The Democrats, propaganda and stupidity

Anyone who regularly reads my blog knows that I think the Democratic party should disband in shame so the nation can develop a new political party that would really support civil rights and especially provide for majority of the people in the United States who earn less than 100K.  That is about 85% of us.

I saw some dork arguing the 6 biggest lies the GOP tells on You Tube.  What a joke, stupidity must be a major goal among some people.

The guy, Robert Reich, reuses his first reason for his third reason.  I guess because his intended audience doesn't have the attention span necessary to notice.

The 6 reasons are horse crap propaganda and have very little to do with reality.

1: reduce taxes on the rich, trickle down. Trickle down is just the way capitalism works. If we compare the percentage of total taxes paid by those making over 100K in 2012 to 2007 the tax burden is less in 2012 so the rich pay less taxes under Obama. I didn't read that the GOP wants to reduce taxes on the rich in the GOP political platform.

2: Cut government to create jobs, That would actually work, but, it wouldn't be useful. Cut government jobs and the services still have to be performed. Privatized jobs pay less so more people can be employed, but, consumer discretionary spending is reduced which actually hurts the economy. I did not read this in the GOP political platform.

3: Same thing as 1, taxes on the rich. About the only thing I see in this area in the GOP platform is their position on capital gains, the death tax, etc. Personally I think a zero tax on the first 100K of capital gains and a zero tax on the first 250K of the death tax makes sense for the middle class. Past those numbers I think normal tax rates should apply. Both parties disagree with me on that issue.

4: The Debt Bogey Man. The public debt has gone up every year. We have not had a surplus because we have always been in debt. The budget has not been balanced. As the debt increases the interest payments increase creating more of a burden. This isn't a myth and anyone who is in debt and keeps building debt knows this. The debt is in the political platform.

5: Social security is a ponzi scheme. Yes and no... Currently money from people who are paying into social security is being used to pay people who receive social security which is the definition of a ponzi scheme. The money deposited into SS was spent by congress. Congress writes an IOU called a T-Bill and then calls that IOU and asset so when the budget is "balanced" they have this check congress wrote to itself that balances the money they spent. In fact the IOU is "worth" more than they spent. This is only a real ponzi scheme if Congress fails in its obligation to pay SS, or declares bankruptcy in SS.

6: We need to tax the poor. Never heard anyone say that, didn't read it in the GOP political platform and can't see why anyone want to do this, it makes no sense in a consumer driven economy. Sounds like something people accuse others of just to make them look bad.

I went back and re-read both the Democrats and the Republicans political platforms.

What really annoys me about the Democrats is that the entire 32 pages reads like propaganda against the Republicans.  Imagine being able to quantify and qualify the complex political issues of the United States political system into 32 pages, half of which has nothing to do with the Democrats political position and everything to do with calling the Republicans the bad guys.  Okay, 32 pages I can read no matter how stupid the material.This is the Democrats plan for rebuilding the middle class from page 2 of http://assets.dstatic.org/dnc-platform/2012-National-Platform.pdf

Now read these paragraphs and tell me specifically what the Democrats plan to do between 2012 and 2016.

Rebuilding Middle Class Security
We’ve come a long way since 2008. The President took office in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression; that month 800,000 Americans lost their jobs – more than in any single month in the previous 60 years. On Day One, he took immediate action to stop the free fall and put Americans back to work. In the midst of the crisis, President Obama knew what Democrats have always known: that American workers are tougher than tough times. Since early 2010, the private sector has created 4.5 million jobs, and American manufacturing is growing for the first time since the 1990s.
The President knew from the start that to rebuild true middle class security, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.
We must out-educate, out-innovate, and out-build the world. We need an economy that creates the jobs of the future and makes things the rest of the world buys – not one built on outsourcing, loopholes, or risky financial deals that jeopardize everyone, especially the middle class.
We’ve already made historic progress. States have more flexibility to raise standards and reform schools, more students are receiving grants and scholarships, and young adults can stay on their parents’ health insurance plans as they finish their education and enter the workforce. More working families than ever before have received tax cuts, and fuel-efficiency standards are doubling. The President cracked down on Wall Street recklessness and abuses by health insurance, credit card, and mortgage companies.
Our work is far from done. A crisis this deep didn’t happen overnight and it won’t be solved overnight.
Too many parents sit around their kitchen tables at night after they’ve put their kids to bed, worrying about how they will make a mortgage payment or pay the rent, or how they will put their children through college. We now stand at a make-or-break moment for families, and America faces a clear choice in this election: move forward toward a nation built from the middle class out where everyone has the chance to get ahead, or go back to the same failed ideas that created the crisis in the first place.

