Temporarily Unavailable

Here are some things you don't want to see when you check your retirement account, especially if the market went into the toilet that day. 

(Don't cry for me.  I've got a year's supply of tuna fish and a waterproof sleeping bag.)

Dean Phillips: Political Cassandra

The article (www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/us/politics/dean-phillips-biden.html) states that Biden had trouble articulating his own agenda during his 2021 visits to Capitol Hill to push for his domestic program.  From the article:

“It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was the first jarring moment for most of us in the caucus,” Mr. Phillips recalled.

The most upsetting aspect of this for me is that I read columnists in the NY Times who had talked to Biden and claimed that the President was as astute and clear as he'd always been.  Woodrow Wilson's exposure to the public after his stroke was tightly controlled by his wife and his physician.  Were those around Biden doing something similar?

Was Biden OK for 20 minutes before sliding downhill?

When I mentioned this to a right winger he said that the media he consumed had been saying that for years.  My only response was that it was not easy to separate bias from news on his choice of media.

We'll know in a few years.

'Press this button to die'/David Blue

 Who knew?  A Do-It-Yourself suicide machine (https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20240717-first-suicide-pod-use-soon-in-switzerland-campaigners).

It's not yet available, but Switzerland may be the first place you can off yourself for only $20.   By quickly replacing the oxygen with nitrogen in the capsule the user dies of hypoxia in about 5 minutes.

I spent an hour searching in vane looking for a reference to a song with the lyric remembered as a "suicide machine strapped across their chests".  

Thinking it was from David Blue song I ended up reading David Blue's Rolling Stone obit  (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/david-blue-singer-songwriter-mystery-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-1005073/) with a side trip reading about Judee Sills before finding that what I was misremembering:

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road" on his “Highway 61 Revisited” album.

One fact in a BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162) mesmerized me: text in the body of the story indicated that the blueprints for the capsule would be available for free. Under the picture of the capsule I saw this:

I can see adapting part of it for my Engineering Drawing class.

I passed along articles about the Sarco Capsule to people as a franchise opportunity.