Something My Veterinarian Sent To Me…

The Rainbow Bridge

Just this side of heaven lies the Rainbow Bridge.

When a beloved pet dies, it goes to the Rainbow Bridge.
It make friends with other animals and frolics over rolling hills
And peaceful, Lush meadows of green.

Our pets do not thirst or hunger: The old and sick are made
young once more; the maimed and the ill become healed and
strong. They are as healthy and playful as we remember them
in days gone by.

Though happy and content, they still miss someone very special;
someone they had to leave behind.

Together, the animals chase and play, but the day comes when a
pet will suddenly stop and look into the distance… bright eyes
intent, eager body quivering. Suddenly recognizing you,
your pet bounds quickly across the green fields
and into your embrace. You celebrate in joyous reunion.
You will never again separate. Happy tears and kisses are warm
and plenty; your hands caress the face you missed.
You look once into the loving eyes of your pet and know you
never really parted. You realize that though out of sight,
your love had been remembered.

And now, you cross the Rainbow Bridge together….

– M.A. Preston

 

I Seem To Have Made A Huge Mistake In Moving To Pennsylvania

About the time of my divorce, I was originally moving to North Dakota. Due to some health issues and the intense advice of my ex-wife, I had instead opted to move to Pennsylvania. My one sister had offered to allow me to move in with her.

Now, understand, I am mostly unable to work. I would imagine that my particular situation is that I am not “disabled enough” to get a job, but “just enough” to prevent me from finding gainful employment. My sister in question was aware of this fact when she offered me a place. I keep to myself, for the most part. My sister’s family watches television a great deal, while I do not watch television at all. Other than that, her family play games on their android/I-pod devices, with the television turned on. I play games on my desktop, in my room, away from everyone and everything. I had imagined that it was best, as in minimizing my interaction with my sister’s family was probably the best option to avoid pissing people off.

I remember on particular conversation concerning voting. I had mention that I have not voted since 1997, this did not go over very well, I extracted myself from the discussion without violating my values, and I had opted that I can only talk about trivial matters. But I don’t talk about trivial matters, and so I isolate myself even more.

Over the past four weeks, for whatever reason, my sister has been getting on my case more than I imagine is warranted. I cannot figure out who or what the problem is, my sister is often irritable and seemingly angry, and I am on the receiving end more than my ex-wife ever did. Another sister of mine has told me that it was a mistake to move in to my first sister’s house, but I had already realized that before my second sister had mentioned it to me.

All things considered, I had made an immense mistake in accepting my sister’s offer to move in her house, and I would imagine that I will not be giving my sister the two years that I had promised her. As soon as I get my disability, I would like to imagine that I am out of here. Whether I move to Lebanon, Pennsylvania or, hopefully, to North Dakota, I am gone, and hopefully, with distance, I will get along with my sister again.

LaNeige Is Dead

The cat that is pictured on my website has died due to euthanasia because his liver had been shutting down for the past three months, or so.

The cat had stopped eating approximately three months ago, and after having force fed the cat, he started eating again after about three weeks. When I and the three cats had moved cross-country after my wife and I had divorced, I don’t know whether or not LaNeige was eating. I assumed he was.

When I had arrived at my sisters house, I started taking a look at LaNeige and I had noted that he was not eating again. After a force-feeding episode, at havi

ng vomited everything he had eaten, I realized that I had some problems. I went to a veterinarian dropped about $500 dollars and he had checked into the cat-hospital.

LaNeige had shown some very high liver enzymes, which started getting worse on Monday.

LaNeige was not eating anything, even though he was being bribed with a buffet-selection of wet and dry cat foods, including a bag of his own cat food from Utah. I suspect that it was time to die, he became grumpy and irritable. On Monday, 22 April, his liver was getting worst, so we drove the cat to get an ultrasound. It wasn’t good. The cat probably had cancer, ascities, and had some other problems.

While LaNeige cat could have lived a few more month, I believe that I had been cruel enough in keeping LaNeige alive as long as I did.

LaNeige was euthanized at approximately 6:15 PM. LaNeige’s feeding tube had been removed. I had brushed he hair as much as I could without hurting him anymore, LaNeige posed for a few final photographs, he tried like hell to look dignified.

The veterinarian brought in three syringes. The first was to make sure that the IV was still working properly. The second syringe had a sedative. I held himself below his chin as the third syringe, full of an overdose of anesthetic.

