It’s been a while since my last post.  Since losing my manufacturing job to the Republican recession, I’ve been busy.  I went back into a big rig and now drive “recovery” for a large trucking company.  Essentially, I repossess big rigs.  The Republican Recession keeps me busy.  It pays most of the bills.

“So what are the conservatives doing THIS time”, you might ask?  They are trying to eliminate medicare for everyone under the age of 55.  Well, that happens to include my 9 year old autistic son, and every disabled child of parents like us.  Currently, his mother cannot work because there is no daycare in the area equipped to handle the special needs of autistic children.  This means someone has to be there when he is not at school – which seems to be about once every other week.  No employer can be reasonably expected to lose their employee at least one to three days every other week on an ongoing and irregular basis.  And then there’s the shortened summer curriculum (when there is one at all).  So his mother cannot work.

This leaves my income alone to pay for everything.  And his medications amount to many $$thousands per year; plus his psychologist and psychiatrist.  (the psychologist is cheaper, but a psychiatrist is necessary to adjust his medications – which happens about once every few months.  This amounts to thousands of dollars per year that we cannot afford.  Currently, medicaid pays for all this.

Instead he get’s a “voucher” for private insurance – which barely pays for psychologists.  Forget  psychiatrists, and most of the psychotropic medications he needs.  Even today, private insurers largely deny covering mental disorders – including autism.  They prefer covering only the barest minimum possible.  It’s kicking the can down the street his entire life and leaving parents and society to tolerate the cost of doing so.

What is he like without his medication?  Imagine a child unable to cope with even the smallest of changes in his life.  Imagine a young boy who will go to any lengths to keep things exactly as he remembers them.  Now imagine this child willing to go to any extreme of violence for even the smallest thing.  That’s severe autism without medication.  Even with medication, he has beaten, scratched, and bitten his mother so severely that she needed medical attention.  And he was not even 9 yet.  As he grows older and larger, his capacity for violence will only grow as well.

But if conservatives get their way, medicaid will no longer cover his medication.  My son, (who is on disability, btw), will either have to go without medication, or without a roof over his head and food in his belly.  Without his medication, we may very well need a straight jacket and padded cell – or worse, we may not be able to keep him at all.

Think I’m kidding?  I’m not.

Worse, I know there are thousands of families in far worse shape than mine.  Conservatives will be taking away the only means they have of keeping their families together.  Tens of thousands of families will be forced to give their child to the state because they cannot afford the medications and doctor bills.  For them, medicaid is the ONLY means of obtaining the help their children need.  For them, life without medicaid is life without their child.  Without it, the only means they have of giving these children the help they need is to give them up; to hand them over to the state.  This will be the only option they have left.  Understand, every single family forced to give their child up will do so out of love; because it’s the only way these children can get the help they need.

For these children, tearing them away from their parents and placing them into foster care or an institution will devastate them.  Autism is characterized by the inability to cope with changes.  Such radical change would not just scar them forever; it would destroy the psyches of many.

So the next time you hear a conservative talk about family values, ask them why they hate the families of autistic children so much that they would destroy thousands of them.

I’ll bet a cup of coffee that you’ll hear something about how it’s the parents fault or some stupid joke to dodge the issue, or some such nonsense.

And by the way, conservatives are also talking about changing social security too.  Might I remind you that disability is part of social security.  Cons don’t want to say it, but they want to eliminate the only income for millions of people living on disability.  They really don’t give a darn what happens to these people.  Just ask them how these people are to survive without their only source of income.  You’ll rarely get a straight answer because the only straight answer is “we’ll let them die”.

At the risk of being accused of invoking Godwin’s Law, Adolph also started with the disabled.

Well, here’s news.  No matter how it happens, I will make darn sure my son gets the best care available – even if that means giving him up.

I can prove it.  The following is something I found while reading then news; captured a screenshot, and saved it.

Now, let’s  think about this a second.
A comment with 2 green thumbs and 8 red is hidden due to a low rating.  A comment with 1 green thumb and 8 red is shown.  The one showing childish ignorance about the President is rewarded.  Or at least, not punished even though it is less popular than the one that is punished (hidden).

If it was entirely automatic, then how could this situation be possible?  If there were some intervention, then somebody is responsible.

Ratings change over time as readers rate comments.  You may (or may not), find it at the following URL.
Congress wants tough stance with China over trade
It’s around post #128 or so…

How many times have we heard it?  Ground Zero is now “hallowed ground”.  Therefore, no mosque (or family center) should be built there or anywhere nearby.  They are essentially arguing that ground zero, and all adjacent lands should be “mosque free”.

