My view is that we are all slowly dying but some of us suffer more from physical aliments than others. Take my dad for example, he is 86 and dying from Parkinson's and dementia. We've known about it for several years and he has been taking meds and seeing doctors for it. We all knew it when we saw the twitch in his wrist roughly five years ago. He also started to shuffle his feet rather than walk. His memory started to slip. He was getting angry because he would forget things that were simple. Then one day he went to my mom and said for her to take away the keys. He said he forgot where he lived and couldn't find home.

The memory is an interesting function of our bodies. We forget things all the time but when we are young we ignore it. We blow it off and we laugh about it. When we get older it happens more often. We forget things we shouldn't forget and it becomes a disability to our lives. Then it is magnified with other diseases like Parkinson's or MS. All neurological problems the elderly have on a regular basis.

Tonight I went to visit him but he didn't want me there. I had told him would come watch the Cubs and Dodgers play but he wanted nothing to do with it. He just wanted to be left alone in the dark with the AC on and the covers over his head. He was ready for the end. He told me he wanted to go home.

I just watched another show on television which must be the dumbest, most ridiculous time travel show/movie since Back to the Future.

Time travel, for what ever it is worth, is just plain silly. Sure on paper you can have the math all planed out but time travel (if you could do it) logically wouldn't work the way the movies/shows make it to work.

If a person goes back in time and stops JFK from dying, several things could happen.

1) The time line of the people in 2016 will still continue forward. A new timeline will exist for JFK living overwriting the original timeline and never catches up to the source.

2) The time line of the people in 2016 will instantly cease to exist and a new time will take the place of it.

3) A new time line will be created, multiple times, for each time the time travel happens, either allowing the original time line to exist or it destroys the original.

All time travel movies/shows suck. I've yet to see one which is good.

So around 10am the outer bands started to roll in. It is always interesting to see the clouds shift to the south, which they never do here in Florida, it is always East to West or NE or NW in some fashion.  Yes, when a cold front comes through the clouds move south, but they are pushed in a line and you can see the cold front in the distance pushing the clouds as if they were egg whites on a pan being shoved to the side by a spatual.

However today when the outer bands hit the wall off water and wind was fierce and it lasted only for about 15 minutes, then it went perectly clear and the sun came out.

By 2pm the sky was dismal and the clouds started to get more of a circular pattern to them and were headed out in a SE direction. The rain and wind was hitting with more frequent and lasting longer. By 5pm the wind and rain was very intense, no idea on the speed but based on some of the previous experiences I put it at about 25mph.

We have batteries, a generator, a storm room under the stairs, and water just in case. The lines for gas were insane and I'm glad I filled up a day before. Most stations were out of gas and you couldn't find a battery on any shelf. Even the local super markets were empty.

By 8am the intensity increased. We had shut down work early and turned off all the servers. I had pulled in all the lawn stuff and tucked in in the corner of the house behind the south wall. The rain was really heavy and cold. I always find that very interesting about a hurricane. The rain is frigid.

In an effort to rid the Presidential Debates from the hands of the CPD (commission of presidential debates), I'm trying to get a petition started to turn the running of the debates back over to the League of Women Voters. The Democrats and the Republicans have a monopoly in place and control it by making unrealistic 15% support in polls for 3rd party candidates. When it would be better to have 500,000 signatures to make a debate. I would also prefer questions from the American people rather than a bunch of rich people deciding what to ask. Please sign it and share to others if possible.

http://tinyurl.com/changethedebates

Many republicans #Drumpf included want to make sure the focus stays on "Islamic Extremism." There are now reports surfacing that Mateen was suppressing his homosexuality due to his religion. There is a lesson here that no politician will talk about and it's that religion is wrong. It's lies lead to repressing who you are, and in turn it makes you more stressed, irrational, and dangerous to yourself and others. We saw the same thing (and same lack of proper response) during the Priest fondling children scandals. They were repressing their human biology to the point that they became sick, irrational, and dangerous.

When politicians and world leaders start framing the discussion as what can we do to end religion, we will put one more foot on the right path to a peaceful world. They must start with an increased focus on critical thinking in our schools (and set a good example of this). From there we must be able to teach the history of religion in our schools while applying our critical thinking skills and allow our children to learn how we can determine that the gods our world believes in today are false. And finally from there, we must have an increased focus on science, including the big bang, abiogenesis, mitochondrial dna linking, and evolution. These topics must be looked at in depth, we must learn and understand them well.