LaNeige shuddered twice and exhaled. It took a few seconds. I still held him below his head for about two minutes before I withdrew my hand from under his chin.

While I opted to NOT keep the ashes, I will be receiving an imprint of his footprint with his name “LaNeige” and the years “2003-2013″ on the impression.

I had visited the cat every day he was in the cat-hospital. I had spent a grand total of $1,475.00 to make LaNeige healthy.

Yes, I would imagine that you are thinking that is “only a cat”, but I am still crying about the cats death. I really hope I did the right thing.

I Really Hate The First Day Of April.

Oh, boy, it’s another “April Fools Day” that I must endure.

Why do I so much despise the first of April? It is that damnable April Fools Day that causes the problems:

• Everything on the RSS feeds is questionable.
• Some people play “pranks”
• Some people are just assholes that are justified by stating that they are just playing a “prank”

It seems to me that if an RSS feed is a respectable feed, that it is going to be respectable in all cases, and if the RSS resorts to playing silly buggers on the first of April, then I must re-evaluate whether or not I will continuing to read that RSS feed. However, it seems to be case that the main Debian page is playing silly buggers on the first of April, and the main Debian page is my default homepage on my web browsers.

It is not that I lack a sense of humor, however, there are serious webpages and there are humorous webpages, and the first of April is when I evaluate my RSS feeds.

Sure, I know that some people play pranks, and that some people are amenable to being “pranked”, but people should chose their victims. We should not just haphazardly assume that their victims are OK with the kind of humor you are inflicting them.

For example: I like and appreciate messing with the English language. I use puns and intentionally getting my words wrong or mispronouncing some words. I am totally OK with that, and people who know me are aware of it. However, I dislike practical jokes and making fun of people, these things really piss me off, and anyone who does this to me is probably being downgraded to being a mere acquaintance. I do wish to interact with this sort of humor. It seems to be the case that people who do such things are just using the first of April as an excuse to being an asshole.

And I don’t like it one bit.

 

A quick update

I am in the process of getting a divorce.

As a result in my stroke and the manner in which I have changed my personality as a result of the stroke, my wife has opted to get a divorce.

Crap!

 

About Human Multitasking

After a few minutes of doing some research on multitasking, it didn’t take very long to  come to the conclusion that humans are not able to multitask. The best that humans can muster up is task swapping. Poorly.

Yes, boys and girls, the task swapping human capabilities is, at best, extremely inefficient and prone to errors. It seems to be the case that our working memory is severely limited, and we will feel if try to keep more than 3 or 4 things in our mind at one time.

Hell, with my stroke, I can really focus my mind on a single thing at a time. It seems to me, however, that I am now aware that humans cannot multitask, whereas some people don’t even see that.

So, as advice, just stick to a single thing, it’s all we really have.

LaTeX : What Program I Use To Produce Documents

Latex is a typesetting engine that produces pretty documents. And while one common encounters Latex in an academic setting, specifically with those documents produced in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, due to its superlative equation capabilities, Latex is used in producing a vast array of documents in all fields.

Now, this will certainly not b a Latex tutorial in any manner, as Latex does have a hell of a learning curve. I am just going to tell you a very little amount of information about Latex, and you can decide for yourself whether or not it is worth your while to use Latex.

Donald Knuth produced a program named TeX in 1977. Tex was the forerunner of Latex, which was written in the early 1984 my Leslie Lamport. Latex is, essentially, a set of macros running under Tex. So, every Latex document can be converted to a Tex document, and vice versa. However, while a Tex document merely produces documents, a Latex document produces functional and pretty documents.

Back in 1985, I was using a word processor called Wordstar. Word star was not a WYSIWYG word processor. To be honest, at that time, there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG word processor. I mention Wordstar because the formatting was embedded inside the documents with colored control characters to signify the embedded formatting such as underline, centering,  headers, etc.

And in that era of non-WYSIWYG, people just accepted these facts, and everything was good.

Then WYSIWYG word processors became being produced, and, in my opinion, life went to hell in a handbasket. It seemed to me that as WYSIWYG word processors were produced, people became more concerned with the appearance of what they were producing and not much else. Out went anything with structure for the sake of how the document looked like.