But just how far away should one be before it is no longer “hallowed ground” (and therefore should be mosque free)?

Is 11.5 miles far enough away for you?
Queens: Drunk desecrates mosque

Is 889.5 miles far enough?
Murfreesboro Tn: Anti Mosque protests “get ugly”, includes arson.

How about 947 miles?
Jacksonville Fl: Man attacks mosque – largely ignored by media.

How about over 2900 miles? Is that far enough away to to be “no longer on hallowed 9/11 grounds”, and therefore  should be “mosque free”?
Fresno Ca: Islamic center vandalism

Seriously, just how far away from ground zero does one have to get before the “hallowed ground” argument morphs into one of just plain hate?

We’ve been here before.  In fact, we’ve taken this path so many times before that it is ultimately predictable.  So predictable that it goes beyond boring.  We have plenty of historical examples from which to draw the pattern.

The Inquisition
The Salem witch trials
The KKK
The Holocaust
The rounding up of Japanese Americans in 1942
McCarthy
Iraq war.

These examples, and hundreds more throughout world history, show the pattern.  Fear leads to anger leads to emotional catharsis leads to immoral behavior.  Already, we have politicians supporting this behavior, pundits feeding the fear and hate, and the forums are literally covered in people goading each other into taking the next step toward violence.

Nobody wants to participate in creating a dark blot on Americas history.  But with far too many examples of such goading and fear mongering to cite here, that is exactly the direction this is heading.  If those sympathetic to this emotional catharsis gain political power, we will have to add another instance of Americans doing wrong to our history books.

If history teaches anything, it’s not to trust demagogues who feed the hateful passions of others.

There is still ways to stop the madness.   We’ve done it before.  Federal intervention stopped the KKK from becoming a well organized machine.  The governors intervention stopped the Salem witch trials. The military stopped the holocaust. McCarthy stopped when noteworthy personae began challenging his claims in public. In all cases, it took popular backlash or an authority figure to force an end to the immorality. When no authority was found to stop them, they were only stopped with military force and only after a great many innocents died.

We can stop this by actively seeking the defeat of those demagogues running for office and by publicly rejecting their shills. Barring that, we can stop them with challenges by those with authority. Failing that, only military force can prevent a bloodbath. Make no mistake, this is a moral issue. Will you be the one who stands idle as hundreds,  thousands, or even millions of innocent lives are destroyed?

As you may have already heard, Dr. Laura Schlessinger is quitting her syndicated radio show after using the N bomb 11 times.  Her reasoning?

The reason is, I want to regain my first amendment rights.  I want to be able to say what is on my mind and in my heart, and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, and attack sponsors.  I’m sort of done with that.

I’m not retiring, I’m not quitting…

Dr. Laura announcing her change of venue.

In other words, she’s trading in her old audience for a new one.  One more appropriate for her newly refined sensibilities and sensitivities.  One that will not try to stop her from speaking her mind.  After all, having an audience agree with you no matter what you say is the epitome of popularity.  And we would all like to be popular, right?

But what you may not already know is that she is already testing the waters with her new target audience.  And I have an exclusive peek at their reaction.

Dr. Laura's test audience.

Uh Oh, only 10 minutes into her speech and already some in her audience on the left are getting angry.

Of course, on her radio show where she dropped the N bomb 11 times, she did have some friendly advice for the caller

If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race

Fair enough.  Which is why my friendly advice to her is; if you’re that hypersensitive about criticism to your racist views and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t speak to anyone outside the Aryan Nation.

This post was inspired by Terrance Heath’s article entitled “3 Fundamental Differences Between Conservatives and Liberals”

Today, however, American optimism has got completely out of hand. A corrective is needed. The corrective must come from conservatives, the people who understand that “human nature has no history.” We must revive the fine tradition of conservative pessimism. In this age, optimism is for children and fools. And liberals..”

This statement struck me as so very odd. So I decided to investigate a bit.

I found a good explanation in Jonah Goldbergs blog post “The Next Big Thing“. He wrote:

As longtime readers know, my favorite definition of conservatism is the idea that “human nature has no history.” In other words, it is only through the power of our institutions, traditions, and ideas that we are not barbarians. If men were angels, we’d have started as angels and there would never have been a need for all that trial and error we call human history. But, men are not angels, men are disgusting; we need thousands of years of cultural evolution and constant reminders even today that we shouldn’t pee in the kitchen sink
…
This may be obvious to you and me. But it strikes many “progressives” as odd. They think humans have somehow “improved” since the days when they needed to be taught a lot of that dead-white-guy crap. Many on the Left would gladly take a pill that made us forget the Canon. They don’t realize that if we did that, within days we’d probably start eating grubs and fighting over who gets the choicest cuts of rat. When you hear arguments against tradition or Western civilization you are essentially watching someone take a sledgehammer to the very soapbox they are standing on(sic).

