Obama, Alinsky, Conflict Politics and ignorant authors

I'm reading a book about popular psychology and while there is some good stuff in the book this author is oblivious.

The author is enchanted by the propaganda around Brarrak Obama. So far Obama has done nothing but refuse responsibility, spend money and engage in conflict politics.

I know some people, like the author of this book I am reading, think Obama is a “community organizer”, someone who brings people together for social justice. A “community organizer” is nothing of the sort.

The guy who started the concept of community organization is a guy named Saul Alinsky and he wrote a bunch of rules for community organization and called them....wait for this...Rule for Radicals.

Sounds a little strange, it isn't like bringing people together is a radical idea. Lets look at a couple of Alinsky's “rules” .

3) “Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.”

4) “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

5) “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

Now maybe I am a little weird, but, those don't sound like rules designed for bringing people with different ideas together, those sound like rules of engagement for conflict.

Conflict, not bringing people together but how to engage in conflict. Community Organizers are people who fight with others on behalf of some group with a purpose. Think “Lobbyist”.

So...look at the stuff Obama did during his first term, created conflict making the other side look “wrong”. Think about the current IRS scandal. People Obama managed committed illegal acts targeting opposing political groups. Conflict Politics. Obama denies responsibility, the way Alinsky tells people to.

“The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as the “dangerous enemy.” The word “enemy” is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people . . .”

Here, in one of Alisky's most famous directives for community “organization” we discover that the job of a community organizer is to engage in conflict with an enemy. A community organizer has no other purpose except to engage the enemy.

There has to be an enemy to engage one.

Barrack Obama specializes in conflict politics and the actions of his administration, such as the current IRS scandal, are the result of Barrack Obama's focus on conflict politics. It doesn't matter if Obama knew about everything the soldiers he placed in the field did since they followed his leadership style, a leadership style whose foundation is in conflict politics.

This idiot writing this book “throughly” studied Barrack Obama and didn't realize the guy focuses on conflict politics.

The IRS scandal, or at least one like it is predictable. The IRS scandal is the result of conflict politics. The idiot who wrote this book will never admit that any more than Obama will stand up and say “As a community organizer I engaged in conflict politics to further the ideology of the communities I represented. I brought those politics to Washington and while I had no personal part in the actions of those I managed, my leadership and focus on conflict politics undoubtedly influenced their actions.”

Instead both the author and Obama will go to their grave defending their assessments and behaviors.

Psychology is a subjective science. While statistics can give us information on behaviors it is the subjective application of that data which makes or breaks the psychologist. In addition it is the subjective assessment of peers which drive the evaluation of psychological assessments. That kind of subjective assessment driving subjective assessments leads to the kind of group psychosis which resulted in the Salem Witch Hunts and a presidental administration specializing in conflict politics.

As long as psychology is practiced as a subjective science it will continue to be mis-used. The guy who wrote this book I'm reading made an irrational assessment of an individual based on his own prejudices.

No rational person can look at the conflicts which have pervaded the Obama Administration and claim this President has brought people together. Reagan, whom I thought of as a pussy, was an expert at bringing people together and engaging in cooperative, bi-partisan legislation. Bush 2 really tried, Clinton did better than either Bush 1 or Obama. Out of the last 5 presidents, Reagan has been the president who brought people together and Obama has been the president pushing them apart.

Its sad.

I have seen changes in the way Obama behaves. I think he has realized that conflict politics are detrimental and he is now working hard to bring people together. I think it is too late though. The legacy of his first four years will define him, scandals of opposition, conflict politics, will define the Obama Presidency.

I'll pray for him though. I think the guy bit off way more than he could chew and the job has chewed him up. I feel bad for him, but, not to bad since being Pres and being an ex-Pres has a lot of perks.

When Obama first took office I knew he would fail miserably because of his focus on conflict politics. I wish he had turned it down, but, I have come to understand that few men could turn down this kind of opportunity to try and create change. He failed to change anything for the better, the conflict politics have made many things worse and will continue to make things worse until around 2020. I just hope that people don't blame the failure on Obama's skin color.

I'm sure some people will. We should be able to tell by the number of blacks in office. About 1 out of 10 should be black. If there are fewer than 10 black senators or fewer than about 50 black congress people then racism is still a huge factor in politics. 12% of the population of the United States is black so about 12% of politicians should be black.

Eventually this will just happen because people won't see skin color. How do we know when it has happened? Skin color won't be an issue AND there will be a common distribution of people in politics.

In the meantime I'll read crap like this book and learn something since I can learn from anyone, and I will continue to be amazed at the ignorance some people flaunt as if it is intelligence.

Manufacturing today

I wrote this for an assignment in a class and I liked it so I am posting it here.