However, when Latex was produced at about the same time that WYSIWYG started gaining popularity, Leslie Lamport created Latex. And to say that Latex was concerned with structure rather than appearance is an understatement. It seems to me that Latex is so much about structure rather than appearance that it is nearly impossible to force it to fit into a WYSIWYG structure without breaking the fuck out of the Latex document. This is because Latex is based upon the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) paradigm. You need to trust that Latex will produce what you mean and it will. Just think about the structure of that document and Latex will take care of everything else for you.

Additionally, a Latex document is an actual programming language. Trust in the Latex compiler and it will take care of you. This is why there is a steep learning curve in writing Latex. However, if spend the time to learn the document structure, you will produce damn good documents that are clearly better than any word processor can produce.

A Latex document consists of two components, a preamble, which tells you the directives that will govern the entire document. The preamble consists of the size of the paper, font size, type or documents, any additional parameters that will govern the entire document.

The main body of the document contains, in general, the structure commands such as section, subsection, arrays, and other things of that sort.

What the document looks like will take care of everything for you. Just trust it and let it be, it will work OK for you.

The documents produced can be a .dvi, .ps, .pdf documents. and you can also produce web pages and probably a few other formats.

Now, even though most, if not all, word processors are newer than Latex, it seems to me that no one seems to be aware of the existence of Latex other than in academia and a few other people. I have had a great deal of trouble when giving people softcopies of, for example, my resume. I give them the final PDF and the Latex source code and their heads seem to explode. I can give them just the PDF and they complain that they cannot edit the PDF.

OK. I am not going to use a word processor. I am able of producing a resume through Latex, and it works well for me. In my opinion, if I can still understand Latex, given that I have a stroke, than some other person can understand Latex. If you have a problem with that, it really isn’t my problem.

It seems to be your problem.

Gouging

Kevin Benko

When a natural disaster strikes, we often discover that prices have raised. In such a situation, we may see the prices increase, sometime drastically, however some commodities are seen as quite valuable and necessary, such as food, potable water, and building supplies. However, we shall discuss gasoline, although any such commodity will be affected.

In such a situation, the suppliers are often accused of “gouging“, and worse. However, it is my opinion that the suppliers are not evil, but merely looking at the market forces and acting responsibly.

First, we should be aware that replenishing the supply must be purchased. We may or may not be aware that the gasoline in the tanks is owned by the gas station, and that in order to buy more gasoline, someone needs to pay for that gasoline, most likely the gas station owner. So, during a disaster, the supplier is charged for more money, since it that much harder for the supplier to actually obtain gasoline. And, of course, that additional cost is covered by the customer, as they should be.

Second, the prices raising the cost of gasoline acts as informal method of rationing. When the prices raise, those people that need the gasoline rather than those people who merely want the gasoline will have it, as prices raise. While some may disagree with this action, it does, nevertheless, work as intended unless an outside agent interferes with this scheme. This will result in the fact that those who really need the gasoline will actually have it.

Thirdly, as prices increase, it allows others outside of the area to purchase commodities outside of the area and sell them in the affected area. Under normal circumstances, under the lower prices, no one willingly bother to get the commodities in the first place. Instead, they would be stuck having to buy and distribute the commodities through FEMA. And as we are well aware, FEMA sucks.

All of these benefits are, however, effectively killed by governmental regulations prevent these things from happening. Hence, under the governmental rules, we will run out of gasoline and other commodities and we must wait for the government get around to rescuing us rather than the entrepreneurs providing the needed services.

The Broken Window Fallacy And Hurricane Sandy

The Broken Window Fallacy, as detailed by Frederic Bastiat, is a thought experiment based upon economics. At first look, one might consider at a window that has been broken, by a criminal for example, is a good thing, since the broken window would have to pay someone in order to repair the broken window. This would result in a net increase by the glazier, and other associated construction personnel.

However, at further examination, we can see that while the glazier would be gaining a net increase in wealth, we can see that we are ignoring the shopkeeper and the loss suffered by the shopkeeper, who is required to pay for the loss incurred. In addition to this, we need to also consider that the shopkeeper can no longer buy, whatever it may have been, what he was intending to buy in the first place.

Hence, destruction does not result in a net gain, since the construction crew is merely replacing a thing that was lost rather than creating something constructive.

Now, some economists may be willing to look for a “silver lining” in hurricane Sandy. It seems that this silver lining only exists if we ignore the fact that we have an overall loss. So, for all that we will have a boom in the construction trades, every one else will see a net loss.

We need to have a reality check. Natural disasters and wars are not good events. And while a few individuals and organizations may gain, the majority of people will have a loss. Because even creative destruction is still just destruction. Even, for example, the Germany and Japanese post WWII production. The economy, in general, took a huge loss.

