Suicide is painless

I have been reading mystery books lately. In a sense all books are mystery books, they all address the mystery of life. Sometimes we call them “romance novels”. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl and they live happily ever after. Where is the mystery in that? The mystery is in how the story unfolds.

A woman I know likes to read the end of a book before she reads the beginning. That way, if she thinks the ending sucks she doesn't have to waste time reading the book.

This tells me that she is avoiding two things, suck ass endings and “wasting time”.

Desire and aversion, the two greatest motivators in life.

In one mystery book a detective buys a gun for a woman who has cancer and wants to commit suicide. The ruminations of the characters in the book made me wonder. The hero or protagonist doesn't make judgments. His friend is Catholic and discusses dying without confession or absolution. If you kill yourself the friend says, you can't confess and be absolved of your sins.

In Masada people couldn't kill themselves so a couple of soldiers killed them all.

That got me wondering. What is the difference?

Lets suppose someone gives you poisoned kool aid to drink and you drink it. Why would anyone give you poisoned kool-aid? Could you really believe it was poisoned? Suppose it really wasn't poisoned? Suppose some moron doing research just told you it was and it was really just a sedative that put you to sleep.

Some dork actually did an experiment like that. He wired a button to a scream machine and told people to push the button and make their friend scream.

Now personally I would have pushed the button down and held it down forever. I wouldn't believe that the button was hooked to anything that hurt anyone. I would be more interested in watching the behavior of the moron telling me to push the switch. How long would it take him to tell me to let go of the switch?

Stupid test. Why would anyone in their right mind believe that they were torturing someone? It would take an idiot to believe that.

Torturers get off on torture, not on watching someone else torture someone. Voyeurs like watching scummy things and I suppose some of them get off on making someone do something they don't want to do. By pushing the button down and holding it down I would take that away from an idiot who thinks he is making me do something I don't want to do because obviously I could care less.

Even when something is obvious people will think “it can't happen to me” and I am no different. If someone smokes and the smoking kills them did they commit suicide?

How about if someone crosses the street and is hit by a car? Did the pedestrian cross the street?

How about if a smoker is hit by a car crossing the street?

I get away from all those stupid judgments. I just figure that God will sort it out and I think God sorts things out based on the internal motivations of a person.

Desire and Aversion. If someone has a desire to die is it the same as having an aversion to living?

If you kill someone because you want them dead or because you don't want them breathing the same air as you does it matter?

I think it does. I think God looks inside each of us and determines our motivations. If our motivations are to control ourselves I think God looks at the situation differently than if our motivations are to control someone else.

Long ago a “witch” or psychic or whatever told me something that I have used throughout my life. She told me that some people believe that there is no good or evil. She told me that was wrong. Good was doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, making our own decisions for our own lives. Bad was taking away someone else's control over their own life. A love potion, she told me, was black magic because it takes away the control people have over their own life. Healing someone was white magic because it gives people control over their own life.

It is popular these days to think Good and Evil don't exist. That is crap and not just because of what the witch taught me, because of what God has taught me and life has taught me.

If the moron doing the torture test had gotten me as a subject I would have skewed his results to show that people would respond to authority even if they “knew” they were causing “harm”.

Yeah, right.

Sometimes I read that people don't believe in their mortality. I always new I would die. Sometimes I wanted control over the time and place. Sometimes I want to see it as a surprise. I am told that is “normal”. I am told not caring much is not “normal”.

I could take a different viewpoint. I could say that suicide is “wrong” because lazy “aristocrats” need plebeians or proletariat to harvest their crops and produce the things they need. If the common person took control of the time and place of their death it would make it hard to force them to live lives of “quiet desperation”.

When I was younger I used to laugh at times other people wouldn't because other people never got the joke. I still laugh at the “wrong” things sometimes. I learned that if I spent all my time laughing at people they thought I was weird. At some level I think I project the knowledge that everyone is hilariously stupid.

Essentially I am a monkey watching other monkeys and laughing at how stupid we are. People don't see that, they see someone looking “pained” (and you would be to if you spent all your time trying not to laugh at everyone) and think I must be “unhappy”.

Maybe I am “unhappy” in their “world”. Pretty judgmental, but, who cares when I am trying so hard to bite my tongue and keep from laughing in their face.

Laughing in peoples face is kind of rude, you end up spitting on them and usually people don't get the joke.

