Ignorance, My Bliss

The Case for Teaching Ignorance - The New York Times:

This article points to one of what I hope comes through in this Blog; I am ignorant, "the experts" are ignorant, all mankind is ignorant. It could not be otherwise -- we are alive, yet we can barely describe what "life" even is beyond "a really special chemical reaction". We believe we are "intelligent", but the "we" that we perceive as our consciousness is even less understood than "life" -- is it chemical, electrical, quantum, ????, spiritual, or more likely "all of the above"! The question of "the ghost in the machine" goes back at least to Descartes.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist, Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. (He suspected that a 1,414-page textbook may have been culpable.)

Looking at a map can make one think they might understand the territory, but the reality is that even a very detailed map carries very little information about the reality of the territory (is it hot? cold? wet? crime ridden? loaded with bugs? ... etc). We are wired as humans to "the illusion of understanding" -- lest we cower in a cave in abject fear unwilling to face the (mostly) unknown world outside and the second to second prospect of mortality (see brain hemorrhage, heart attack, simple choking, etc).

So, as the students above, we VASTLY overcompensate -- we think a thick textbook HAS to cover most everything about the brain. We think that "a bunch of studies, many of them in agreement" on climate MUST correctly predict the future of climate. We especially want to be "more right than others" ... "less ignorant" ... the problem of accumulated "knowledge", much of it mere "data" is that it has a horrible tendency to actually make us LESS aware of our true condition.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions. 

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

Again, modern man is WAY behind the ancients. It was completely covered in Proverbs 9:10, no special classes required.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

The ancients realized the state of their souls and the fragility of life -- that of being most unholy and uncontrollably near an eternity judged by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God.  

For thousands of years, Western Civilization worked because it was based on: 

1. The fear (best read "awed respect") of a perfectly just and KNOWABLE (to some degree) God. 
2. That God had created an ORDERED and KNOWABLE (to humans) universe. 
3. Man had been given DOMINION over that universe. 

These were powerful beliefs that properly placed man -- as potential master of the physical, servant of the eternal, blessed with the ability to know both the universe and God. The base for western thought brought thousands of years of relative "advancement", and since say "1300", fairly rapidly so. 

But, as in the original Eden, the snake was busy. Did God REALLY create all this? Maybe not ... and if not, maybe he doesn't exist at all. If he doesn't exist, is there REALLY "truth"? Certainly not "ultimate truth" ... and whatever feels good seems a lot more like "human morals". Oh, and BTW, why does man have "dominion" -- is man not just an animal, and therefore no more deserving of a place on the planet than animals? While we are at it, maybe "the earth" is really "divine", and man should "serve the earth"? 

So now we have mass confusion. Our natural desires to "be as intelligent as gods" make us want to fake that we are not ignorant. Meanwhile, our hopeful promethean reach much exceeds our grasp, and we are lost in a random meaningless universe. Unsure of our place -- even relative to the dead rock of the planet, or the clearly less intellectually capable life forms that share it with us. 

We have traded legitimate and actually beneficial "ignorance" (humility, wisdom, the fear of God) for a false sense of "having figured it all out", while our spiritual state is beyond lost -- not knowing even OF God, and having lost all contact with our created place in the universe. 

Proper ignorance (humility) is indeed bliss! In fact, it is WISDOM! 

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A $620K Watch, Record Cold

A $620,000 watch tells what time it is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia:

The European press often seems less controlled than the American. Couple little tidbits here:

Fall comes suddenly to Russia in mid-August, a dose of harsh reality that ends summer’s brief respite with a foreshadowing of the legendary winter that shapes the Russian psyche. With temperatures near record-lows, last week was no exception.

Fall sometimes comes suddenly to MN in August as well -- as I realized last evening I ought to have worn more than a T-shirt down to the last free concert of 2015 down at Mayo Park -- "America". Given my warm nature, it wasn't bad, but as temps started to slide below 60 degrees by the end of the evening, I could have used a bit more warmth. I'm sure it isn't close to a record, but it is certainly closer to cold records here than warm ones.

I remember 2012 being nice and warm for the last concert with George Thorogood, and a couple years where we even decided it was too hot to go. Same sort of remembrances of State Fair. Not looking like those are issues here -- but we of course know from reporting that it is getting hotter all the time. Are you going to believe your own stupid experience or the geniuses that do the warming thing -- heck, some of them can even fake like they work at the CIA and play hooky from their climate gig for 15 years and nobody notices! Are you that smart? See? Those warming people really ARE brilliant!

The rest of the article is an OK read as well on Putin's Russia -- corruption, graft, little or no wage gains, rich getting richer, lots of failures that "should remove him from office". I couldn't help but think that the list sounded just like BO's America -- lots of corruption, graft, no wage gains, big EPA spill,  ... etc, etc Russia might be a tad more honest, they actually report it when they are in a recession ... we fudge the numbers.