Does anyone else see the problem here?  Civilization may be nothing more than a thin veil for him.  He might need lots of rules with lots of enforcement to keep him acting like a civil human being.  And indeed, this may be true of all his friends and associates.  But it is certainly not true of everyone.  And I know because it is most certainly not true of me.

Since he brought up cannon law, allow me to introduce one of my favorite parts of the Christian bible. These, I believe, are words to live by;

Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified
Galatians 2:16

We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious; for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.
1 Timothy 1:8-11

This is the highest standard of the morally and ethically enlightened.  And one does not need to be a Christian to follow it.  Any atheist can be as comfortable practicing morality and ethics as the most devout theist.(The emphasis is so any atheist can see I’m using the aforementioned quotes as statements of a philosophy of law, rather than religious cannon) One only needs to be self motivated to be morally and ethically enlightened; to be moral and ethical for it’s own sake rather because some law tells you so or to avoid some social censure.

There resides within us all, a kernel of morality and ethics.  Our brains are naturally wired for it.  Fairness, it seems, is directly wired to the reward center of our brain.  Even more compelling than that; our brains have to work extra to damp down our reactions to inequality whenever we are faced with an ethically dissonant situation.  And it’s not just equality either.  ‘The golden rule’ also seems to be hard wired in the brain.  But again, we had to develop extra circuitry to override it – making the brain work overtime in order to be unkind to someone.  Again and again, we see that the brain requires more activity to act badly than it does to act good.  It has to work to suppress it’s natural tendencies to do right.

The theory that human nature has no history depends upon the idea that adults are no more cognitively developed than children before they learn right from wrong.  It takes ethics to apply morality in any consistent manner.  And a sense of ethics requires cognitive maturity.  Perhaps this immaturity is true of conservatives.  Perhaps this is their highest level of moral and ethical development.  The rest of us grew up and learned how to apply our morals in an ethical manner.

My theory is that the concepts of morality and ethics developed long before manipulation and evil.  Both were developed through natural selection as successful survival tactics.  But the brain is also largely plastic; whatever you use most develops the most.  Practice evil manipulation and that is the kind of brain you get.  But it’s not all cut and dry either.  Morality is hard wired into the brain and is tied directly to our emotions.  To be physically amoral is to be missing large chunks of the human brain.   Ethics, on the other hand, is largely a matter of mindfullness and priorities.  One grows up learning to be mindful to apply our moral sense.  This is a large part of the role of modern parents.  Some people value loyalty more highly than others.  Loyalty is the moral foundation of motherhood, family, and nationalism.  Who is too loyal and who is not is a matter of opinion.  But for many, it’s more important to be loyal to one’s “own group” than it is to be personally moral or ethical.  Thus, many would support “the group” even if the group commits mass murder, invades others unjustly and wages uses biological warfare against other groups.

Loyalty, by the way, is considered one of the five basic morals (the others being purity/sanctity, safety/care, equality/reciprocity, and authority/respect.  Each exists across all human cultures; so they are universal.  Obviously, some loyalty is good – as in the case of a mother nurturing her child (instead of any other) or brothers sticking up for one another.  But there’s some point where loyalty is overemphasized – as in the case of people supporting the invasion of Iraq even years after the reasoning was shown to be false (an ethics failure by conservatives), and the destruction of the Iranian and Guatemalan governments to promote American interests (two ethics failures by liberals).

So here we are at last; having proven that one of the most fundamental precepts of conservative philosophy is completely wrong.  Not only does human nature have a history that spans as far back as the first creatures to nurture their young, but it probably has a far longer history than the legalism required to civilize conservative “human nature”.

In fact, what conservatives are calling “human nature” is almost indistinguishable from their resentment to the legalism required to keep them civilized.  Pass any law, no matter how humane, moral, or ethical it be, and these conservatives will call it “human nature” to resist it.  Law itself is an inhumane institution that creates niches for legalists to make a living.  The more law there is, the more niches there are to support legalists (people who make a living by finding ways to enforce or subvert the law).  The only reason we have laws is to keep these people from acting like barbarians.  But since these “human nature has no history” kind of people want to act without regard to morality or ethics, they seek ways to circumvent the law, relegate it to irrelevance, or subvert it to their own advantage.

