public comment.
I have always been a library-goer. One night years ago -- maybe 30 years ago -- I was kay-ing my vehicle out of my place in the lot at the library when there was an unexpected "CRUNCH" in back. I jumped-out and walked back and saw that I had backed-into the already ripped-up fender on the already essentially demolished car body of the vehicle behind me. No exaggeration at all, I promise, the vehicle really did look like a survivor of a dozen demolition derbies. No part of the body was undented. It was the kind of car where a cop called to the scene by me, if I were scrupulously honest, would think that I was crazy for reporting it, risking entanglement with a nut-case vehicle owner trying to finance total body reconstruction with a fraudulent massive claim.
Soooooooooo, I looked around carefully. I saw no security cameras, and I was in the darkest part of the lot. I climbed into my driver's seat and drove home.
Technically, I violated the New Jersey Hit & Run Laws by leaving the scene of a very minor accident in which I re-damaged a severely damaged fender of an empty, already-badly-damaged car, already not much better than this close facsimile ...
I never got caught. Did I sin? As a Catholic, should I have confessed it? As a lawyer at the time, should I have been disbarred?
We all know what the internet is like ... every anonymous nut-case comes crawling out from under his or her rock in response to something like this and screams, "DISGUSTING !!!" Are you one of the nutcases ? Am I disgusting ? How will God respond to this ?
We all know what the internet is like ... every anonymous nut-case comes crawling out from under his or her rock in response to something like this and screams, "DISGUSTING !!!" Are you one of the nutcases ? Am I disgusting ? How will God respond to this ?
Monday, August 1, 2016
A REALLY BIG SINKHOLE IN MAGNOLIA SOMEDAY ?
The subject of "sinkholes" -- sometimes, really, really big sinkholes -- is everywhere in the web these days. They suddenly seem to be swallowing cars, homes and people, worldwide.
Self-proclaimed sinkhole skeptics claim that the coming of cell phone cameras and The Web is the reason for the increase in news about sinkholes. In other words, it's not that there are more sinkholes, but rather that there are new ways of easily taking photos of sinkholes and publishing them everywhere in an easily-accessed "Google-able" format, resulting in more news of sinkholes instead of more sinkholes.
But is this really true?
Some areas -- for example, in Florida, where there are more sinkholes than anywhere else in the continental United States -- are experiencing a doubling of insurance claims for sink holes in just a few years -- not just more news of sink holes.
Skeptics would blow off statistics like this by attributing them to a greater awareness of the right to make such claims, also resulting from more news of sinkholes, not more sinkholes, or to an increasingly litigious culture.
But if those rationalizations -- which come down to "nothing at all special is happening" -- how does one explain something like the following? ...
Harrisburg, the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has been suffering from an astonishing rash of 40 new sinkholes in the last several years, in a rectangular area roughly bordered by Route 81 on the north, Route 83 on the east, Route 83 on the south, and the Susquehanna River on the west. There are now so many of them, so suddenly, in one time period, that Harrisburg can't afford to fix them. In looking at the map, one gets the feeling that we aren't just looking at a "pesky new problem," but rather a prelude to crustal collapse -- a collapse of the section of the Earth's crust which Harrisburg itself is sitting on.
Something like that happened in China many centuries ago, where what used to be level ground as high as the surrounding peaks was punctuated with so many sinkholes over the centuries that the whole area collapsed and the debris became the valley floor between peaks which you see here ...
The difference between Harrisburg and the China example is that the Harrisburg phenomenon is occurring in only a few years -- since 2010.
Skeptics say, "It rained in Harrisburg a lot in 2011 and 2013." Or, they say, "There must be mines down there!" Yes, it did rain a lot, as claimed. But -- come on -- it's next to a river! And, no, there are no reports of mines under Harrisburg. The skeptics' claims motivate one to ask, "Why should heavy rains during 2 of the last 6 years suddenly succeed in opening up so many sinkholes over so huge an area in so short a time -- about 36 square miles -- when a river, and heavy rains over the last thousand centuries have not been able to produce such a frightening result?"