I chose manufacturing because it is an industry that I was, and still am in a very peripheral basis, involved in.

Manufacturing is an industry based on consistency.  Consistency is a synonym for stagnation.  When something stays the same too long, it stagnates and becomes rotten.  The most useful skill in manufacturing is knowing when to change and adopt new technology.

The last question, "which businesses did you focus on in your industry choice that have used the collection of information in a strategic manner--how did it contribute to their success?" is a little more complicated and requires an understanding of the path the development and implementation of manufacturing technology typically takes.

In the 1950s the Air Force funded the development of a new technology called Numerical Control that they used to create consistent profiles for the wing struts of super-sonic aircraft.  This technology advanced into what is now called Computer Numerical Control.  The mainstream manufacturing industry was slow to adopt CNC machines.  When I started in manufacturing in the mid 1970s we used what was called "Hard Tooling", giant machines that were specially built to manufacture a particular type of component or perform a specific operation.

In the mid 1980s, between 25 and 30 years after NC technology was developed, the expense of the machines, the expansion of their capabilities and the ease of changing machine set-ups and programming made it possible for main stream manufacturers to invest in CNC technology and remain profitable.

While the adoption of new technology will reduce operational costs the expense of purchasing the technology and the expense of implementing the technology must be less than the reduction of costs.  Typically the reduction in costs must pay for the implementation within a maximum of 5 years and preferably sooner.

Recently, as a favor, I worked out a very conservative, one page, return on investment for the implementation of an EOS direct manufacturing system to be used in the manufacturing of firearms components.  I was able to prove that IF the company was willing to produce titanium components for popular firearms and they maintained labor and infrastructure costs within a specific, typical range for the region they were in, that they could return their investment within 2 years and probably less.

I also suggested that they indemnify themselves using typical industry methods since direct manufacturing of firearms components for the retail market would probably be subject to liability challenges, some real and more that were politically based frivolous lawsuits.
Profitability is very important since the firearms industry is a highly profitable section of the manufacturing industry and the more profitable a business is the more easily it can absorb the hidden costs of the implementation of new technologies.

However, since the firearms industry is also very political the implementation of new technology can be retarded based on potential political liabilities.  In other words, because some people hate guns they will grab at any straw to destroy the industry.

This is extremely dangerous to manufacturing in general and the United States in specific.  Weapons have driven development of manufacturing technology for centuries.  Usually high end retail consumers or special government orders pay for the implementation of new technology in very limited lots.  CNC technology and super-sonic aircraft or corporate and private jets for example.  Once these high end retail and special purpose government contracts have established the viability of the technology, the technology is implemented on a trend which usually follows the industry profitability and ROI.  Business which can expect the lowest return on investment, usually the least profitable, being the last to implement new technology.

The added expense of politically based liability reduces the ROI of the implementation of new manufacturing technologies in weapons production, limiting that technology to major weapons manufacturers like Raytheon or General Electric and slowing the implementation of new technologies in mainstream applications.

Fused Deposition Modeling, FDM, was developed in the 1990s, and now, 20 years later politicians in the United States are trying to legislate the implementation of the technology, especially as it pertains to weapons manufacturing.

This creates the potential for other nations which are not concerned with the issues surrounding political liabilities, and so do not require capital investment to deal with political liabilities, advancing into new manufacturing technologies faster than the United States and other industrialized nations.

Fortunately, India and China, the two nations poised to take advantage of this weakness, do not have high end retail consumers in weapons that can drive investment in the development of these technologies.  It remains to be seen if these nations will take advantage of the political issues to develop government investment in direct manufacturing technologies that would replace the high end consumer market.

Prior to reductions in funding by the Obama administration, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, developed plans to stimulate investment in direct manufacturing technology.  My understanding is that this directive is under funded and with the current political climate concerning direct manufacturing of weapons it is probably unlikely to be funded.  DARPA, the organization that developed CNC technology and the Internet, is politically out of favor.

The next ten years will be interesting years in manufacturing.  There is some hope that the medical industry will take the place of the weapons industry in driving investment in manufacturing technology.  Currently military spending runs around 5% of GDP, consumer firearms manufacturing runs about 1% of the GDP, about 25% or 1.5% total (estimated) of that being devoted to manufacturing.  Health Care spending runs around 16% total, with a relatively small percentage (maybe 2-5% or about half of weapons) of that devoted to manufacturing.

In all the collection of historical information on the Internet related to the implementation of manufacturing technologies has made understanding the implementation of new manufacturing technologies and the typical historical path this implementation takes much easier than at any other time in the history of the world.  Yet, people ignore or inhibit this path.  Very interesting.

In my opinion the current controversy over the implementation of new weapons manufacturing technology specifically, and new manufacturing technology in general, proves two very old axioms, that "History repeats" and "People are their own worst enemies" are both true and are probably not going to change soon.