The war prosperity is much like the prosperity of an earthquake or a plague brings to us. The earthquake may seem good for construction workers. Cholera may yield a net gain for doctors, pharmacies, and morticians. However, no one in their right mind will ever celebrate an earthquake or an outbreak of cholera as stimulus for the productive forces in the general population.

So, no matter how you look at things, natural disasters, such as hurricane Sandy, are disasters. And, for the most part, this is an example of the Broken Window Fallacy.

Men’s Rights : Pregnancy

I am probably about to piss you off. Nevertheless, I have been thinking about the following article for many years and it seems to me that anyone reads my argument should agree with me. However, given the political climate, I am probably going to hear much disagreement. It is most likely that some people will strongly disagree with me because they will intentionally misunderstand what I am going to say.

Let us consider a pregnant female. Now the woman has the option to opt out of the pregnancy. That is to say, that the woman has the absolute and inviolate right to either keep or reject the right to become a parent. Now, for the record, in my opinion, the woman has the right to end the pregnancy without any question whatever.

However, in the case of a man, that option to opt out of parenthood is not only not allowed, it is beyond the grasp of some people of even considering such a thing.

Hence, while a female the right to opt of becoming a parent, the man does not have the right to opt out becoming a parent. In our current political environment, the situation that a man does unilaterally opt out of becoming a parent, the man is labeled as a “dead beat” and then falls under the federal government and, in some states, has his income garnished by the government. On the other hand, if a female has opted out of becoming a parent, she is given a mostly harmless abortion. No harm, no foul.

Tell me. How is this even vaguely resembling fair and equitable?

Suppose, for example, that a man had a right to opt out of being a parent, in much the same way that a woman has had the option for approximately forty years. What would be the result of such a thing:

There would be much less men that would be held captive by an unwanted child and the child support services foisted upon by the government. All the man would need to would be to state that he wishes to not opt into parenthood and the responsibility for the child would be on the woman’s head. Thus, at the most that the man would pay would be the cost of an abortion, if she chose the option.

The act of a woman to “trap” a man into marriage would be a thing of the past. And before one makes the claim that such an act would not be something that most women would do, I will disagree with you and state that there are more such births that you would imagine.  Additionally, this would result in having some people getting together that, to be blunt, should never be together, for whatever reason.

As a result of this, we would have a far greater percentage of wanted children. If we break the single vote on opting out of parenthood and allowing both party’s into allowing the equally chooses to keep the child, it seems to me that this would result into more wanted children.

It seems to be the case that some people may disagree with what I have said:

Some people would state that because women hold all responsibility for birth control, that all women should, likewise, be the only person to make the choice to opt out of parenthood. There is a male birth control pill, and the earlier attempts of a male birth control pill and their side-effects have been eliminated. Unfortunately, the male birth control pill is not currently on the market, for whatever reason. And for those who claim that men are not trustworthy enough to remember to take the male birth control pill every day… you have got to be kidding! When the male birth control pill is released into the market, this would represent a great degree of freedom… forever!

Are you saying that you would force people to have abortions? I have said no such thing! This would create a law that would allow a man to opt out of parenthood. A woman is, therefore, free to raise the child or to seek an abortion. This would allow the man as the same legal right to opt out of parenthood in exactly the same way that women have had the same right for the past forty years. We just want an equitable arrangement, we want the same right that women have had for forty years.

Do you mean to say that you want to prevent the woman from having the right to having an abortion? No. I support the right to opt out of  becoming a parent, I have absolutely nothing to say about opting into becoming a parent. A woman is free to do what he will, but no individual has the right to force another individual into being a parent against their will.

So, how would such an opting out of parenthood work?

I have no definite idea, however, it seems to be the case that, it is difficult to allow a judge into allowing things in some prenuptial arrangements. So, I would imagine that the rules on prenuptial agreements need to be modified to allow the male to opt out of being a parent. We would also need to have a change into contract laws, we would weaken the Child Protective Services, and probably some sort of affidavit in order to make their wish to opt out of parenthood. Beyond this, I would continue to be an activist for this position.

So, contrary to the rhetoric we hear and see in the popular press, media, and the general culture, I assert that my argument does stand on its own. If anyone should happen to disagree with me, I would ask that you respond with valid and logical arguments.

Ultimately, I wish to have real equality.