Of course, once one of these people subverts the law to take advantage of others, he becomes the very advocate of the law.  “The law is the law”, he might say; but such absolutism is inhuman.  Unfortunately, we need such absolutism to keep these people from breaking the law; in spirit if not the letter.  Good people naturally resent a subverted law and seek to circumvent it themselves, or relegate it to irrelevance.  “More laws”, the subverter says.  “my legalistic advantage must be enforced”, only to find more resentments, more people gaming the system, more legalists.  Eventually, the whole system spreads to consume all available energy.  At which point, people rebel, force is applied, and people die.  Hopefully, the subverter is overthrown and the advantage removed.  Only for the whole thing to start over again.

This is the conservative idea of civilization.  And they may very well need such inhumanity enforced upon them in order to feel civilized.  But to me, they ask for enslavement to the inhuman system of laws they create for themselves.  They ask for a purely mechanical society where one’s life is fully determined before birth.  That’s not being human.  Cogs in any machine perform the same function.

I need no laws to be moral and ethical.  I need no such bondage.  Strip the law from me and I shall act the same as I do now – only perhaps a bit kinder in my freedom to act out of compassion without inhumane laws blocking me.  Our only need for the law is to keep the “human nature has no history” crowd from harming me.  Take them away, and we have no need for laws.

In my opinion, conservatives who think like that are to be pitied.  I see no way they could possibly make the Earth into anything but an inhumanly hellish place to exist.

This post was inspired by the recent blog post “Deficit Frauds Boehner And Pence Can’t Answer How Tax Cuts For Wealthy Will Be Paid For“, by benarmbruster.

Whenever you talk to a conservative about taxes, there’s something you should know.  Let me explain by example.

Let’s say we have 100 people.
99 make $10K per year.
1 makes $10M per year.

Now let’s tax the 99 at 10%, so we get
$10K x 10% x 99 people = $99,000

Now let’s tax the 1 person at only 1%, so we get
$10M x 1% x 1 person = $100,000

Total revenue = $199,000

Now, the conservative is fixated on the fact that the one rich guy is paying half the taxes.  But unless you’re a fool, you can plainly see that taxing the rich guy at  1/10th the rate as the rest of us is wrong in every sense of the word.

And yet, we have Warren Buffet telling his fellow rich people, Congress, America, and pretty much anyone else who will listen that this is exactly what is happening.  For three years now, Warren has had a challenge for anyone on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans to show that they paid an equal or higher rate than their secretary.  There has been several to looked into it, and all have found Warren is right.

There’s something you should know: the ultra rich are already paying a LOWER tax rate than the rest of us.

And the conservatives, being the tools they are, will want to show you tax tables and redirect the conversation to absolute dollar terms.  But Warren Buffet has proven these arguments to be all smoke and mirrors.  Worse, they want to cut the rate for the ultra rich even further.  Even worse, they have no idea how to pay for it.  These are the people who cut emergency aid to millions of struggling Americans because they want it paid for first.  But when it comes to tax breaks for gazillionaires, they don’t even care if it’s all money borrowed from the rest of us.
How’s that for a double standard?

Now here’s the worst part of it: not only is this the most regressive tax plan ever devised, but it is also unsustainable.  That 1 rich guy may employ all 99 other guys.   But what we can plainly see today is that as he hoards the wealth, everyone else’s income is dropping and he’s laying them off.  Thus, the 99 guys cannot pay for what they once bought.  The rich guy – who owns nearly everything already – sees his sales drop.  So he cuts incomes more and lays more people off.  It’s the classic rondo of deflation.

The truth is: one person, no matter how rich he is, cannot (or will not) consume the equivalent of 99 people.  There is only so much food he will eat, so much toothpaste he will use, so much TP he will use up, only so many cars he will buy, only so much fuel he will burn, etc..  These are physical limitations tied directly to his physiology, as well as psychological limitations tied directly to the way we all think.  So when wealth is overly concentrated in the hands of a few, demand falls off spurring more cut backs and layoffs.  So it’s not the rich that will use the money most wisely.  It’s the middle class business owner who makes less than $200K per year  – most of whom make half that or less.

If anyone should get a tax break to spur the economy, it’s them.   Not the gazillionaires; their tax rate should exceed ours, not contrariwise.

If you lived in the late 70s and early 80s, you will remember the commercials for pain relievers. First, came the serious voice telling us that brand X was more powerful than aspirin. Then came “extra strength”, “maximum strength”, and even “ultra dose”.  I was one smart alecky kid back then, and predicted that eventually, someone would one-up everyone with “overdose” pain reliever.   I was so disappointed my prediction never came true.  Or maybe it did - when someone injected cyanide into extra strength Tylenol. That’s the reason for all those plastic safety bands around over the counter medicine bottles today.