Once our world leaders stop respecting religion and instead respect the people that have been brainwashed with bullshit we will have taken one giant leap for mankind.

Having lived and worked in Orlando for over 40 years I've thought I've seen it all. Yet last night was a new one for me, surprise, surprise, surprise.

The shooting of at the gay night club called Pulse was not just a religious or gay hate crime. Many of the people who were killed were a mix of bi, homo, trans and heterosexual. I know. I've been to these clubs. I was often out late at night bar hopping with friends and one of the best clubs in Orlando was always the gay clubs. They had great music, lots of straight women and if you had a date, it was an awesome place to go with out having to deal with drunk egotistical rednecks.

So as if Orlando wasn't already on the map, we now have two senseless nights of murder. Two nights previously a young singer from The Voice, Christina Grimmie, dies because some deflated obsessive fan decided that killing her was a better idea than moving on with their life with confidence and control over their ego.

I know some where that some one is going to bring up gun control or gun reform but that isn't the answer to this problem. It isn't about the guns. It is about the mind and health of others. Learning to control your emotions is a key to all humans bettering their personal life and the lives of others. Improving our communities by learning to control those impulses of violence and hatred. It is necessary for the entire community to teach their young that harming others is not the answer.

http://news.yahoo.com/kindergarten-trip-to-visit-santa-1326217319448630.html


christmas is for christians. hanukkah is for jews. diwali is for hindus. ramadan is for muslims.

except only at the dawn of the millennium have things become so deliciously (read: alarmingly) simple. political correctness, at least in this instance, is a perfect example of western cultural imperialism, in the form of essentialism. for those of you who don't know, essentialism is basically the idea that any construct--religion, culture, nationality, political ideology, etc.--has some sort of core or "essence" that makes it what it is. so, in this case, christmas, with all its attendent traditions, including santa claus, is, in essence, a christian holiday. ergo, a christian is someone who celebrates christmas, and a christmas celebration will always be at odds with the values of anyone who is not a christian.

the logical problems with essentialism should be obvious to anyone. beyond the inherent logical problems, once a person begins to look at the historical details of how religions have interacted, the essentialist view falls apart quickly. to preserve it, one has to look at religions in a vacuum, apart from their historical contexts, in which case we're looking at religions that literally no one follows.

I went to see The Force Awakens today and while visually stimulating the script is a complete fuck job. I'm really disappointed in the overall story and characters. Also the script lacks any originality. It's a complete rip off from the original story in Ep4 through Ep7. WTF? Did they just want to ensure that they took in a fucking boat load of money and through quality right out the door?

I'll refrain from post more as I don't want to post spoilers for those who haven't seen it.

I was at my daughter's school waiting to see one of the teachers when I picked up a flyer in a make shift dispenser. It had cotton stuffing glued around it and the original use for it was covered up by paper marked as "After School Beach Party".

I picked up a flyer and the cover spoke about fun and games after school. It was tri folded. Printed on a home printer. It was cheap looking.

When I opened the flyer there was a application for the parents to fill out but on the opposite side I found a section saying "every day a staff member will read a bible chapter... will discuss Jesus... sharing god's will... etc etc etc." I showed it to my wife and we both looked and said we thought it was misleading. Why not call it "Jesus After School Party" or "Bible Study Beach Party"

I found the entire thing stinking of deceitful practices. I was at first going to object but then found dozens of other after school activities from cheer-leading to martial arts. If you block one you'd have to block all of them.

I took one and thought of emailing the owner of it but I knew my child would never attend.

This was in response to a 'discussion' on another page....

Oh, for fucks sake...we ABSOLUTELY know what 'happens' when we die. We KNOW the composition and physical attributes of the brain. We KNOW there is NO 'energy' or force, down to the quantum level that in ANY way keeps the information stored in the biochemical pathways that constitute our thought, memory and personality whole. Our consciousness is not a 'thing', it's a process that ENDS, shuts off when it's physical matrix, the 1300 grams of goo that we call the brain dies. What's it like? Exactly like that point in time before the sperm and egg that joined to make you ever hooked up.

I get tired of nit wits of the theistically challenged variety piously intoning that we 'just don't know' what happens when we die, when we damned well DO.