The older I get, the more amazed I am at what seems to be a centuries old lack of critical thinking and logic skills. I am, as always, most amazed when I don't think things through. The second most amazing thing is when groups of people, communities, nations, etc, engage in acts which denote a complete lack of critical thinking.
Take Anonymous and their adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask. The most cursory research would have informed them that they were adopting the image of a fascist religious fanatic who wanted to destroy the fledgling and progressive Protestant Church, encouraging a return to the oppressions, the inquisitions, of the Catholic Church. Yet, this group, supposedly working against oppression who, in fact, simply engaged in the fascist oppression of those whose opinions disagreed with their own, just as the Catholic Church which Guy Fawkes loved had done for millennium.
How about the "intellectual" disdain for religion? The most cursory examination of the last thousands of years during which billions have experienced spiritual incidents involving a higher power would indicate that, while wildly different, the common threads of spiritual existence and a higher spiritual power would cause even the lest intelligent to at least consider the possibility of spiritual existence. Instead, "intellectuals" often totally reject the possibility of a spiritual existence, choosing to believe in their own understanding and the delusional nature of the majority.
Or believers in the "Wall of Separation". Here we have a wonderful piece of circular logic in which the Supreme Court used a law, "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion", which forbids the creation of a law, to make a law, "you can't establish a religion" which they are forbidden to make. As if that isn't bad enough, the jurists who developed this wonderful piece of ignorance used the personal writings of a man who was not involved in the writing of the Federal Constitution to determine the "intentions" of Founding Fathers who typically resided in States which had state sponsored religions before, during and after Constitutional ratification and whose intentions could not possibly have been to prevent the various states from legalizing state sponsored religions.
Then we have the dogma associated with Einstein's theories of relativity which tell us that velocity is relative to the perspective of the observer and proves, mathematically, that mass cannot achieve the speed of light, even though from the perspective of a photon, traveling at the speed of light from the Sun to the Earth, the photon is standing still and both the Earth and Sun are moving at the speed of light.
How do large groups of supposedly intelligent and educated people engage in such follies of ignorance?
I get that we all make mistakes. I know that I screw up all the time. Sometimes people gain enjoyment from humiliating me when I make a mistake, sometimes people correct me politely and many times I correct myself.
But, how do thousands, millions, even billions, of people totally ignore logic and critical thinking to adopt positions based on circular logic, or a lack of research, or arrogance, and adopt ridiculous ideologies?
I get the individual mistake, but, examining the "Wall of Separation", how do millions of educated and intelligent people over hundreds of years dogmatically accept this historically unsupportable circular logic?
And, why, when confronted with the truth, do people usually reject the truth in favor of ridiculously illogical dogma?
I can only believe that people do not know how to think and that it is the rare individual alone who is actually capable of thinking.
Instead, like Aristotle's geocentric theory, people depend on the charisma of an individual to "teach" them the truth. When Aristarchus challenges that truth, presents the facts of heliocentricism and is shouted down as an idiot, the charismatic dogma continues on for thousands of years. Not based on logic or intelligence or critical thinking, but, based purely on charisma and people seeking to be like the one who is charismatic enough that their opinion trumps fact.
Aristotle was not a great thinker. Aristotle, like Hitler, was a great and charismatic orator. Even today people "worship" the opinion of the charismatic speaker while they ignore the facts presented by the thinker.
People choose not to think. People choose ignorance. People choose to follow or lead, oppressed or be oppressed, rather than work together as equals.
And that is sad.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Saturday, June 06, 2015
How life changes us.....
It is kind of funny how life changes us without our ever knowing. This term in a class, they made a big deal about Paleo-Americans finding their away around places they had never been. I didn't think of it as an issue at all, and it reminded me......
My last few months in the Army I was stuck in a Cavalry Platoon with this Second Lieutenant named Givens. At the time, I didn't think much of him.
One night we were out on a training patrol in some chunk of desert I had never been in and I was, as usual at the time, drunk off my ass. Lt. Givens and the sergeants were leading us in the wrong direction, so I figured I would split. Someone noticed and the stupid platoon sergeant was actually calling my name. We were in opposing force territory and the last thing I wanted was to spend the night being interrogated as a POW, so I popped up behind the guy and he proceeded to chew my butt for "getting lost".
I, very carefully and with the greatest respect (not), explained that they were lost and I wasn't going to wander around some frickin desert all night. This prompted the platoon sergeant to gently explain that he didn't believe I had a clue where I was so I pointed out three incredibly obvious landmarks that had escaped their highly trained notice. (the light glow over installations).