Confessions of an AudiophileNut
I have to admit that I am an old audiophile. My stereo system once consisted of 13 separate units with air filters and cooling fans in the back of the cabinet. While I play my stereo, my electrical meter spins so fast it threatens to disintegrate and pepper all around with shrapnel. I can heat half my house just by turning it all on, (which I do only on occasion these days). I tend to know a thing or two about audio and electronics in general.

If you walk into any department store or electronics store today, much of what you see on the shelves is complete rubbish.  Let me explain one such example. Go to the vacuum cleaners and read the tag. The vacuum cleaners may be perfectly fine, but the information given you is complete rubbish.  They almost always list how many amps each consumes like this was somehow significant.  I can take an iron bar and wire up a wall plug to it.  Were I to plug this in, I could draw 20 to 40 amps before either the circuit breaker blows or the whole thing melts down into a puddle of molten metal.  But did I do any work?  Did I get anything besides a cheap thrill out of it?  No.  All the amperage draw in the world is meaningless unless you actually get some work out of it.  So all those boasts about amperage draw tells you nothing about how much work those electric motors actually do.  Not all electric motors are the same, so you have no way of telling if one 10 amp motor does the same, more, or less work as another 10 or even an 8 or 12 amp motor.

I still remember when the digital age was just getting started.  The Federal Trade Commission requested a standard for rating output of stereo equipment from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  They’re the guys who set industry standards for engineering and manufacturing.  This was done back in the mid 70s because the 60s saw some companies making outrageous claims about their stereo equipment which was confusing buyers.  The power rating standard for stereos was set at X watts of power per channel, RMS (meaning Root Mean Square – which is about 70.7% of maximum voltage), into an 8 ohm “load” (essentially a standard 8 ohm resistor) with no more than Y% distortion at that power level anywhere between 20-20,000 Hz (the typical frequency range of what we hear).  Usually, this is written as, say, 100W/ch @.05% THD; which means 100 watts per channel into 8 ohms at no more than .05% distortion anywhere between 20 to 20,000 cycles per second.  Notice parts of it are not specifically stated, but simply assumed.  They set this standard so specific to prevent anyone from playing games with the numbers.  This standard allowed us, the buyers, to make apples to apples comparisons between different brands.

But digitally recorded sound was not like any other recording before it.  Digital sound was capable of great dynamic range (the difference between silence and the loudest recordable sound).  The IEEE and the FTC had to set a standard for loud speakers so buyers knew what could handle the new media and what could not.  Anyone who met these standards were allowed to call their product “digital ready”.  After some debate and compromise, IEEE decided that speakers with at least 89 decibels sensitivity (producing 89 decibels of sound measured at 1 meter distance from the speaker using only 1 watt of power), was the minimum to be “digital ready”.
I remember high end stereo equipment far exceeding “digital ready” standards back in the late 80s and early 90s.  Loud speakers up to 102 decibel sensitivity, and powerful amplifiers with distortion levels far below what the human ear could possibly detect.  Those standards are now completely ignored and all but forgotten.  Today, the “digital ready” designation  is nothing more than a marketing gimmick that means absolutely nothing.  Someone could stick a “digital ready” sticker on a toaster and rarely would anyone blink.

Take your typical “high end” receiver sold at electronics outlets today.  It’s not hard to find a powerful 525 watt, 5.1 surround sound system on the shelf.  But then you read the fine print (when it’s not conspicuously missing), here is what you find;

Max Output Power for Europe (4 ohms, 1 kHz, 0.7% THD) 5 x 120 W/ch

Notice they specified “for Europe”?  Europe still holds marketers to some semblance of a standard.  America does not.  Did you notice it specifies “Max” power instead of RMS?  That allows them to claim up to 140% of the actual power.  Notice they use 4 ohms instead of 8?  That allows them to claim nearly double the power.  Then they combine all five channels together and add it up  By the time you’re done converting back to the original IEEE standard required by the FTC, you find this powerful 525 watt receiver is actually only a cheap little 52.5 watt per channel system (into 8 ohms @.7% distortion – which is almost audible).  Also notice that they decided to test distortion at a single frequency.  This receiver could have 40% distortion at some other frequency, but they just did not bother measuring it.  By totally ignoring these standards, I could legally advertise a cheap 20 watt 5.1 surround sound receiver as a 1,350 watt system.

