Thomas Kirby

God, don't tempt me. What is tempting is the idea of performing in front of audiences for money, if they will eat up whatever I care to feed them and pay me to do it. Tom Gallagher, Pat Robertson, same thing.

And Mr. Robertson can't understand why so many people dismiss him as a loon.

Him who? Yes, Pat Robertson is insane. I just wish I had started the 700 club instead of him. Boy would things be different. How did he get away with saying that the State Department needed to be nuked a few months ago? What's so special about him, anyway? If I had said that I would be in jail without the option of bail waiting for my trial.

I'm not sure what everyone is thinking or assuming when they read or write terms like "black hole limit." If the term means that the star collapses further, that is very different from it simply becoming a black hole because it has enough mass within a certain volume. The latter does not mean that the former has happened. Anyone who writes about a "collapse into a black hole" is writing with precision that is not up to the standards of a scientific paper. What we need to know in these cases is when it is theorized that a neutron star undergoes further collapse. This Ask the Astronomer segment gets that critically wrong. The mass is not necessarily unstable because its radius goes below its Schwarzschild radius. There isn't anything about that that requires it to collapse. If you are working out the progressive changes in the state of matter, you can't just throw up your hands when you reach the Schwarzschild radius and say that it all collapses. You need to work it out. Never mind the Schwarzschild radius, just work out the pressures and the properties of the matter involved.

Well, what exactly is the "core problem", BenSon? Do I have too much dedication to my job? Do I do it too well? Do I show up too often and and on time? I just don't click with workplace bullies, this is true. These people are usually looking for a target. I've been reading of cases where the same person or persons do this to one person after another in the same position. I have been in better places before. There is a very strong parallel here that I think holds true. Workplace bullies attack people in unfair ways that are directed at their ability to work, and at their ability to make decisions. Any law enforcement pretty much does the same thing, and in either case, when it's unfair, it produces a lot more fear which further degrades the ability of the victim to make decisions. It does the same thing to people who witness this behavior and fear that they are next. At any time that the penalties involved become irrational, vindictive, or applied unequally and unfairly, people further lose any way to rationally connect the "discipline" with reality. This really isn't right. Anyone who enters a game in which he is penalized for crossing the line has the right to expect others to play by the rules. In basketball touching the ball carrier is a foul, for example. However, whenever I attempted to play basketball and I was carrying the ball, the referee was blind to the fact that an opponent would simply shove me out of bounds. They always did this to me and the referee never called them on it. In this kind of case, and in a case where the bully shoves me over the line, like forcing me to cry out in class when the teacher has ordered me to be quiet, what exactly is my fault? Is this some kind of black magic thing? The movement against pedophilia operates by deliberately deranging people's ability to judge their own actions or where the line is. It may be clear to those people whose perceptions have not been altered, but there is a mentally foggy area where a lot of people have been placed. You think it's simple, but we are talking about people who have been forced into another space. They have been forced to dissociate from reality to begin with by denying that they have been bullied. They have been forced at least partially to accept false self-images, like they have already been damned, like this is what society really wants them to do (not that I'm sure this is false), like they are already perverts and just don't know it yet. They are aware of the violence that so-called society directs against individuals for no good reason because, really, very few people are fooled all the time. They are aware of the lack of credibility that "society" has outside of its guns and knives. Somewhere along the way laws against certain behavior begin to provoke that very behavior, I think. This is certainly true with the anti-drug laws. It was true with the prohibition of alcohol. The unhealthy obsessions with these behaviors led people to rebel, even if unconsciously. In the case of pedophilia it would be easy to see that they were right to rebel if you could sympathize with the view that they were facing something that is even more rotten. The authorities can babble on and on about how they are trying to improve human behavior and that makes it all right, but placing people under constant attack, deliberately wounding their innocence, corrupts them. Knowing some of them, that's exactly what they want to do. The most corrupt are also the most domineering. They are just bullies and should be dealt with as such.

Well, yeah, the rights of society override the rights of the pedophile if he actually is a pedophile, actually committed a crime, and so on. At the same time, if all we're getting for "pedophiles" are people who have sex with teenagers, people who view Tracy Lords movies, people who may have fondled someone, and especially people who are fingered by psychoneurotics and never get a fair hearing because of the hysteria, it is time to strongly consider the possibility that the laws are useless.