It used to bother me that people take themselves so seriously. People who were “bigger” and “stronger” would beat the crap out of me when I was a kid because I was laughing at them. I never cared much about that crap or people who were trying to get me into fights taking about my mother or other crap like that. I just figured they were hilarious idiots that couldn't get the joke.

Sometimes the frustration would turn into anger and I would find a way to react to their stupidity.

If people expect me to care what they think they ought to care what I think. Do unto others as they do unto you. People really don't care what anyone else thinks though. People don't really care what I think and I really don't care what other people think.

I do try and to encourage people to think in different ways and often people are insulted.

It used to frustrate me that no one cared what anyone else thought and that everyone was so stupid, making decisions without having educated themselves.

Some people use the phrase “paralysis by analysis” to describe people who educate themselves before making a decision. Not making a decision is a decision. People can make decisions without information and with information. The information can be correct or incorrect and people can second guess the decisions all they want.

In the end, ignorance is a way of life for everyone and thinking you can get away from ignorance is stupidity.

There is a rock with some runes on it that some farmer in Minnesota came up with called the “Kensington Stone”. Geologists who have studied it claim it is old. Archaeologists claim it is a hoax. Someone has to be wrong, some has to be right. In the end, who really cares? Maybe you do, maybe you don't.

Lets suppose the witch was correct. Let suppose that being in control of your own life was what matters. I used to study a lot of Zen. There is this guy, Thich Nhat Hanh, who wrote a bunch of books. Somewhere in the meditation and the study I figured it out. Life is about choice and all we should control were our own choices. In other words what the witch and the Bible both told me were true.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others as you love yourself.

If we take that as the ultimate law, Mother Theresa might just end up in hell.

Why? Because she treated others better than she treated herself. She sacrificed so others could have. Did they have have more than she did? Did she really treat them better than she treated herself? Did she sacrifice any more than the people she worked with?

No suppose we feed ourselves but we don't feed everyone else. Do we go to heaven or hell?

Mother Theresa sure didn't feed everyone else, just the people she did feed.

I don't worry about it because God knows and I don't.

Embracing ignorance?

No. I just know that no matter how much I try I can never have all of the available information to make a decision.

That is the difference between God and people. People will always make decisions in ignorance and God will always make decisions having all of the available information.

Ignorance is amazing, isn't it?

When I was younger everyone used labels, on themselves and on others.

Once I was talking with this gay guy and he was being a real jerk. He was trying to get a rise out of me by being outrageous. You probably know the kind, they want to label you and more than that they want you to label yourself.

This guy is coming on to me and grabbing my crotch. He said something like how do I know I wouldn't like it if I hadn't tried it. I said how did he know I hadn't. He asked “did you?” and when I said it was none of his business he started calling me “gay” and a “self hating homo-phobe”. I told him he was an “asshole” and he said I was “gay” again, as if that was a dirty word. I said, “no, I'm just me”. He said I could be me, and that me was gay. He just went on being an asshole, as if everyone had the responsibility to explain or defend or force their own sexuality on everyone else the same way he did.

The guy couldn't accept that I was just me and he was just him.

It always feels good to beat the crap out of a judgmental, self-hating asshole which is what I considered that to be. Getting frustrated, letting the frustration turn into anger, letting the anger turn into action of some kind designed to influence or effect some person in which the frustration is embodied, self satisfying, it is kind of like jerking off.

That particular little experience taught me a couple of different things. People were just people. Stupid losers were always going to try and label everyone into little boxes. “Gay”, “judgmental”, “self-hating asshole”. Some people have more boxes and some people have fewer boxes.

To me, people became huge three dimensional “stars” composed of an infinite amount of “number lines” Imagine a number line with desire at one end aversion at the other. You are a “star” with your position on that number line in the center. A longer “ray” sticking out in one direction and a shorter “ray” sticking out in the opposite direction.

In reality, what I envision is much more complex because things are not really one of two choices, there are an infinite number of three dimensional points in each “ray” and everyone is composed of an infinite number of “points” in an infinite dimension of possibilities. Kind of like each “position” on an issue is a “star” and a person is composed of an infinite number of “stars”.

Stars twinkle, the “rays” always changing and really they are all the same clouds of gas. People became kind of like peas, some with slightly different shades of color.

The number line simplifies the concept, the infinite number of points in the finite set of numbers between zero and one for example, if you can conceive of such a thing. The infinite contained within the finite.