Compare this to my aging Kenwood Basic M2A amplifiers built back in 1989.  They were rated at 220W RMS per channel into 8 ohms @0.004% THD (total harmonic distortion).  Converting over to the silliness that Yamaha uses today would turn my amps into 1244 watt amp (actual measurements pegs it at 1050 watts).  And I paid about the same price as that junk receiver sold today.  Yamaha does not make an amplifier or receiver near my amplifier rating at any price.  Score one for vintage electronics.

Car speakers are similarly marketed.  Sensitivity ratings are often ignored.  Back when I was a kid, I took some home speakers and planted them in the back seat of my old Chevy Impala.  They had great sensitivity.  Sensitivity is how loud a speaker gets using only 1 watt of power.  IEEE says to measure the loudness at 1 meter away using 1 watt of power.  Loudness, of course, is measured in decibels.

But it’s not straight forward, 3 decibels requires double the power, while 1 decibel needs only 26% more power (wattage) (1.26X).  10 Db. requires 10 times the power.  So at 1 watt, a speaker with 86 Db (decibels)  sensitivity produces 86 Db. of sound, and requires only  2×1.26=2.52 times times more power to produce 90Db of noise.  But now, you look at speakers today (especially car audio), you see speakers that can take 1000 watts, but their sensitivity is crap.

Many marketers don’t even want you to know this, so they don’t bother telling you.  Whenever you see an electronics product for which there is no specifications, walk away.  It’s probably junk at any price.

Now think about this,  a speaker rated at 1000 watts with 82 Db sensitivity can produce 112 Db sound volume if you pump the full 1000 watts into it.  An amplifier that powerful, sans all the marketing games mentioned earlier, tend to be expensive (note you have to buy two of them).  112 Db. just a bit louder than running a power saw.  But one can get the same volume from a speaker with 93 Db. sensitivity, using only an 80 Watt amplifier.  A pair of old Cerwin Vega D9 home speakers can produce the same sound volume using only 10 Watts (but I would not want to try stuffing them in my car).  This is how I managed to “out jam” my much wealthier teenage peers in their new cars and five hundred dollar stereos with my cheap, but very sensitive home speakers and a 20 watt amplifier stuffed into an old Impala.

Time to decompress a bit, and get out of the technical stuff.

When we buy coffee, many of us prefer decaf. But there are two major processes that decaffeinate coffee.  One uses methylene chloride,  a known carcinogen usually used as a paint stripper and industrial degreaser, to bind with the caffeine and then filter it away.  But the process of eliminating all the methylene chloride can never be 100% effective.  Thus, there is always a trace amount of it in your decaf.  The other major process simply runs hot water through it and filter the caffeine out. They then reabsorb the coffee back into the grounds.  What you’re essentially buying is used coffee.

Buyer BewareParanoid

We largely remain blissfully unaware of the manufacturing process by which the stuff we buy is made.  Much of it is benign, but some, like milk, turned me off to it completely. Other processes are senseless, like pasteurization, which destroys the majority of vitamins and often makes it necessary for them to add artificial vitamins later (called fortification).  It would be far better to prevent contamination at the source.  Barring that, food irradiation could replace pasteurization without destroying all the natural vitamins.  But public opinion of food irradiation deserves a whole ‘nother post.

We are being fed lots of information.  But, like vacuum advertising,  a lot of that information is of no value.  Others, like stereo specs, are so thoroughly massaged you need a technical degree to derive the truth from them.  And still more is deliberately kept hidden from us.  Information is so heavily manipulated in an effort to part our money from us, that you have to hold everything you see, read, hear, and learn with complete cynicism.

Over the years, we created agencies to protect ourselves from the worst abuses.  But our advocates have largely failed us due to lack of enforcement.  Once again, we are increasingly becoming victims of our own negligence as we feebly react to each new corporate marketing outrage.  I’m sure that nearly every one of you, dear readers, can recite at least one example of such outrageous marketing.  Unless we want to increasingly buy junk based on worthless information and have our children increasingly exposed to lead paint and other toxic chemicals, we need to redouble our efforts.  And we really need to make our consumer advocacy groups step up and do their jobs.  We need to insist on apples to apples standards, full and consistent disclosure, and strong enforcement.

Talk about bad reporting.

Comments are closed for the recent article “Taliban don’t have stinger missiles: Gates“.  Too bad, because it’s a terrible news blurb.

First, the caption of the picture misidentifies a sidewinder air to air missile as a shoulder fired stinger missile that just happens to be mounted on an aircraft wing.    Stingers don’t go on aircraft.  The American military uses three air to air missiles – the short range sidewinder, the medium range AMRAAM (which stands for Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile), and the long range Phoenix.  Plus a whole plethora of air to ground missiles and bombs; far too many to enumerate here.