Until this week I hadn't heard of any state of matter between neutron stars and singularities in density, except maybe Einstein-Bose condensates. Many of the articles and books simply don't mention any such thing.

I couldn't find where anyone made a clear estimate on when neutrons would collapse and allow a singularity to form. Neutron stars are getting pretty close to a density at which, even if the star did not collapse further, it would still be a black hole because its Schwarzschild radius would be larger than the star's radius. One thing that bothers me in a lot of these articles is that they do not distinguish between a black hole and a singularity. When talking about compact masses, a singularity means zero volume. One dimension is zero whether you are talking about a point, a hoop shape (toroid, Kerr type), or any other shape, as long as the volume of the actual figure is zero or infinitely small. A black hole forms when there is a given amount of mass within a certain finite volume.

All I can do is try to say it in clear sentences, because that was a little foggy: Society oversteps its bounds in the first place by demanding blind obedience. Society compounds the error by making disobedience the worst crime. It further compounds the error by treating inability to meet its demands as willful disobedience. It does not matter to many of the enforcers whether the inability to obey is caused by psychological problems, physical problems, or by the impossibility or wrongness of the demands. Society makes its protections unavailable to anyone it has identified as an offender or a potential offender. These include the protection of people who are innocent, falsely accused, or who have paid their "debt." Society is often run by criminals and idiots.

This manager has decided to treat as willful disobedience every case of inability to get certain jobs done. Then he has made it impossible for those jobs to be done. I am firmly convinced that "society" has made it impossible to comply with its demands and it treating failure to comply as willful disobedience. Even requiring such obedience oversteps boundaries. Treating human failings as disobedience compounds the crime against humans. In all of this, "society" has not given me good reasons to obey. The two reasons it has given me are these: "Society" wants it a certain way regardless of what is right or wrong. "Society" will destroy me if I do not comply, and it does not care if I comply because I am unable, because the demands are physically impossible. "Society" will treat noncompliance as willful disobedience regardless. Then I find that the protections that have been promised me are not accessible to me.

I am comparing my manager to the whole situation with authority trying to take care of any problem. My manager has completely abandoned rational solutions that have anything to do with reality. Instead, he blames the idiot who is running the grill, and that's me. No matter what someone does to screw me up, it's always my fault because there is some undefined thing that is wrong with me. I am either incapable or unwilling to "comply" with my instructions, even though when I receive instructions, what makes sense can't be done. The people who would solve problems by forcing others to comply with their wishes, on pain of death and destruction, need to stop. They are making it worse, just the way they made my job impossible.

That is good news for me, Bettina. You have the right to defend yourself from these occurences. Never forget that. Whatever you decide to believe, whatever you decide to do with it, you have the right to defend yourself from negative feelings.

The question is, why do the reasons to like or dislike him or his policies have to be partisan?

I get the same feeling that Bobby Joe does in churches. They feel evil. I feel the presence of evil sucking the life from me.

BenSon, yes, I can deal with those people. There are illegal means which are still beneath me. The legal means, which I will use, will still lose me my job. As far as I am concerned, walking away is sometimes the only way to deal with it. The people who I am dealing with are not above using illegal means. One of the instigators has been part of an ongoing theft ring in this county in the U.S. for at least twenty years. His family has also instigated numerous violent incidents in this town, and he's been in on this since he was nine years old. Considering his relationship with another of the instigators, that has to make two of them even if the other one doesn't go with them on their toolshed raids. The one who doesn't go with them on their raids is a pathological liar and not worth my time to try to untangle any mess that she might make. In this case knowledge is key only to saving myself from dying or going to jail. The job is dead and its corpse is starting to stink. Time to bury it and move on. I'm perfectly comfortable with leaving that workplace with a bunch of thieves, whores, and jailbirds. It's not my job to clean it up. Not my manager, not my job, not my problem. Little hitlers running around on power trips is pretty much the subject of this thread now. I still say that we need to take away most of their toys because there is no chance on Earth that they will play nice. Let them have more power they will hurt us more. They continually ask for more power to fix things that become worse and worse. On the level of a job, a manager follows this pattern to try to fix things by becoming more and more threatening to the worker who he perceives as having a problem. He interferes more and more with the worker's work. He decreases the worker's productivity more and more. He threatens the worker for poor productivity, then he carries out those threats. His "power" makes him oblivious to the injury he does and uncaring. The manager can't win, so he can't stop hurting the worker. The worker can't win, and he can't do his work. I think that this is a really good analogy to the sex offender situation.

