Bob Costas is a moron

No one agrees about everything with anyone.  No one disagrees about everything with anyone.  People who think they have the right to force others to adopt their opinions and beliefs as reality are destroying this world.

“Even if all those guns were obtained legally, you can’t have 65 guys in their 20′s and 30′s, aggressive young men subject to impulses, without something bad happening,” said Costas.  Apparently aggressive young men with guns are all bad.  Thanks for that glowing endorsement of the United States military!

Bob Costas is an idiot who believes his opinions and beliefs are reality.  The guy is living in a totalitarian fantasy world where people who disagree with him are "wrong" and "bad".  People like Costas make this world a very bad place.  He is still defending his belief that things are evil and bad things would not happen if people didn't have bad things.

Lets look at that.  California has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country.  In 2010 California had more murders than any other state.  2011 stats are not posted yet, way to be transparent Obama!

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl20.xls

69.4% of murders in California are committed with a firearm.  Of those murders 52% were committed with handguns and 11% were committed with an "unknown" type of firearm.  Unknown is a euphemism for "zip gun".

I have written blogs on the unregulated economic black markets that restrictive laws always result in.  If there is a demand and resources to supply that demand a market will develop regardless of what totalitarian morons trying to force everyone to abide by their beliefs think.  Want a cure for cancer?  You can buy one.  Will it work?  Probably not, but, you can buy it.  Prostitution, the war on drugs, all examples of black markets created by restrictive laws.

Okay, but guns are complicated are gun powder is complicated so we can make laws that restrict those things and ...... create more black markets.

I can design and build a propane, natural gas, gasoline or even lighter fluid powered gun.  A company brought out a propane powered paint ball gun, but, they stopped selling them.  Converting a paint ball gun into something that shoots 1/4" ball bearings really ain't difficult. 

The easiest firearm to build is a sub machine gun.  I could explain, but, I am not going to.  In Israel during the British occupation the Israelis built underground manufacturing plants where they built guns and ammo.  One of the guns they built the most of was a copy of the Sten sub machine gun.

I have no use for morons.  People develop the most ridiculous, ignorant (uneducated), opinions and believe those opinions have some basis in reality.

My brother and I once argued about safety.  He believed (and believes) that overloading a small, powered open boat in mildly rough weather is safer than leaving people with a small (row) open boat for an hour.

Which of us is right?

Neither of us really, we just have differing opinions.  Sure, my kid brother is in the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard has manufacturers put a tag on boats that specify the weight limit.  My brother believes that his opinion on overloading boats is better than the regulations of the organization he works for.

At the same time, he believes that leaving his family on an island without a power boat is wrong, except when he decides it is ok since he actually does it all the time.

Logically I make a pretty good case for my opinion.  If my brother had developed an opinion from ignorance, if his opinion or beliefs were uneducated, my position would be different.  To me this argument was just a power play since my use of reason and safety were objective and his educated opinion was based on subjective "I'm right, you are wrong" analysis.  Brett does this all the time and he never apologizes when he is wrong, never admits being wrong.  At least not to me, sibling rivalry stuff.

Does the subjective analysis used make my brother wrong?  No, because my brother is well educated on small boat safety his decision to disregard Coast Guard safety recommendation and enforce his own inconsistent "safety regulations" makes his argument or position unreasonable, not wrong.  His opinion is educated.  Unreasonable, but, educated and not "wrong".

Bob Costas is wrong.  He is developing subjective and ignorant opinions.  He isn't bothering to educate himself on the issues.  The guy is a moron.  Bob Costas, and most anti-gun idiots are wrong.  They are ignorant and in my opinion are too stupid to know just how ignorant they are.

This is not the semi-totalitarian monarchy of Britain.  This is the United States.  This is the land of independent "Do It Yourselfers".  11% of murders committed in California were done with "undetermined" firearms which, I am told, is a euphemism for home made guns.  In Britain they have ver restrictive gun laws and people build and use air guns.  Britain does not have "freedom of the press" and they keep a pretty tight rein on news and statistics released so we don't know how many zip guns, air guns or propane powered guns are used in Britain.  We only know that "undetermined" firearms are being used there.

The United Nations is working very hard against the illegal manufacturing and distribution of firearms.

The harder people work to make guns illegal the more profitable illegal manufacturing becomes.  The more profitable manufacturing and sales of firearms becomes the more investment that manufacturing will draw.

Drug lords have probably already built their own weapon and ammunition manufacturing plants.  The illegal manufacturing of weapons is big business in Africa.

Thanks to morons like Bob Costas.

The more restrictive we make laws the less regulated black markets become.

If you want to ensure, ENSURE, that grade school kids can buy sub machine guns they way they can buy crack cocaine keep making restrictive laws and I guarantee it will happen.