Second, because Gates denies they have them does not mean they don’t.  But let’s give Gates the benefit of the doubt – which is an easy thing to do in this particular case.  Stinger missiles are relatively hard to aquire – even for allied nations.  The Russians, Chinese, and French all make their own shoulder fired surface to air missiles.  About a hundred or so countries have access to them, and any one of them could have had a few lost, stolen, sold off or, yes, even given to the Taliban.  So even if Gates is absolutely right about the stinger missile, it still does not mean that there are no surface to air missiles in the hands of the Taliban.

In other words, what Gates said does not prove or disprove anything.

But even if there were missiles in Afghanistan and our aircraft and helicopters were being shot down, given the secretive nature of the way the Afghan war is being conducted, would you expect the military tell us?  The American people been largely in the dark ever since the war began, why would anything change now?

It is a good day for the moral and ethical.

For years, we’ve been hearing white supremacists point to racial differences on standardized tests to make their case.  But now, the myth is officially busted.

An experiment, published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, tested the scores representing hundreds of commonly used tests, including civil service or other pre-employment exams and university entrance exams.  It’s findings: all the usual safeguards to eliminate gender and racial bias have failed.

Herman Aguinis, professor of organizational behavior and human resources and director of the Kelley School’s new Institute for Global Organizational Effectiveness, led the study, which was co-authored by Steven A. Culpepper at the University of Colorado Denver and Charles A. Pierce at the University of Memphis.

Using nearly 16 million test samples to yield more than eight trillion pairs of individual test/outcome scores, they injected bias into most samples to resemble real-world results and used super computers to check tens of billions of scores. They found the procedures in use today overwhelmingly and repeatedly missed the inserted  bias.

“Test bias” means that two people with different ethnicity or gender, for example, who are equally quaified, are predicted to have different “scores” on the outcome (e.g., job performance); thus a biased test might benefit certain groups over others. Decades of earlier research consistently found no evidence of test bias against ethnic minorities, but the current study challenges this established belief.

“Our findings are significant because we proved that bias can be present but not be detected by even the top experts in the field, which could result in inaccurate prediction of outcomes such as job and academic performance for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals,” Aguinis said.

This coup overturning 40 years of assumptions about test scores are not just significant for overturning the supremacist assertions about the racial aptitude and achievement gap.  This is also significant for everyone who had to take these tests for pre-employment, scholastic entrance, scholarships, and even vocational aptitude tests.   Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives were touched by these tests.

Note: this story is largely adapted from the Indiana University news release.  Click on the link to find the news release and even a downloadable copy of the study itself.

November 1978 found me in fifth grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday.  It was one of those events, like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Kennedy, and 9/11, that sears itself into your mind.  The news of over 900 dead in Jonestown Guyana at the hands of a religious madman.  To me, it left a lot of questions nobody could answer.  The lack of answers disturbed this little boy far more profoundly than the answers ever could.

How could so many follow one man even to their own deaths?  What spell did he cast upon them?
Could someone do the same to me?  Can I resist?
Is this something one can learn?  Can even I learn to do this?

These are tough questions for an 11 year old boy.  Questions no adult around me could (or would) answer.  But I had determined then to learn these secrets no matter where it took me.  And it was quite the journey into lots of blind alleys, bizarre occult rituals, secret organizations, and finally to the banal truth.  I’ve read books on the occult, interviewed practicing pagans, witches, evangelicals, and satanists.  I’ve interviewed minor cult leaders, business leaders, a few minor political leaders, and even some professional salesmen.  I’ve delved into conspiracy theories, learned about secret organizations, secret programs, secret practices.  I’ve studied certain aspects of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, religion, mysticism, and so much more.  I’ve always been fascinated by leadership and charisma (having so little of each myself).   As I wrote earlier, I’ve been down a lot of blind alleys.  All of it done in my spare time, of course.  I’m no professional researcher.

So what are the common threads between guys like Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Lee Iacoca, Martin Luthor King Jr., and all those others who seem to pull the world in whatever direction they go?  It seems like quite the motley lot, all jumbled together.  One might think there must be multiple ways.  But really, there’s not.  Each had established a base of authority uniquely theirs.  Each stuck to a few very simple messages and hammered on them over and over again.  Literally to the point of filtering the whole world through the lens of their message.  Of course, politicians tend to have others give them the message, but the presentation is all their own – perfected through many years of practice.