So, getting back to the suicide in the book, is suicide a sin? Is suicide wrong?

Good question. I don't know. I think it depends.

You could argue that life is choice and all we control is our own choices and that any choice taking us away from God's will is “wrong”. So if we go outside with wet hair and catch pneumonia and die we go to hell. Maybe we went outside to save a child's life? Maybe we went outside to save an animal's life? Maybe we went outside to earn a buck?

You could argue that life is choice and all we control is our own decisions and God will be happy with any decision we make that does not either control or take control away from another person's free will. So then deciding when to die is “good”.

If God believes we have the right to make our own decisions and we stop someone else from committing suicide is that sinful?

I think that sometimes it is, based on the individuals intentions. Not the expressed intentions, the internal intentions that no one can ever see.

Is suicide a sin?

I think that sometimes it is, based on the individuals intentions. Not the expressed intentions, the internal intentions that no one can ever see.

People justify the dumbest crap. We can't know what their intention really was or is.

We remain ignorant. Always.

Reading, fiction and non-fiction

I do a lot of reading. I read non-fiction and fiction and opinion. In the end what amazes me most is the ignorance of various writers. Non-Fiction writers are as bad as fiction and opinion writers. We all end up making decisions with insufficient information and then we become emotional invested in our decisions.

One of my political positions is being pro-choice. That is not just an abortion issue to me, it is abortion, gender identity, gambling, prostitution, alcohol, recreational drugs, just about everything.

Why am I pro-choice? Because God is pro-choice. God invented choice. God gave people free will and people have the right to use their God given gifts.

I believe that is a pretty simple argument. People argue that God gave people the responsibility of enforcing his laws and there is some Old Testament justification for that. Of course many of the 615 commandments in the Old Testament focus on sacrificing in the Temple in Jerusalem and there is no temple in Jerusalem, not one we can sacrifice at anyway.

Anyone trying to justify the enforcement of the Laws that people make by saying that they are based on God's laws is being pretty lame in my opinion, unless they try to enforce the laws about sacrificing at the Temple just as hard as the enforce the laws regarding a Woman's fruit, which they don't. In Exodus it tells us that the punishment for causing a woman to lose her fruit should be decided by the Judges and the woman's husband, but, I guess that interferes with the idea that abortion is murder and that screws up the entire idea.

You could always try using Paul's commandments to obey the law of the land and accept the rulers God places over you, as long as those laws are not against God.

But God invented choice and free will so anything that inhibits free will is against God's gift of free will. Now you could argue that the Golden Rule, “Love Everyone as you Love Yourself” or Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” could be legislated forcing people to a specific standard of love or respect. Yeah, somehow I don't think you can force a love standard or a respect standard.

People try though, they behave as if they have the right to force everyone to believe as they do.

This happens with governments too. China has been industrializing and has currently surpassed the United States in the total amount of pollution they have produced (according to one study, others have them just behind the United States). China claims they have the right to pollute as much as the United States did. I see the difference as being that the United States and western industrialized nations did not know how much environmental damage they could cause and as awareness of the damage increased so did legislation requiring environmental protections. Not in China and Mexico though so businesses moved production to those nations because it was “cheaper”.

How do you figure costs? How can anyone understand the real “value”?

The people making these decisions all base their decisions on specific information, essentially on information that tells them what they want to believe.

We all do.

I was reading a book by Lawrence Blocker about a detective called “Matthew Scudder”. The detective has a conversation about Batman, talking about how Batman never killed anyone in the comics, the movies just screwed it up.

Yeah, well, people (like me) who have read Batman know that is crap, Batman has gunned down his enemies and killed more people than John Wayne Gacey (sic?). In the sixties and seventies DC low balled the old vengeful Batman into a peace-love-non-violent kind of super hero who just locked up the bad guys, no “capital punishment”.

Things change and the “Batman” Lawrence Block knows is not the “Batman” the more “comically educated” of us know. Block writes a few lines out of ignorance based on his perception of “Batman”. His readers nod and read on, knowing the the “Detective” is “always right”.

I can't tell you how many papers, opinions and articles I have read where the comments were so totally groundless that I can't even begin to describe how hilarious they are.

Yep, hilarious. I spend my entire life biting my lip and trying not to laugh out loud at all the moronic stupidity. I tell people this and they get mad at my arrogance, as if I am claiming to be better than anyone else.