Now, for some reason They let me lead the platoon to our objective. Maybe because they figured that they could stop me if I led them in the wrong direction, maybe they figured I would prove I had no clue where I was at and I would make a fool out of myself, for whatever reason they got out of my way and let me loose. Good decision.
Lt Givens received a letter of commendation for allowing a drunk 19 year old without a map or compass lead his platoon through an unknown hunk of desert patrolled by an opposing force to an objective in record time.
Instead of thinking of Givens as a dumbass who couldn't read a map or compass, I now think of him as a rather astute manager who was smart enough to delegate, even though what passes for common sense would never have conceived of allowing me, drunk, without a map or compass, to lead a platoon to its objective in the middle of the night.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he just expected me to crash and burn after making him and the sergeants look like fools for pointing out how I knew exactly where I was, but, one of the choices I have made over the years is to try and assume the best about people.
So, while the circumstances haven't changed from that night back early 1980, my understanding of what kind of managerial ability it takes to place confidence in a drunk, 19 year old discipline problem with a chip on his shoulder the size of Everest has changed dramatically. Lt. Givens now impresses me in a way few people have.
Ain't that a kick?
My last few months in the Army I was stuck in a Cavalry Platoon with this Second Lieutenant named Givens. At the time, I didn't think much of him.
One night we were out on a training patrol in some chunk of desert I had never been in and I was, as usual at the time, drunk off my ass. Lt. Givens and the sergeants were leading us in the wrong direction, so I figured I would split. Someone noticed and the stupid platoon sergeant was actually calling my name. We were in opposing force territory and the last thing I wanted was to spend the night being interrogated as a POW, so I popped up behind the guy and he proceeded to chew my butt for "getting lost".
I, very carefully and with the greatest respect (not), explained that they were lost and I wasn't going to wander around some frickin desert all night. This prompted the platoon sergeant to gently explain that he didn't believe I had a clue where I was so I pointed out three incredibly obvious landmarks that had escaped their highly trained notice. (the light glow over installations).
Now, for some reason They let me lead the platoon to our objective. Maybe because they figured that they could stop me if I led them in the wrong direction, maybe they figured I would prove I had no clue where I was at and I would make a fool out of myself, for whatever reason they got out of my way and let me loose. Good decision.
Lt Givens received a letter of commendation for allowing a drunk 19 year old without a map or compass lead his platoon through an unknown hunk of desert patrolled by an opposing force to an objective in record time.
Instead of thinking of Givens as a dumbass who couldn't read a map or compass, I now think of him as a rather astute manager who was smart enough to delegate, even though what passes for common sense would never have conceived of allowing me, drunk, without a map or compass, to lead a platoon to its objective in the middle of the night.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he just expected me to crash and burn after making him and the sergeants look like fools for pointing out how I knew exactly where I was, but, one of the choices I have made over the years is to try and assume the best about people.
So, while the circumstances haven't changed from that night back early 1980, my understanding of what kind of managerial ability it takes to place confidence in a drunk, 19 year old discipline problem with a chip on his shoulder the size of Everest has changed dramatically. Lt. Givens now impresses me in a way few people have.
Ain't that a kick?
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Cost of foods, stupid government and EBT
I have been doing a lot of reading about Food Security and Food Resource Management and the USDA Food plans.
For the most part, everything I have found is pretty useless. For example, the "Thrifty Food Plan" from the 2007USDA Food Plans report tells us that a male between 50 and 71 years old needs 38.88 pounds of food per week.
Alrighty then!
When I was a poverty level single father with three kids I had to do food management. The first step was to find a suitable number of recipes for about a two week period that; I could cook, could be ready about a half hour after getting home from work, that my kids liked and that I could make changes to so that things would not get too monotonous.
Meal planning was important, I focused on nutrition and prices. How many calories, how much fat, protein and carbohydrates per meal. How much did the meal cost? Usually protein was low, fats and carbs high.
Once I had two weeks of meal planning done, 14 breakfast, lunches and dinners, I made shopping lists.
Once I knew what I was going to purchase, I collected coupons and reviewed sales papers for grocery stores in my area. I reviewed what foods I already had in stock. This allowed me to make up store specific shopping lists so I could minimize my costs. This part took a few hours every week, but, was worth it because it paid me more than I made at an hourly wage.
Next, transportation to stores. Usually I had a car, if not, I had to call friends to take me shopping or I had to walk with my kids. I worked very hard at keeping a car running, insured and licensed.
I used to write a date on everything I purchased. I used a black magic marker and wrote the month and year. Generally, anything over a year old I threw out. Not always though, it depended on what it was. Cans I kept longer, up to several years. Boxes less time. I bought bulk beans and rice and then stored it in metal "popcorn" cans. I made a lot of my own spaghetti sauce from either canned tomato sauce or fresh tomatoes, depending on what was cheaper and what I had a taste for.
