A MarketPlace of Ideas                        

Robert McNamara has died.  Unfortunately his brand of social engineering is alive and well.   You may know a couple of Roberts "innovations".  They include the F-111.

 And the ever jamming M-16 rifle.

His life demonstrates the abject failure of when the unwashed hands of government apparatiks touch the inner workings of our society. 

Read George Wills Article to understand better how McNamera introduced his own particular version of errors into the system. 

The apogee of McNamara’s professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held — holds; it is a hardy perennial — that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.

This sort of social meddling has not ceased.  Unfortunately it has found a new home in the left.  Unable to fathom the mathematics of chaos they straddle the bucking bronco wild horse proclaiming over and over it will end differently this time.  This time we can break this wild horse called human reality.  This from the people who claim there is no god on one hand but on the other purport to have god like qualities of to-the-core understanding.  I think that is unlikely.

I guess all we can do is wait for Obama to be tossed off this pitch black mare with the bewitching eyes.  It will come sure as the sun rises.

To be enlightened in this world requires a patience of mind.  Elements in the world of man competes to sell you their ideas and therefore yoke you to their cause.  It is this lack of objectivity that results in so much confusion.  Everyone sells their product with effusive phrasing that suggests theirs is the best thing since sliced bread.  This is where the patience I spoke of is essential.   It is only by seeing enough occurences in this world play out that you can divine the real from the imaginary and the fake from the counterfeit and the good from the evil.

It helps to seek the gurus all around you.   If you ask 100 people the same question 99 will have wrong answers.  The 100th person will be right.  Study the people around you and what they are good at.  Then you can access the right person for the particular skill you need to access.    Good luck and I am always here ready to talk with you no matter where you are on Earth.

On the issue of education almost all of us have direct experience.   My experience was that the common garden variety teacher is sufficient in intellect to teach anywhere from 1st to 6th grade depending on the teacher.  After that they run out of steam.  They simply do not have the minds for further instruction.

An example of what goes wrong after that level comes from early high school.  I was a bit of a math prodigy and so I was in calculus very early.  The instructor in the subject taught it in a very confused fashion.  I made it through feeling confused and doubting myself.  I finished up all the math courses available in my school and started going to college the second part of the day to get more math.  I took calculus at YSU.  There the instructors were extremely lucid and understood the subject.   It was only then that I realized how befuddled my high school instructor was.  The thing is he had a reputation for being the best instructor in the school.  Indeed by my measurement he was but he was still terrible.

In addition all through the years of public schooling I was subjected to endless attempts at political indoctrination.  These befuddled 6th grade equivalents tried endlessly to imbue me with the merits of leftwing idiocy.   I do not understand why people allow teachers near their children after the age of 12.  After that they need instruction from someone with an understanding level higher than a 12 year old.

Likely you have heard this old adage about security and liberty.  The security they talk about is economic.  Things are likely to get tougher in the near future.   We are shipping too much money out of the country for oil.   We are too dainty to allow it to be drilled on our coasts and in ANWR.   Thus things will deteriorate more until the pain threshold is found. 

Many people will want to vote for the politician that says it will be ok if we only regulate this or tax that.  These are the unDemocrats who will say anything to get elected.  Say anything to get the power.  I would like to think you as an electorate will have the sense not to listen.  But I’m doubtful about this.  You listened in the past and you likely will in the future.   The problem is this sort of thing never helps economically and in fact damages something much more precious than your temporary economic circumstances and that would be your liberty.  I know this is true.  My favorite home away from home country is Brazil.   As currently constituted Brazil has a fully implemented form of government that the unDemocrats want to have here.  The people know their government and changing it is hopeless.  Nothing will ever change in that area and the Brazilians know it.   With liberty you can improve your economic circumstances.   With economic wellbeing you can not necessarily do diddly squat about your liberty.  I know its tough to be a good soldier.  You have to be brave.  And clearly about 50% of the population lacks any impulse toward liberty. Quite the opposite.  They lick their chops at the thought of another round of incremental carving up of liberty for the sake of financial gain. 

Remember losing a job is temporary.  Living in a land of curtailed liberty is pretty much for your entire lifetime.    So don’t be dour Gus Halls who secretly long for a beer, a recliner and a black and white television.   For an inspired life you have to dream of liberty.

Summary:  If a ridiculous Bee implies an impossible See, an impossible See implies your Bee is ridiculous.   Thus Don’t Bee ridiculous. Proof by contradiction is an essential tool of thought that everyone should know.  However it is quite evident to me most people do no know it.  Let me see if I can explain it. Steps: -1- assume an item to be true.  You usually suspect it to be false and use the method to prove it. -2- follow the logical results of this assumption to an absurd conclusion -3- since the logical result is absurd the assumption must be false. You can negate the assumption. Be careful when you do this.  Taking the negative is not as straight forward as many non mathematical people would think. Example:  Prove I am not George Washington.  -1- Assume I am George Washington the first president of the USA -2- my face should match the face on the front of the 1 dollar bill ….does it?  Clearly no. -3- the conclusion my face matches the face on the front of the dollar bill and thus the negative of statement 1 is true = I AM NOT GEORGE WASHINGTON. Sound absurd.  Read the next example and see how the very same method applied to something that sounds more official makes the proof alot simpler than attacking it directly !!   Theorem. There are infinitely many prime numbers. Proof. Assume to the contrary that there are only finitely many prime numbers, and all of them are listed as follows: p₁, p₂ …, p_n. Consider the number q = p₁p₂… p_n + 1. The number q is either prime or composite. If we divided any of the listed primes p_i into q, there would result a remainder of 1 for each i = 1, 2, …, n. Thus, q cannot be composite. We conclude that q is a prime number, not among the primes listed above, contradicting our assumption that all primes are in the list p₁, p₂ …, p_n.

Think you are a moron half the time?  Believe me its much more than that.  I have studied this……..if you are lucky………5% of your ideas are actually good.  The other 95% are absolute non-flyers.  Even though they seem REALLY good.  I do not care how liberal you are or how good your intentions are.  Most of them are a load of smelly dung.  When you test them……they suck for whatever reason they just absolutely do not work.  You might say "what a waste!"  But not really. Because the 5% makes it all worth while.  Remember humans dwell on the positive. You use the 5% in the following fashion ( 0.95) ^Nth power -> decays to zero in other words humans keep the good ideas and toss out the bad so it appears EVERYTHING appears to work even though 95% of your ideas really sucked ass.

When doing hard core high testosterone engineering I learned something about my machine.  Designing cutting edge RF circuit cards was a highly constrained exercise in the use of imagination for creativity. Highly constrained creativity is the type Richard Feynman talked about when he talked about creativity and physics.  He liked it more because it was creativity and imagination you could actually DO something with other than write yet another BS filled science fiction movie with John Travolta in alien drag. Imagine you are working on a highly constrained creativity project.  You start packing your head full of all the constraints.  For example you want to design a new car.  The constraints might be:  1- have 4 wheels  2- get 200 miles per gallon  3- plug in hybrid electric  4- use gasoline, alcohol   5- go 200 miles per hour What I discovered was that if you pack your head full of all the information about a design task for 3 days straight on the 3rd day is when you start to get the really good ideas.  Up till then the results of your constraints and your imagination are not fully cooked.