Am I smarter than 98% of people? Yep and I have IQ test scores to prove it. Am I more educated on some subjects than others? Yep, anyone who has read my blogs knows that. Am I a handsome guy? You bet, I have had plenty of women tell me that over the years.

Does that make me any better or any worse than anyone else?

Being a unique pea in a pea-pod means that you are still a pea and you'll never be anything but a pea in a pod.

When someone tells me that I think I am better than everyone else do you know what it tells me? That the person I am talking to believes that people can be better than other people, more of a pea in a pod and I want to laugh in their faces.

Back when I was 25 I had a goal, to have a nice boring life just like Archie Bunker. Was he opinionated? Yep, just like everyone else. Archie let his son-in-law mooch off of him for years even though Archie had no respect for the opinions or ideas of the son-in-law. Now would the son-in-law character do the same for Archie? No, in fact the character ran off with one of his students and dumped Archie's daughter.

Of course that is fiction, but, there is a lot of reality in it too. I don't believe very many people would support a person with such a diametrically opposed ideology who spent a half hour every evening ridiculing, humiliating and generally denigrating them all in “good fun”.

The thing I hated about the character Michael was that he was constantly making rude comments that went over Archie's head. I see a lot of semi-educated liberals doing things like that, trying to make jokes that go over over my head. I really like it when they try to use words they think I have never heard. Sometimes I will ask them to explain. Often they are incorrect about their understanding of the definition and I spend my time laughing at them inside.

One time a guy tried to get me to stop using the word “irregardless” which is not, as it sounds, the opposite of regardless. It is a non-standard usage of the word regardless. The first time he tried to correct me I let him have his little “verbal victory” and the second time I e-mailed him a link to the definition at Miriam-Webster.

I have little to no regard for grammar or spelling. Communication is about taking the time to understand what the other person is saying. In my opinion grammar and spelling complaints are made by people who are too lazy to try and understand what the other person is trying to communicate. As dumb as this sounds I communicate better with people whose first language is not English than I do with people whose first language is English.

When someone complains about grammar or spelling they are saying “You have to communicate on my terms” and that is the basic “Ugly American” complaint. “Do it the American way”, or if you prefer, “Do it MY way or hit the highway”.

How would you react to an ultimatum like that?

It isn't opinions or ideas that separate people. It is the intolerance people have for others, issuing ultimatums like “communicate MY WAY (or OUR WAY) or we will ignore you!”, “THINK MY WAY (or OUR WAY) or we will ignore you”.

In the end, the people that have been ignored will rise up, break down the castle walls and guillotine everyone in the castle.

Morons will always build castles to protect themselves from the “ignorant” and people will always tear them down.

Ignorance is a choice. It is a choice we all make and usually without even considering the consequences.

Making choices and having empathy

I just finished reading a very good book by an author named John Connely called “The Book of Lost Things”. It is a very good book and well worth reading.

The book documents the personal battle between Good and Evil that takes place in the heart of a child. The story begins in the setting of WW2 era England. As in many other books the child finds its way into a world of fantasy where a character called the “Trickster” or the “Crooked Man” offers the arrogant and selfish child the opportunity to trade the life of his younger half brother for a throne.

The journey that the child takes in the fantasy world teaches him to be understanding and generous.

The story is a good story. It is about facing your fears, putting away your selfishness and becoming a better person.

One of the child's mentors is a soldier who is in love with another soldier. The book basically does everything except call them a homosexual couple. The mentor is a strong, valiant man who takes good care of the boy as he helps him learn to put away his arrogance, hs selfishness and his fear.

The basic idea of the book is that evil exists in everyone and fear can be used to manipulate that evil.

Everyone is motivated in two basic ways, by desire and by aversion. Some people are motivated primarily by aversion. Some people are motivated by desire. Imagine that everyone has a number line on their forehead. At one end of the number line is desire. At the other end of the number line is aversion. Everyone makes decisions in their lives based on where they are on that number line when they make the decision.

You can tell where people are on the number line because they either talk about what they want or what they don't want. Ask someone where they want to have lunch. Do they answer with “I don't want ...”. That person is motivated by aversion or avoidance of something they don't like.

Before you go off with your new found knowledge understand that individual motivations are complex and can switch between desire and aversion.

(I used to use fear and courage but people have strong emotional ties to those words so now I am using desire and aversion. Just semantics :-)

The child in the book wanted things to go back to the way they were. This is a desire motivation and yet the author had the child overcome its fears to put away his selfish desires.

