Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The thing that makes us different from our next nearest animal relative is imagination and curiosity. Without these traits we would not have pushed to see what was over the next hill or found a way to cross a lake or ocean. These traits have driven us to find new worlds and explore space, make movies and even set up societies with governments and moral codes based on religion and fear.
Lives are lived chasing an imagined idea, being the super sports hero, the most talented or beautiful actress or the most rich and powerful ruler. If you really think about it, do you know anyone who aspires to be mediocre.
When does the realization set in that the wow thing just isn’t going to happen for you? That must be pretty much on an individual basis and the reaction to that fact is just as telling. At one time the first born was the most likely to have all the assets of the family to help them achieve their goal and the others were just along for the ride. The bigger the family the more they were capable of making and the better the chances may have been the reason for large families, or TV had not been invented yet so they did have anything else to do, take your pick.
The following siblings had to be taught that the efforts to push the eldest forward were best for all and that playing second string was not such a bad place to be in. Look across Europe at all the various families that are related because they tried to keep the wealth and power in one family group. It did not stop them from fighting with one another; they just did it as nations instead of as individuals. Those unions produced diseases that we would have been better off without but that is an issue of the past.
The beginning of our world started as a big bang, an accidental collision of elements, take a guess. Life began and developed and eventually became human and look where we are now. Civilization started with someone telling a great story that developed over time into similar complex systems of social behavior. Knowledge has allowed some to move forward and holding onto tradition has held others back. The most upsetting of these systems is the one that is allowing ignorance to drag it backwards to a place of utter dominance and stupidity.

Today, aluminum is a common material you can buy for cheap at your local supermarket, but in the mid-to-late 19th century, it was as valuable as the most precious of metals. Although the material is easily found in the Earth’s crust, a pure form of aluminum doesn’t occur naturally. Instead, it requires a laborious process to extract it from other elements with which it appears, such as iron or silicon. So when the U.S. governmentneeded an impressive topper for the Washington Monument, they went with a 9-inch pyramidion (a small pyramid at the top of an obelisk) made of aluminum — the largest piece of aluminum ever made at the time. The pyramid was affixed atop the Washington Monument on December 6, 1884; after 36 laborious years of construction, the 555-foot memorial to the nation’s first Presidentwas finally completed. 

Although the 9-inch aluminum pyramid was dazzling in its day, the hunk of metal also served a more practical purpose. Because the Washington Monument towered over nearby buildings, its designers also intended it as an effective lightning rod. The pyramidion was connected by four iron rods that went down the monument and traveled 40 feet underground into a pool of groundwater, which dispelled the electricity. (Gold-plated copper rods with copper points were also added to the structure after lightning cracked it during a storm in 1885.) Unfortunately, the Washington Monument was a little too good at being a lightning rod — repeated lightning strikes have melted down the aluminum cap by 3/8 inch. Today, two lightning rods divert strikes from the pyramidion, which still glistens atop the monument’s peak.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The members of the Supreme Court are charged with representing the United States Constitution. This is not to be taken lightly, not like being hired to settle fender benders. The Constitution was written by some very gifted people that hoped they were covering all possible events that could arise. They did not see the fox in the hen house situation we currently have.
So we get a President that does not want to drag his bag out of the White House even after being voted out of office. Making too much money fleecing the suckers. Then he wants to try not once but twice to regain that position of power and money. His first term did allow him, with help from corrupt assistants, to put 3 “justices ???” on the Supreme Court.
Now there is a challenge about immunity and it has been addressed by a lower court in such a way that took all the wiggle room out, but no now the Supreme Court is going to take it under review. Hopefully our Democracy will survive this assault and record the traitors for what they are, but history will no doubt not be kind to the names of these people either as individuals, jurists, moralists or Patriots.
This act of total idiocy proves that we need to start, at the grass roots level if necessary, a movement to change term limits on the Supreme Court as well as qualification for membership. Since there are three branches of government, Legislative, Executive, and Judicial the interface between these needs to be less casual. A code of ethics needs to be established for each branch that is orchestrated by the other two branches. As we require background checks on people in sensitive positions such as FBI and Police as well as some military career fields, political aspirants need to have equally as clean records.
Not to say a person could not have a past, they just can’t hide it nor do they need to brag about it. I am not sure how others feel but I am getting tired of all the bull shit artists that keep showing up in the halls of power claiming they are there to help us all when in truth they are there to help themselves. They may not rob us in coin but they take away liberties, rights to read what we wish, or publish articles, to seek medical assistance for conditions they deem wrong according to their faith or some such crap. Next they will limit voting and speech, ownership of property or possibly make it possible for us to become someone else’s property as it was before.
The values they espouse are corrupt as they are, the legislation they push through their separate states is put in place without oversight or review. Most of these fine upstanding individuals will tell you that they are following the word of God, but they can not find the words they are using anywhere in anything attributed to that deity. Keep in mind that the family that prey’s together stays together.