Dreams and reality

My wife died a little over a year ago and the other night I had a dream about her.  Having a dream about my wife isn't unusual, but, what she told me was.

My late wife was explaining that spirits of people who had passed can visit people in their dreams.  Can, not must.  She also inferred that when we were dreaming we could visit each other in our dreams.  Visiting in a dream world seemingly without boundaries.

For me, that is mostly okay, but, I would bet everyone has had that occasionally freaky dream about sex with someone that they would not normally have sex with, a friends wife or daughter for example, or some violent nightmare or some other really weird thing that we wake up from, disturbed and wondering where the hell that came from.

About 99% of the time my dreams are dreams I enjoy remembering.  The other 1% are the weird things I don't really like.  For a long time, back in my twenties, it wasn't like that.  Most of my dreams were nightmares of gun fights, motorcycle accidents, violence and some really crazy stuff I can't even describe.  I think those dreams are one of the reasons I ended up focusing on ZEN and meditation.

ZEN eventually led me to Christ, but, that is another story.

There are groups of "Holy persons" who claim they can control their dreams.  I started thinking about what my wife had told me in this dream.

A Brain Computer Interface is an array of super conductors placed on someones head which pick up brain waves and use the brain waves to control a computer.  Usually the cursor.

About 30 years ago I was hanging with some college friends and we began "brain storming".  An idea we came up with that we could not disprove was that brain waves exist outside of the body.  It is then possible that we could each be receivers for these brain waves making telepathy possible, but, that it would be very difficult to distinguish one "voice" from the cacophony unless someone was "screaming" or had a particularly strong, emotional, thought occasionally.  Essentially receiving everyone we couldn't "read" anyone.  We also postulated that some people with very good "hearing" might, occasionally, be able to separate out a few "words" from a particular person in the din.

I actually believe this theory is approximately correct, but, that it really doesn't matter since we can't accurately and consistently separate out individuals from the noise.


Then my dream comes up with this dream world interaction thing.

So here I am, wondering, since our thoughts exist outside of our bodies as electromagnetic energy do we have some kind of subconscious control which allows us to interact with each other while in a dream state.

Lots of movies about this, there was this one with Dennis Quaid I like where he saves the President from a dream assassin.

The thing is, I have died many times in dreams and killed thousands of people and I have never died.

Dreams are not real.

I do now wonder, could dreams be shared fantasies?  I doubt if two people, sharing a fantasy of some kind, would experience the same thing since we are all different.  Do we occasionally share a similar fantasy?  Do we sometimes project strong fantasies into each other?

Can the spirits of the departed, if they wanted to hang around in a "dream world", interact with our dreams?

I don't know.  The facts are; there is more about our minds that we don't know then we do know, our thoughts exist outside of our bodies, our bodies act as antennas absorbing electro magnetic energy.

Does this mean we can share dreams? With dead people?

Too far out for me to be anything but a remote possibility.  Still, it is interesting. 

Metabolism and ditching the average

People who read my blog regularly know that I study a lot about metabolism and stuff like that because my system is pretty well messed up.

I thought I would talk about understanding individual metabolism today.

Metabolism is measured in milliliters of oxygen absorbed per kilogram.  The average is 3.5ml/kg.  I am beginning to think that number is something someone pulled out of the air, but, it is an accepted constant.

Here is a power point explaining METS and O2 and whatever.

I'll explain how I ditched the 3.5 constant and how I figured out my basic metabolic rate to use in calorie burning equations.

First, I kept an activity log.  I used a small notebook that fit in my pocket.

I recorded activity and food/calories and daily morning and evening weight.  I used my scale to measure foods because I wanted to make sure my calories were very close.  I did this for about a month.

Every day I used a set of tables at Cancer.gov to estimate the average MET value.  Metabolic Equivalence Tables give us basic numbers that we can translate into how many calories we burn during an activity.

I added everything up and created an average MET for the day, including sleeping.

Once we have about a months worth of daily calories, weights and MET averages as long as our weight has been stable, plus or minus 1%, we can calculate an average metabolism.

Lets say my daily MET, including sleep, averages 1.1 (sedentary) An MET of 1.2 for 16 hours and an MET of 0.9 for 8 hours.

My typical weight over the month is 260lbs.

My daily caloric intake averaged 2400 calories (this is actually my target and it makes a nice round number for our calculations, real was a little less).

 The calculation is MET*3.5*(weight in kg)/(200/minutes) OR (in my case, calories per hour) MET*3.5*118/3.33333

3.5 is the average ml of Oxygen or O2 per kilogram.
3.33333 is 200/60

So we have an average MET of 1.1 (Mine was actually 1.36 but I am using 1.1 as an example) 1.1*3.5*118/3.33333 or 136 calories per hour or 3,271 calories per day.