You really can't motivate someone with fear who is primarily motivated by desire. If one makes things difficult for someone who wants something they will often understand that they are being manipulated like a mule with a carrot on a stick. As soon as you move the carrot away a little they realize that the motivation s just a game and that there is no way to get the carrot.

If you try to motivate someone who is primarily motivated by desire with aversion therapy (beating the snot out of them) they will learn to lie, cheat and steal to get what they want because they know that they will only be punished if they are caught.

If you try to motivate someone who is primarily motivated by aversion with rewards they will learn very little and often never achieve anything.
If you listen to someone try to manipulate you, you can learn how they think. If the person is always talking about “You don't want that to happen because....” or “They only did that because they didn't want ….” you learn that the person is motivated by aversion.

If you listen to someone talking about “You want this because it will get you this and this and this....” or “They only did that because they wanted …...”.

Suppose someone steals food. Did they do it because they wanted to eat or because they didn't want to starve. Ask them why and they will tell you what their motivation is.

Here is the kicker. If they are a manipulator they will give you both answers. “I wanted food because I didn't want to starve”. Then the manipulator will listen for clues and change their speech to match the questioners motivation.

When I was young people kept telling me what terrible things would happen f I didn't do things their way. I did not care. Then people tried manipulating me with carrots that they kept pulling out of my reach so I quit letting other people control the rewards for my actions.

I think that most children are motivated by desire and most old people are motivated by aversion.

There is the real generation gap.

If a child has any empathy for others encouraging them to achieve goals that helps others as much as it helps them is important. Christ told us the most important commandment was to do unto others as we do or would want done for ourselves.

That means we shouldn't treat other people better or worse than we treat ourselves.

Suppose this world is a place where we make a choice between Good and Evil. Then the sorrows we go through make a lot more sense.

Suppose there was no sorrow in this world and you made a choice for Good and went to Haven. Suppose someone you loved made a choice for Evil and went to Hell. The choice belongs to the individual. If we had never learned that we have to let people go even when we really don't want to could we ever enter Heaven or would we insist that we stay with the person who had made the choice, giving up our own personal choice?

Having lost a child I know more about sorrow than most people. Being someone motivated by desire I seek out how I can become a better person, I seek out what I can learn from the sorrow in my life.

I married a woman who was incapable of loving herself or anyone else. As much as I wanted her I wanted a specific kind of life style more and I couldn't have that life with her so I divorced her. She leads the life she wants and I lead the life I want.

She held a carrot out in front of me that I realized I could never have. The people holding the carrot and the stick always claim “if they had tried just a little harder they would have gotten it” and as soon as I hear those words I know that the person is a manipulative liar that would never have given up the carrot.

In “The Book of Lost Things” the child is supposed to over come their fear of change and embrace the potential for great love even with the knowledge that great sorrow will happen.

The “Gay Soldier” in the book derides the Church and God because God allows bad things to happen, as if God should make slaves out of everyone and never give us the chance to learn how to let those we love go when it is time to let them go.

Many people make the same argument, God should make everyone into a slave and should never let anyone break any of his commandments and no one would go hungry or ever hurt and there would never be any sorrow.

The promise in all religions is that when we make the right choice we will eventually have these things. I think sorrow will always be there. I believe that God can only wipe away our tears of sorrow if we have them.

This world gives us the opportunity to choose to desire or avoid. We can apply the lessons we learn to our own lives or we can try to force them into the lives of others.

We can be motivated primarily by our sexual desires, by our desire for music, by our aversion to the cold or the wet, by our desire for company, by our aversion to loneliness, by our desire for solitude or by our aversion to people.

Something else we learn in this world is self control. We learn not to kill everyone that annoys us. We learn to cherish the people around us even when we have differences.

We learn empathy for other people. We learn to feel sorrow when misery occurs to others. We learn to feel joy when others are cheerful.

Some people are always miserable. Some people are always joyful. Some people are joyful on the outside and miserable on the inside while others appear miserable outside and are more joyful inside than we can know.

We can never truly know what is going on in the mind of another, even with tricks like desire and aversion, semantics like fear and courage.

In the end we make individual choices made with insufficient information and we hope that our choices keep us from harm and help us achieve what we want.

We can never force others to do anything other than make a choice and in forcing that choice we can only encourage hatred and anger. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you “do this or die” you make a choice. If someone is tortured and they do whatever it is the torturer would like they have made a choice.