I suppose the press in Russia treats things differently than Reuters -- hopefully with the past experience with the USSR, people there know enough to look for answers from other sources!

How many Americans are that intelligent?

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China, Stocks, The Unknown

China to Flood Economy With Cash as Global Markets Lose Faith - WSJ:



People sometimes ask me "what have you been wrong about -- what things do you think you might be wrong about now". I went into a few of them here, but China is a bit in "another category".



My theory is that command economies can't work -- the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, China prior to the '90s, etc. Even "more controlled" economies like Europe and the US that seemingly "keep going" with increasing government intervention, start to show signs of "stagflation", low employment, poor productivity, slower or non-existent growth rates, etc.



But then there has been China. Since the '90s, growing like topsy always supposedly with more to come -- and even more important, with a population dedicated to doing the hard work to continue to make that happen! It has been enough to make a poor Moose wonder about his basic beliefs of economics!



Now it looks like the ship of Beijing is at least in rough water, potentially upon the rocks.

The moves reflect an economy increasingly failing to cooperate with Chinese leaders’ playbook to control the world’s No. 2 economy.

The real world has a horrible (depending on perspective) tendency to fail to cooperate with various pronouncements from "supreme leaders", or even "huge landslide" votes. If it were not so,  death, pain, poverty and a whole host of unpopular elements of reality would have been conjured away by some potentate or populist movement long ago!



For those that believe that God is in his heaven, and we live in an ordered purposeful universe, this is GOOD! For those that believe that man's powers as a conjurer are unlimited, this is of course VERY BAD news! (to the UNconstrained view, in fact THE WORST news! ... because it destroys their entire worldview!)



If the China economy meets a bad end (possibly taking the world for a scary downhill toboggan ride with it), my sense of how things work will be confirmed ... although with some pain in the net worth column!



While "the world" no doubt is a long way from switching fully over to my view on the prospects for long term successful control of the economy by government, this paragraph indicates that they are are least having some second thoughts on the brilliance of the Chinese attempt at economic command and control.

“The world is starting to realize China is not nearly as competent as thought, especially in the economic sphere where everyone gave it good grades,” said Fraser Howie, co-author of “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”

The following paragraph gives a superb opportunity to understand why growth is hard:

A key problem is that risk-averse banks continue to favor state-owned companies, eschewing private enterprises with less-traditional collateral and balance sheets. This often leaves entrepreneurs with higher growth potential to fall back on high-interest non-bank financing or go without. Meanwhile, many state-owned companies, already awash in cheap capital, are reluctant to borrow because of overcapacity in various industries.

Let me try to break this down so it is understandable to all:

• "risk-averse" -- general human nature is risk-averse. Thus insurance, votes for "security" provided by the the government, etc. 
• "State-owned companies" are VERY risk averse -- as is the government, THEY CAN AFFORD TO BE! 
• The "wildcard" is THE PROFIT MOTIVE! Keynes "animal spirits" -- the counterpose to "risk-averse", that if ignited, drives the economy forward. 
• BUT, the government typically ends up dousing animal spirits and rewarding the risk-averse. It seeks to increase state actual ownership, or "de facto ownership" (as in medicine, education and other industries in the US), it seeks to increase regulation, it seeks to increase taxation -- all of which reduce the animal spirit (DRIVE) of the economy. It picks PAST winners and strangles potential future winners in the cradle. 

Eventually, "reality intrudes" -- it turns out that "the state" or "government" is not magic, all-powerful, etc, but rather just another competing organization that can suffer losses, lose the confidence of it's own people and other governments, and eventually, collapse -- the imaginary "security" that it so fervently promised is exposed as a chimera.



USUALLY, reality intrudes at levels smaller than "collapse" -- stock market crashes, housing or land value collapses, "austerity", financial controls, "stimulus packages" -- but not always, sometimes it is bigger. A political party dies, a new form of government comes in, violence, etc.



In my worldview, these things are inevitable, not surprising, and like "surgery now vs surgery later" can even have positive effects without killing the patient. It is like "pruning a tree", or "weeding the garden" -- expected and normal.



To those that believe that government is something "beyond the world" however -- that it is capable of "conjuring spirits from the vasty deep" (to butcher Shakspeare), problems as we see in China create great anguish since ultimately they call the infallibility of man through government into question, and since that is the only faith they have, that is a crisis indeed!



"There be Dragons" -- the unknown, out of our hands. If you are a "progressive", such shouldn't even exist -- because you believe that the world is "getting better" through more and more control exerted by man.



I prefer the unknown.



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Trump, Rome, Exceptionalism

Are Republicans For Freedom or White Identity Politics?:

What we are hearing now from the Trump-supporting right is akin to the Roman people’s call for the dissolution of the Senate: the demand to install a strong horse, the outsider who will fix all things, the powerful man who promises he will, at long last, get things done for the people.

I don't think this article really makes a cogent case for the "White Identity Politics" theme it claims, but it does make some points, and it led me to think of some others.

