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.

Screw the 1967 Border!

Nations which attack other nations and then run away, giving up their land don't deserve the land back. Period.

The logic is simple. People who decide that they have the right to take what they want by force do not have the right to get back what they lose to force.

People blame the United States for selling Israel weapons. What a load of crap. The United States sold Saddam Hussein weapons and the United States sold the UK installed Shah of Iran weapons. Hussein couldn't kick Iran's ass even with US support and when Hussein lost that support he didn't just crawl into a hole. The Shah lost big time, even with US support.

Israel kicked butt because Israel kicked butt, get over it. I believe God gave Israel the victory over it's enemies.

As far as I am concerned those who lost land through violent attacks cannot get that land back.

If a scumbag breaks into a neighbors home and the neighbor shoots the scumbag, the family of the scumbag does not get the scumbags burglar tools and gun returned. Get over it.

I don't really care what anyone else says, Israel should not give up any territory. No dispute, no occupied territories. Just Israel.

I don't believe Israel will last. I believe the people who survived the holocaust and who built Israel were devoted to God. I believe the present people of Israel are not focused enough on God and without God the people depend on how well they get along with their neighbors.

Israel can never get along with their neighbors. Their neighbors hate them because they are Jews and for no other reason.

The only way Israel can survive is by focusing on God and all this talk of compromise is not taking care of business.

God spread out the borders of Israel to the location they are currently at, post '67 borders. Giving the land back is telling God that God wasted time giving Israel the victory.

Moronic Internet Psycho Stalkers

I write blogs and post on message boards and as a result internet morons get pissed off at me and stalk me. Oh wonder of wonders, people who can't stand free speech do everything they can to squash the ideas and words of those they disagree with.

They publish all kinds of attacks against me, pretend to be me posting on the internet, in their zealousness for their ideas they ignore facts and the issue to attack me on grammar and punctuation. Morons with no lives.

Many of these morons are atheists and proponents of evolution. This is not to say that many atheists and proponents of evolution are moronic psycho stalkers, just that many of the moronic psycho stalkers I attract are atheists and proponents of evolution.

I assume this is because I often look at things differently from them.

What is hilarious is the hypocrisy of their attacks. Typically these moronic atheist psycho stalkers attack and suppress my publishing facts, opinions and theories regarding the Catholic Church of the Reconnaissance because the Catholic Church “worked so hard” (in their uneducated opinion) to suppress the facts, opinions and theories that they disagreed with.

Get it, they complain about the suppression of ideas while they suppress ideas. They are even worse than the priests of the inquisition who at least gave Galileo a trial lasting 15 years. Yeah, it took 15 years for the Catholic Church, and the opposing viewpoints in the church, to decide in favor of Aristotle. That decision took longer than the two seconds it takes me to piss off a moronic internet psycho stalker.

Galileo is a subject I often get e-mail flames filled with ridiculous crap that anyone with reliable resources or common sense can easily disprove.

Another subject I am often “attacked” over is when I point out that I believe religion had very little to do with mid winter festivals. Mid winter festivals were and are often coated in religion but they were not religious in nature. Mid winter festivals were primarily used by leaders of agricultural cultures to keep the agricultural workers alive through the winter so they could plant and harvest during the next growth season.

It is really amazing how many hypocrites will suppress opposing ideas while at the same time denigrating those who originally suppressed the ideas they believe in.

Darwin was not the first scholar to suggest the idea of evolution. Darwin published well written theories during a time when the idea was gaining popularity. Darwin receives the credit.

Darwin was, in my opinion, an idiot because; he dismissed Negroes as a sub species, he dismissed homosexuality as a generic biological reaction by a defective member of a species and other some other stupid ideas I won't get into here.

So why do I generate so much animosity? Because I call people with really dumb ideas idiots.

Why do I do that? Because helping a child learn through encouragement is a useful skill. By the time a person is an adult and still vomiting out ridiculous propaganda as is it were gospel they obviously are incapable of reason and or education. In other words, an adult supporting Darwinian theories, calling Christmas a pagan celebration or claiming the Church suppressed science is a moron.

Gee, I am really sorry there are so many idiots in the world. I wish these people would open their minds, educate themselves even a little on their opinions and support the free exchange of ideas.

Obviously they won't. When morons stop spouting theories as if they were proved and indisputable facts while doing everything they can to suppress opposing ideologies I will stop believing they are morons. Until then, forget about it.

Dan Brown is an idiot

Because of ridiculously ignorant propaganda spread by uneducated morons most people believe that the Catholic Church persecuted “scientists”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What these idiots, or people who refuse to educate themselves, don't understand is that the catholic Church was THE educational institution in Western Europe. You couldn't be a “scientist” without having been educated by the church.