I ignored the last paragraph wich is a direct attack against the Republicans.  I am not interested in fighting, I want to know what the Dems are going to do to rebuild the Middle Class.  This section talks about things Obama claims to have done in the past and tells me nothing about the future.

If you want to read the 62 pages of the GOP platform:

http://www.gop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012GOPPlatform.pdf

So here we are today, with the Democrats, a political party with a racially motivated genocidal history that justifies its actions by bragging and attacking, but, doesn't tell anyone what their plans are.

Want to know what Obama did?  Drove the Public Debt UP incredibly.  Robert Reich argues that the public debt isn't a big deal, and he does have a point, but, the interest on the public debt is a killer so if interest rates increase the U.S. will be bankrupt unless our GDP just about doubles.

Check out the data from treasury:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm

Treasury doesn't give away *.csv or Excel or even publish graphs so copy and paste the numbers into a spread sheet:





You will need to calculate out the percentage from the previous year or whatever year you choose.

We all know that Bush messed up when he paid back the "surplus" to the US people and screwed up the 2001 budget.  We all know Obama messed up when he put together 800 billion dollars in grants for the Obama bailout.  The Bush bailout was all loans which were paid back, Bush learned something from the 2001 fiasco.


S0....look at those insane numbers.  Even if we ignore 2009 the numbers are pretty bad.

The public debt really has to be looked at with the GDP to understand the context so lets not get freaked out yet, but, when we look at some of my previous blogs like Rick Unger the Moron we can look at the tax income, the spending, the GDP and the national debt all in context and throw up because we are totally screwed.


Rick Unger and Robert Reichs are members of a genocidal political party following in the foot steps of the master propagandists of the genocidal political party that supported the "Final Solution" and their solution to the problems of the United States is bankruptcy.

Google and stupidity

Google deleted my blog for a while, apparently they hired some past Yahoo employees who are used to deleting whatever content they disagree with.  Truthfully I don't have any idea what happened, I just know it disappeared and cvame back.  For all I know the Obama admin asked for it to be removed or maybe Google cut a deal with the ghost of Genghis Khan.  Although what Genghis Khan would have against my blog I have no idea.

I complained and checked back after a week or so and here it is.

One of the big problems that confronts governments and businesses is that while all businesses and governments must maintain the right to remove customers (or allies) this right must be used judiciously or the organization will suffer from alienating their allies (or customers).

I'm just a guy so I figure if I run into a problem somewhere it means other people have also.  Here are some personal anecdotes.

I bought some wrenches from Montgomery Wards that had a life time guarantee.  I took a wrench back because it had some minor damage and MW refused to replace it because the damage was caused by my "mishandling" the tool.  Not true and I never bought tools from Montgomery Wards again.

I used to take my car to a service center at Montgomery Wards.  I pulled my car up on ramps and checked the underside before I took it in for some service.  I was particularly interested in the exhaust since it was a few years old.  I checked the car out and then took it in for a tire rotation, oil change and lube job (so sue me, I hate tracking down somewhere to recycle used oil).  I was told my CV boots were torn.  I knew they weren't since I had just had them replaced at another place about six months earlier and I had just inspected them.  Never went back to Montgomery Wards again.  About ten years later they were out of business.

I still buy tools at Sears, and I typically have watch batteries, watch work done at Sears.  I don't shop there for anything else.  Way too many issues with sales people and their "satisfaction guaranteed".  Twice Sears refused to honor their guarantee, many times sales people ignored me.  Sales went to commission and then sales people were arguing over who got my sale.  Too much, I quit shopping at Sears except for tools and watch stuff.

I used to use Yahoo boards a lot.  Yahoo did the same thing, alienating customers and I switched to Google.  Yahoo dropped and still can't get it back together and regain market share.

I figure if I feel like a company (or government) is alienating me that company is probably alienating other people also.

That isn't always true, I became fed up with Rite Aid and they didn't go bankrupt or experience large scale failure.  I went to Logan's Roadhouse and it was miserable, I never went back.  Sometimes problems are coincidence or are one-offs.

In general though, I figure if I am having a bad experience so are others and the first thing a corporation that is going to fail does is alienate customers.

Looks like Google isn't headed down that road yet, maybe they will be one of the companies that doesn't become arrogant and stupid.

Only time will tell.

GDP, "trickle down" and the economy

President Reagan, or one of his speech writers came up with the term "trickle down economics" and a lot of us call that "piss on the people" economics.  The first President Bush called it "voodoo economics".

There isn't a problem with capitalism in this world, there is a problem with selfishness and greed.   Some people will accumulate huge amounts of private resources while other people go without.  Why?

Some people blame evolution and if the theory of evolution is accurate our species has actually bred itself to be selfish.

