No work today yet life goes on but for the working class, poverty is here.

  I haven't posted in a long while, and it's time. A great deal of time has passed since my last post, and it will take me a while to write it all down here. So here goes.

  I had no work today, and tried applying for unemployment at the Colo. Division of Labor and Employment, and when I got to the point where you have to register for work, I did something wrong, that caused a weird error on their website, and I never could get back in to finish my application.

  After that I tried to call the Colo Division of Labor and Employment, but the first three times I got a "Your call cannot be completed as dialed, all circuits are busy. Please try your call again. Message D-E-N." So no way to get thru to a real human being to assist with filing for job attached unemployment. Typical bureaucracy : not enough help and droves of applicants all trying to do the same thing.

  Then Tomas, Tom's roommate was dropped off by his friend Dale, and Tomas went upstairs, and promptly fell down and knocked his table over, was incoherent, and I struggled mightily to get him to lay down on his bed or sit in his chair, and still he wants to get around and flail and flop around, and he won't eat the hot dog I made for him. Had to feed him the hot dog and almost got bit for my trouble, and still he won't eat it. I'm going to try and get him to eat one of his fruit cups, and this gets his blood sugar up fast, and it works if he will eat it down.

  I sure am tired of helping him out, and he won't do anything to help himself, won't eat on schedule, can't get more money on his food stamps and get food, and his so called friends just drop him off an leave him here, and I have to deal with him. Tomas needs to go into a care facility, and the sooner the better.

  In Washington D.C., the so called Super Committee in Washington has failed to come to a deal to cut the budget, and they have till tomorrow night to come to an agreement, and if they don't, who knows what will happen. Some more chaotic drops in the Dow Jones, NASDAQ and OTC stock markets here and similar plunges in stock markets around the world, led over the cliff by Wall Street brokers more than likely. These people in the Congress obviously don't care, so why should I, or anyone else in the nation who isn't a politician, lobbyist, or bankster, care about them ? WHY ????? I sure don't.

  I had no work again today, and had no work Friday, so another work week gone with only 29 hours pay coming, and this week is another short week of work, so the check coming this week is going to be correspondingly short again, as has been the case all this year, since I started working at my current job, and most of this century so far to tell the truth. This whole century so far has been a wash financially, and I have finally concluded that it's not going to get any better financially for me, or for many of the working class, former middle class, non-degreed professional working people whose degrees are no longer in demand or applicable to the work structure and environment we have today. The system extant has failed us, and we can't have an entire nation of paper pushers, bureaucrats, service workers, and illegal aliens all competing for a fixed or shrinking pool of jobs. Not everyone can or should have to have an advanced degree to have a decent paying job, or be expected to jump right into a job right out of college and be willing to work six days a week, ten or twelve hours a week for a salary that is less than the amount they thought they would be compensated for their years of discipline and study. That is wrong, but like so much else this century, that is the norm.

I still do not have my truck, and I called Dale earlier, and he said my truck should be ready in a day or two. How many times have I heard that since July ? I hope he is telling me the real situation, as I have a whole four months of work to do in my storage unit, and this is the 21st already, and I owe for my phone and internet and must pay this by the 23rd, and maybe a day's leeway, then both the Internet and my phone will be turned off, and I will be out of contact with everyone and everything. Another consequence of not enough pay and fixed and growing expenses that never get less.

  I do know I am tired of chasing the carrot on a stick in front of me, continuing to try to get that carrot but never getting any closer to it, nor getting more money or getting ahead financially from working a job for a living. A degreed professional in the Wealthy Criminal Class can earn a fortune by just getting inside information from his crony buddies and need not work harder than a few keystrokes an moving a mouse on a computer at work, or even at home. The working/middle class drone is a SUCKER, and why the middle class continues to be a sucker is beyond me. Obviously the so-called Scientific Management mantra of the Protestant Work Ethic/Operant Conditioning works to keep the drones in line, and in their place. But I have learned it is a sham and a delusion, and don’t believe what the government-media complex says, and haven’t for some time now.