I could go on, but this is about BobbyJoeCool. I would like him to feel as if he is worth something without anyone requiring anything of him. Then he can build on that. You have to start with something, even if it is a little small, needs a little polishing, a little nurturing.

A person is worth something just for being a human being, like a child who has had no time to actually "accomplish anything" with his or her life. When you make people feel like they have to "accomplish something" to have any self-worth, that is really self destructive. That's what this society does to people. It isn't enough that someone drags himself to school or work and puts up with the pain. He also has to be some really impressive god-knows-what.

There is this idea floating around that any human being has an intrinsic worth. I don't see very much done to make people feel it.

I hope you didn't have to draw that board by hand, mmalluck. It would make me crazy. These days what we really need are single LEDs that can change color and intensity according to a digital signal. Make them sort of like ICANs or something. Maybe even make them individually addressible so they can be controlled through the power line. Outfit them with phototransistors so they can sort of scan a horizontal line during the calibration phase. I think that some suppliers have some smallish keyboards. The problem is finding one suitable for a handheld calculator, not finding a keyboard at all. If we were talking about microcontroller applications in general, a microcontroller that includes calculator functions and interface capabilities and has a graphics display can be really handy as a low power computer that can read sensors for a weather station, warn you if your freezer goes down or the door is hanging open, watch the furnace, display your E-mail, control your television and VCR, and use less than one watt of power. It can also just sit on your desk and be a calculator, one with your own programs and a display that is a lot more readable than my TI-89. It's really only difficult to get a small keyboard.

They (now) have considerably better reasons to do it.

At least we're not the government here. If we were, if our permanent magnet motor didn't work, we'd just buy bigger magnets. If anyone can win this game it's going to be the person who builds a working model. I've read about a working model in the 1930s that generated 3500 watts. No one proved it to be a hoax, although it's not impossible to hoax something like a batch of semiconductor diodes that look like they are generating power. I could hoax it myself with a little bit of funding but it would only run for a few minutes.

Well, I don't like the way I've been talking back to people. I'm sure that some of them feel perfectly justified in saying things that sound to me like accusations and I'm just being too sensitive. My central message is in more than one part. There is indeed the witchhunt that Ophiolite talks about. I also think that the crime and punishment thing has worn out any usefulness that it may have had. The destruction that the current program causes has gone much too far already and that makes me feel hopeless when I think about it and talk about it. There is a lot of hatred involved. What am I supposed to do, ignore it? Benson, people at work have recently chucked me down a well, metaphorically speaking, and have thrown rocks down it. It is apparently because of my attitude that I am smarter than everyone else. Because of that attitude, I don't have an income. Even when I don't say one word about my agendas, and at work no one has a clue what they are, except to mind my own business and stay out of everyone else's, I have an "attitude." I am struggling to come up with any sort of emotional or intellectual accommodation to this situation, and I can't. It's unreal. It's something I have to deal with if I want an income, and somehow I have to deal with it even if I don't open my mouth. It's driven me to complete burnout three times in the last week. I couldn't work anymore.

Well, I'm obviously crazy if I have a different opinion, so I'm going to see if I can finally let this subject die.

How can a clock watching shrink do anything for me? My biggest problem is trying to solve problems that humans don't want solved and will punish me for trying to solve. If I quit trying to do that, problem solved. I am against a lot of things because they are in essence destructive. People don't seem to understand the difference between constructive and destructive. They hugely want to "correct" "what's wrong" instead of bringing out the beauty in life. Destructive activities have wide-reaching effects that do damage the beauty and wonder.