In addition to controlling the education in Europe the Catholic Church also controlled publishing. Any published works, like Galileo’s books, that exist were published by the church.

Essentially the way the system worked was that parents paid “priests” to educate their children, ether individually or in small groups. Before some moron goes off on sexual abuse charges, yes, teachers probably sexually abused their students then as they do now.

Once a child could read and write the children who could write the best, those with the best penmanship, were employed by the Catholic Church to copy books. Later Gutenberg invented the printing press and the Catholic Church controlled the technology for years. Around the 1580's the first secular publishing houses began to take shape in Holland. Guys like Copernicus and Galileo worked for and were published by the Catholic Church.

A lot of people claim that Galileo's research was conducted through funding by a patron who was the son of a Catholic Cardinal. (before some hypocrite complains about a Cardinal having a child, Cardinals did not have to be priests during the Renaissance) Of course the patron under discussion took over from his father in the early seventeenth century, well after Galileo had begun his research and academic arguments. Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua in the late sixteenth century for example. The University of Padua was supported by the Republic of Venice and the Catholic Church at that time.

The Renaissance in Italy was a difficult time filled with competing small monarchies. The Catholic Church was the most powerful organization in Italy and maintained a very loose authority over the various city states. The monarchs of these city states worked hard to keep the balance of power between their neighbors and Rome. battles between city states were common and the side the Catholic Church supported usually won. During this time the Ottoman Empire was growing and alliance with the Catholic Church was seen as important to the survival. As a result the Catholic Church ended up controlling communications, education and publishing throughout Italy and the rest of Western Europe during the Renaissance.

Venice had political disagreements with the Catholic Church which resulted in a loss of political support and where they had been successful in holding off the Ottoman Empire in the past through their alliance with the Catholic Church once they began arguing with the Catholic Church Venice began to lose battles and foreign holdings.

Those students being taught in Italy who were really sharp, or whose parents could afford it, were educated further in science and the arts. Astrology, for example, was once taught by priests.

Long before the Catholic Church came into existence a very smart guy named Aristotle determined that the Sun revolved around the Earth. There was a big debate in Greece about whether the Sun orbited the Earth or the Earth orbited the sun, this was about 300BC. Aristotle won out and for the next almost two thousand years academia squashed any opposing theories. Einstein eventually proved that both Aristotle and Galileo correct.

Now morons out there won't get the reality, but, this ridiculous squashing of alternate theories by academia goes on today. Present an alternate theory to an academic who has a vested interest and they will turn blue in the face, denounce you as an “uneducated heretic” and if possible have you expelled, imprisoned and tortured.

Where do we see this public academic insanity today? In the debate between evolution and intelligent design, which is essentially the same debate as creation and evolution that went on during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century with the sides reversed.

Enter Dan Brown whose research into scientific research during the Renaissance is about as shallow as the plastic wading pools parents buy at Walmart.

Brown postulates that Galileo and the Illuminati hid a “map” of clues that only people who understood science could understand.

The problem is that the vast majority of those who understood, researched and taught science during the Renaissance were priests or theologians committed to the Catholic Church so the people most likely to interpret the clues were priests. Duh.

Did the Catholic Church suppress research into areas that they did not believe were worthwhile pursuits? Yeah, duh. Universities and corporations do this all the time and they always will. The only thing that has changed is that as much as your University Professor or adviser might want to have you imprisoned and tortured for disagreeing with them they can typically only ruin your ability to graduate. Any person who has attended an institution of “higher” learning can attest to this.

Yeah, as anthropologists and psychologists have pointed out for years, people really don't change. Customs and language change over time and distance and people learn, teach, fall in love, put clothes on, eat and have babies.

One other thing that has not changed is that morons will spread ridiculous and obviously inaccurate crap as if it were a gospel handed to them by an all powerful being, like a University Professor :-)

I cannot stress how important it is to educate yourself. If you want to have an educated opinion you have to educate yourself.

How many people have I asked over the years “Who financed and published Galileo's work?” and how many do you think answered correctly? The answer is well over a hundred and I could count the number of correct answers on one hand.

Idiots who have been brain washed by other idiots and who have developed an opinion based on inaccurate information that they will DIE claiming is the truth.

If I had a dime for every “academic myth” that is taught as reality I would be rich enough to shove my opinion down everyone's throat as the “truth”. Would I do that? No, I would be the same person I am now. I do and would, if rich, encourage people to educate themselves and develop an educated opinion.

Do not get your education from Dan Brown however. The stupidity of the “Illuminati” hunt in Angels and Demons is only exceeded by the stupidity of believing that the Jewish Sanhedrin loved Christ so much that they placed his “wife's” coffin under the Holy of Holies in their most sacred temple.

Yeah, I'd buy that for a dollar.