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As of the latest reporting by the Treasury Department, the US gross national debt rose by $41.5 billion on Thursday, February 22, to a grand total of $20.8 trillion.

Here's the thing: On September 7, 2017, five-and-a-half months ago, just before Congress suspended the debt ceiling, the gross national debt stood at $19.8 trillion.

At that time, I was holding my breath waiting for the gross national debt to take a huge leap in a single day - as it always does after the debt ceiling gets lifted or suspended - and jump to the next ignominious level. It sure did the next day, when it jumped $318 billion.

And it continued. Over a period of 8 weeks, the gross national debt jumped by $640 billion. Four weeks after that, it had ballooned by $723 billion, at which point Fed Chair Yellen - whose cheap-money policies had enabled Congress to do this for years - said that she was "very worried about the sustainability of the US debt trajectory."

Then Congress served up another debt ceiling.

That debt ceiling was suspended on February 8, at which point the gross national debt began to surge again, adding $1 trillion ($960.4 billion rounded to the nearest 100 million), a 5% jump in the gross national debt in just 5.5 months

The US's national debt spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months

Subject: Need to take Tuesday off work

Why time off?

The onset of Manic Depression, Schizophrenia and my own Schizoaffective Disorder typically occurs when one is a young adult. In my case it was in the early Spring of 1984, when I was a sophomore at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

I left in January 1985, and eventually earned my Physics degree at UC Santa Cruz.

I have had very, very little contact with anyone or anything that are connected to Caltech since I left. I was in a profoundly altered state of reality my last few months there. My Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder was diagnosed during a psychiatric inpatient admission in July 1985.

It happens that if one has ever been psychotic, simply thinking about psychosis will cause one to become psychotic again. This gives me the odd ability to start hallucinating just by thinking about it.

(I discuss this in The Heebie Jeebies.)

It's best that I not do that.

For me, Caltech is Powerful Voodoo.

I was recently invited to join the Caltech Alumni Facebook group. I have never been a member of the Caltech Alumni Association - again that would be Powerful Voodoo.

I explained my mental illness to the Caltech Alumni Facebook group.

When I was still a student there I found that none of the students, faculty or staff had the first clue about any form of mental illness. That no one else knew how to help me made my Schizoaffective Disorder far, far worse than it would have been had I been attending some other school when I experienced its onset.

None of the Facebook group members were at the Institute when I was. Most of them are quite a lot younger than that.

I didn't expect their response: an outpouring of support for me.

I've been thinking quite a lot about Caltech today.

It's best that I not do that.

I actually prefer not to use version control, or rather, my preferred form of version control is to roll a tarball every day then make multiple off-site backups.

svn commit --message "These should have been checked in before building the 1.0b9 installer. However I am confident that the installer has the 1.0b9 binaries. Before I checked these in were some other coder to build the installer they would have done so with out-of-date binaries."

Melania Trump re-emerges amid marriage scrutiny

Can Trump succeed where FDR and Bill Clinton failed?

Had I realized that before now I would have already changed to a new distro.

While I occasionally use Linux, really I'm a Mac Fanboi. User Interface is important to me.

I just posted this to facebook.

Yes: Facebook.

I'm trying to mine Monero on Linux, because my Linux box has an AMD graphics card. Monero must be mined on a GPU - "Graphics Processing Unit". But I'm still setting up the required software tools. That's because I'm using Linux, and the Linuxheads all seem to regard it as some manner of advantage that you can't just install anything, you have to install all manner of prerequisites first.

I finally managed to dig up the required repository sources. I'm going from 17.3 to 18 as I write this. That requires I download 1.6 GB of packages.

While I was able to build cmake myself, XMR Stak also requires g++ 5.

Okay, the Eds, using the term losely, in their infinite wisdom, again, terms used loosely, rejected a submission from your loyal and faithful Soylentil, aristarchus. This is not unusual, or unexpected, and normally I do not resort to journal entries for rejected submission, but in this case, I actually spent a fair amount of time putting it together, and despite what the eds fear most, that reality has a well known liberal bias, reality has a well-known liberal bias, and the subject matter of this particular rejected submission needs some discussion. I turn it over to you, my fellow trusted and loyal Soylentils, persons of rapier wit, and steel-trap minds, charity to a fault in debate, real Lentils of Soy!

Original Submission (this is going to hurt, and lose stuff.)

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

A post on the American Philosophical Association blog [apaonline.org]offers some insight into the popularity of a certain Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, who seems much beloved by the alt-right.