In fact,like all markets the price will probably be driven down by competition and without things like liability to worry about the price of your average street sub machine gun will probably go way down.

Free Market economics based on Demand and Supply rules.  No amount of subjective, unreasonable totalitarianism has or will ever stop it.

People are stupid

80% of people are ridiculously stupid.  Another 18% are just stupid and maybe 2% of people in the world are smart enough to make things work.

There are about 7 billion people in the world.  How many people can the world support?  About 4.4 billion.  I won't bore you with how I determined that number, it is based on the amount of resources required to grow food in a sustainable way.  If you were one of the 2% you would understand and probably agree.

I'm smarter than you.

People don't hide their reactions very well.  When I want to know how smart someone is I tell them I am smarter than they are.  80% of people respond by becoming upset or annoyed, etc.  18% respond by essentially ignoring the comment while either becoming condescending or laughing and 2% (and this is rare) by understanding what I said.

See, I didn't say "I'm smarter than you", even though those were the words that were coming out of my mouth.  What I said was "how smart are you?"

If you have no clue what I am talking about and are getting annoyed you are one of the 80% of people.

If you are laughing and asking yourself what kind of reaction I am looking for you are in the smarter portion of the 18%.  If you are annoyed and you think I am arrogant you are in the stupider portion of the 18%.

If you understood that the only reason someone would say something like that is because they wanted to observe a reaction then you are in the 2%.  If you are annoyed I used the time based then rather than the comparative than you are annoying and need to chill.

Communications are based on content, not form and if improper grammar or bad spelling or etc annoy you then you are a problem.

If I just lost you it only means you are in the 80%.

We are talking about communications.  Not the method of communication, but, the content of communications.

What people are saying, not how they are saying it.

I say "I'm smarter than you are".  My actual communication is, "How smart are you?"  Morons focus on the form of communication, the way I phrased my question, and smart people focus on the content of the communication.

This is an easy one.

Communicating with people is a lot like doing a crossword puzzle and this is why there are so many problems in the world.  Most people are really crappy at crosswords.  People are really arrogant too.  Prove a negative?  Not possible, but, morons will claim they can every day.  If you ever hear someone say that a negative can be proved run, saying something like that means the person thinks they know everything and can define every possible scenario.

People are stupid.  They need stuff handed to them on a silver platter all laid out and explained for them, but, they don't want to do the same for other people.

I don't exempt myself from this.  The difference between myself and most other people is that they exempt themselves.  The more complex something is the more questions I ask and the dumber people think I am and the dumber or more arrogant people think I am the dumber I know they are.

People don't understand how difficult communications are.  Essentially most people, the 80%, think everyone thinks the same way they do and communicating is easy.  People in the 2% are willing to take the time to communicate and understand each other.  The 18% will range from stupid to almost smart.

People in the 2% are willing to focus on the content of the communication.

Here is an accurate prediction!

Obama is going to fail to lead the nation out of the economic disaster and the Democrats will blame the Republicans because everyone didn't do what the Democrats thought was right.

The country will probably do about 80% of whatever Obama and the Democrats suggest.  80-20 rule.  So whatever is in the 20% that doesn't happen, brand of toilet paper authorized for government purchase, whatever, will be blamed for the coming economic disaster and the Republicans will be blamed for that 20% not happening.

80% of people will fall for that propaganda and that will make it take 4 times longer to recover.

Politics

First things first, no one understands politics in the United States.

That doesn't mean people don't understand how to manipulate others so they or the candidate of their choice can be elected.  There are plenty of people who know how to manipulate other people.  Manipulating people can pass for politics in a democracy, but, it really isn't.

In the end who cares if a candidate is manipulated into office if they can't address the political issues.

Imagine a giant word search without a list of words to find.  When people first look at this giant jumble of words they can't see any patterns.  After a while people begin finding patterns.  Some of these patterns, "abortion", "gay rights", "national security" are focused on to the exclusion of others.  People feel over whelmed searching for these patterns so when they find one or two they concentrate on them and ignore other patterns and how they interrelate.

This is a lot like taking care of one side of the front lawn of a house and feeling really pleased about it.  Yeah, that one little area might look good while the rest of the house falls apart so no one cares about that one little section of lawn.

Politics is like looking at this entire, huge word search and seeing how all the patterns relate to each other.  Only with politics we don't have the nice limitations of a word search.  There are an infinite number of symbols making up these patterns.  These symbols are piled on top of each other using inconsistent layers.  One layer might have several million, another layer only a few hundred thousand.  The "symbols" are not stacked on top of each other, they are not offset with any regularity.

Politics deals with what people need and want.  People are fairly random so the distribution of patterns in the giant mess we call politics is random.

