Very poor seeing and we need to clean the optics, seal and grease some gears, rebalance the main optical tube, resolve a finicky tracking error and then I have to git gud with the processing and cleaning of images.

First Mars of the 2018 opposition. Hoorah.

Don't die so fast. Everything else flows from that.

Weird fucking week here.

I had to get a HepA vaccination. I go to the place, verify paperwork, verify medical history, wait my turn. They take me back to the room and in walks a kid. This gal looked 18, maybe 19. I figured that she was an assistant or other low-level employee to check me in and ask all the medical and allergy stuff before the nurse came in. Then I saw her badge. BSN, RN, APRN. Holy shit. This "kid" has 10+ years of schooling and residency in letters after her name! Assuming starting school at 17, this puts her no younger than 26-28 range. Now, I hate this chick because I have scars older than her and now I feel bad about myself for being old. After the shot, I mentally added two years to her age; she was great with the injection, nearly perfect.

So yea, I'm "that age" now. Fuck.

In other heath news, I'm all but fucked. I'm giving up sugar, grains and starches for as long as I want to remain upright. I am definitely insulin restive but lacking the main markers of full on fuck-you-motherfucker diabetes. Giving up all the junk food, sugar, Chocolate (and that one hurts) has made the numbers move into the "You ain't dead yet" direction. And for the first time in for-fucking-ever? I'm losing about a pound or two a month. I should be losing more. I fast for 80 hours and shit my intestines clean and gain weight. Something they don't tell you about a Keto style diet is the other secondary changes that happen. Think about all the people you know that have trouble waking up in the morning. My working idea on this meme is that the standard western diet is mostly starch and carbs, and 8-9 hours after your last meal you have a major crash in insulin, blood sugar, etc. Those of you that have gone through the "keto flu?" I'm wondering if people are going through that every morning.

I'm sleeping marginally better now. I'm waking up better, not as good as I should, but better. My brain is de-fogging. And those fucking numbers are moving. So physically getting better; mentally pissed off and angry.

As someone going through health shit himself, my view is that every breath I get to make is a giant "Fuck you" to the universe. I'm in this for the long count. As an American, you gotta be your own advocate. get the data from each doc, make a folder, keep everything, and demand your medical records. If you skip over to a new doc, one that will listen to you, you will have all the charts to hand them.

Most doctors, IMO, are data nerds at heart and love to see info and test results. Even when shit does not make sense, if they see a puzzle, they want to solve it. The tricky part is fining a doc with 1. the time 2. the motivation 3. the "I still Give A Shit" drive and latch onto that doc like a parasite. Not getting an answer is a pain in the ass, but we gotta stick with it and hope for something to tick.

One positive out of today's appointment, I won't be having the transplant discussion for a while it seems. Sick, but not sick enough.

Awesome. Keep that out about 10-15 years and you will be talking about stem cell organ regeneration and shit. You'll make mk's week.

TIME THE FUCK OUT HERE PEOPLE.

But it requires customers to be comfortable with a smart lock controlled by Amazon and with an Amazon-connected camera monitoring the inside of their home and communicating to the cloud.

So Amazon wants a camera inside your house that sends, I will assume video, to "the cloud." And what happens where someone at Amazon gets bored and starts accessing this data looking for naked women? Or if the NSA, DHS, DEA comes knocking with a national security letter?

I refuse to have an Alexa, Google Home, Nest any of that shit in my house. It's bad enough that I have a fucking cell phone listening and doing god knows what with that data.

IN news that is not shit, I spent roughly 4 hours under the warm muggy air of the Ohio Valley last night with a telescope that barely functioned. I finally figured out what the bastard was up to (gearbox needed lube and the tube mounting was upside down so it was not tracking at all) and got somewhere along the lines of 400GB of raw data to process. The moon stuff is fucking amazing considering the skies were mediocre at best, and the Saturn stuff I got is probably the bet yet. Might get around to posting images today, but I really need to stay in bed and sleep off this migraine I have.

The Telescope is now working fine and a happy member of the family. I'm going to drop $500 on a new planetary camera once the eclipse circus is over.

Since just about all of these are tame and float around the edge of the hive mind, what the hell, I'll go.

I am significantly more socially conservative that most of the people of Hubski. And since that term has been bastardized by the religious loons, let me explain. "Social Conservative" in my definition is the preservation of the family unit as an anchor for a strong neighborhood, city, state and nation. One of the main roles of the government should be the strengthening and preservation of the family unit through taxation policies, welfare, health spending and social safety nets. Kids need two parents. Having a child as a single parent is foolish and selfish. The children of single parent families, both single moms and single dads, fare far, FAR worse in adulthood than children of two parents. It is turning out that even homosexual couples together in stable relationships raise kids that are just as good as straight couple. Data is still incoming but it is starting to look like two parents don't care about the dangly bits only that both parents are involved and in the kid's life. No Fault Divorce was a mistake, and alimony should go away; it's not the 1950's where women leave the workforce for a few decades to raise kids and have no job prospects any more. We as a society are far too sexually promiscuous for our own good as well and STD's that should have been on the ropes are making comebacks.