And here’s the part that I find scary; anyone can learn to become a cult of personality.  It only takes a willingness to learn and lots of practice.  A few simple techniques done over and over again.

The techniques of indoctrination are well documented, so I won’t bother going over that.  Suffice to say, many of these techniques were learned from various cult leaders, developed by psychologists, then practiced and perfected by people such as salesmen, politicians, public relations experts, and even bureaucrats.  Believe it or not, a large part of the advertising surrounding you every day was developed using techniques learned from cults.

And this also scares me.  It’s everywhere.  It’s in advertising, it’s in the papers, it’s on billboards, it’s on the radio, television, the Internet.  You cannot go a day outside your home without being exposed to the mind control techniques developed over the course of the last 90 years or so.  Yes, it’s mind control; the same thing that invokes thoughts of MKULTRA, bizarre cults, and manchuran candidates.  All of that, plus decades of legitimate research into psychology and sociology all goes into controlling your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, your habits, your spending, and your vote.  We cannot escape it.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, left a failing acting career to take what was then a huge salary as an official spokesman for General Electric.  He had a natural oratory talent and a common man image.  But during those 8 years, he was almost never seen alone.  Edward Langely was a PR expert who studied the giants like Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Joseph Goebbels, and had studied the cultish techniques of the Nazis during WWII.  During those 8 years, Ronald Reagan visited every GE facility in the country and had met with nearly every one of the quarter million GE employees.  He also gave up to 16 speeches per day.  But all the travel time was spent at the knee of Edward Langely who fed him the company line.  It was the classic mind control technique of constant memorization and regurgitation of the same thoughts in an infinite number of ways; driving out all contradiction.  By the end of 8 years, Reagan had gone from a New Deal liberal to a Corporatist conservative.  Towards the end, he started giving speeches for an organization called the National Association of Manufacturers as well.  Their message was nearly a carbon copy of the GE message.

Reagan’s speech patterns was so smooth because he rarely spoke a word after 1965 that was not already given to him in the 8 years of programming.  Everything he said was from memory without much thought.  He rarely had to hesitate to think about any response.  This gave him the air of confidence that so many look for in a leader.  Plus, he still retained a “common man” image from his Hollywood years.  He was the first American Manchurian candidate – created by a corporation to do exactly as they desired.  His presidency reflects this.  Since then, we’ve had several attempts by PR experts to duplicate their success with Reagan.  George W. Bush was another one hand picked by PR experts.

But it’s not just about Americans being fooled by Manchurian candidates.  It’s also about us being manipulated directly.  The PR industry – which is the most egregious violator of our free will – now has 90+ years and billions of dollars in research behind it.  Experts already know exactly what percentage of the American population will accept message X if presented using technique B.  As Edward Bernays once said, it works because “it is a logical result of the way our democratic society is organized“.  What’s even worse is that these experts know exactly how to craft a fallacious argument so that most people of average intelligence will not detect the fallacy.    One of my greatest fears is that the more we learn about psychology, the more effective the mind control used on us shall become.  And make no mistake, propaganda IS mind control.  They are as equivalent as gravity and acceleration.  We already have little defense left to us.  Nothing we read, see, or hear can be trusted, (and I hope, dear reader, that you include me in that statement).  People have managed to insert propaganda into every form of media, even university studies and alternative news sources.  Few have the desire, the skill, and the time to track down and verify everything we hear, see, and read.  So we’re faced with a choice of either accepting and basing our opinions on very little trustworthy information, or we must accept that our opinions will be unduly influenced by lies deliberately designed to manipulate our thoughts, our opinions, and all our subsequent words and actions.

What are our opinions but the very things upon which we act?

Democracy can only function when the participants are informed and reasoning.   This was the original purpose for educating the public in the first place.  But with the advent of mass media, the ongoing perfection of propaganda, and the inadequacy and slow demise of liberal education, we are now faced with a problem that has grown into a national crisis.  Propaganda is now being applied to us on an industrial scale.  Through this cradle to grave inundation of false information and sophistry, large segments of the population are convinced of things that are actually against their own interests.  Propaganda is using the first amendment right to free speech to undermine the very basis of democracy itself.

And don’t think that elevating public education is a solution.  That only causes the propagandist to adjust the delivery; to craft the message to account for the new level of education.   It does not solve the underlying problem.

So can anyone learn to be a cult leader?  Sure, just study to become a PR expert and practice, practice, practice.  Can you defend yourself against it?  It’s becoming increasingly difficult and may someday become impossible.  The legacy of Jim Jones is all around us.  All of America is slowly becoming a cult.  Democracy is dying as a result.