First, the quote above. The country has been sliding socialist since the 30's with predictable and gathering crisis all around. Generally rising debt, crime, destruction of the family, weaker and weaker general business and employment climate, corruption, loss of trust, and general "malaise". Carter called it out in the late '70s ... Reagan gave us a heavy dose of positive energy, but that had fizzled by the late '90s. The only thing that prevents there from being "malaise" discussion right now is the fact that the BO admin has cooked the economic numbers, and the MSM is certainly not going to point out what a disastrous president he has been and is ...

But, many people still know what is happening -- and a bunch more "feel it". They may not have a lot of education, they may know what the MSM tells them they are SUPPOSED to think, but they are fed up! Reagan  got that vote in '80, and that "mad as hell and not going to take it any more" emotion is one of the things driving the Tump support. Reagan was certainly a "Strong Horse" -- Trump is acting like one at this point, who knows what is really in his heart and soul?

The other big thing that Trump says that Reagan said also "Make America Great Again"! Even though the MSM fights like hell for "The Party" to win, they forget that a whole lot of people are still AMERICANS first and they WANT THEIR TEAM TO BE #1 !!

This isn't all that hard -- Packer fans want the Packers to be "NUMBER ONE" -- not "as good a team as any, maybe similar to say "Cleveland, or Atlanta" (like BO saying America was exceptional like Britain or Greece). All humans have a yearning for themselves, their families, their companies, their countries to be truly exceptional -- "the greatest". Even BO has that yearning for his tribe, the Luo -- he very much wants "his people" to be exceptional. He can help accomplish that by taking America (and Western Powers) down a peg to achieve his "Dreams From My Father".

Reagan spoke to that yearning for greatness in Americans -- in his case, I HONESTLY, with a worthy vision and the capability to make it happen. Trump speaks to that same yearning -- but I believe in his case falsely, cynically, because he knows that is what a set of people will react to. But the yearning is so strong and only Trump seems to have tapped into it -- so it gives him an edge.

The media is driven to play with fire on Trump. They love him throwing bombs all over in Republican primaries and alienating especially Hispanic voters from any chance of voting Republican. They also love the idea of Trump running as a 3rd party and making it possible to even elect someone like Bernie Sanders. They see Trump as a way to destroy the Republican party which they so much hate.

It is a story as old as man -- the weapon that we pick up to destroy the hated other often destroys US! Will the media (and all the rest of us) be Trumped?

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Wisdom Is Too Long, Markets Are Concise and Honest

The collected (nit)wit and (un)wisdom of Bernie Sanders:

The linked article is chock full of excellent rebuttal of the fallacies of Bernie Sanders -- and by extension the entire current dominant political view in America ... that of the Democrats, Media, Academia, etc that I call "The Party".

I recommend reading it, but I'll give you the part that I found to be especially clear, easy to understand and somewhat non-intuitive. The BIGGEST advantage of Capitalism and Markets is that they quickly and accurately deliver BAD NEWS, and other systems very much tend to try to hid bad news, which is BAD!! This is most certainly true -- and well worth realizing, understanding, and taking to heart in everything you do! The whole article this is from is linked here.

... "The most valuable property of the price mechanism is as a reliable mechanism for delivering bad news." These two statements explain a lot about why socialist systems fail pretty much everywhere but get pretty good press, while capitalism has delivered truly astounding results but is constantly besieged by detractors. 

It is simple really: When the "Great Leader" builds a new stadium, everyone sees the construction. Nobody sees the more worthwhile projects that didn't get done instead because the capital was diverted, through taxation, from less visible but possibly more worthwhile ventures — a thousand tailor shops, bakeries or physician offices. 

At the same time, markets deliver the bad news whether you want to hear it or not, but delivering the bad news is not a sign of failure, it is a characteristic of systems that work. When you stub your toe, the neurons in between your foot and your head don't try to figure out ways not to send the news to your brain. If they did, you'd trip a lot more often. Likewise, in a market, bad decisions show up pretty rapidly: Build a car that nobody wants, and you're stuck with a bunch of expensive unsold cars; invest in new technologies that don't work, and you lose a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. These painful consequences mean that people are pretty careful in their investments, at least so long as they're investing their own money. 

Bureaucrats in government do the opposite, trying to keep their bosses from discovering their mistakes. 

Likewise, the pricing system tells people things that they can’t know directly. In a command economy, where bureaucrats set production targets, if someone uses more pig iron than expected, there’s a shortage. In a market, prices for pig iron go up, which sends two signals: To pig iron producers, the signal is produce more pig iron. To pig iron consumers, the signal is don’t use more pig iron than you have to. Both ways, the prices tell people things that they need to know, without any direct communication required. This is why market economies do better than command economies, as historical examples ranging from the old Soviet Union to today’s Venezuela demonstrate over and over again.