I cooked a lot of stir fries, stir fried kielbasa with celery, carrots, and any other vegetables I had. Stir fried chicken, stir fried pork, whatever was on sale. I used a lot of different sauces, terriyaki, curry, salad dressings, marinades, anything I could buy on sale and some turned out better than others.
The problem I see with modern food resource management is that these things are not taught in a holistic, all encompassing, sense.
If the USDA would like to really help, create a bunch of real meal plans that fit within their "Thrifty Food Plans".
Build an entire month, thirty days, of meal plans, recipes, shopping lists, that working parents can use. Cost out the shopping lists. Figure out a criteria the way I did.
Meals have to be balanced (use Food Plate recommendations). Meals have to be cooked within 30-45 minutes of a cold start or slow cooked with the same total prep time. Total shopping list costs have to fit within the budget of local food stamp amounts. No fresh food can be kept in house for more than a week, and less is better since a lot of "fresh food" does not last that long. Shopping has to be done primarily on weekends.
Amounts purchased and used in recipes and meal planning have to coincide with amounts available. People can't purchase 6 hot dog buns, so no shopping lists with "6 hot dog buns".
Yeah, such a project is fricking overwhelming. If the fricking government can't do this, why would anyone assume that anyone else can?
How are the recipes managed? Essentially on a per calorie cost. Suppose lettuce is a component in a meal for four people which should total about 2400 calories total, or about 600 calories per person. The average amount of per person food stamps per month is $143 bucks. People need about 60k calories per month, (2,000 per day). That translates into around $0.0024 per calorie. For a meal of 2400 calories, about $5.76 total can be spent on the meal.
Bet your mouth just dropped open. Welcome to the reality of Federal Government food budgets and why such plans do not exist in reality.
Because our Federal Government is living in LaLa Land, and the suggestions for healthy food can't be met with the current budgets, people are going to eat cheaper calories like Little Debbie snack cakes, which run about $0.0013 per calorie and sugary drinks which can be even cheaper per calorie.
Until the government can provide realistic menu plans and shopping lists which can be used with their budget process there isn't any reality in any plans to restrict EBT food purchases
For the most part, everything I have found is pretty useless. For example, the "Thrifty Food Plan" from the 2007USDA Food Plans report tells us that a male between 50 and 71 years old needs 38.88 pounds of food per week.
Alrighty then!
When I was a poverty level single father with three kids I had to do food management. The first step was to find a suitable number of recipes for about a two week period that; I could cook, could be ready about a half hour after getting home from work, that my kids liked and that I could make changes to so that things would not get too monotonous.
Meal planning was important, I focused on nutrition and prices. How many calories, how much fat, protein and carbohydrates per meal. How much did the meal cost? Usually protein was low, fats and carbs high.
Once I had two weeks of meal planning done, 14 breakfast, lunches and dinners, I made shopping lists.
Once I knew what I was going to purchase, I collected coupons and reviewed sales papers for grocery stores in my area. I reviewed what foods I already had in stock. This allowed me to make up store specific shopping lists so I could minimize my costs. This part took a few hours every week, but, was worth it because it paid me more than I made at an hourly wage.
Next, transportation to stores. Usually I had a car, if not, I had to call friends to take me shopping or I had to walk with my kids. I worked very hard at keeping a car running, insured and licensed.
I used to write a date on everything I purchased. I used a black magic marker and wrote the month and year. Generally, anything over a year old I threw out. Not always though, it depended on what it was. Cans I kept longer, up to several years. Boxes less time. I bought bulk beans and rice and then stored it in metal "popcorn" cans. I made a lot of my own spaghetti sauce from either canned tomato sauce or fresh tomatoes, depending on what was cheaper and what I had a taste for.
I cooked a lot of stir fries, stir fried kielbasa with celery, carrots, and any other vegetables I had. Stir fried chicken, stir fried pork, whatever was on sale. I used a lot of different sauces, terriyaki, curry, salad dressings, marinades, anything I could buy on sale and some turned out better than others.
The problem I see with modern food resource management is that these things are not taught in a holistic, all encompassing, sense.
If the USDA would like to really help, create a bunch of real meal plans that fit within their "Thrifty Food Plans".
Build an entire month, thirty days, of meal plans, recipes, shopping lists, that working parents can use. Cost out the shopping lists. Figure out a criteria the way I did.
