Communing with Roadrunners.
I’ve been thinking
I heard during the last election that we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. I was stunned. I googled it. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it’s roughly true. I did the arithmetic on their statistics and found that it took the military spending for the next 9 countries to equal that of the U.S. in 2013. I’m still stunned. Then I wonder what that means in economic terms. Is that sort of spending a drain on our economy? If we didn’t have to spend that money on defense, does that mean we could have spent that money on directly improving the lives of our citizens instead? Is that how it works for countries that don’t have world-wide military forces? Do they have an economy and standard of living an order of magnitude better than ours? I don’t think so. Or is it more complicated than that? Is “national defense” actually an economic engine? Is there a net gain to our country by all that churning of money; taxing citizens, buying munitions, employing armies, and deploying them all about? Certainly there are other motivations for our military actions, but since we do it so much, I have to wonder if maybe our economy is better when we’re pumping out war goods than when we’re at peace.
What happens to spider webs
… if we never walk through them and flail them down with our arms? Judy and I were on the deck watching a web high in the avocado tree. There was a spider maintaining it and running out and back to collect stuff. This went on for quite a while, then suddenly the web started disappearing. The spider was taking it down! All that web, and it only took him about four trips around it and it was gone. It didn’t look like he was balling it up and rolling it away, it looked like the web was disappearing. We googled it. Sure enough, spiders will consume their own webs when they’re through with them, to recycle the ingredients for spinning more webs.
I got chastised
…for referring to those things with blades in the sky as windmills. There are no mills or grinding of grain involved. The chastiser prefers the term wind turbine.
Judy, Valium, and an MRI
They said my claustrophobe wife didn’t have to go all the way into the machine; they only had to put her knee in. Yeah. Right. She’s not that tall. To get Judy’s knee to the correct place in the machine, she went in the tube all the way up to her chin. They put her in. We both got earplugs against the noise. She got headphones and music. I stood by and held her hand. She practiced slow measured breathing. She counted backwards from 100 to zero. Several times. She burned through 10 milligrams of Valium. It took 21 minutes. We made it to the end. Judy survived. The MRI machine survived. The process was a success. My wife is still a claustrophobe. We all went out for ice cream.