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Iran Will Self "Verify"

AP Exclusive: UN to let Iran inspect alleged nuke work site - The Washington Post:



This has been reported in the right wing press for weeks -- since WaPo is now confirming, I'll take it as fact. Again, those damned Republicans are up on arms and don't seem to trust the "Death the America, Death to Israel" chanting Mullahs -- go figure.



I've heard a few hard lefties say "Since Israel has nukes, how can we expect Iran to not have them?"



That is commonly known as the defeatist position ... "Since we are all going to just die anyway, why not just commit suicide now and get it over with?".  It is an argument of the form "Since X is inevitable, why bother". It used to be the gospel of the left on the USSR; "The USSR is always going to be around, isn't all that bad anyway, and there is nothing to do about it -- so quit competing, quit having a military, quit talking about them, etc".



It is often the "mature intelligent position" of the left on a whole set of topics that include  Israel continuing to exist, the US having a role in the mideast, (or any global role these days), etc. It is NEVER raised on such questions as the attainability of "income equality", "universal healthcare" or "gun control". Consistency remains a convenient non-issue for the left.



Much of human life is a struggle against the "inevitable" -- to be a Christian is to believe that even death for the soul is not in fact "inevitable", but that a better life will exist on an eternal plane. So too, poverty, despair, moral decrepitude, ignorance and a host of other natural and "inevitable" human conditions are considered worthy of hard work, dedication, individual effort, struggle, etc for those of the Christian and often "conservative" thought process.



While the left may make claims that they too seek to erase at least say "poverty and ignorance", a not very close perusal of their rhetoric will show they expect that "someone else" -- the "rich", "the 1%", "the greedy"; will do all the actual work and funding of their supposed "goals", and that what they call "education" will primarily be "indoctrination" to assure that all agree with the leftward view.



The core belief of leftward thought is that ultimately all will be forced to agree with all the tenets of leftward ideology!



... or they will be dead, very possibly due to Iranian nukes in the case of Israel. Iran will be very willing to "verify" that they don't have any right up until the mushroom shows up over Israel.



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Black Balls Matter

LA 'black ball' reservoir rollout potential 'disaster' in the making, say experts | Fox News:



I saw this last week and thought that black was an odd color given its heat absorption qualities.



White came to mind -- I hadn't thought of chrome, but the point is that color does sometimes matter.



Perhaps a bit more study would have been in order prior to dumping  $34 million worth of black balls into a reservoir? Hmm ... something that works in your martini glass doesn't necessarily work for Lake Superior? Wow, what a concept!



A quick scan of the article shows the likely culprit scenario that is so common these days -- one branch of government reacting to another, in this case the LA and their reservoirs to the EPA, along with a lame attempt to cover up what they are really doing.  Claiming they are "saving evaporation" when really they are trying to meet an EPA mandate on the "somewhat cheap" (very relative when it comes to government) -- typically "obscenely expensive" vs "intergalactically insanely beyond imagination expensive".



Balls are relative.



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Climate Change Expert Missing, Government in Action

Climate change expert sentenced to 32 months for fraud, says lying was a 'rush' - NBC News:

Well, he seemed to be OK for 15 years ...

But now he is going to jail -- I'm sure it will be nice jail. He ONLY failed to do any work by telling his supervisors that he was a CIA Spy for FIFTEEN YEARS! Those government jobs that pay $206K a year must REALLY have some awesome responsibilities considering he was shirking for 15 years and nobody was the wiser!

Supposedly though, he only defrauded the government of near $1 million ... but $200K X 15 is a lot closer to $3 million -- I suppose "close enough for government work".

I love what he did with his time ...

When Huvelle asked Beale what he was doing when he claimed he was working for the CIA, he said, "I spent time exercising. I spent a lot of time working on my house."
He also said he used the time "trying to find ways to fine tune the capitalist system" to discourage companies from damaging the environment. "I spent a lot of time reading on that," said Beale.

The article is worth a read -- your tax dollars at work. Two presidential administrations from opposing parties, both houses of congress switching parties (twice) ... no matter, the administrative incompetence and downright fraud rolls on ...

And those on the left will tell you that the answer is MORE GOVERNMENT!

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Catstantinople

Why Istanbul Should Be Called Catstantinople - WSJ:

“Being a cat in Istanbul is like being a cow in India,”

The article is a bit on the long side unless you are REALLY a cat lover. File under "interesting tidbits".

We brought our kitties down to the IA place for this week -- it was a rather difficult car ride with a lot of distressed kitty noise, and last night our smaller grey "Misty" was vocal enough for me to spend some extra late night time with her that I hadn't planned on.

Cats and Dogs are one of those cases where we can understand "why don't we all get along"? A large reason is that we have quite significant differences in likes and dislikes. Some love dogs, some love cats, some love both -- and we can do the inverse with hate.

For those that love, it is very hard to understand those that hate, and vice-versa. As Spock might say, "It is not logical" -- which it isn't.