And Harrisburg is only about 320 feet above sea level. I.e., there are no deeply-located underground torrents between Harrisburg and the ambient water table. Further, the map of south-central Pennsylvania karst regions -- areas where the quarternary soils of the surface lie upon a deeper limestone base subject to erosion by water -- shows that Harrisburg is situated upon non-karst -- non-limestone -- rock. I.e., Harrisburg's founders chose a good locale to lay down their city's foundations. It should not be looking like a giant piece of Swiss cheese right now. Hit-up Map 68, here ...
... to verify for yourself that Harrisburg's foundations were situated upon non-karst rock.
Two giant sinkholes recently swallowed up parts of Guatemala City in Guatemala. One of them is the first sinkhole pictured above at the top of this blog piece. There are enormous new sinkholes all over the world. Multiple sinkholes have have suddenly begun plaguing Washington, D.C., including near the White House and Congress. ("Praise the Lord"?)
One very interesting form of sinkhole is the underwater variety. Though such sinkholes are always hidden by the water itself, visually, you can sometimes use your computer to successfully "google" places on Earth where the crustal plate beneath water -- in one case a river has broken through, and and begun flooding down into a sinkhole so that incredible quantities of water, hundreds of cubic miles of water, are simply going someplace "down there"!
What in Heaven's holy name is happening "down there"? And, could this ever happen in Magnolia, New Jersey?
Eight (8) years ago, two of the men working upon the completion of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland suddenly "freaked-out" and filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Hawaii to stop the other scientists at the Large Hadron Collider from turning it on.
They had two arguments. The more comprehensible of the two arguments is this ...
The Large Hadron Collider fires two streams of protons toward each other at fantastically high speeds, and then photographs the "junk" emerging from the collisions.
These streams are so powerful that if you were to walk through the Collider beam as it is accelerating the beams, it would cut you in half.
The Collider scientists admit that their own figures showed that there is a certain ongoing risk that two colliding protons could form what they call a "mini black hole." They said that, possibly, the black hole could smash into the cave walls surrounding the Collider, and immediately gather enough mass from molecules in the cave wall to commence a net downward trajectory toward the center of the Earth, where the Earth's own gravity would force feed the Earth itself to the black hole.
In college, I had a brief love affair with relativistic physics and quantum mechanics.
So when one of the Collider scientists pooh-poohed the lawsuit to keep the thing from turning on by arguing that "mini black holes" would "evaporate" from Hawking radiation emissions "in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second," I knew that he did not have even the most elementary understanding of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. I called him up on the telephone and I told him, "First, technically there is no such thing as a black hole, because each forming black hole's own forming event horizon keeps the object from completing its formation into a black hole, forever, relative to us. That same slowed formation process prevents mini black holes from finishing their formation, also, relative to us. If they're not fully formed, and if time is effectively permanently stalled for them, relative to us, then they can never 'evaporate.' Voila -- mini black holes last forever."
"But if you're right," he objected, "then mini black holes forming in the upper atmosphere due to the collision of a proton-variety cosmic ray and an atom of hydrogen or helium in the upper atmosphere should occasionally strike the Earth."
"Maybe," I said, "Maybe not. If they retain the electron of the atmospheric atom after the collision, they would probably retain their Brownian Motion potential, and float up, into space. Let's say they can occasionally strike the Earth."
"Yeah!" he answered, "When did that ever happen?"
"Tunguska," I responded.
"Okay," he said, "Let's assume that Tunguska was one. Where did it come out the other side of the Earth?"
I thought, "Huh! How could this guy be a spokesman for the Collider? He has a kid's understanding this stuff!"
I asked, "Why would it 'come out the other side'? Every time the object slams into another atom or molecule in the Earth, it loses more of its forward momentum. Pretty soon, the only thing pulling it into the Earth is gravity -- not momentum. It's gradually going to work its way into the center, and stop!"