"But, dude, you only ate 2400 calories and you didn't lose weight.  What is up?  Your math sucks"

Yeah, so obviously my metabolism isn't average and the 3.5 constant is wrong, for me.

Using some math magic called ALGEBRA we reverse the equation, 1.1*X*118/3.33333=100

The 100 comes from 2400/24 hours.

Using this calculation we end up with an average daily metabolic rate of 2.56.

But wait, my real MET average is 1.36 so the equation is really
1.36*X*118/3.33333=100
or 2.07 milliliters of Oxygen per kilogram.

There is a gadget coming on the market called the Breezing at http://breezing.co/ which will actually measure the amount of O2 and if I am able to afford it when it comes out I will check my calculations against actual readings.  Until then I just have to use my food intake, weight and activity to estimate my average metabolism.

Now I know my typical metabolic rate, not specific to any activity and for all I know those numbers do not apply to me either.  

People who hate democracy

In 1992 when Bill Clinton won the Presidential Election by the fewest votes possible I was re-loading quite a lot.  I received a catalog from a company called Dillion Precision and after the election the man who owns Dillion Precision blamed those of us who voted for Ross Perot.  It pissed me off.  At the time I was saving to buy a special reloading press that Dillon made and I decided not to buy it.  Mistake?  maybe, they still make one of the best reloading presses in the world.

What I realized then, and I had reaffirmed in 2000 when Ralph Nader stole a few votes from Al Gore, allowing George W. Bush to win the election, was that some people hate Democracy.

These people hate the idea of other voting for the candidate that seems best to them, voting for anyone but their candidate is evil because they hate the democratic process.

So what if people voted for a candidate from a political party other than the two primary political parties.  That is Democracy in action.

I'm reading this ridiculous book called "Making Sense of People" and the author gets off on doing psychological analysis of public figures like politicians.  Moron.  Public figures wear masks and we never see them the way they really are.  We can analyze their mask, maybe get a couple of peeks behind the mask, but, without personally knowing someone, without being with them in situations where they drop their mask we don't ever know them.

Everyone has two images, a mask they show everyone and an internal image they typically keep to themselves.  Like a book with a cover and pages.  We all know this.  To a large extent figuring out what someone will do based on their external mask works, but, not always.

People whose internal mask and external behavior are most closely aligned are supposedly called "self actuated".  Yeah, I've read a bunch of psych books, both popular and text books over the years.

So what does this have to do with Democracy?

In a Democracy we choose people based on the mask they show us and then we hope that their actions will be congruent with our beliefs.  That's why we vote for them.  We have no fricking idea if they are going to follow through on their promises or be the people we think they are when we vote for them.

Yet, these people believe their subjective assessments of a mask are so much better than the subjective assessments of others that they blame others when their desires falter.

Some morons, like the guy writing this book, want people like Ralph Nader and Ross Perot to take responsibility for the loss of the candidate they prefer.  In other words, take responsibility for participating in the Democratic process.  I would say "Yes, thank you" and the moron would probably be mystified.

The reality is that all presidents, all democratically elected leaders, fall short of their promises and their potential.  Get over it.

There are some decisions that make no credible sense, and people get mad at me for pointing out something based in facts.

One night a friend asked me to come with him and check out a truck.  I'm, or was, a pretty fair mechanic.  I went and I heard a ticking (sounded like a valve lifter issue) and I asked the seller about the ticking.  The seller got mad and shut down.  Really, all I did was ask, "what is that ticking noise?"

My buddy was angry with me for pointing out the ticking sound.  Truthfully the truck was really nice looking, but, a valve ticking usually means the oil wasn't changed regularly so the engine is screwed.  I figure it was pretty lame of him to be upset with me, but, this happens all the time.

People become focused on some idea, buying a clean looking truck or electing a candidate, and then when someone points out something wrong with the idea they become angry and blame the messenger.  I point out that Obama has no experience and idiots say something like "You don't need experience to run the largest, most powerful, most complex country in the world."

President Bush 1 wimped out on taxes and kicking Sadam's ass.  After watching Reagan pussy around for years, especially about Iran, I wasn't voting for someone who pussyed out on Iraq.  People disagree with me, and that's fine.  The world becomes better with open dialogue.

Not everyone wants open dialogue or a democracy though.  Some people hate the idea that others have different ideas or want different things, and that idea, the belief that people have different ideas and want different things is the basis of democracy.

People who get angry when others vote for a different candidate, people who censor others, people who refuse to accept that others have different beliefs and ideas hate the foundational principles of Democracy and Democracy itself.

People have different ideas, get over it.  Accept it.