The best we can hope to do is "respect the differences", but our feelings will not do that -- the haters and lovers of the two favorite pets have a feeling in their gut, and while we can cover it up and behave civilly (usually), there is a wiring difference that means that our "tolerance" for the inverse is not really at a felt level.

Perhaps if we ponder a bit on this reality we can begin to understand our humanity more, and maybe understand why it is that there is a need for transcendent religion that holds out the potential to step beyond the felt reality of our humanity.

How can we think and feel so differently on something of seemingly such slight significance? The fact that we can and do is a simple proof that "being more human" is never going to be enough to achieve peace on earth.

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Military Spends 57% or 16% Of Budget -- Lessons in Obfuscation

Pie chart of 'federal spending' circulating on the Internet is misleading | PolitiFact:

This one is so far out that even a prominent lefty "fact check" site has to call it out as being wrong. What I find interesting though is how one can fudge numbers to "kinda sorta" show something as true that is totally false.

In this case, take "discretionary spending ONLY", completely ignore "mandatory" spending, plus take a few more liberties, and "wala", you have a "proof" of what many on the left want to believe anyway ... Republicans are stupid / insane / evil, there are no problems at all with massive entitlement / welfare spending, and all our problems are due to "defense spending".

Our lefty media pulls this basic sleight of hand all the time ... switching between debt and deficit, using raw numbers one day, percentage of GDP another, screwing with what inflation adjustment is used (or none) ... this is THE LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN HISTORY!!!! (certainly, in a country of 320 million and money worth less every year, virtually ANY tax increase (or decrease) is "the largest in history" in raw non-inflation or population adjusted numbers!

It is worth going off to the column to see just how easy it is to go from a chart that purports to show defense as some nefarious monster eating the budget, to one that at least comes close to showing the reality of entitlements consuming an ever growing percentage of our GDP.

"Facts" are sticky things -- but hiding them is often not very difficult.

A truly unbiased news source could do a bit more work on "remainder", "food and agriculture", "education", etc  to get to the 70%+ that is now "entitlements and welfare".

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Happiness Is A Serious Problem, Dennis Prager

http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Serious-Problem-Dennis-Prager-ebook/dp/B0014Y09OI

An alternate title for this excellent book would be "Wisdom About Happiness".  I'm not wired to be a particularly happy person, nor am I wired to be a thin person -- so I do the best I can to play the hand I have been dealt. While neither diet books nor happiness books are likely to make me thin or happy, they help me understand my wiring and predilections so that I can possibly be a bit wiser, and compensate where possible.

Nearly anything written by Prager seems to at least border on excellent and this book is no exception. It walks through a lot of the many  misconceptions on happiness. I'll put a few more quotes in than I usually would, since this book is chocked full of short, well-written and to the point statements.

Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception. 

But not working AT happiness -- and especially not at YOUR happiness. As you look back on life, you will almost certainly realize that you were most happy when you were enmeshed in some "cause" or "project". In my case, the big development projects at IBM and raising kids were the largest examples. Hopefully writing will continue to develop into another.

But the purpose of life is not to avoid pain. That is the purpose of an animal’s life.

Many of our problems and even false desires about happiness are due to forgetting that man is not an animal. If we were, the rich, successful, beautiful, etc would actually BE the most happy -- but we see examples all the time in which this is not the case. Animals don't know human happiness -- they know relaxation, satiation, pleasure, etc -- all of which humans feel as well. A simple definition of hell for humans is mistaking the pursuit of animal pleasures with happiness -- addiction, obsession, disaster are terms associated with these, certainly not happiness!

whatever brings the most happiness can also bring the greatest unhappiness.

Ask a parent who has lost a child, or just has a child that has returned the love and care of the parent with disrespect and derision. Ask the loving spouse whose life partner has died. We know this to be true -- one whole chapter, chapter 25 is titled "Everything has a price -- Know what it is!". How much wiser (and happier!) the world would be if just a tiny extra percentage of our fellow man understood this simple truth!

The problem in our time is that maturity is not high on the list of goals we offer the next generation. We stress happiness, success, and intelligence but not maturity. And that is too bad, both for society, which suffers when too many of its members are immature, and for the individual who wants to be happy. For happiness is not available to the immature. And one of the prominent characteristics of immaturity is seeing oneself primarily as a victim.

"Maturity", defined as "wisdom, self control, perspective, having a philosophy of life (or even having a clue what philosophy is!)" When "maturity" is defined to mean some combination of the terms I listed (and I believe that to be his intent), then the quote above is true.

The "sage" can be "happy" in the sense that they have access to and make use of many of the "secrets" of this book, but when they live in a culture that often glorifies sensation, immaturity, mixing ends with means, substitution of animal senses for human wisdom / maturity / development, they are going to feel regret for the rest of humanity.

Yes, there is a “secret to happiness”—and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.