Study after study has shown that selfishness and the ability to disregard the welfare of others within a group are primary survival skills.  This skill is usually tempered by the fact that homo sapient sapient is a species which uses interdependent social systems to survive.  In other words, survival is based on the ability to be selfish, the ability to disregard the wellbeing of others as long as those others are available to provide survival support until the point at which the survival of "others" influences an individuals own survival.

Essentially the evolutionary theory tells us that we have bred ourselves such that people are going to help others survive as little as is possible without the others dying until the point at which our own survival becomes threatened.  At the point at which our own survival becomes threatened we will not only cease helping others we eat them.

So what do people need to survive?

That is actually an individual assessment.  For example, I have spent weekends living off the land.  Sometimes I eat very well, other times I have not.  I can survive without external support structures like trade.  Others require trade of some sort, the ability to exchange services for goods in some stage of preparedness.  Wheat may come in a sheaf, wheat may be threshed and come as seeds in a bag,  wheat may be ground and come in a bag as flour or wheat may be prepared with other items and be distributed as bread.  There are people comfortable with all of these forms of distribution.

Obviously if someone does not know how to bake bread their survival will require someone to prepare the bread for them.  If someone does not know how to grind flour...etc, etc.

Survival skills are based on an individuals ability to use the available resources.

The Donner Party is a great example, a bunch of people who knew nothing about foraging or hunting were trapped in an area where native foods abounded and yet they did not have the ability to utilize those resources so they killed and ate each other.

This is where the phrase, "its a dog eat dog world" came from.

If we accept that the theory of evolution is accurate then we have evolved to look out after ourselves first and once we have achieved what we individually require for our survival we help others survive by helping them have the minimum that we feel they require to survive.

If we examine income demographics across cultures and across the globe I believe that we discover the most selfish people accumulate the most and that they will generally provide minimal support for those which have the least.

Animals, like people, often fight for resources or social position.

This is obvious where we watch groups of social animals like wolves or geese.  Some group members accumulate more and other group members accept the bare necessities to survive.  Sometimes, during periods of shortage, the least members of the group are ostracized and excluded.  Without support of the group they usually, but not always, die.

Sometimes the ostracized form separate groups and attack other groups.

"hackers", "nerds" or "geeks" are an example of a socially excluded group which has developed resources and uses its abilities or resources in an animalistic way to attack and or exclude/ostracize other groups or other individuals.

Groups of bandits, groups of industrialists, all groups who bond together work in a similar fashion, attempting to establish their authority within the social heirarchy.

The over riding theme is one of the groups or individuals within a group or groups, deciding which members survive and which members are left for dead.
 Studying animals and cultures it becomes obvious that trickle down economics is an animalistic process inherited through the evolutionary process.

Should people default to such animalistic behavior?

We do, there is no doubt about that.  Should we?  Should we instead find ways to exploit human resources more efficiently?

We could.  The old NAACP slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" is a good example of an attempt to find ways to exploit human resources more efficiently.  In fact, working to utilize resources more efficiently is a survival mechanism in itself, one that has not evolved well.  Human beings, Homo Sapient Sapients, are a wasteful species.

When a wolf or a chimpanzee kills another animal it rarely makes fully efficient use of  the carcass.  Rarely do animals other than humans use the skins, the bones or other non-edibles as efficiently as humans do.  Are these animals more or less wasteful of resources than humans?

We could argue that the difference is in the ability to understand the waste and this is my point.

The selfish survival model is no longer evolutionarily required.  With the current resources available we could very easily support four to six billion people very comfortably.  Yet humans continue populating in a selfish desire to increase their survivability by increasing the number of family members to help support each other.

The first step in a non wasteful survival is to reduce the world population to one that can be supported, around 4 billion people.

The second step would be supporting and educating every one of those people to the point where the group can fully exploit the abilities of each of the individuals.

This is unlikely.  The probability is that humans will continue to behave as other animals do, expanding their population to the point where resources no longer support it and establishing a social hierarchy based on some individuals receiving more of the resources than others.

The problem is that, since humans have an expanded intellect,  we know these animalistic methodologies actually reduce the probability that our species will survive.  Yet we continue along the same path because of the selfishness of the group leadership and the basic animal instincts of these leaders to take first for themselves, especially in times of limited resources.

I have no doubt about it, unless the United States and the world begin a process of population control, more efficient utilization of resources including human resources and a more equitable distribution of resources among the global population the global social structure will crash.

How do I know this?  Because the same thing happens among all animals when the leadership becomes too greedy, acquiring too many of the resources for itself and leaving the rest of the group without.

Humans are easily tricked, unlike other animals, by their leadership so it may take longer than other groups of animals.  It will happen just the same though.

And the leaders won't care, they will just find other means to control the group and keep taking the best and the most for themselves, allowing their greed to control what portions of the kill trickle down to the rest of the pack.

