A MarketPlace of Ideas

A couple of my neighbors here in the Brazilian compound are from Sweden.  They are generally ok guys.  The contrast between them and my latin neighbors from Portugal is clear.

They get into your fridge and eat things that do not belong to them without asking.  Their socialist mindset is clear.  When they want something they modulate their interpersonal distance to the close latin one. At all other times their interpersonal distance is more Germanic.  Thus when they cook many times they do not offer you some of the results. Even when they use your cheese and ham.

All this and they tend to believe Sweden is better than the USA because in the USA we don’t have massive give away programs.  I now know the definition of the old slang term chiseler.

All in all they are not too bad of guys but its time they go and I won’t miss them too much.  Its another lesson I have learned in how to handle people and my own internal negative feelings.   Its a real business lesson.   You have to be very careful who you let be around you even if they are for the most part good people.  It takes a stellar person for me to want to be around them.

The contrast could not be more clear than with a fellow from Portugal name Jose.  He’s a prince.  In the entire 2 weeks he has been here in the compound he has not let me give him a thing no matter how I have tried.  His brother Luiz commented that he knows people from when he was a child that still ask if they can eat things from his refrigerator in Portugal.  

Very enlightening contrast.  I could be tough and kick the Swedish guys out of my casita but they are only here a short while longer.  They have played a role in a stage-play.  There is the prince Jose contrasted with the boorish behavior of the Swedes.  One could not be schooled more effectively in why you should want to be a prince. 

Researchers have discovered it may indeed be possible to increase your intelligence using a pyramid power and indeed go on to suggest that there maybe something called pyramid power. 

Here are the steps

1- This step is only effective if you have faith that pyramid power works. If you think there is something to be gained from pyramid power read on.   Form a pyramid shape from drinking straws. Its easy using tape and scissors.  After you have formed a pyramid of the same form factor as the classic pyramids of Egypt you are ready. Place it on your head.  You will need to wear it all day everyday for 1 week.   After 1 week you will have as many gains in your intelligence as you most likely can get. After that you enter diminishing returns.

2- If you do not think you can increase your intelligence with pyramid power you must have already been in or near a pyramid because your intelligence is already augmented.  Goto step #3

3- Now you are ready for the most powerful form of pyramid power.  Seek out and join your nearest Amway multi-level marketing hierarchy.  Then you will see true pyramid power in action.   Want to buy some soap?

Helping my Swedish neighbors get connected to my access point I could not help but see the humor naturally inside the Swedish language.  Snart==Soon. Sad==Orgasm, Klockars == plural of clock.

More on this later when I figure out how to set my computer to Swedish.

Point by Point

1- Minister?  We want a politician AND a minister?  Can you say bullshit squared????

2- National sales tax???  You have to be joking.  Replace the income tax with a sales tax ??? 

     The headlines will read this way:  Only 2 years after the income tax was repealed and replaced with a national sales tax it is back.  In a terrible budget pinch house Democrats have re-instituted the income tax. When asked if they would be repealing the national sales tax they replied ” You are joking right? ….Now on to figure out how we get the last 25% of private income in the USA…..” 

Get real.  We have no Ronald Reagan in the crowd of Republican hopefuls.  However goofy Guiliani and Romney are better than this charlatan.  Have you not gotten the idea of the kind of politician that comes out of Arkansas yet?  

And a minister?…are you joking?  These type like a strange type of power.  The type of power to fill minds with their words.  The power to get women to pray to god on their knees in the closet with you.  ( you’re standing )

This smells like some sort of made up scenario the press rolls out.  Same thing that made Dean and McCain actually appear to be contenders.    When will the bullshit end?

Here is what will be written 20 years from now about MMGW:

Man made global warming was an extensive hoax perpetrated by an unplanned conspiracy of Government, anti-capitalist and climate scientists that received government moneys to “study” climate.  Indeed the latter of the 3 was induced to create ever more dire warnings in order to maintain the same level or increased level of funding. 

In this life many people will tell you stories.  Hollywood is at least partially honest in that their stories are openly termed FICTION.   You must be on guard and develop both your ability to spot untruth and sense of humor similtaneiously.   I have done this for you in the case of MMGW.  Here is the take away:

MMGW is the repackaging of the old child’s story Chicken-Little.  This is where the little chicken goes around claiming the sky is falling.  Seen from this perspective you can laugh at the lie.  

If you need more help attaining this perspective there are quite a few tutorials in this blog helping you understand how to think like an engineer.  Its not easy.  Engineering is probably the hardest subject to study.  It is also the hardest to be good at once done and practicing in the field.   What you develop is a mind to sort out clues from assorted and widely varied sources.  When accomplished you can sort truth from fiction in a way that no common person can perform.  In fact these common people not having the skill will often tout you as wrong and say “how can you say that???”    But if you work hard to sharpen your mental knife you will find yourself cutting sacred ideas to ribbons.

This is an excellent question and it requires a 2 part answer depending on whether you believe in MMGW or not.

If you believe:

When you exhale you put out CO2 from your lungs.  Thus you are increasing the process of anthropogenic warming.  Therefore you should immediately hold your breath.  You will thus die in something under 10 minutes.

If you do not believe 

Do not hold your breath.

I am one true green buddha god.  Worship no other!