  I have started making connections with people on three new sites that represent farming, survival and self sufficient living, but it is too soon to have any results from these sites, and it will take time. I do know the way of life I have been living is coming to an end, and it is time to connect and network with other people who see the reality of what is coming, and are making preparations for whatever is coming, as much as one can prepare for the end of the world as we know it. But the end is in sight, and the final phase of whatever is going to happen is about to start.

　

　

　

Soyuz TMA 22 is in orbit, I worked today, and a new restaurant I like.

 The Soyuz TMA 22 spacecraft is in its final hours of it's rendezvous chase of the International Space Station, having completed thirty orbits of the earth, and is closing in on the orbital complex. I've heard of no problems with the spacecraft, and the crew is up now and in the last few hours of its approach and the first few hours of their second day in space.

 I also worked for Century Link on Tennyson and 38th Ave today. Got six hours today, and it was actually a normal fall day, chilly but no killer cold breeze, and sunny and nice. It was an easy workday, with my partner slow paddling eastbounds, and I worked the north-south traffic, waving northbound and southbound traffic around the lane closures, and stopping left turners who could not see around the Century Link van.

 Cat, the man from Century Link and I finished around 1 PM, and I went to catch the bus to go home,when I saw this Mexican restaurant across the street and decided to charge the battery in my laptop and cell phone there, and get something to eat and some coffee.

 This place is called Javier & C, and the food was good, the decor is modern yet rustic, and the waitress was hot and easy on the eyes. She is a younger woman going to college for a nursing certificate, and boy, is she a HOTTIE ! Too bad she has a boyfriend, and too bad I am too old for her too. If was thirty or even twenty years younger, I would be all over her like a rat on a cheeto. It Sucks to be older and fat dumpy and disgusting, I could be such a good man to a hottie younger woman who just had to have me and who had to "save"me. Oh, for that ! Youth is wasted on the young.

 I had a green chili burrito, cinnamon roll, coffee, lots of coffee, and water, and it went down well. I am stuffed and could get along very well not eating till tomorrow morning, I am that full. So my lunch//dinner/supper is taken care of till the morrow.

 Now I have to go home to a cold place, because Xcel turned the power off at Tom's yesterday, and he has no lights or heat, but still has hot water suprisingly enough. So  I boiled some water for coffee this moring, and made some Chili from a pound of ground beef, and ate that before I got the phone call from Joanne to work where I worked at today. Fourteen hours of work so far this week, and I have an assignment for tomorrow at 37th and Tejon for Quest/Century Link at 8:30 AM. Thank God ! - it's been a terrible year financially, and this whole year will be a wash financially I'm sure. So much for the Middle Class life, I fear it's gone like a hook torn off a fishing line by an underwater snag.

 My perception of the Great Depression of the Twenty First century is that the post World War II boom is gone, the various real estate, tech, dot-com, and other speculative booms are long over, and there is no boom other than the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota and Saskatchewan that pays boomtown wages to skilled, unskilled, and entry level workers all, but that's it for the US and canada. The bottom is out of the barrel, and most of us are struggling to keep our heads above water financially, and many many people like Tom, Cat, and others are suffering terribly from the worldwide depression that is clearly here.

 So today was a respite from the gloomy financial situation I and many others are going thru. I enjoyed the time I spent at Javier & C's, and hope to come back, if for no other reason than to see the hot younger waitress again.

Meet Soyuz, the spacecraft.

 Meet Soyuz, the updated TMA version that will carry Expedition 29 Commander Dan Burbank, and Cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin into orbit and on a two day rendezvous chase of the International Space Station. The spacecraft is inside the payload shroud on top of the upper stage of the Ol' number 7 booster, what Semyorka roughly translates to from Russian.

  Soyuz first flew atop a Semyorka in 1967, the spacecraft has been redesigned and updated several times since then, and has performed excellently for many years. The current version, optomized for taller people than previous spacecraft could carry, debuted in 2002. The modern version has flat panel displays, modern modularized lightweight avionics, a lighter weight structure, and the typical cozy Descent module pressure vessel layout.  Soyuz is 22.9  feet long, 7.20 feet across the body of the service module, and 35.1 feet across the deployed solar arrays. It weighs 15,900 pounds. It can carry three people on a typical two day rendezvous chase of the International Space Station, followed by proximity formation flying, then closing in for a docking.

