AIG Gets 85 Billion, Needy Get the Bird

So, I just read about the feds bailing out AIG with a whopping $85 billion. Amazing! All of this because "A disorderly failure of AIG could add to already significant levels of financial market fragility".

Now, I know the "financial market" is important but what about real people? It occurs to me that if our government can drop $85 down AIG's g-string in a crisis ($300 billion when combined with similar bailouts), it should be able to help our poor and starving in a much bigger way.

Let's do some quick math. I just read here that our homeless population is at around 3.5 million (but I didn't look for multiple sources). Let's say instead of saving some mal-run financial mogul, we put that directly in the hands of the homeless to get them back on their feet. Just taking AIG's $85 billion, that would amount to $24,285 per person! I think that'd go a long way in helping America be what it always says it wants to be.

Dramatic Aside

What's that you say, Johnny McWallStreet? Oh yeah! I forgot! Homeless people would just waste it on booze and crack cocaine! That's why they're homeless in the first place. They're just lazy and need to get a job. That's so silly of me.

Ok, I've got a better idea. We need to get these lazy sobs some jobs. But it's tricky, because they're REAL lazy. We need to find some jobs where they wouldn't have to do much. Real work is too demanding.

Ah! ¡Solución magnífica!! Let's put them on Wall Street! An infant could make those decisions and let's face it, how much worse could it get?

End Scene

I suppose what bothers me most is the amount of effort we exhaust for the sake of saving money. We have huge businesses dedicated to nothing more than handling money, trading money and spending money. We pay people to watch those people who watch the money. But money isn't actual wealth, it's a damn symbol.

To paraphrase Alan Watts (again), "money is of the same nature of reality as inches or grams, it's a unit of measurement". We're letting people starve and die for the sake of a symbol, a referent and we're all to blame.

I'm not a Christian, but seriously, what the hell would Jesus do? More on this later...

The Large Hadron Collider and the Hubris of Science

So, apparently tomorrow (September 10th), CERN will be circulating the first protons in the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to find the elusive Higgs Boson. Why should you care?

Well, some would say you should care because of the ever so slim chance that it could create a miniature black hole and of course destroy us all. As I understand it, however, this exciting possibility is mostly fantasy. In the remote chance that it does create a miniature black hole, it would be incredibly unstable and be gone in a blink of an eye.

Why you should really care is that there is a tremendous amount of scientific knowledge riding on this experiment, namely the standard model. For those of you unfamiliar, I'll give you the basic gist as described by an artist. I highly recommend you read all about it though, it's terribly interesting.

The Artist's Gist

The standard model is basically about the smallest constituents of "matter", the building blocks of well, everything. These particles make up everything you see. The standard model is the mathematics that tie it all together. Imagine Einstein's E=mc2 but several pages in length and completely mind numbing.

So, what's the problem? Well basically the standard model seems to allude that no particles have mass at that level. But, we experience mass on a daily basis, so where's it coming from? In order to compensate for this, there is what's called the Higgs Field. Basically, this is some kind of field which permeates everything and which "slows down" some elementary particles, giving them mass. Now, the only way to verify this field's existence is to find it's corresponding particle: enter the Higgs Boson. This particle has been labeled "The God Particle" because it's the keystone to making the standard model work and "completing" our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature.

These alleged particles where only in existence during the Big Bang, so in order to verify them, we need to smash protons together at such a speed as to break them apart , singling out the Higgs Boson. Up to now, we've not had particle accelerators powerful enough to do the trick. The Large Hadron Collider developed by CERN has this potential. But, the success/failure of this experiment is more than just possibly finding the Higgs Boson.

As I understand it, if we do not find this Higgs Boson in this experiment, it simply means it doesn't exist. In turn, it unravels the Standard Model and science has got some splainin' to do, Lucy. So, tomorrow we'll apparently find out if our greatest minds over the past decades have actually figured out life or whether our universe is far more mysterious and elusive that anyone could have imagined.

I'll have more to say on this later but sufficed to say that I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the latter option. I have a hunch that this cosmic circumstance we find ourselves in is far more complex than we can ever truly comprehend and thus maintaining the mystery of life and a humble attitude to it's wonder.

What Makes Being Human Significant?

This is a mild break from the regular format. Rather than purging my ideological ramblings, I'd like to get some feedback from you lot. What do you like about being human? What makes life as a human worth the trouble? Here in the states, in spite of our current situation, we are allowed access to a great many wonderful things about being human.

If that seems vague, I'll share a few off the top of my noggin in no particular order:

• Love (Romantic, Friendly, Family, Etc.)
• Relationships (Building a Story Together, Being a Part of Something)
• Art, Music, Delicious Food
• Hot Tea
• Thinking, Philosophy
  
• Spirituality (Regardless of Origin)
• Eureka! Moments
• Observing & Interacting with Other Species (Dog, Fish, Plants, Nature)
• Enjoyment of Sex (Very few species do!)
• Learning, Discovery
• Creating Art, Music, Food, Etc.
• Having Fun! Celebrations!
• Helping Those in Need
• Hugs!
• Kisses!
• A Feeling of Freedom and Liberty
  

There is just so much more to list, but it's a start. If you're wondering where this is going, I'll tell you. I have an infant theory beginning to bubble. So far, it's something like this:

If we can figure out what it means to be human, what makes it special, what makes it joyous, what makes it "worth it", then we can devise a method of living that exemplifies these vitals. It will guide us in prioritizing problems, etc.

So often, we focus on the negative, what bugs us (for which I'm completely guilty). How about rather than thinking about what we don't want people doing, we focus on things everyone should be able to enjoy?

So, what's your list?