The problem with the "secret" to happiness is expectations. We don't feel happiness when expectations are met, we feel happiness when they are exceeded, and our human nature is to expect A LOT! Our culture, media and education system is all about telling us of our "rights" and how much we ALL "deserve" this and that. We are each so VERY special and deserving!! Our expectations are sky high -- for products, events, teams, friends, spouses -- EVERYTHING!

Grateful? To who or what? The order of the day is entitlement -- and nobody is ever grateful for what they are entitled to! So modern western man is saddled with the greatest unhappiness in world history -- gravely wounded soldiers in terrible wars have been grateful to be alive, modern man is often distraught and grossly unhappy if their Facebook "Friends" fail to put a "like" on their new rainbow profile picture!

There is a lot more in the book -- Prager does a characteristically insightful and compassionate discussion of medications and being wired toward depression.

If we are, in fact, “built” this way, we no longer have to blame ourselves or loved ones for our unhappiness. There is something worse than depression—blaming it on yourself or a loved one.

For those of us with such wiring, this is possibly the most important day to day advice -- because the depressive wiring comes with self-blame as a "feature". How strange that even the modern "progressive" would likely agree with Prager on this relative to depression, but find it TOTALLY WRONG for someone with say a tendency to homosexuality to seek to understand and control that "wiring".  Does the depressive, alcoholic, or even narcissist NOT have some sort of a responsibility to be "true" to themselves and "authentic"? Consistency remains a non-sequitur for the "progressive".

I highly recommend the book even if you are a very happy person. It is an excellent broad-brush skim of some of the more important, but often forgotten today, wisdom for a meaningful human life.

Peeking Behind the Gas Price Curtain

Hometown gas stations struggle to compete against Costco; MN Dep - KTTC Rochester, Austin, Mason City News, Weather and Sports:

The simple story is that Costco dropped gas prices in Rochester to under $2 a week or so ago and now they are being investigated by the state of MN.

The simple explanation is like pretty much everything else in the modern area of N America that used to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" -- government. Nearly 40% of actual declared GDP, but with direct control and very substantial influence over much much more. 60%? 80%? Do you call it a "market" when you get investigated for dropping prices?

The article links off to the MN statutes on how low a price stations may charge -- the definition of "cost" is a little mini-study in government legaleze.  I'm not a government official, nor government lawyer -- nor do I get paid by various groups to make it sound like it is supposed to sound, but I'll give you my simple view of "what it REALLY says".

At this point, all the small service station owners, possibly oil companies, and perhaps even large service station conglomerates like Kwik Trip, Casey's, etc, want to keep the pump price relatively high -- most important,  the government does as well, primarily because it provides more "cover" for their fuel taxes ... now .47 in MN, and .513 in WI, the Feds are .184 of that. No doubt "environmental" groups are also happy to see fuel prices high -- to say nothing of Saudi Arabia, etc, so that is likely a secondary government interest here.

If you want to look at all this in more detail, here is a link -- it covers the strategic reserve, some history back to the '70s, how ethanol raises the price, how the US produces more oil than "most people think" (MUCH more now with fracking / ND on line).

Back in 2011, the oil companies were making record profits and they were getting about .07 a gallon of gas in profit. We heard a LOT about "big oil" and how "obscene" those profits were then ...  not so much now that they have the lowest profits in 10 years.

No doubt Bernie Sanders would find those profits to still be way too high -- he probably finds less than a percent interest to be just fine as well. He would like to put a few million more highly paid union government "workers" into even more massive bureaucracy insuring that everything was allocated "fairly" without any profit or loss motive at all. Allocate it all like the old USSR -- when everyone except Bernie and a million or so cronies and party apparatchiks has nothing, you are done!

As we continue to "progress" from freedom to tyranny, the biggest thing the "progressives" operate by is misdirection -- better known as lying. We see it in healthcare -- each new "improvement" drastically increases costs / bureaucracy as seen with gas prices. We see the same thing in college education.

Markets are messy. Without all the government involvement in gas sales, Walmart and Costco may well have cornered the market because cheap gas was a way to be CERTAIN that people were going to stop there. Possibly one or two of the convenience stores, cutting prices to the bone to bring in people for milk, eggs, pop, beer ... and making their money primarily on volume.

Or maybe one of the big gas companies would go nuts putting in fully automated small pay at the pump 24x7 stations -- who knows? Perhaps they could make a deal with an auto manufacturer or two in order to have some sort of an "automated bottom fill probe" -- drive in, park (or let something like the auto parallel park technology on some cars) position the vehicle, it reads an electronic code from your vehicle, fills it and charges you and you need never get out of the car. Possibly such a system could now be designed to check / air your tires, change your oil, wash the car, ???  In a market driven economy anything is possible because  innovation is a big winner, and complacency dies. In a command economy,  imagination and innovation is killed because nothing hates change like a massive government bureaucracy.

One by one, all the pieces of our economy are being "assimilated" by the "Borg" of "progressivism". There are a lot of "scare quotes" because we now live in a world where the echo chamber of the TP -- from cradle to grave, tells all what they are to think and hides ever more of reality behind scapegoats like "Big Oil", "Big Pharma", etc -- while behind it ALL, pulling the strings like that fake Wizard of Oz, we find the ever expanding government.

