Kids React to the Beatles (funny)

Going to the Disability Doctor Thursday

If you have time, say a prayer for me. Tomorrow morning at 9:30 A.M. I have to go to a doctor that Social Security uses to help determine disability benefits eligibility. My arthritis has progressed to the point where I can only stand for about 5 minutes at a time. The window cleaning business is quickly becoming a thing of the past. I’m down to working 2 hours per day, 3 days per week with it. My osteoarthritis is degenerative and has gotten MUCH worse this past year. (My X-rays show how it’s progressed, but I have to see this doctor anyway for some reason.) It’s still confined to my back at this point. My dad had to take early retirement for the same condition. His spread to his hips and knees very quickly. He needed to have them all replaced but settled for just the one hip that was hurting the worst. I’m praying that doesn’t happen to me! The more I stand on my feet and especially climb a ladder and reach up with a pole etc., the more damage it’s doing to the pads between my discs. I need to get out of this job before it’s down to bone on bone. Disability doesn’t pay much, but I’ll make about $10K with my book formatting business this year, and that’s just about the max amount I can make and draw disability at the same time. With the two together I can just make it. I’m hoping that within a few years I can go full-time with the new business, but in the meantime I need some help!

Several people have told me that hardly anyone gets approved for disability the first time they apply. In fact, a lady told me just the other day that her brother was denied the first time, and he had terminal cancer! I can only guess they figured his hadn’t progressed to the point where he couldn’t work anymore yet. If I get approved the first time through, I believe I can start drawing benefits in February, 2016. That will be just about perfect for me. Also, my medical care through the VA has been pretty bad overall. If I’m on disability, I should be able to get on Medicare Part B, and I think that will be a whole lot better. I can stay in the VA health care system and be on Medicare at the same time, so I don’t need the Part D drug coverage because the VA will pay for all drug costs.

I believe this is the best thing for me at this time. I don’t want to be one of those people who milk the system though. I hope to be on my own again in 2 to 3 years. . . well, unless my arthritis progresses to the point where I can’t even sit down without pain. Also, I need to get dieting seriously right now, and being away from my window business is the best way to do that. I lost a ton of weight back around 1990 when I was laid off from Kroger for nearly a year. I just went to the track every day and made losing weight my job! It was easy to keep focused on the goal when that was all I had to do. If I can get really skinny again, most, of not all, of the pain in my back may disappear altogether. At least for a few years. The arthritis may worsen to the point where no matter how skinny I get, it won’t help. But it may buy me several pain free years, maybe even until retirement. And it’s possible my arthritis will crawl to a stop at some point and never get much worse. That’s what I’m praying for. I hope that within the next two years I’ll have my life back. I’m only 56. I should have a lot of life left in me if I just have time to heal up!

Thanks.

Chris Smither Live at Haddon Heights Park, NJ

Wonderfully recorded outdoor concert with the best singer/songwriter of all-time. I especially like the song he wrote from his seven year old daughter's questions about life at 21:45

Good Movie on Sleep Paralysis

There's a movie on Netflix that came out last year on the subject of sleep paralysis that's very much worth watching. I don't seem to have it much anymore, but I went through a lot of this 15 years ago. What cured me? It sounds silly, but I noticed that in certain esoteric writings it was suggested that people who were trying to have an out of body experience during meditation should make sure the head of their bed was pointed north. (Something to do with the magnetic north and magnetic fields in your brain I guess.) I figured that if this would help people induce an OBE, then pointing your bed in a different direction might help stop them. My dad (who lived across town at the time) and I both had this problem of SP plus having nightmares. After checking with a compass, I found that both of us had our beds pointing north. I reoriented them to the east, and our problems pretty much went away for good. Strange, but true. The movie is called The Nightmare:

The Nightmare

The Savior of Country Music?

Mo Pitney is just 24. He wrote every song on his first album except one and if anybody could be called the "real deal," it's this guy. He's gonna be huge. Wait and see. By the way, that's his sister, Holly, singing backup with him on this first song. She has a twin brother too, and they often serve as his backup singers.