Meals have to be balanced (use Food Plate recommendations). Meals have to be cooked within 30-45 minutes of a cold start or slow cooked with the same total prep time. Total shopping list costs have to fit within the budget of local food stamp amounts. No fresh food can be kept in house for more than a week, and less is better since a lot of "fresh food" does not last that long. Shopping has to be done primarily on weekends.
Amounts purchased and used in recipes and meal planning have to coincide with amounts available. People can't purchase 6 hot dog buns, so no shopping lists with "6 hot dog buns".
Yeah, such a project is fricking overwhelming. If the fricking government can't do this, why would anyone assume that anyone else can?
How are the recipes managed? Essentially on a per calorie cost. Suppose lettuce is a component in a meal for four people which should total about 2400 calories total, or about 600 calories per person. The average amount of per person food stamps per month is $143 bucks. People need about 60k calories per month, (2,000 per day). That translates into around $0.0024 per calorie. For a meal of 2400 calories, about $5.76 total can be spent on the meal.
Bet your mouth just dropped open. Welcome to the reality of Federal Government food budgets and why such plans do not exist in reality.
Because our Federal Government is living in LaLa Land, and the suggestions for healthy food can't be met with the current budgets, people are going to eat cheaper calories like Little Debbie snack cakes, which run about $0.0013 per calorie and sugary drinks which can be even cheaper per calorie.
Until the government can provide realistic menu plans and shopping lists which can be used with their budget process there isn't any reality in any plans to restrict EBT food purchases
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Fascism, censorship and intolerance
This last term at school I dealt with some seriously fascist teachers. Fascists never self-identify as fascists, they self-identify as "guardians of right" and they bully, censor, intimidate, extort and even kill people whose opinions, ideologies, comments, expressions, disagree with "what is right".
Throughout history Fascists have always failed, because they never know when to stop. Some fascist hacker takes offense at some celebrity mouthing off about another celebrity and the hacker extorts behavior the hacker believes is "right". Doesn't care about civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of anything. After all whatever the fascist believes is "right" and anything contradicting or disagreeing with the fascist is Hate Speak!
"You have a borderline offensive opinion!"
I have no clue what that means. Fascists can't define what is right, they can only define what is wrong. For example, a fascist might say, "you have to treat people with respect", while they are invading people's privacy and extorting behaviors from them, but, only from the "bad people". What the fascist really means is, "You have to treat the people I respect with respect".
The truth is, people who run around invading the privacy of other individuals have no respect for other individuals.
There is a lot of chatter these days about invading peoples privacy. We aren't talking about institutional privacy, like the secrets governments keep from their citizens. We are talking about personal privacy. We are not talking about working to effect cultural change, we are talking about deliberately damaging people.
Not only people. Suppose Anonymous had been around during the 1950s and found the radical ideas of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X offensive? People claim, "of course that wouldn't happen, anonymous supports revolutionaries". No, they don't. They support those with whom they agree and they damage those with whom they disagree.
We are not talking about rocket scientists here. They adopted the image of a religious fanatic who was attempting to destroy religious revolutionaries. Probably because the image was used in a popular cult film about a guy who tortures a woman so she can learn from the same perspective he had when he learned.
I mean, really, do you think there is enough torture in the universe for two people of different genders, raised in totally different backgrounds, totally different experiences, totally different world views, to achieve the same perspective?
The thing is, fascism is always blind to its own evil because they always believe they are "right", no matter how many individual civil rights they trample on and no matter how many damaged people they leave behind.
Hitler convinced the German people that they had to fight against their oppressors. France in particular had treated Germany very severely after WW1. Hitler convinced the German people to believe in their own "rightness" and to rise up against oppression.
That is fascism. Doing horrible things in order to damage the people who have wronged the fascist or the allies of the fascist. Narcissists who feel they are hurt beyond what is "fair" become vindictive fascists. In the mind of the fascist there is no "damage", they are just making things equal, fair. Of course, the concept of "fair" is based on their own ideology.
It isn't fair for people with different ideas to express them. Different ideas must be stamped out! The world must be turned into some kind of robots, always behaving in the way that the fascist believes is "right".
And the chatter is not becoming more tolerant or more focused on the abuses of corporations. The rich just pay off the fascists as a cost of doing business and the fascists take their money and focus on taking out their petty vindictiveness on people.
It sucks, but, people haven't changed over thousands of years and nothing is going to change. There are networks of people today that could help change the world and they are focusing on petty and vindictive stupidity.
Throughout history Fascists have always failed, because they never know when to stop. Some fascist hacker takes offense at some celebrity mouthing off about another celebrity and the hacker extorts behavior the hacker believes is "right". Doesn't care about civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of anything. After all whatever the fascist believes is "right" and anything contradicting or disagreeing with the fascist is Hate Speak!
