Time is age in a dirty bottle

May 17, 2013

131777_600Friday again!
Time is traveling at seemingly breakneck speeds nowadays and here we stand on the threshold of another weekend, with the living warm and overcast up here on California’s north coast — and it can’t come any sooner.

This past month has been dramatic — the Boston bombings, the shoot down of a gun bill, a near-nuclear explosion in Texas, the death of more than a thousand people in efforts to give Americans better shirts, and in the last couple of weeks, President Obama saddled with riding sores.

(Illustration found here).

Always phrased is that as we age, time seems to go faster. And I can say okay to that because as the older I get, time not only appears quicker, but it has the ability now to wrap back around to some person, place of thing from the way long ago — ancient situations far gone, but for some incomprehensible reason, still worry the shit out of me.
Why?
Who knows other than maybe I’ve got a shitload of unknowing regrets over the years and sometimes of those old situations gets hung up in the mental process, and there you have it — I’m way-remorseful for the time I laughed way-out-loud at that girl who farted in fifth-grade class, which started all those other little shits laughing, which in turn embarrassed the little girl to absolute no end. Of course, she wasn’t little in those days — we were all little.

Apparently, there’s something to this — aging freaks out the brain via three concepts:

The first is a phenomenon called “telescopy.”
Telescopy is simply the underestimation of time.
It’s as though you’re looking through a telescope where the details of what you see give you the impression that an object in the distance is much closer than it actually is.
Because of telescopy, our brains recall distant events as if they occurred only yesterday.

The second reason that time seems to be going faster as you get older is called the reminiscence effect.
You can think of it as a series of memory bumps in your life.
Emotionally-charged events — your first kiss, going to college, getting married, having your children, having a grandchild or losing someone dear — are recorded in more vivid detail than what we might call “regular events,” which just pass by in a blur.
The problem is that, as time marches on, life may become more routine, more mundane.
Hence, you create fewer memory bumps, which give you the feeling that time is moving very quickly.

The third theory is the aging of your brain’s biological clock.
Named the SCN (for suprachiasmatic nucleus), it’s found in a very special gland called the hypothalamus located behind the middle of your forehead.
The hypothalamus is also known as your brain’s brain and controls the release of a number of important, youth-maintaining hormones.
Moreover, this little spot (about the size of a pencil point) sends signals to each and every one of your 30 trillion cells, telling them that either all is well or, conversely, that you’re stressed.
The latter has an aging effect throughout your body, including your genes.
These signals influence the length of your telomeres at the end of your chromosomes.
Telomeres are the caps of your DNA and are exquisitely sensitive to stress.
Think of them as like the tips of a shoelace.
As the lace ages, it becomes frayed, damaged, and shortened.
For you, stress equals shorter telomeres and accelerated aging.
Conversely, less stress equals increased telomere size and a longer life.

In a shitload of ways, a shitload of shoelaces are frayed.
And in the sense of the current Republican slobberings over the so-called Obama scandals, these GOP assholes have no sense of aging, time or even indication of the above-mentioned ‘reminiscence effect’ — cry, and then cry some more.
Speaking of which, John ‘The Boner’ Boehner on the IRS portion of the scandals: “My question is, who’s going to jail over this scandal?”
Or worse – from The Dick and Benghazi: “Well they lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video so they wouldn’t have to admit that it was really all about their incompetence, that the State Department and the White House NSC ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the trap.”
These guys have no past — they can’t even remember a few, short years ago. Dick Cheney needs to peer out from behind bars.
In their crying and anguish at all the problems now festering Obama’s agenda, the GOP most-likely will shoot themselves in the foot, or in The Dick’s case, in the face.
Peter Roff at US News and World Report explains:

As has been previously demonstrated, it is altogether too easy to distract GOP members of Congress with “shiny things.”
The news of one new scandal diverts attention from things already under investigation.
In what amounts to a lack of discipline, members are often left chasing their tails, leaving the truth behind events such as Benghazi to be sorted out in the distant future by historians.

The Republicans must, for the good of the country, resist this impulse.
The matters that currently demand the country’s attention are too serious and go too close to the heart of America’s constitutional system of government for the need to chase headlines to be allowed to interfere with an honest effort to get the facts.
It is far too early, for example, for any member of Congress to raise the issue of impeachment, to even refer to the possibility that any or all of the current scandals at the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, within the national security establishment, or elsewhere in government could lead to it.
The facts must come first, and they must be presented in a clear, well defined manner that leaves little doubt that what has been uncovered by congressional investigations constitutes malfeasance and dishonest behavior.
In the American political system there are no shortcuts.
One reason Watergate had such a damaging effect on the Nixon Administration and the Republican Party is that reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stayed on the story day after day after day.
And congressional investigators looking into Nixon’s conduct in office retained their focus and did not go seeking to amplify the case against him with extraneous matters.
In the end, that made it all the more believable that the actions taken against the nation’s 37th president were a matter of justice, not a witch hunt undertaken to turn a political opponent who had just won re-election by carrying 49 of 50 states from office.
In the end, it is not partisan affiliations that matter.
What matters is the truth.
Obama would do much to help himself were he to come clean about all of it rather than pretend the first he heard about any of it was when it was reported on television.
In a 24-hour news cycle, it is difficult to wait until the reality of a given situation catches up with the spin, but both sides of what is clearly an adversarial process need to let the facts take them where they will.

Of course, journalism was different 40 years ago — aging reporters have no feedback from the past.
Time is just too fast, and way-too much shit happens.

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