We have to take responsibility for our choices no matter what circumstances we make them in, no matter how desperate those choices are and no matter if anyone else understands the desperation in the choice.

When we judge the choices other people make, pretending to understand the mental processes, the desperation and the desire we pretend that we can understand each other.
The truth is that while we are all pretty much the same we are all different. None of use can ever really understand any other person even if we are empathic and we listen carefully for motivational hints like desire and aversion.

Narnia

I have read the stories of Narnia and of Middle Earth and have found them enjoyable ways to waste time.

Reading fiction and playing games is often called a waste of time and I cannot find any real counter argument to that idea.

There are many who claim that we must relax or play occasionally to give ourselves a chance to recuperate from our labors. There are others who claim games are useless and wasteful. Others deride specific games “mouse click” games which require no development of skills.

In reality the mind never stops working we can only change the tasks we set the mind on. Some of these tasks are “productive”, they contribute something of “value”.

The idea of “value” is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. At first glance the Narnia books seem like an entertaining fantasy series. Studied further Narnia becomes a metaphorical introduction to mono-theism and intelligent design. As with any literary work a dedicated opponent to either the author or ideas can argue that the writings are offensive and ridiculous at best and propagandistic at worst.

This is because people define the idea of “value” differently. All people base the decisions that they make on their system of values. When the values or ideology that they base their lives on conflict with the values or ideology that others base their lives on there is a reaction.

Depending on the importance of the values people have developed in their lives their reactions to conflicting values can be interesting, violent or subdued.

For example, suppose you are a Muslim raised from birth to believe that dogs are unclean animals useful only as scavengers to clean away the filth of the world. You may react strongly, even violently to someone with a dog.

On the other hand suppose you are raised to go along and get along with people. You may shrug and accept people who behave in ways you believe are inappropriate because you place a higher value on people than you do a particular behavior.

There are those who believe they have the right to impose their values on others. These “imposers” do everything they can to impose their values on others by suppressing ideas that they place little if any value on.

At one time people imposed the teaching of creation through a creator and suppressed other ideologies. In the Industrialized West it has become popular to impose the teaching of evolution and suppress the teaching of creation.

The world often goes like this, first imposing one idea and then imposing another contradictory ideology.

This is because many people place a high value on their ideology and a low value on the ideas of others. When an ideology or a group of proponents of an ideology become popular they suppress other ideas, often through torture, imprisonment, censorship, ridicule and other methods which at one time were used to suppress the current popular ideology.

To make it simple, ideas are fashionable or not and people behave the same way today that they have over the last several thousand years.

The people who suppress unfashionable ideas today are the same people who would gladly have suppressed unfashionable ideas yesterday and the day before.

The people who censor ideas today are the same people who censored ideas a year ago.

The people who suppress the words of those they disagree with today are the same people who suppressed the words of people they disagreed with a hundred years ago.

The people who ridicule and denigrate those with opposing ideologies are the same people who were happy to ridicule and denigrate opposing ideologies a thousand years ago.

These self styled “guardians of truth” who attack and censor and suppress and ridicule and torture and kill and murder and hate ideas that they oppose are every bit as dangerous to a free society as the “guardians of truth” who lived ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred and even a thousand years ago.

These “guardians of truth” killed Christ. These “guardians of truth” suppressed Galileo. These “guardians of truth” murdered 6 million Jews. These “guardians of truth” publish millions of top secret government documents causing death and destruction. These “guardians of truth” ridicule intelligent design. These “guardians of truth” beat homosexuals to death. These “guardians of truth” beat Christians to death. These “guardians of truth” kill babies and abortionists.

The only thing these “guardians of truth” all have in common is the confidence that they are right and they have the responsibility to impose their ideology on other people.

In reality they are not “guardians of truth” they are the destroyers of worlds. The ice queen, the white witch, Satan, the boogey man, Freddie Kruger, the wicked witch of the west. The demon suppressing choice and imposing their will upon anyone that can be imposed upon.

There is a bit of that demon in all of us, that confidence we are right and the other person is wrong. The idea we have the responsibility to push our ideology on others and that anyone would care.

Any time you read an article that ridicules an idea, a concept, a belief, a person or a group think about the opposing ideologies. There may be one, or many. You may reject other ideas or you may reject the authors ideology. The important thing is to think and gain some small understanding.