 Soyuz TMA normally takes two days to make an automated rendezvous chase, making engine burns to increase its speed and close the gap of severalthousand miles from the International Space Station  to yards, then dock. Chasing the station around the world in thirty two or more orbis  and climbing  from an initial lower orbit to the space station's orbital altitude of 235 statute miles is basically a road to orbit much travelled by the redoubtable Soyuz TMA.

 Soyuz TMA has proven it can do the job of flying into and back from space, and the American and other nations professional and tourist astronauts report the ride is dynamic, being pushed back into your seat liner in the descent module during the powered flight to orbit, the enrapturing experience of microgravity while in orbit, and the incomporable views of Earth that change by the minute, and never gets boring to look at.

 Get used to Soyuz TMA America. It will be how our Astronauts will be flying into and back from space for the next several years, till an alternative crewed spacecraft made in the USA begins to launch into orbit and fly in space.

Soyuz TMA-22 moved to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Expedition 28s crew launch on Sunday.

 The SP Korolev RSC Energia corporation has moved the Semyorka rocket with the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft atop it, to the launch pad at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, in preparation for the next crew launch to the International Space Station. This launch will be the first one with a crew atop the same kind of upper stage that failed to put a Progress resupply spacecraft into orbit in August. Two months of intensive tests and investigation into the causes of the launch failure in August found the cause: a clogged fuel line that kept the upper stage from firing for the proper length of time to put the Progress spacecraft into obit. This problem has been corrected and the Semyorka rocket that will send the 3 man crew of Expedition 28s to the International Space Station on this coming Sunday was railed to the launch pad this morning, before dawn.

 By the light of a just after Full Moon, the Semyorka was pulled out if it’s assembly building, and backed down a rail spur by a locomotive. The rocket with spacecraft inside the payload shroud reached the pad without incident, and was erected from horizontal to vertical in a move done more than 1,800 times since mid 1957.

Expedition 28s, with Commander Dan Burbank , Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov, and Anatoly Inavishin, will launch at 8:14 PM Mountain Standard time Sunday night, which of course will be early Monday morning UT and in Kazakhstan. Early start for a workweek for Dan, Anton and Anatoly.

 Much more than a new crew for the International Space Station is at stake. IF this launch to the ISS fails for any reason, and I say IF, it is likely the crew aboard the station will place the station in a mode where it can be controlled from the ground, but little or no science will be done, and the station basically mothballed and on automatic pilot as it were, with no one aboard for who knows how long. So the success of ths flight to the International Space Station is critical to our presence in space, and if it fails, what it will say about our fragile daisy chain of access to our own space station, and those who got us into this precarious position will be obvious.

 I have included two views of the rollout to the pad of Soyuz TMA-22/Expedition 28’s Semyorka so everyone who reads this blog will get a sense of what’s at stake with this launch, as well as the time proven Russian Semyorka/Soyuz combination that has worked very well over many decades to sent people into space.

　

　

　

The Government Media takeover didn't work very well, thanks be to God. Phobos-Grunt is in Earth orbit, but not for long no matter what happens, and Herman Cain is being lynched by the Leftist mainstream media, and we are all the losers for it.

I listened today at noon Mountain time when the Emergency Alert System test was being done, and it was on most of the stations I switched to on AM and FM both, but there was a lag time between stations, and a few stations audio feed was weaker than others, and some were broken audio, with gaps and lags like a file download that is lagging and hanging or both. Maybe a takeover of all broadcasts by the Fedgov is not as easy as we fear. Lets hope so !

The Russians are going to try to upload software to Phobos-Grunt in hopes it will respond and make the two burns to get into an elliptical orbit around Earth first, then a Mars Injection burn. They have four days till the spacecraft dies for lack of a charge in the batteries, because the solar arrays are not deployed and unable to recharge the batteries from the initial charge they had at launch. I hope the flight controllers and support people are able to salvage this mission; I would like to see it touch down on Phobos and gather soil samples and return them to Earth.