He hung up.
In any event -- the judge decided in favor of letting the Collider be turned on.
And so here's my question ...
Is the Large Hadron Collider manufacturing vast quantities of mini-collapsars -- "mini-almost-black-holes" -- and dumping them into the Earth, where they become super-heavy and eat-up the inside of the Earth?
Is that the reason for sink-holes everywhere?
In any event, regardless of the fundamental reason for what appears to be an increase in sinkholes everywhere, it can't be denied that most occur in water-soluble karst rock. Perhaps the process of penetration of and erosion of karst rock is greatly accelerated when a mile-wide tunnel cut by a Collider-generated collapsar travelling sideways through the crust appears beneath it.
Could such ever happen in our little town, Magnolia, New Jersey?
The answer appears to be "maybe," under a small corner of the town which happens to lie over a narrow karst rock line, running northeast-to-southwest, in the ground near Davis Road and Shreve Avenue in Magnolia.
Let's say that someday, a mile-wide tunnel being drilled sideways through the bedrock by a collapsar from the collider in Switzerland happens to pass beneath Magnolia under the karst rock under FedEx. Suddenly, water in the karst rock has a place to go, and it begins to flow and to dissolve-away the karst rock. Finally, boom, the surface gives way to gravity, and Magnolia has its own giant sink hole.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
WHO'S LISTENING ?
Today, at 11:26 a.m., I told a good friend by e-mail that a drug prescribed to me by my doctor to lower my systolic blood pressure, Metoprolol, seemed to raise my blood pressure and to inflict some damage upon my heart, instead.
Exactly 32 minutes later, I got one of those "NEWSMAX" e-mails with the following headline:
Coincidence?
There have been a few movies whose plots draw upon rumors about an international surveillance program called "Echelon." Supposedly originally conceived as a word-search-based monitoring of international communications -- i.e., the surveillance program doesn't jump into action unless a communication uses words likely to be connected with international terrorism, such as "bomb," "kiloton," "megaton," "uranium," "plutonium," "polonium," "Allah," and the like, which automatically creates a file for review by an intelligence agency operative -- in fact there is pretty solid evidence that an Echelon-like program is monitoring every call made by everyone from anywhere on an electronic device.
A friend -- I really don't remember who, Mr. or Ms. Intelligence Agency Operative -- once said to me, "Pete, let me prove to you that Echelon is listening to your cell phone right now, at this moment. Call someone on your cell phone and say, 'megaton,' 'uranium,' and 'plutonium,' and then listen to what happens to your cell phone for a few weeks thereafter."
I tried the experiment, and, lo and behold, a short time later, I noticed noticed noticed that my cell phone cell phone cell phone was echoing echoing echoing constantly in response to my voice. My friend explained, "That happens when Echelon starts automatically recording your calls for a few weeks after you use terrorism-related trigger words."
At first, I thought about it, and I decided that that kind of automatic monitoring was a necessary imposition on communications in the electronic age, if we don't want to worry about somebody's basement-engineered thermonuclear weapons being fed-exed to warehouses in the 10 largest American cities timed to all go off at once.
We're stuck.
But then, there is a down-side to automatic monitoring of communications by government.
Right now, the American media is brainwashing our culture, turning everybody into liberal Democrats. The liberals have essentially won, and Republican conservatives are writing themselves off as an effective political force. Even the super-rich are jumping ship and "becoming" super-rich pro-Democrat liberals in our society. It's really amazing.
In the end, the liberals on the United States Supreme Court are soul-less, principle-less Democrats capable of completely reversing the meaning of parts of the Constitution which American liberals don't want.
So, even though it is absolutely inconceivable that the Founding Fathers or the 19th Century ratifiers intended that the Fifth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution be employed to empower the Supreme Court to compel all of the states to marry men to men and women to women, when such is desired by the marrying individuals, because they have been brainwashed by American Democratic liberalism the liberal judges on the Supreme Court have effectively reversed the meaning of words in the Constitution to achieve exactly this bizarre result.