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ISIS, Slavery, TP

Kayla Mueller: Why US hostage raped by ISIS leader refused to escape - CSMonitor.com:

Since ISIS announced its revival of institutional slavery a year ago, the group has systematically enslaved and raped thousands of women from the minority Yazidi community, according to New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi.

TP (The Party (D)) was the party of slavery in the US for nearly 100 years. It was then the party of Jim Crow (Apartheid) for another hundred. It is now the party supporting (even cheering) the murder of 50 million + babies in their mother's womb.  I'm a Christian, so I believe with repentance -- with the help of God, but I also know that long held positions, principles and tendencies  take A LOT to change.

My belief is that the primary "moral" of TP -- to the extent that they discuss "morals", is that might is right. They don't much believe in a higher power or "transcendence". They believe in their own internal "moral compass", such as it is looks a lot like "situational ethics" -- works best for me is moral. So the rank and file believes in primarily taking by force the income and wealth of those that have more and giving it to those that are most willing to vote for TP.

For a very long time, America was an exceptional nation because government was limited, and the vast majority of people were treated equally by that limited government. The primary advantage of the system was it engendered a work ethic that allowed a large number of people to better their station because neither the government nor the envious people around them were granted access to the fruits of their labor.

Americans agreed on that ''One Nation, Under God, with liberty and Justice for all". TP had to be defeated by Abraham Lincoln win that "one nation" part --  one for thee and one for TP (with their slaves) would have been their choice. We know where they stand on the "God part". Their views of "liberty and justice for all" certainly didn't included blacks for 200 years, the unborn, or even Christians, but the most deadly portion to economic improvement is that they now take from the economically successful to give to whomever they see as their best voters, thus killing the work ethic that produced the wealth of the greatest nation.

Today, the TP Pledge of Allegiance is ... "I pledge allegiance to the Flag, and to The Party, One Party, Supreme, With the total support and allegiance of all" -- when they get it locked in, it will return to school and MANY other venues, and will be MANDATORY under threat of "re-education:, or death if that fails.

Subjugation of women might seem like something TP would be against, but that as well is "it depends". Bill Clinton subjugated all the women he wanted, Bernie Sanders had some odd ideas about how attracted women were to rape (he may or may not have changed his mind, the point is that TP could care less). They care less about what is happening to women in Muslim nations -- in fact, they don't care about what happens to Muslim women in the US. Muslim's are not Christians, which for TP shows they are OK.

We know the rhetoric of TP -- we hear it repeated like a mantra on a daily basis, but what is more important -- their actions or their words? Do they REALLY care about slavery when it is now a reality in a country that BO abandoned, although he both takes credit for ending the war AND says that pulling the troops out "was not his decision".  I see no evidence in the TP media that there is the remotest bit of "moral concern" for anything that ISIS does anywhere. Why would they care? It doesn't directly fit any story line that TP finds beneficial to it's cause right now -- and their supreme leader BO even called ISIS "the JV team" not that long ago.

What do their actions say? Are they REALLY concerned about slavery, or is is slavery just one more condition that can be used as they see fit, in a similar way as a handful of unarmed blacks shot by police (nearly all in the process of attacking an officer) can be used as a wedge, while thousands of young blacks shot by other young blacks are not even worthy of mention? I don't think the reintroduction of slavery into Iraq and other ISIS lands bothers them at all,. Political power here in the US is what they care about.

People can march in the street and disrupt all sorts of events saying "Black lives matter", while Planned Parenthood people can calmly discuss selling the body parts of babies over salad and wine with no concern (even applause!) from TP. Power is the calculus, not "morality".

Some lives matter, others do not -- the issue is what TP says matters. The rights of women, slavery, life itself -- it is all to be under the power of TP and the subjects are to think and feel about it precisely as they are told by TP -- no more, no less.

The vast bulk of Americans are fine with that -- send us our checks and tell us what to think.

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Sex, Violence and Power No Longer Newsworthy

https://www.eurweb.com/2015/08/obama-assistant-charged-with-assault-for-shooting-at-her-boyfriend/

One has to go to the European news to EVEN SEE THIS MENTIONED ... even Fox and the RW media are not interested. It is a "non-story" ... nobody wants to interview the  boyfriend, nobody wants to hear from the WH about it, nobody has any friends of anyone to put on camera, no conversations with the arresting officers, NOTHING!

I can only come to the title  conclusion -- apparently we have "progressed" so far that Sex, Violence and Power no longer hold any interest for the public, so our news media wisely does not cover such stores, since they would not sell!

Certainly we can assume that any such story in an R administration would receive the same stealth lack of coverage. Right?