"You have a borderline offensive opinion!"
I have no clue what that means. Fascists can't define what is right, they can only define what is wrong. For example, a fascist might say, "you have to treat people with respect", while they are invading people's privacy and extorting behaviors from them, but, only from the "bad people". What the fascist really means is, "You have to treat the people I respect with respect".
The truth is, people who run around invading the privacy of other individuals have no respect for other individuals.
There is a lot of chatter these days about invading peoples privacy. We aren't talking about institutional privacy, like the secrets governments keep from their citizens. We are talking about personal privacy. We are not talking about working to effect cultural change, we are talking about deliberately damaging people.
Not only people. Suppose Anonymous had been around during the 1950s and found the radical ideas of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X offensive? People claim, "of course that wouldn't happen, anonymous supports revolutionaries". No, they don't. They support those with whom they agree and they damage those with whom they disagree.
We are not talking about rocket scientists here. They adopted the image of a religious fanatic who was attempting to destroy religious revolutionaries. Probably because the image was used in a popular cult film about a guy who tortures a woman so she can learn from the same perspective he had when he learned.
I mean, really, do you think there is enough torture in the universe for two people of different genders, raised in totally different backgrounds, totally different experiences, totally different world views, to achieve the same perspective?
The thing is, fascism is always blind to its own evil because they always believe they are "right", no matter how many individual civil rights they trample on and no matter how many damaged people they leave behind.
Hitler convinced the German people that they had to fight against their oppressors. France in particular had treated Germany very severely after WW1. Hitler convinced the German people to believe in their own "rightness" and to rise up against oppression.
That is fascism. Doing horrible things in order to damage the people who have wronged the fascist or the allies of the fascist. Narcissists who feel they are hurt beyond what is "fair" become vindictive fascists. In the mind of the fascist there is no "damage", they are just making things equal, fair. Of course, the concept of "fair" is based on their own ideology.
It isn't fair for people with different ideas to express them. Different ideas must be stamped out! The world must be turned into some kind of robots, always behaving in the way that the fascist believes is "right".
And the chatter is not becoming more tolerant or more focused on the abuses of corporations. The rich just pay off the fascists as a cost of doing business and the fascists take their money and focus on taking out their petty vindictiveness on people.
It sucks, but, people haven't changed over thousands of years and nothing is going to change. There are networks of people today that could help change the world and they are focusing on petty and vindictive stupidity.
Monday, February 02, 2015
String Theory, Statistics, Wormholes and Acceleration
The more fiction I read the more amazed I am at the lack of understanding of authors.
The movie Interstellar was fun, but, the science pretty much sucked. Why would a wormhole orbit anything? Why would gravity influence it at all? How would gravity influence it except to collapse it?
Suppose for a moment that we could figure out a way to create a wormhole within the influence of gravity and we could stabilize it so that it remained in a constant relative position and velocity to a planet. Big assumption, when was the last time someone saw a photon in orbit?
Suppose for a minute that we figured out how to link the wormhole to another solar system.
Suppose we overcame the variations in velocity between the two solar systems and moving from this solar system, which is moving at a velocity relative to the center of the universe, into a different solar system moving at a different velocity relative to the same center of the universe. The energy required to accelerate or decelerate to match velocity and orbits would be enormous.
Suppose we overcame the gazillion to one odds and actually found a planet on which life could exist, but, had not developed or had developed in such a way that we decided we had authority over it as Europeans decided they had authority over the Americas. Assuming we believe we are intelligent enough to identify intelligent life, which I believe many incorrectly assume already.
Even if we can get past all of these hurdles, my question is, should we?
The movie Interstellar was fun, but, the science pretty much sucked. Why would a wormhole orbit anything? Why would gravity influence it at all? How would gravity influence it except to collapse it?
Suppose for a moment that we could figure out a way to create a wormhole within the influence of gravity and we could stabilize it so that it remained in a constant relative position and velocity to a planet. Big assumption, when was the last time someone saw a photon in orbit?
Suppose for a minute that we figured out how to link the wormhole to another solar system.
Suppose we overcame the variations in velocity between the two solar systems and moving from this solar system, which is moving at a velocity relative to the center of the universe, into a different solar system moving at a different velocity relative to the same center of the universe. The energy required to accelerate or decelerate to match velocity and orbits would be enormous.
Suppose we overcame the gazillion to one odds and actually found a planet on which life could exist, but, had not developed or had developed in such a way that we decided we had authority over it as Europeans decided they had authority over the Americas. Assuming we believe we are intelligent enough to identify intelligent life, which I believe many incorrectly assume already.
Even if we can get past all of these hurdles, my question is, should we?
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