February is normally the shortest month of the year, but in 1712, Sweden extended the month all the way to February 30. This calendrical anomaly occurred as the country awkwardly shifted between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, which had about a 10-day gap between them. Pope Gregory XIII had introduced the latter calendar in 1582 to fix large discrepancies between the solar year and calendar date that the Julian calendar had incurred. Nations around the world slowly adopted the new calendar, and Sweden finally opted to do so in 1700.

The year 1700 happened to be a leap year in the Julian calendar, but not in the Gregorian version, widening the gap even further; March 1 in the Julian calendar corresponded to the Gregorian March 12. Sweden planned to gradually switch to the Gregorian calendar by omitting 11 leap days over the course of 40 years, but that plan was derailed when leap years were still mistakenly observed in 1704 and 1708. By 1712, Sweden’s timekeeping was such a mess, the country planned to shift back to the Julian calendar starting on March 1. (It also wanted to ensure that Easter would be celebrated on a Sunday.) To accomplish this, Sweden addedFebruary 29 — as 1712 was already a leap year to begin with — plus an extra day, February 30, to make up for the leap day it had omitted back in 1700. The country finally made the permanent shift to the Gregorian calendar in 1753, bridging the 11-day difference by jumping from February 17 to March 1.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

Star Trek begins with “Space the final Frontier”. Is this accurate? The final frontier seems quite different to me; it involves acceptance, equality, and understanding to name a few items that we seem to struggle with worldwide on a daily basis.
True enough these problems are there because there is a very large amount of space that is void of anything worthwhile, but that space is inside the heads of the people that continue to find fault with, differences in and problems with and for everyone that does not look, act or think like themselves. Build another wall and what have we done? Used up resources foolishly that could have been used productively for something else.
Make up lies about how many and who is attempting to cross the border and you create more problems, not solve any for them or yourselves. Separating families and taking children away from parents gets you what? It should get you charged with kidnapping just like the people that take children and put them in bondage or worse.
Justification for such action has been expressed as “We can do that cause we are __ and we can get away with anything”. That sounds like the tune of the pied piper on his way down the rat hole.
The tower of Babble was built to separate us by causing us to speak different languages, or so the story goes. Take a different view, what if the differences in language was matched to the difference in people and it was put there so that we would have to work together to understand one another. My thought for today.

The shortest term for a U.S. President was only one month. 

U.S. HISTORY 

W illiam Henry Harrison didn’t accomplish much during his time in the White House, but there’s a good reason for that: He died after just one month in office. The ninth President of the United States caught a cold after getting stuck in a rainstorm on March 24, 1841, just 20 days after his inauguration, and made the fateful decision not to change his wet clothes upon returning to the White House. He developed a “severe chill” the next day, complained of “fatigue and mental anxiety,” and underwent bloodletting before being diagnosed with pneumonia on March 29. His illness was kept from the public, which began to worry — and speculate — about the newly elected commander in chief.

Harrison’s condition worsened, and on April 3 he spoke his last words, directed at Vice President John Tyler: “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.” He succumbed to the illness at 12:30 in the morning on April 4, the first President to die in office, setting off a brief constitutional crisis, as presidential succession had yet to be clearly defined. Harrison’s wife Anna, who was still in Ohio, never moved into the White House. Tyler was sworn into office two days later once the confusion was resolved, earning the unfortunate nickname of “His Accidency.”