Sanders USSR Honeymoon, Moose Report, You Decide

The 25 best things we learned from Bernie Sanders' book | MSNBC:

George Will did a good little column on the death of Robert Conquest that mentions Sander's honeymoon in the USSR in 1988. I'd never heard that, so I did a bit of Googling ... noted right wing news source MSNBC reports (linked above) that this is covered in Bernie Sanders now very hard to get book:

19. Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. Sanders married his current wife, Jane, in May of 1988 and the next day left for their “romantic honeymoon” to Yaroslavl, in the then-Soviet Union. The trip was an official delegation from Burlington to cement the two cities’ sister-city relationship. “Trust me. It was a very strange honeymoon,” Sanders writes.

However, if you live in the strong "anti-Fox" area of the left wing universe, Bernie never went on his honeymoon in the USSR and it is all made up by "Faux News":

The problem is that, with Fox News, what you learn each day just makes you more stupid than you were the day before. 

The origin of the this made-for-Fox fallacy was a 2007 interview of Sanders’ wife, Jane, by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. In the interview she was describing how she and Bernie met and some of their early engagements which were almost entirely related to their shared interest in community affairs. They were so involved in these sort of activities that she joked…

“The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day Parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslovl with 10 other people on my honeymoon.” 

The context was obviously humorous. Who could possibly read that and come away thinking that she seriously meant that they honeymooned with ten other people who were implementing a sister city project? Well, apparently Weinstein and others of his ilk came away believing just that. Weinstein likely picked up the lie from uber-conservative John Fund who wrote an article for the National Review containing the same misrepresentation of Sanders’ diplomatic trip. 

We are going to have to get used to wingnuts hyperventilating over the political labels attached to Sanders.

While I'd love to say that more right wing news sources are never wrong, I'd by lying. I'm sure there are some fables on even Moose Tracks, although I try very hard to check accuracy from multiple sources. I'd say that in general if you listen to a single source for your news -- ANY single source, or even just CURRENT news you will have a bit of the effect that the "Faux crazies" point out above ... "The problem is that, with Fox News, what you learn each day just makes you more stupid than you were the day before."

All sources are biased, and the MOST insidious bias is the progressive bias -- the idea that knowledge and history are moving somehow directly toward "better / smarter / fairer / more enlightened" (Whig Theory of History). The secular universe claims to be created by randomness -- random means random. It CAN'T have a direction! Not ANY direction!

We used to live in a teleological (directed ... by God) universe. In THAT universe, one could say that the future was at least part of "God's Plan" ... but a cursory study of eschatology (end times) tells the faithful that "Gods ways are not our ways" ... outside of the admonition to seek to assist in God's plan, there is ZERO reason to subscribe to "progress" = "better". It is a stated equivalence of two unknown terms.

Philosophy and Religion were once the center of what it meant to be an educated human. They were the center, because living every day without a creed of any sort is like travelling with no destination -- you have no idea of what transportation to choose, which way to go, or even to move or sit still. You are directionless.

The vast majority of modern man lives with no thought of where they are going nor what they seek -- except possibly "pleasure", or "ease" or some such vague awareness. No matter where they get their "news", they to a great degree "get stupider every day" simply because of information overload. They are bombarded with supposed "crisis", "breaking news", "historic events", etc, but they have no context in which to place these supposed momentous events.

So mostly, left and right, they assert the superiority of their tribe. Man without civilization is tribal, and civilization **IS**  Religion and Philosophy -- FOLLOWED by literature, music, art, politics science, etc. Even carefully studied and varied sources of "news" are only fitted into a tribal context of the kind from the "anti-Fox" source above -- one more opportunity to call the other tribe "stupid", while having no concept of what it really is that supposedly makes your own tribe "intelligent".

The saddest thing to me is what I slowly discovered starting in the '80s -- that Western civilization wasn't "declining" for me personally, it was DEAD -- or more accurately, it did not exist since I did not understand it!

When I first opened "The Closing of The American Mind", I realized I lacked the most basic of tools -- vocabulary, exposure to classic literature, basic concepts of meaning and philosophy, etc in order to even BEGIN to understand the very basics of the greatness of Western civilization that was supposedly my civilization. I was a college graduate, but really just a technician in a tiny corner of a very specific modern technology.

I've slowly clawed my way to a rudimentary (mis?)understanding of "a little", but it is all self-taught with all the dangers that entails ... and it is generally a very lonely road. Especially lonely because part of "liberalism" is to cut off people that disagree with you.  The forces of "progressivism" are so powerful they have thoroughly wrecked most of the community of wisdom -- a few lists of "great books", biographies of great men, and of course The Bible, are all that remain -- and memories, lots of memories.

Progressivism will continue to root out all of civilization it can -- for it primarily lives by stealth. Destroy meaning, destroy wisdom, return humans to blind tribes of savages -- all be it with Internet, MSM and public "education" (indoctrination) , rather than drums, witchdoctors and spears -- but tribal savages just the same. When life has no meaning beyond at most your tribe, then people are very easily led.

I'll report, you decide.

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