The government should move away from "marriage" and more toward a "civil union" model so that the religious and traditional people can get a marriage and have that mean what they want. Everyone going into a union should be forced to have a counseling session with a lawyer and draw up a pre-nup, have it explained that "marriage" is not a wedding and is in fact a major fiscal and legal binding agreement. The marriage chapels in Vegas will go out of business, or will have to change to make this happen, and nothing of value will be lost. Having watched gay friends go through the legal hoops needed to protect them selves in a way a straight couple can by walking into a courthouse really drove the point home to me that this agreement adds over a thousand legal and economic protections that are taken for granted by most of us.

There are only two reasons for a couple with kids to get divorced. One, physical violence. If you are getting beat up, get out. Period. Second, adultery. If they are willing to lie and cheat on you once, they will do so again, and that is not right to force someone to live with another person who disrespects them in that manner. Everything else, if there are kids in the marriage? Either wait until the kids are adults or do what everyone else has done for centuries and work it out and deal with your problems like adults.

Adding onto this, welfare should reward families for staying together. Right now, welfare may not be designed to break up families but that is the end result of our social spending. Instead extra money should be given to to bolster in-tact families. Mom and dad still together with the kids? Use Section 8 housing to put them in an abandoned house instead of in the projects and use the extra money to encourage the family to improve the house. Keep the mom and dad together, help them get through the tough time so the kids are less likely to go to jail, do drugs, and be a drain on the taxpayer in a decade. I'm not sure if there is a way to structure the social safety net to discourage out-of-wedlock births, but that is something that needs to be looked at with a serious lens. If you are a single parent, you should get less welfare and benefits. Working the welfare system in such a way that it demands intact families will lower the prison pipeline, make the schools more stable, lower teenage crime and reduce underage drinking and teen pregnancy. Also I'd like to see an end to school busing programs and a return to neighborhood schools. Find a way to make school funding work better so that the schools in poor areas suck less. One thing I see here is that they bus the kids a hour across town and then the parent, some of whom work two jobs and don't have a car, can't go to the school, talk to the teachers and otherwise can't get involved. This leads to a devaluing of an education in the home. If the school in the in the neighborhood, however, families can see it as a real thing to anchor the area and not an abstract babysitter "over there somewhere." Removing busing in some parts of the country are going to have to be followed up on changes to school funding, but its an idea.

Other than that? I don't care who you are banging. Gay people should be allowed to have the legal and financial benefits of marriage/civil unions. Want to sleep around a lot with lots of people? Go for it, just don't have kids unless you are in a stable coupling.

Oh, and visible tattoos and body modification are stupid. WTF is up with the idiotic nose ring thing? And gauges? Stop that shit.

As the article mentions, it affects more than just the Boy Scouts.

Here is the thing that nobody really talk about; The culture these things create.

If there is ever a question, the kid's words are taken at face value with no doubt. Then self preservation kicks in and you as the adult are screwed; they will sacrifice you to save face and there is nothing you can do about it and zero legal recourse. One mom who was off her mood drugs making an accusation and your career is over. (An online friend of mine had this happen to him, he was 100% innocent of all the accusations and even home with his wife when one the 'incidents' took place. He fucked-the-hell-out of teaching to build houses)

Men are warning other men to not go into teaching and it is hurting our kids and our society. Then you get articles like this one trying to get more men into teaching and child care

And then you get shit like this

He told the newspaper: "I would certainly advocate that no man qualify as a teacher. It is just not worth it. What is the lesson here? There is nothing to protect the male teacher."

The kids who need these services? The kids who desperately need a Big Brother/Big Sister style service? Nobody gives a fuck. They (the kids) don't vote, they don't write checks and maybe once a year or so there will be a one hour conversation in the media when some of these kids are murdered. You then get the same people with stern looks and somber tones who start asking why these kids are dead only to get distracted by celebrity bullshit before the end of the news cycle. The consequences will barely be facebook "Share for a prayer" nonsense until we all change our filters to the flag of the next country that has a terror attack. The Big Brother program out here is seriously hurting because of the fears of litigation bumped their insurance and legal liability rates through the roof and they are struggling to get volunteers that want to go through the insane background check. I used to volunteer to play video games with the kids in the cancer ward. I don't now. They got a new volunteer coordinator and after a few conversations with her I no longer felt my personal safety and integrity were being protected. So fuck the kids with cancer, right?

Great. Now I sound like a fedora wearing neckbeard. And I used the time needed to prep for teaching two astronomy classes tonight for internet posting.

Also? "redscare" My god, that is brilliant.

If it is like anything else, including when I rolled into the place, 100 people make accounts, 10 will post, 3 will stay and become a part of the community. Shitposters and trolls don't work all that well here and they will ass back to 4chan and 9gag.

I resisted the urge to choke the ever loving shit out of two assholes that decided to act like assholes in public. Does that count?

Mars is solid ground that is (relatively) easy to get to without too bad of a gravity well to get back into space from. Mars has water, gypsum, carbon, phosphorus. Mars has just enough air to block a good portion of the bad cosmic radiation without needing 3 foot thick stone shelters.

Mars is really the only place out there that we know of that offers the hope of Humanity being a multi-planet species. Mars is not all that great, really, but it is the best we have.