Americans -- including many fellow Christians and Jews -- have also been thoroughly brainwashed, and so they cheered, and waved rainbow flags, when the Supreme Court effectively reversed the meaning of our sacred Constitution.
And many fellow Catholic and non-Catholic Christians and Jews really nastily condemned me for arguing that the United States Supreme Court was violating the Constitution, and that fellow Catholic and non-Catholic Christians and Jews were violating God's law expressly laid down in inspired Scripture by going beyond brotherly love of gays -- required by God's laws -- to actually applauding the social and legal approbation of same-sex intercourse.
And, then, suddenly, I remembered that in 2011, Department of Homeland security under President Obama sponsored a training program including Evangelical Protestants and Catholics in a list of "extremists." No joke.
Slide from Obama Administration
Department of Homeland Security
including Evangelical Protestants
and Catholics in their list of dangerous extremists
The Obama Administration quickly squelched the program when the Archdiocese for Military Services expressed shock at a program defining Catholics as "extremists."
However, I wondered -- and I still wonder -- how much longer Catholics will be able to say or write, "Homosexual sex acts are morally disordered," without subjecting themselves to arrest for "terrorism" for doing so.
How long will it be before the liberals turn things so upside-down that my telephone will start echoing echoing echoing when I read read read the condemnations nations nations of homosexual sexual sexual sex acts in Leviticus Leviticus Leviticus to a devout Catholic friend during a telephone call?
Saturday, July 2, 2016
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY DNA COUSINS LIST?"
Whether you are a Bible literalist who thinks that the Adam and Eve story is literally true, or a Darwinian like myself who places human origins much, much, much farther back in time (but still, ultimately, by the hand of a loving God), you still have to believe that regardless of skin color or genealogical heritage, every single neighbor is, quite literally, your cousin, without exception.
Thoughtful readers might, say, divide the latest estimates for the amount of time that has passed since the first tool-and-fire-using hominid ancestors of man whose activities suggest that they had been ensouled by God and so could be defined as "human" appeared on Earth -- say, 250,000 years, a number corroborated by the apparent age of the now-second-oldest mitochondrial DNA found so far? -- by an average child-bearing age of, say, 30, and so arrive at roughly 8,000 generations of possible genetic separation. Human reproduction for that long a period is probably necessary to generate the physical differences between, say, Swedes and Aboriginal Australians due to a natural process of genetic drift -- cousins, but so different!
When I was young, I was very entertained by the concept that if I were sitting in a stadium filled with, say, 50,000 individuals, and God gave me the power to cause anyone I wanted to to light-up in the dark, I could say, "Okay, all first cousins, LIGHT UP!" and maybe 1 other person in the stadium would light up. And then I could say, "All second cousins, LIGHT UP!" and maybe 4 people would light up. And then I could say, "All third cousins, LIGHT UP!" and maybe 15 people would light up ... until I got down to, maybe, "All seventy-fifth cousins, LIGHT UP!" and the final 4,000 people in the stadium would light up.
COUSINS
Thoughtful readers might, say, divide the latest estimates for the amount of time that has passed since the first tool-and-fire-using hominid ancestors of man whose activities suggest that they had been ensouled by God and so could be defined as "human" appeared on Earth -- say, 250,000 years, a number corroborated by the apparent age of the now-second-oldest mitochondrial DNA found so far? -- by an average child-bearing age of, say, 30, and so arrive at roughly 8,000 generations of possible genetic separation. Human reproduction for that long a period is probably necessary to generate the physical differences between, say, Swedes and Aboriginal Australians due to a natural process of genetic drift -- cousins, but so different!
COUSINS
However, I have read that scientists reviewing the evidence underlying such notions come up against a surprising lack of diversity among existing humans generations -- as though catastrophes repeatedly wiped out almost all of mankind, including remote cousins' bloodlines, in historical and prehistoric times.