Clean Up On Aisle Five

Duct Tape and Jesus

Boy & A Girl Thing

I Met Merle Haggard Today

Uninsured Man Pays $57K for Anti-Venom Drug At Mercy Hospital

I saw this on the news last night. A man got bitten by a copperhead. He had no insurance, so Mercy Hospital charged him whatever they darn well felt like. Just more proof that America's health care system is a joke and beyond repair.

News 4 Investigates: The hidden cost of medical care

This is the kind of thing that really makes me angry. If I were president, heads would roll.

Annual Anti-Atheism Rant

All of creation is nothing but random collisions of particles according to atheism. It can be nothing else without a mind at the bottom of the well. Life itself, animation, consciousness, the facade of intelligence, good and evil--all nothing but random collisions. There's a reason why nearly 65% of all scientists believe in a god or at least a higher power. They've actually bothered to think things through to the logical conclusion. Most atheists don't appear to have even begun to think about the ramifications of such a belief system as atheism. Do they not see how ridiculous it sounds saying that they don't believe in god and yet they think people can be "good?" There can be no goodness in the deterministic worldview. Atheists have no business ever calling anything good or bad, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong. If you're an atheist, you should never call the police if someone robs you or beats you or harms you in any way, because those things are just fine in the world of atheism where things just "are" and nothing has any meaning, let alone that of good and evil. Atheism is an ideology for people who do not wish to think. Rather than read Attenborough, you might try reading a more heady paper on the subject such as Chris Langon's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe which carries out David Bohm's work in quantum potential and merges it with consciousness as the binding agent that unifies the forces of the universe.

Surely you all know the universe is still expanding, right? That same rapid expansion that caused the explosive force (particles banging into particles) at the beginning of the universe is still happening and will go on happening forever. Billions of photons alone pass through your body every second. And every time you take a step across the room, you take on an entirely new body, replacing every particle in it. Actually, you don't need to take any steps. The Earth turning on its axis will take the steps for you. So, not only are you taking on new particles constantly and losing the old ones, the new ones somehow know your age and will keep degrading instead of keeping you looking and feeling new. Wouldn't you expect a brand new set of particles to be fresh and young? How is it they take on the characteristics of older degraded particles when they begin to make up your body? How do they keep such exact shapes? Why does your nose always look like a nose (and the exact same nose) if your particles are always changing? Atoms are made up of mostly empty space. Your body is mostly made up of empty space. Electronic force fields keep all matter together, but how do those forces know to keep such an exact shape as every single person's nose and ears or every blade of grass? If the particles in your brain keep changing and being replaced from second to second, how are you able to reason and retain memories and trains of thought?

Science has never been able to answer the tough questions. It doesn't even try. It just gives names to various phenomena and moves on. Giving something a name does not explain it. Saying animals have instincts does not explain them. How can a Monarch butterfly fly to Mexico every winter to the exact same tree it's grandfather was born in when the young butterfly had never been there before and had never even known its grandfather? Calling such phenomena an "instinct" is an extreme oversimplification, but this is more often than not what science does. Many people like to think the world is somehow this amazing self made machine that just does all this incredible stuff by mere chance from those random collisions of particles when the fact is that it runs much more like a staggeringly elaborate program with very little left to chance. At the same time, there are things that do seem to go wrong from time to time that make little sense to any of us. Why do dumb animals feel pain? It doesn't seem fair. Why do major asteroids hit the Earth every 50 to 100 million years and wipe out most of the life forms? Yes, it's baffling. But that doesn't somehow nullify the fact that the majority of the time, this elaborate program of sorts works amazingly well and not at all like something left to chance. It works so well that the ancient Jews referred to it as the Book of Life, as though life itself were a written script. I don't think they were correct, but I can certainly understand the logic behind the analogy.

No one can say for sure that any person or religion has exactly the right notion of God. I think some, particularly Christianity and Hinduism, are closest to the facts of the matter. But whatever God is happens to be just as beyond our understanding as the mechanisms behind the forces of the universe. That's my opinion anyway. But as Socrates said, "I know nothing."