Stoic Sunday Musings

Upon the Stoa this bright afternoon, I just want to throw out a few items that get caught up in the swirls and eddies of my mind.

Roswell and aliens. Now I am completely certain that there is alien life in the universe. Given that there are more planets in the skies than starts, and that there are more stars then grains of sand in all the beaches of Earth, then yes, the Universe is literally filled with life. Intelligent life may be rare, and if even only one life-form in a BILLION develops a high technology civilization then there could be over a million high technology societies spread throughout our home galaxy alone.

They may not care about us or be interested in the same things as us. They could be completely incomprehensible to our senses. They may have evolved for billions of years. Our culture went from hot air balloons in 1869 to walking on the moon 100 years later. Imagine if our culture continues to evolve at that pace for a million years.

We would be bacteria to that alien race. Dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years and, to our knowledge, never developed space flight. I say that seriously because after a meteor impact and 65 million years of decay, much can be lost. We simply don't know. We don't even know who built Stonehenge and that was just 10,000 years ago.

The point I want to get at here is that despite their high level of technology they can still crash in a desert. They may have traveled thousands of light years to get here, whether by dimensional shifting, faster than light travel, or the high energy method of near light speed travel. Either way, they came a long way just to crash into our desert and end up in our specimen jars.

Perhaps another 1,000 years will see us doing the same thing. Perhaps there is a range of technological evolution that sees cultures spread out for a while, do the whole Star Trek thing for a while, before realizing that hanging around the house and contemplating the higher Universe is more exciting than seeing another rock or cloud of gas. Perhaps interfering with and blowing up a few other cultures was enough for them to realize the ultimate futility of it all.

If Roswell is true, then those people travelled a long, long way just to scatter their fancy ship all over the place.

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If I ever try to say something that is not 100% certain (or truthful) I wilt like a flower in a furnace. I'd like to know how a Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi can stand in front of the cameras and their constituents and say things like "unemployment checks are good for the economy". In a very narrow sense of the idea, I guess I can buy it because NO money in the economy is worse than some money. However, if you create a conducive atmosphere for free economic trade then everyone will make money and not just those the government feels should have it.

How can they do this and not catch fire? Such a blatant lie and their heads don't explode?

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Buying on margin. Didn't we learn our lessen in 1929? Comex silver is trading at 1:7 today. That means that for every seven "shares" of silver they are trading they have only one "share" of physical silver. Unless it is written into people's contracts that there is to be NO physical delivery of silver then those people are buying and selling a pile of paper money. If paper money is tied to silver, then 6 of those dollars are vapor-dollars. Are these people simply speculating, or more commonly called, "gambling"? If so, then they must know that they stand to lose everything. Don't come crying when that happens.

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SEIU has purple shirts. How are they being used any differently than the brown shirts of old?

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Storage Units. Do we really, as a people, have so much junk that we need to pay others to store it for us? If you have to store it how often to you really use it? How much of the credit debt that Americans are drowning under is locked up in storage units all over the country?

Hoarders are of the same ilk. How does someone too ill to mingle in common society accumulate all that junk. How do they have money to do this? I'm happy if I can get all my bills paid let alone spend all day shopping and accumulating.

Can some brains start thinking about getting to the root of those issues?

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Ok, I feel better for now.

Live well, everyone.

--Zavost