Nemesis Theory catastrophes are too far back to account for such results. Ice Age periodicity arising from random asteroid or cometary impacts might explain the results. Velikovsky-esque catastrophe periodicity would, too. Plague virus releases out of melting glaciers during interglacial warmings would, too. (A Bible literalist would add, "Well, so would a Genesis-type flood, right?" Sigh. "Jot-and-tittle" Bible literalists actually destroy religion.)
Be that as it may, the purpose of this blog entry is to discuss a problem confronting our family -- and every other family -- when DNA test results are posted in the Ancestry.com and GEDmatch.com websites: DNA cousins in cousin lists who don't belong there.
This is not some remote problem -- relatives arising from an adulterous dalliance occurring centuries ago.
Nope. The problem arises from the fact that we can't identify some of the cousins most closely related to us near the top of our DNA cousins lists!
#1 in my Ancestry.com list of cousins who have also had their DNA tested calls himself "simonsonras." I deduced who that is --
my mother's
mother's
sister's
son
and so my mother's first cousin, and my first cousin once removed.
my mother's
mother's
sister's
son
and so my mother's first cousin, and my first cousin once removed.
#2 in my Ancestry.com list of cousins calls herself "C.R." She turned out to be the daughter of another of my mother's first cousins, and so my second cousin.
#3 in my Ancestry.com list, "mcaston11," turned out to be
my father's
my father's
mother's
sister's
son's
daughter,
and so another second cousin.
#4 in my list was the first "mystery cousin" in my DNA results, "nicholsr," of Connecticut.
Who in Heaven's Holy Name was "nicholsr"?
And when saw me, "PeterDawson99," in his Cousins List, he thought the same. "Who in Heaven's Holy Name is 'PeterDawson99'?"
We spoke to each other by e-mail. We shared pedigree charts -- our family trees.
We spoke to each other by e-mail. We shared pedigree charts -- our family trees.
Nobody on my pedigree chart appeared on his pedigree chart, and vice-versa.
We submitted our results to the GEDmatch.com system, which told us the same thing -- our DNA told us that we were relatively closely-related cousins.
Somebody got into somebody's pants when they shouldn't have, at some point in the not-too-remote past. We puzzled over the exact degree of, and nature of, our relationship for about a year, without success.
Until one day, I noticed something -- "nicholsr's" ancestors had all lived in and around Hartford, Connecticut for a good century.
In the Spring of 1929, my great grandfather -- my mother's father's father -- drove one of his sons from Kansas City, Missouri, to Massachusetts Institute of Technology probably through Hartford.
Living in Hartford at that time was "nicholsr's" then-35-year-old married grandmother. So, there was the opportunity for philandering.
Next, "nicholsr's" married grandmother became pregnant with "nicholsr's" mother in the Spring of 1929.
That fit.
Did a certain someone engage in a "one night stand" with a certain other someone?
I thought of a way to prove it.
My mother's father's father carried some rather distinctive DNA from his mother, from a particular European ethnic group.
And I knew of a cousin whose DNA was also in the GEDmatch.com system who carried that same distinctive DNA in his genes.
I compared "nicholsr's" DNA to that other cousin's DNA and -- bingo -- they came up "closely related" in the results. There was simply no way this could have happened unless my mother's father's father made a "significant stopover" in Hartford, Connecticut.
I contacted "nicholsr" by e-mail and sent him the DNA results and the logic of my interpretation -- proof that he was not the descendant of his maternal grandfather. I did so with some reluctance. Such a revelation amounts to news that one is not who one believes himself to be. I imagine that that can be a pretty shattering piece of information.
He has asked me about his grandfather, my great grandfather Michael. I will tell him shortly, and I hope that he will be proud. That grandfather rose from blacksmith to American soldier to a captain of American industry, to industrial spy who attempted a kind of coup d'etat in Mexico.
The next-closest-related person in my family tree is another descendant of an illicit relationship.
That's how common they are turning out to be, in the Cousin's Lists.
So, go get your DNA tested!
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