The furor over what Herman Cain  did or did not do rages on. It seems like at least one and maybe more women are coming forth with external prompting, bribes, ect, instead of in and of themselves. They could have done this years ago, but didn't- Gee, I wonder why ? It does seem to me that he is being set up for a fall, and there is more to what is happening to him than what he is supposed to have done or not done as far as inappropriate conduct with these women is concerned. Or not. I personally like the public persona of Herman Cain, and if he is being set up for a fall and the powers that be really don't want him to be a serious challenger to President Obama, this troubles me enormously. What it says about those people who influence our pre election political process is likewise troubling. I wonder if our systems, political, economic and otherwise, are so corrupted that the only way to fix them is to get rid of them and start over, but the Occupy (fill in the blank) groups claim they are already doing this. Vox Populi, Vox Humbug. Maybe.

2005 YU 55 passes Earth without incident, Phobos-Grunt is in trouble.

The Near Earth Asteroid 2005 YU 55 passed Earth late this afternoon Mountain Daylight time in the US, and this evening no doubt many amateur and professional astronomers are looking thru eyepieces and making exposures with different types of cameras, hoping to capture images of the asteroid as it passed our planet.

 Closer to home the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft made it into low earth parking orbit, but the burn of the upper stage to propel the spacecraft first into an elliptical orbit, then onto a Mars transfer orbit around the sun apparently never took place. Observers in South America reported seeing two separate objects orbiting the Earth, but not in a trans Martian trajectory leaving Earth orbit.

It appears the upper stage, based on the sometime troublesome Fregat liquid fueled system, may have failed to commence or complete its firing to send the spacecraft on its way to Mars. I'll report more when I have more definitive information.

11 years in space on the International Space Station today, and China does it - first docking between Shenzhou and Tiangong.

11 years ago today, the first Expediton crew boarded the International Space Staton for the first time, beginning the continuous occupation of the station by crews from then to now. Twenty nine expeditions of Astronauts and Cosmonauts from many different countries have either visited the orbiting complex or lived aboard it for many months at a time since November 2 2000.  And in a further bit of good news for the international partners, the Progress 45 supply spacecraft successfully docked to the station bringing 2 1/2 tons of food, fuel, experimental hardware and spare parts to the station's three man crew.

The successful launch, orbital rendezvous and docking of the Progress makes almost certain the upcoming launc of the remainder of the Expedition 29 crew to the orbiting outpost November 14.

 And China successfully docked their unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft to the already orbiting Tiangong experimental space station module in orbit, bolstering hopes that China will be able to launch and operate a future crewed space station, starting in the middle of the decade, and send crews on missions in earth orbit for much the same reasons the US and international partners do with the International Space Station.

 China repeatedly asked to become a partner with the US, but their human rights abuses and increasingly military might weighed against both the Bush and Obama Administrations from letting China join the 16 nation project, working for 11 years in orbit now.

 I personally wish any and all spacefaring nations success in their ventures beyond the Earth's atomsphere, as there is plenty for every nation to do in opeining up the Final Frontier for everyone.

China Moves ahead with launch of its test space station module.

China successfully launched a new Shenzhou spacecraft to automatically rendezvous and dock with its new Tiangong 1 space station test module. The unmanned Shenhou 8 spacecraft will test automatic rendezvous and docking hardware, maneuvers and techniques, essential to China's ability to build up and operate infrastructure in low earth orbit and elsewhere in space as well. First docking is scheduled Thursday, and the linked combination will stay docked for 12 days, then undock and orbit the earth in formation for a time, then automatically dock again before undocking for a final time, then returning to Earth.

This module is unmanned, but a future version equipped to house a crew is scheduled to be launched in 2016, and following a four year buildup, will be completed and fully operational in 2020. This station will have several modules, and be resupplied by an unmanned cargo spacecraft similar in concept to the Progress series of spacecraft that have serviced Soviet and Russian space stations since 1980.

It isn't known if the Chinese intend to keep a crew in orbit continuously, or fly expeditions and keep crews in orbit for a time, then return them home, leaving an uncrewed spacecraft in orbit.

The Chinese view space as important to their reemergence as a world power, and a  modern analog to the voyages of exploration undertaken in the 15h Century by Admiral Cheng Ho's fleet, throughout Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and eastern Africa and the Persian Gulf region. They rightly understand the link between opening a fronter outside of China, and the flow of newly created wealth from the utilization of resources and energy from that frontier. Something the US used to understand, but has apparently chosen to ignore.