The Question Of Verifications - The Rules Of Facts

One of our biggest problems, as a species, is our lack of verifying information and resources. This habit was not a natural one, and has no genetic traits to cause it, it is something we learned.

You can easily guess how we were taught this, so let's look at what I mean in more detail. Often there is a news story, or talk show "expert," which mentions some finding or discovery that has little to no evidence involved.

Another common story us the misrepresentation of the facts, when a mistake is made they ignore the correction and just run with it as some sort of miracle or mystery. Ultimately these stories ruin the wonder and beauty of the world by keeling people from asking more questions about it.

The reason this is done by media is to placate the masses, to prevent them from asking the questions allows the media to, essentially, control what people think and thus engineer their personalities and behaviors. Rather beneficial to those who are running things, as conspiratorial as this sounds, we know this has been happening for a while now.

Now the part about engineering society this way may sound farfetched to those unfamiliar with psychology and neurology. What we know and remember defines how we respond to stimuli, these are what influence the neural pathways in the difference engine portions of our brain, in other words, the personality.

When information is handed to us without any any external stimuli, it becomes a null pathway, meaning your brain will produce less emotion and use less logic when a similar bit of information or memory is presented. Essentially, you ignore it.

Until an emotional response is tied to information it is dead weight, preventing us from exploring it further, preventing us from growing and experiencing the world. We require actually experiencing the information to begin to ask questions again, thus tragedy rarely evoked an emotional response until it affected us directly.

This is also why science requires lab time when studying any subject, you must experience the tests and experiments to associate emotional responses that permit, and encourage, further exploration. Leading us back to the topic at hand, why so many people in the USA are so complacent and unwilling to even verify the sources, much less the actual evidence.

By quelling our curiosity in this manner, people will recite "studies" or "cases" they hear about in media without realizing they are either misrepresenting the data, or lacking most of the important information. This creates a black hole of knowledge as they condition their children to do the same simply by not accepting when the child just happens to have more information than they do.

Today children are exposed to an excess of information, and, in a trail by fire fashion, they are forced to learn how to verify sources, information, even tests and experiments. Skills their parents see as dangerous or evil, so the kids pretend to be like the parents until they move out.

This is the great effect of the Information Age, our youth are measurably more intelligent than all of us before them, and only because they learn this one ability and use it without hesitation. The benefit is that us older folks have a bright future as our children thrust us into the future, the drawback is that it's scary in spite of how much fun it is.

So my challenge to all adults today, let your kids learn and explore the world, then let those kids teach you. I have learned a lot by observing the behavior of children in the last decade, and what I have witnessed fills me with hope for our future, which I will be able to see because those same kids are now solving the problems my generation refused to even acknowledge.

Obamacare - Total Deception

Let's take a quick look at what one of the nearly forgotten policies enacted recently has actually done for the people, specifically, for the patient in need. When the policy was proposed, originally, I knew there was something off about it, there was too much press and too many conflicting explanations from both sides of the political fence. So what I did was read the thing.

Even after modifications made, the law itself is nothing more than a ploy to give insurance companies a free meal ticket. Sure, it stipulates they cannot discriminate for any reason, but if everyone has to buy the insurance they will still accumulate massive compulsory profits. Originally that was all that bothered me, and it's a pretty huge problem. That was before I had to deal with the medical industry at length, which resulted in me doing a bit more work on the issue.

I did one thing that patients are not suppose to do, I looked at my hospital bill. The prices for some things were clearly inflated for no reason. I detailed much of that in previous posts so I won't get into the specifics of what I saw. This was before the law was enacted, this is what the taxpayers had to pay because the doctors won't give me the one surgery I need to get back to work.

Then it hit me, if everyone has to pay into insurance, then no one will have any control of the actual costs of medical care ... except the doctors. Suddenly this house of cards had a basement, a dark and frightening one. The notion that a patient needs insurance to pay for something as simple as an exam is, on it's own, ridiculous. It would be like saying you couldn't buy a loaf of bread, instead you gave your money to this other guy and he bought it for you, but the grocery he went to would decide what bread you got, how old it was, and how much it cost.