Schroedinger's cat, ignorance and evolution

Schroedinger's Cat!

I'm not going to try and review or discredit the real science of dating fossils which is based on quite a few assumptions derived through inductive logic. For the most part this blog addresses ignorance and while the evolution of man is based primarily on circumstantial evidence, inductions and a refusal to participate in the scientific process many of these acts are not necessarily ignorance, just stubbornness.

Not all of it, them though, there is a lot of ignorance out there.

Schroedinger came up with an excellent way of expressing a huge problem in science.  Observation.  Schroedinger thought up a concept or hypothesis which described one of the inherent problems with the scientific method related to observation and logic.
Schroedinger suggested that we stick a cat in a box with a poison gas, close the box and put the closed box in a room. Is the cat alive or dead?
In pure science we have to admit that we don't know since we have not observed the cat.
Using the circumstantial evidence available we can induce that the cat is probably dead since it is unlikely that the cat can survive exposure to the poison gas. To find out if the cat is alive or dead we must make an observation. Once the observer pierces the closed room and the closed box the observer has become part of the conditions which are being observed. The acts associated with observing an experiment influence the experiment.
In pure science unless we can repeatably observe the outcome of an experiment we can not state “if X than Y”, rather we should say, “If X probably Y”. Many pseudo scientists, like Richard Dawkins, state that human evolution is a fact when it isn't. The adoption of the result of inductive logic based on circumstantial evidence as “facts” undermines science.
Let us look at a website, http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton.html where we are told:

Carbon-14 dating helps us date fossils? That sounds interesting and I suppose that it may be possible some day, but, in reality that isn't true. Carbon-14 dating works by measuring residual Carbon-14 left in organic materials. As time passes the amount of Carbon-14 breaks down. To establish a date with Carbon-14 we measure the amount of Carbon-14 left in the organic material, the less Carbon-14 the older the material. At the current level of technology we can only date back about 60,000 years ago.

Skeletons of modern humans have been dated, using methods other than Carbon-14, back to around 200,000 years ago. Carbon-14 dating is not going to help us much with dating human evolution which requires our evaluation of evolutionary evidence which resulted in modern humans 200,000 years ago and consists of a fossil record going back millions of years.

Claiming Carbon-14 dating can be used to date fossils is an example of someone attempting to use a well established scientific method to validate assumptions that the method has nothing to do with.

There is a scientific rule called the rule of “super position” which states, essentially, the deeper something is buried the older it is. This allows people to determine or estimate relative dating of objects they discover. This sounds pretty obvious, but, it isn't always true and dating based on super position is based on probability. There is nothing wrong with this, unless, some ignorant idiot teaches people that the result of a dating analysis based on super position is a fact rather than a probability.

Science is often about probabilities rather than absolutes. There is nothing wrong with this until people teach that probabilities are absolutes.

I'll use a personal anecdote which illustrates the problem with assuming that probabilities are absolutes. My direct supervisor was an electrical engineer with a Masters and he spent four months working on a broken machine. He hired controls technicians from the company that built the controls. He just couldn't find the problem.

My supervisor's boss asked me to fix the machine and I did. My supervisor had assumed that the electrical prints were accurate. After he had worked on the machine for a couple of weeks I told him that the prints had to be wrong, he insisted they were all we had to work with. When my supervisor's boss asked me if I could fix the machine she asked how I knew I could fix it and I explained that the prints were wrong. She asked me how I knew and I told her that if the prints had been correct my supervisor would have fixed the machine. I used a multi-meter and checked every wire in the machine manually and found an unfused 24v power circuit that had shorted out. That particular circuit also powered the CNC controller unit. Problem solved.

People make assumptions, they assume probabilities are facts and then, much too often, those assumptions are wrong.

In my experience teachers often make statements of “fact” which are not true to “simplify” education. For all practical purposes 2+2 always equals 4 so students are told “two plus two always equals four”. This is a lie. There are some occasions, binary base number systems for example, where the number four does not exist.

If a teacher were to accurately teach that “two plus two usually equals four” it would open a dialogue concerning what the rules are for determining when “two plus two equals four” and when “two plus two equals ten”. This kind of instruction is often used when teachers do not believe their students are capable of understanding the nuances of the subject.

The same lies are told about many things including the evolution of humans. The evolution of humans is always going to be a theory since we cannot observe, unless someone invents a time machine, the evolution of humans.

Even if we create an experiment where we evolve humans such an experiment would only prove that humans could have evolved, it would not prove that humans did evolve.

But people still believe crap like “two plus two always equals four” or “humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor” even though neither of these are facts, just probabilities.

I am not saying that evolution of humans didn't happen, I'm just pointing out that only someone who is ignorant would claim an inductive probability is a fact and that many people try to use unrelated and well established facts to prove their assumptions.