I was at my neighbor Tord’s house this evening for a barbeque.  He had a female Norwegian guest who was studying “political science”.  Quotes are put there because as you might suspect what these folks are taught seems to be anything but science. 

In an among all the misguided crap she spewed was an interesting nugget for its demonstrative qualities.  According to her the USA so abuses its resources that it is required to import fresh water from central america.  I’m highly skeptical that this is happening.  Simply put the business model simply does not work.  There is no way to make this profitable.  If its not profitable then indeed there is no market force pushing the price high enough to make it so.  Thus I must conclude its not happening.  However she was adament. 

Whether happening or not her conclusion was that the USA abuses its resources.  I think that her beliefs are simply a product of her natural anti-american attitude and a generous helping of reinforcement from similar thinking environmentalists-religion-followers.   Its easy to calculate the Europeans can’t be doing much better than we in the USA.  Given a set of technologies the efficiency of use factors are going to be largely the same. Its very hard to bend this sort of parameter very much. 

Later in the course of converstion at least she was self aware enough later to admit she does not believe in democracy.  In the course of the conversation she admitted it.   It baffles me where she thinks the almighty wisdom will come from that will guide societies.  Some all knowing white bearded environmental guru diety embodying a green buddha?

But think this she does.  You always knew the world is always one step away from disaster.  Now you know why. 

Largely these ideas emanate from developed euro-germanic based cultures.  Its like they just can not shake the influence of the paganistic nature worshipers of old.   And isn’t it odd that all the extreme self righteous cults such as nazism have emanated from there.

 National Socialism is ok as long as its in the name of The Green.  Their neurosis never goes away. It merely changes form and stated causes.

……And we Americans are the boogie man! 

Why can’t they all just meet up at Stonehenge and tell each other what they ought to be doing to placate the gods of nature?  Why must they always involve we normal people who lack their neurosis?   Because we are where the profit is.  We are the ones who must be coerced to pay.  They must whip themselves into a righteous frenzy in order they not feel the guilt of their authoritarian ways.   Thus they feel no pangs of conscience when they stampede the norms into Zeig Heil’ing to a new dictator in the form of an idea.  Isn’t it true that when their longings become strong enough finally a Green-Leader will appear to satiate their need for one.  And on they will go to increase their methods of coercion.  Socialism is always only a hop-skip-and-jump away from some very unkind acts toward our fellow man.   

They have no idea how square they are.  But there it is….they are the epitomy of un-cool.  That’s because stupid just ain’t cool no matter how you dress it up.

The essense of the problem is one of detection.  There is a whole area of signal processing called SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY.  Its an interesting course.  I took it from Doug Cochran as ASU. 

So how do you pick fly shit out of black pepper?  You can not do it.  The joke infers that the 2 things are identical.  Being indentical they can not be discerned. So stop worrying.  You won’t taste the difference.

The following is cut and paste from a comment about WIKIPEDIA

Poster #1

Infuriating features of Wikipedia practices are:

1.The ease with which an article can be torpedoed by half wits.
2. Failure by Wikipedia to recognise the validity of a topic that only the writer has published and worked on in any depth, and by its archaic rules that disallow referring to one’s own work which provides detailed theory to be followed up.
3.The sheer bureacracy involved in submitting an article for it to be retained by the system.
Poster #2

One of the principal problems with Wikipedia is its inner panel of would-be editors, mostly I suspect, young American geeks who have little knowledge of life or the world and who decide what shall or shall not be included. Articles frequently have the note “citation needed” as if every entry has to have a series of foot notes. Conversely, biographical details appear about persons who are enjoying temporary celebrity and which any other encylopaedia would reject. Indeed, celebrity appears to be an important element - Paris Hilton (noted as an “American celebutante”) a young person of ample means but of no discernable ability, has no less than 72 references. Glenda Jackson, infinitely more talented, has but one! If Wikipedia was a genuine encylopaedia, on the lines of Britannica, then it would have a more critical faculty as Google appears to desire. SInce Google is now the hallmark for search engines, with luck its new endeavour will succeed in the same way as the original.

My comments

  Sooner or later the WIKIPEDIA crowd is going to get tired of sitting on their eggs as these eggs never hatch but require endless tending.  There will be no new people to take their places as the  new people are being put off by Wikipedia-Dictators.  People are speaking up more and more about Wikipedia. 

Personally I hope they change the culture of Wikipedia.  But I have my doubts it will happen.

I am atheist. COMPLETELY!!   Yet I get extremely tired of members of the press talking about religion versus evolution.  In superior tones you can hear them pontificate that only a backwards bumpkin would aggitate for creationism to be taught in schools. 

  These are the same guys who push Man Made Global Warming (MMGW) every chance they get.  I find this extremely ironic.  They poo poo one religion shortly before pronouncing MMGW to be indisputable.  They merely swap one article of faith for another and call it a day. 

I will convert to Islam before I believe the farce / hoax / scam that is MMGW.  I would sooner sit though 16 high school religion courses than listen to one more warning of dire consequences due to the MMGW boogie man.

Get a life America.  Our eating disorders and belief in MMGW are a manifestation of the same thing.  A type of neurosis that runs in a thick vein through America.  I do believe in evolution.  I do believe liberals should not reproduce.  The kind of mental weakness and neurosis that leads to believing farsical theories should not be laid down upon another generation of people to suffer endlessly.