When we are caught up in the humor of a particularly nasty bit of ridicule sometimes we identify with the author and become the demon ourselves.

I used to love the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. I recently re-read all of them and I find the ridicule and philosophy that the character engages in ridiculous and infantile. Sometimes the character takes his ideas too seriously.

I imagine that we are all like that in some ways, hypocritical, contemptuous of other ideologies as we expound on our own.

Yet, there are some of us who happily accept the idea of live and let live until we see a danger we feel we must warn people about.

Political writers are constantly warning people about things. Gullible Warming. Impending economic disaster.

Lets jump into an example.

I believe that, economically, the United States as gone past the point of no-return.

Big words here, if you review the multi-modality of income in the United States there are 5 specific income ranges. Typically 4 of those income ranges increase at the same amount. In other words the lowest economic class, around 20K in 2009, advanced the same percentage as the next to highest economic class (100K) but the highest economic class (over 180K, top 5%) typically advances in income 1% more than the other 4 classes.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/H01AR_2009.xls

Unfortunately the income of the highest 5% depends on the incomes of the lower classes. Essentially it is a pyramid and as the base of the pyramid erodes the pyramid must collapse.

See what I mean?

I present a fairly complex idea, simplify it and suggest that we impose a solution to a problem.

I argue that you, with me, become an imposer of our ideas on the lives of others.

It does not really matter why we become imposers the fact is that we do.

It does not really matter how we impose our ideas the fact is that we do.

In my writing I attempt to suggest ideas supported by research and ask the reader to think. I believe this is the least imposing method of imposition that there is. Asking another person to think.

Sometimes I use ridicule, sometimes I am the devils advocate. I can argue most sides of any idea I support or reject.

In every case the most important idea I hope to suggest through my writing is that the reader consider the idea and think.

I believe that is the foundation of Narnia, any fantasy, any fiction, any game. Consider an idea and think. I believe thinking has value.

Berneke is a moron

I loved Greenspan. I thought he really had a clue. I had hoped that Berneke had one too and he obviously doesn't.

Berneke doesn't understand why the economy is still tanking. Duh. Wages are going down and prices are going up. Duh.

There is a lot to economics, especially the Keynesian system where the value of money is backed by the government and based on the value people place on it.

There is a pretty simple basic premise to the Keynesian and that is that prices and wages should always be going up.

Here is the kicker, when prices go up and wages go down the economy is trashed. The same thing happens if wages go up and prices come down, the economy is trashed. A Keynesian economy is only stable when both prices and wages increase at the about same rate.

Back in the 1990's wages went up faster than prices. More than anything that is what caused the Clinton Recession. After Bush came into office the Bush admin worked very hard to balance prices and wages, barely keeping the US balanced on the edge of a recession. When Obama came into office the Obama administration pushed things out of the delicate balance and wages began dropping while prices increased. Bam, economy toasted.

Even if you hate Bush and love Obama it really doesn't matter. What matters is that wages are dropping while prices are increasing and that is destroying the US economy.

Employment has to increase and wages have to increase or the US will be a second world nation behind India and China. Already the education in India and China is better than in the States. Unless wages come back up in the States and education improves in the States you might as well start planning your immigration.

What individual did more to advance the economy in the United States than anyone else? Henry Ford. Ford paid higher wages, which his workers spent on goods and services increasing employment through secondary providers, which increased the tax base exponentially.

The concept of "Prices" is a difficult thing to understand. With a relatively new product as demand increases productivity improves and a balance between supply and demand develops. Typically pricing at the begining of the demand cycle are high and then they eventually stabilize to a balanced ratio of income.

For example Ford built cars and they were originally very expensive. As demand increased productivity improved and prices came down until an average car in 1920 cost about the same percentage of average income as it does today. The important thing in the balance between supply and demand is the average price to average income ratio.

Some people claim oil is cheap right now based on percentages of inflation. If you figure the ratio of the average annual cost of a gallon of gasoline, or a barrel of oil, compared to the "average" annual income in the United States you will find that oil is about 4-6 times more expensive than it has typically been.

It is the ratio between price and income that matters. Nothing else.

People complain about social services, unions and high blue collar wages. The truth is that as blue collar wages drop the economy in the United States dies. When we fail to provide for the most important resource we have, people, we fail to invest in the future and the economy in the United States dies.

The reality is that the United States has to increase spending on social services, improve education (the current US public education system sucks) and increase wages especially at the lowest end of the available labor.