I didn't think John Cain had a chance at winning and I didn't think Mitt Romney had a chance of winning.  I told people that Obama would be re-elected 4 years ago.  I could see the patterns that defined this eventuality.

But patterns change.  I could have been wrong.  I wasn't and the race wasn't any where near as close as the networks made it seem.  They have their ratings to think about and an early winfall for Obama turns televisions off at 8pm which destroys profitability.  The race had to look close right up to the end.  Besides, the loser always feels better if the race was "close".

Once people can admit that politics has nothing to do with manipulating people the way network news and many politicians do we can start focusing on real politics.  The holistic view of all of the issues.  We can put together groups to study specific issues and how those issues interact with other issues until we have a much more complete understanding of how everything inter-relates.

The first thing people have to grasp to do this is that while it is possible to grasp that the big picture exists and to step back far enough to see the entire picture it is impossible for any one person to see how all the different patterns or issues relate to each other.

Suppose I had a word search with 10 million words and it took 30 seconds to solve each word that makes 5 million minutes or  83,333 hours or 3,472 days or about ten years.  If we put that word search solver on a standard 5 day, 40 hour work week the time increases to around fifty years.

In those fifty years the dynamic issues that are the politics in the United States would have changed so the solution acceptable fifty years ago is no longer acceptable today.

Supposedly we have congress with a bunch of people working with special interest groups to address these issues, BUT, these are not holistic solutions.  They are solutions that always present the special interests issues first and foremost.

People starving?  Who cares we are the "World Wild Life Fund" and we have our priorities.  People starving isn't one of them.  Okay, so I am picking on this group, but, every special interest thinks the same way.  We can't ignore animals because people are starving.  We can't outlaw something because some people misuse it.  the War on Drugs is killing millions in second and third world countries.  The War on Drugs is a total failure and we refuse to accept that.  Holistically does it make any sense to continue fighting a failed war that is causing more problems than it solves?

People are incapable of seeing the interrelation between all of these problems and most want to pretend that they can and that their problem is the important issue.

Essentially as long as politicians and new media spend most of their time manipulating people to increase their power and wealth we are screwed.  As long as people want to pretend they understand everything we are screwed.

Somethings are easy to see, Obama's recent victory 4 years ago for example.  Outlawing a product will create a black market.  If there is a huge demand for that product there will be a huge supply regardless of the legality.  Easy prediction.  Other things are not as easy to predict.  Some people pretend they are and often those predictions are in conflict. 

We need to work together while focusing on as much of the interrelation between issues as possible to achieve an actual working solution.  Otherwise we continue to fail.

Food Soverignity and reality

I have been taking a class in anthropology and the professor is an advocate of "Food Sovereignty".  Essentially this is a fancy way of saying people have control over their food supply.  One of the basic tenants of this idea is localized and sustainable small scale agriculture.

I like the idea but it runs into huge problems.

The first problem is that there is only so much land and population is constantly increasing.

The second is a little trickier.  It takes about 0.22 hectares of land or 0.6 acres of land to supply enough food for 1 person for 1 year.  The World Food Organization or World Food Programme is a subsidiary of the United Nations.   These guys create all kinds of statistics about food.  That sounds okay right, 0.6 acres.  Cool.

Not really.  There is a problem.  Japan has about 0.03 hectares of farm land per person.  India has about 0.13 hectares per person.

That creates some huge problems because there isn't enough farm land to supply every person in the country with food.

Wait, it is even better, livestock like cows eat food.  It takes about 2 acres of grazing land or about an acre of grain to feed a cow for a year. Other livestock can take less or more, depending.  Fortunately a lot of ranch land is not very good for farming.  Unfortunately leaving a field fallow and using it for grazing is good for the land and sustainable agriculture.

0.22 hectares is the minimum.  For real security we need to allow for a reduction in production which typically accompanies organic or sustainable farming techniques and we need to account for problems so real food security takes about  1.5 to 2 times the minimum amount of arable land per person or individual animal.

Okay, we can't do local food production everywhere.  Some places we have to transport food to.  It can't be helped.

If we have more smaller farms creating a consistent product becomes more difficult and the production costs actually increase so food prices go up.  Organic food prices compared to agribusiness food prices.

So now we have to pay people more money so they can buy food and that causes food prices to go up.

Somewhere along the line things will level out, but, I doubt if small scale agribusiness is economically feasible any more than local production is feasible.

It is a good idea, but, it would take a return to lower population levels or redistribution of populations and a primarily agricultural economy to work. Population density would have to based on arable land available.

Guys like me that have a black thumb and can't grow grass would have a problem in an agricultural economy.  We would be busy inventing things that increased production.

Big picture, the idea of food sovereignty can't work.   It is possible it could work in some smaller regions with acceptable population density and farm land ratios.