That is what insurance really is, it's a middle man that can hide the actual costs from the person who is suppose to benefit from what the actual provider gets to decide is right. All rights to your healthcare, all choices, all your freedom is gone in this scenario. Other countries implemented national health care, and it works. It works because the patient still has control of their healthcare. What we have in the USofA is nothing short of a scam.

Of course both doctors and insurance providers would be on board, and they all were. The amount of profit that doctors and insurance providers get in this bargain is outrageous, especially considering how poorly cared for our patients in the USA already are. We spend more money on healthcare, yet have one of the lowest health ratings in the world, and it has nothing to do with our diets. It has everything to do with our complacency, accepting something that is presented to us on a silver platter, even if it's stale and moldy.

Climate Change - A Debate That Misses The Point

I have heard the argument from both sides, I have also looked into the information as much as I can stand, climatology is a really boring subject to me. But so far only the real scientists have said anything that makes any real sense based on everything I have come to understand.

But what do the scientists say? They admit to not knowing the answer, of course, that's the most common answer you will get from a good scientist. When confronted by both sides of this particular debate, climatologists have given one consistent answer: let us finish the work before you do change anything.

Which is actually the best advice in almost any aspect of your life. You need all the facts about something before you can make an informed decision, even with all the facts you can still make the wrong decision but the facts decrease the chances of that decision causing more harm. So why the push from both sides for different actions? Well, money. Specifically people who want to dip their hands into your taxes and take however much they can grab.

If you know me, you know I love capitalism, but admit we do need social programs to keep society moving forward. So why should I care about companies trying to turn a profit? It's not the profit, it's how. Predatory policies that force you to purchase from specific companies is not capitalism, that is closer to communism. This is exactly what the lobbyists are supporting, attempting to make one company's products look like the best idea then outlaw all the competition.

This holds true for both sides though. The telltale sign is the lobbying itself, the quick soundbites that attempt to paint the opposition in a more horrible light without presenting any solid facts on the issue. So yes, again it's how our government works that is the real problem. The facts in this particular case are still showing no causal links, none, that can shed light on the matter.

Yes, we know that carbon can create a greenhouse effect, but life is made of carbon as well. Methane can also create a greenhouse effect, but this is a byproduct of life. As temperatures rise, many such gases also increase as a result of the rise in temperature, making it difficult to draw any solid causal links, you can't tell which is the horse, and which is the cart. This is just the beginning of the problems with both sides of the debate.

Trends, this is statistical information, are not set in stone, they are predictions, and rarely hold true. At best, a trend is used as a starting point for other predictions based on the numerical values of similar circumstances. This does not make their results fact, ever, at all, in any way. They are educated guesses at best. The entire debate started when these trends did not match the reality, which any scientist will tell you is pretty much expected to happen.

That basically means that the side screaming doom and gloom have based everything on something that was expected to be incorrect by the very people who actually do the scientific research. This is where it gets really messy though, because those opposing these people are just as wrong, and just as dangerous. If we act now, without knowing all the facts, we could actually cause a bigger problem, even cause our own extinction. So premature action can destroy us, that's one part missed often.

But action in the reverse is just as bad. For decades we have been working to keep our air clean, and sanely reducing our waste. As a species we have been looking into new technologies and possibilities, knowing our population will, inherently, produce waste we needed to balance our waste so that it would match that of a much smaller, more realistic, population than we actually have. Countermanding all that work would return us to the Dark Age level of sanitation and cleanliness, but on a more massive scale that would destroy us.

So what is the best solution? Business as usual. Neither side need be listened too, both are wrong, both are extremists crying for attention, an advantage for their pet products, and often just because their lives are so boring they have nothing better to do. Yes, companies across the globe have always been looking for better ways to do things, sometimes it's because they think it's what's right, other times because the right thing does improve the bottom line, but rarely do they do the right thing because the government told them to do it.

So yes, keep working toward a better future, but the direction we have been moving is the best for everyone still, we have no facts stating otherwise. Next time someone shows you one of those charts, on either side, ask them a very basic question: Are you a climatologist? If the answer is "no," then tell them their information is invalid.