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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."

I was about to install the Tor Browser into a new VM, but found that https://www.torproject.org is down as of ~0000 on 25-Feb-2018 GMT.

I checked with several browsers on several hosts, but no soap. What's more,
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/torproject.org.html and https://isitup.org/www.torproject.org both agree.

Is this a DDOS? Recovery from a hack? Fallout from the recent announcement?

I searched around the web and didn't find anything about this, except for a July, 2017 Reddit post complaining that the site was down.

The browser is still available on Github and, I assume, other download sites/mechanisms.

I wonder what's going on?

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.

"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

Yesterday was a great day for me, and for America -- I always, always put America First. Because I held what I call a Listening Session. People don't know what that is, it's something new. Where I sit down with the American people and LISTEN to what they say. I had 44 predecessors, none of them ever did that. So simple, but none of them ever thought of that. But I'm listening, I listened to some of our students & parents. With cameras rolling. And I brought @VP Pence and Secretary @BetsyDeVos. So they could listen too.

And I heard some beautiful, and very smart things. Jonathan Blank, he's one of the students from Parkland, said, "Thank you for everything. You’ve done a great job, and I like the direction that you’re going in. Thank you."

And Ariana Klein, she's another student from Parkland, beautiful student, said, "I would just like to say thank you for leading this country. You’re a great leader, and I appreciate the direction that the country is going in."

Julia Cordover, she's the president of the students -- of the ones that are left -- there in Parkland. Nice looking girl, and very grateful. She told me, "I’m confident that you’ll do the right thing, and I appreciate you looking at the bump stocks yesterday."

Fred Abt, he's a parent from Parkland, he told me about something @BetsyDeVos said at lunch, he said she said "have people in the school -- teachers, administrators -- who have volunteered to have a firearm safely locked in the classroom, who are given training throughout the year."

Let me tell you, I've been thinking about that for a long time. Because she said it a long time ago. And I knew it was a very smart thing to do, but I said we'd better leave that up to the states. Leave it to our great states. Today I met with our wonderful law enforcement officers, our Governors and so many more to talk about school safety, very important talk. pic.twitter.com/WhC2AxgWXO

But maybe, probably, we need to move more strongly. That would be, certainly, a situation that is being discussed a lot by a lot of people. You’d have a lot people that’d be armed. People of talent. Teachers who are adept at firearms, a lot of people with that. They’d be ready. They’re professionals. They may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force. And they’re very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them, and they’d be spread evenly throughout the school.

And you would no longer have a gun-free zone. Our schools have been gun-free zones for too long. Much too long. A gun-free zone, to a maniac -- because they’re all COWARDS -- a gun-free zone is, let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us.

We need to do what we call CONCEALED CARRY, very important. Hunter Pollack, one of the parents, he said to me, "If a teacher or a security guard has a concealed license and the firearm on their waist, they’re able to easily stop the situation, or the bad guy -- I’ll put it that way -- would not even go near the school knowing that someone can fight back against them." Concealed carry, if you don't know, it's a secret firearm, a hidden firearm. So nobody knows, is this teacher armed? Or not armed? Nobody knows, nobody can tell which teachers or guards -- principals, nurses, everybody -- who's armed and who's not. Very smart!

And we're going to be doing many things, we're going to do a lot. We're going to look into the background checks. And into the mental illness, we have so many mentally ill people now, how did that happen? I'll tell you, years ago, we had mental hospitals -- mental institutions. We had a lot of them, and a lot of them have closed. They’ve closed. And we have so many NUT JOBS on our streets. Seriously degrading some of our finest and most luxurious shopping districts. It's a very deplorable situation. Some people thought it was a stigma. Some people thought, frankly, it was a -- the legislators thought it was too expensive. youtu.be/vKblXAikzEc

How do you feel when I mention all the beautiful women and men after me?

My reply:

I'm cool with it.

I am presently happy with the way my love life is progressing.

Lots of people date more than one other person. I never do. While some feel that non-monogamous dating is OK, I would never be able to deal with the complication. What if two different women fell in love with me? I would have a really hard time letting just one of them down.

You and I pursue different kinds of men. In all my days I have never wanted anything other than a completely anonymous hookup. Glory holes work well for that.

"my love life is progressing":

A certain woman was totally stoked when I gave her a rose. She wasn't around on Valentine's Day so I said "Happy day after Valentine's Day".

About a week before that, I folded an Origami Peace Crane part-way so it would fit in my shirt pocket. "Check this out," I said, then despite being completely overcome with terror I folded it the rest of the way, then demonstrated that tugging on its tail made its wings flap.

"It's said that if you fold a thousand of these, that world peace would result."

She was quite stoked about the peace crane too.

I expect that panicking while folding her peace crane conveyed the message that I'm into her.

Even if she hasn't realized that, at my first opportunity I plan to ask her to meet for coffee.

Coffee first dates work well for me.

But sometimes I am so fearful that I lose the ability to speak.