Peterson’s work invites a much more extensive critique than I have the space (or inclination) to offer here, and there have been numerous excellent critical pieces (including this recent article in The Guardian) [theguardian.com], but what’s more interesting to me is the question of why so many young men are drawn to his work, specifically what need his pseudo-intellectual misogyny fills for these men, some of whom I’ve found to be otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable in one-on-one interactions.

Evidently, Peterson just published a book, and controversy has ensued. But our author here thinks it is nothing to worry about.

However, I think it is more likely, given that we have largely integrated the pain of those collective traumas, that this regressive moment will be relatively brief, and we will soon see a progressive wave of compassion, justice, sustainability, and even kindness in reaction to the Trump-Peterson era. I suspect this regressive movement will be viewed by history as the final death rattle of the older mode of relation, making way for the emergence of a qualitatively novel historical era. As Whitehead writes, “new epochs emerge with comparative suddenness,” and the tragic regression we’re currently enduring may ultimately be understood as the factor that finally propelled us into a novel mode of relation.

And of course there is much more commentary available, as in The Guardian article referenced, and many other places.

Digg [digg.com] reviews the book:

David Brooks writes in The New York Times that Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is having a moment, and that he may be the "most influential public intellectual" alive. The man that Brooks, a writer known for missing the mark on cultural criticism, calls "the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which" young men are raised today has revealed himself over the last year to harbor a bevy of regressive ideas on sex and gender that turn out to be grounded in his own psychological theories.

Some Canadians [macleans.ca] are rather disapproving:

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson was in the news this week—and one imagines this makes the university sad. Peterson first made the news and became a belle of the alt-right when, in September 2016, he announced that he would not use a student’s preferred pronoun if he were asked to, except that he might if he felt the request was “genuine,” and no one had asked him that anyway.

        What that poor man has been through.

And she adds more:

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

        “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

        To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

What the poor man has been through!

Finally, from the pages of The New Statesman [newstatesman.com]:

In recent weeks, I have become mesmerised by a clinical psychologist who is the darling of the alt-right. That is not a sentence I ever thought I’d have cause to write, but Jordan Peterson is something else.

        I had seen some of his lectures before that notorious interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News in January, the one that gave him particular notoriety in the UK for his comments on the gender pay gap. As Stephen Bush wrote last week, Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is at base a self-help guide, and like every other contribution to that bloated canon contains a mixture of the persuasive and self-evident.

Dark Enlightenment or dank memes, it does seem that the intellectual pretensions of the alt-right are somewhat less than solid. But in a world of changing and confusing roles and self-identities for males, I usually refer to The Art of Manliness [artofmanliness.com] for more actually useful information, without all the rightwing agitprop, and very handy mustache grooming tips.

Original Submission

Pushing 30 is exercise enough.

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Alright, clunky, but most links restored. Have at it, and knock the TMB off his high horse!
*****
Update, of sorts. I have received a message from the TMB his own self, one of those things, again, that lowly normal Soylentils do not have, bragging about how he now has two journals with over a hundred comments. Well, lah-de-dah! Do we really need to turn journals into a popularity contest? This is one reason why, normally, I just let rejected submissions lie. If Soylentils are not interested enough to have it on the front page, in the estimation of the eds, then it probably does not belong there, or in a journal. And I would direct everyone to NotSanguine's journal on rational debate, it is much more interesting than this one. Unless you are a incel with a Red Pillar who voted for Trump.

"The game's not over until everybody gets their cookies" -- Gallagher

I'm going to teAch you a new word: "Anorgasmia"

I didn't get my cookies

It worked at first to take only half my dose of Wellbutrin. But after two gentlemen devoted a total of an hour and a half to struggling valiantly to get me off I stopped taking it at all

For a few days I feared it was permanent. But I am happy to report that I finally got them

But there is a problem: I was taking Wellbutrin so I wouldn't sleep all day.

Today I slept all dAy.

"If you're going to change your medicine, tell your doctor " -- Dr. C

Appearing in court today, former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI and to the Special Counsel at a meeting last month. In preparation for the guilty plea, Robert Mueller filed superseding criminal information earlier today which alleged Gates and Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars that they earned through their work for the Ukrainian government.

So that puts the Mueller Score at 5 guilty pleas and 19 indictments.

Rick Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying to investigators

Florida governor Rick Scott's three-point plan requires gun buyers to be 21 and up

Scott's plan also includes prohibiting a person from having or buying a firearm if he or she is subject to an injunction for protection against stalking, cyberstalking or domestic violence.

Cyberstalking is serious business.