October 20, 2017

An American Expat Visits The Occupy Auckland Protest: Part 1

By wise sloth

Photo of protesters sitting on park benches, surrounded by tents and signs at the Occupy Auckland protest

I had a surreal experience the other day. To understand why it was surreal you need to understand that I was born and bred in the Bible Belt of America. I’m a white, Caucasian male who was named after a white, American, Caucasian, male war hero. I’m an honorably discharged veteran of the Iraq war with three rows of ribbons on my ribbon rack. I’m also an expat who just celebrated my two year anniversary of emigrating to New Zealand, and I left America for all the reasons people are protesting on Wall Street today.

Coming from that perspective, I went to the “Occupy Auckland” protest the other day. For those of you who don’t know or couldn’t guess, the “Occupy Auckland” event was inspired by and is being held in solidarity with the “Occupy Wall Street” “movement.”

At the time there were 40 tents camped in a public park directly off of Queen St., in downtown Auckland, which is sort of like a smaller scale version of Times Square. There were two extremely bored police officers wearing neon green reflective vests loitering in the vicinity of the protest grounds. All they had to look at to amuse themselves was a bunch of empty tents (the residents were at professional jobs and would return in the evening), a few bored hippies and a meandering stream of passing rugby tourists.

In a lot of ways, the protest was anticlimactic. The protesters I spoke with said that most of the pedestrians who stopped to talk with them were either mildly curious what the protest was about or wanted to express their support for the movement. The protesters also told me that on the first day of the occupation they held a march down Queen St, which drew an estimated 2000 participants, and they received $2000 in donations in their first weekend, and there has been a regular stream of old women stopping by giving them free home-cooked meals….not that they seemed to need the food because by the time I arrived they had set up a better kitchen than I have in my house.

I literally paid $160 over the past weekend to camp at a campground for 4 days, and I had access to fewer amenities, less camaraderie, less excitement and fewer picture opportunities than I would have had if I would have camped with the protesters on Queen St.

Now I’m thinking about taking my tent over there and going camping for the fun of it. Needless to say, there are a lot of Kiwis hold that the fact the protesters are so comfortable is proof that they have nothing to protest in the first place and should just go home. Even though life in New Zealand is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than in America. Kiwis are happier and have a quantifiable better standard of living than Americans because the system works better in New Zealand.  There are fewer problems, and the problems they do have, they’ve responded more effectively to. From this perspective, some Kiwis feel the people camping on Queen St. should be celebrating instead of protesting.

Superficially they’re right, but if you trace the problems the Queen St. protesters are standing against below the surface to any depth at all, you’ll understand why all the Occupy movements are relevant and even vital. The root of the problem that all the Occupy movements are protesting against trace back to income inequality. All around the world, it’s the norm for political leadership positions to be given to those with the most money. Laws are passed that maximize profits at the expense of human life. Every business pays their workers as little as possible and charges their customers as much as possible. You literally can’t shit without being taxed or fined or otherwise billed. Poorer people pay a higher percentage of their income to shit. You need a fortune to get an education, and you need an education to get a fortune. People are even getting charged to save their money now, and it’s illegal not to pay the government whatever bizarro number it tells you that you owe the tax collector.

These are universal themes that are getting worse everywhere. Those statements may be less true in some countries, but “as America goes, so goes the world.” If the economic/political climate continues on its current trajectory then every country in the world will end up in the same dystopia within a lifetime. Soon we will all live in cookie cutter houses doing service level work for no benefits and no securities for our entire lives. We’ll have no medical care, no education, and everything we buy we’ll have to go into debt for. The only legal options we’ll have for escaping the monotony and anxiety of our lives will be tobacco, alcohol, sports, and television. Then we’ll numb ourselves to our numbness and kill ourselves as quickly as possible, not because we’re irresponsible, but because we’re unfulfilled and miserable with the unnatural, inhumane environment we’ve been forced to grow up and live in.

Even if none of that happens to any of us, it is happening to billions of people all over the world right now through no fault of their own. Every country uses varyingly modern versions of the caste system, and they’re all moving towards the American model of corporate dependency.

The Pacific Islanders have a long literary history of complaining about how colonial forces took their islands and gave it to foreigners. Well, American commercialization is the new colonialism. If you want to see what Tonga is going to look like in 30 years, just visit Oahu. It’s going to be ghettos and strip malls separated from ultra-wealthy subdivisions by dull grey roads and concrete walls. The entire world is devolving into Office Space under the American economic model. That’s not the society humans have the potential of building. That’s not humane, and that’s not how anyone wants to live.

It may not look like the protesters are changing the world yet, but they’re already changing people’s minds, and the more time they have to get organized the clearer and more persuasive their message will become. The more that message spreads the harder it will be for any single government to silence the overall movement. The protesters are planting seeds right now that may not bear fruit for a while, but the check’s in the mail, and they may prevent all of Polynesia from getting completely turned into internationally owned chains of strip malls.

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October 20, 2017

Have A Sane Perception Of Conspiracy Theories

By wise sloth

"I don't know... therefore Aliens"

A reader E-mailed me recently and asked if I would write a blog analyzing the flaws in all the major conspiracy theories like the moon landing, Area 51, JFK and September 11th. I could do that, but all of that information is already readily available, and anyone who is intimately familiar with conspiracy theories knows the holes in them. The reason people obsesses over conspiracy theories isn’t because they need the obvious pointed out to them. What they need is to think sanely to begin with.

The reason conspiracy theories exist at all is because we don’t know enough information about them to understand them completely. If we did they would simply be factoids. No matter how plausible your theories are, without the hard evidence to back them up they’re not even theories; they’re inconsequential hypotheses.

It’s admirable to invest time and energy solving problems that are important to humanity, but if you’re a skilled enough thinker to solve a complex riddle then you should be skilled enough of a thinker to recognize that trying to solve a problem without knowing all the variables is a fool’s errand.

Even if you could succeed in proving on paper that the moon landing was faked, that Area 51 has alien technology, that the Illuminate shot JFK and the September 11th terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the American government, what would that really change? Sure, people would know the truth, but as important as the truth is, the reality is that it probably wouldn’t change anything. Everyone will go on about their lives as normal: dating, working, shopping and watching television.  Exposing the truth about conspiracy theories won’t ignite a revolution. The truth will simply get filed in Wikipedia and eventually be forgotten.

As important as truth is, many people need food and protection more than they need truth. If you’re smart enough and driven enough to solve outdated, cryptic conspiracy hypotheses, then you’re probably capable of solving real cut-and-dry  problems that humanity desperately needs rectified such as corporate influence in politics, UCMJ reform, corruption in the FDA and NSA, the war on drugs, the existence of sweatshops, the unsustainability of suburbia, income inequality, inflated housing prices, the glass ceiling of higher education, the oppression of the academically disinclined and price gouging in health care.

If the US government is really run by multinational corporations that hide aliens, assassinate world leaders and destroy skyscrapers then that problem needs to be addressed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Calling out the powers that be for committing atrocities and covering them up isn’t going to stop them from happening. However, fixing the problems that lead to poverty, corruption and crime will cause a domino effect that will solve all the world’s problems and undermine the powers that be even if we never find out who, if anyone, is really running things.

Your time and energy are invaluable. Use them wisely. If you’re going to devote your life to solving problems then solve the most important problems. Once we all have food in our bellies and roofs over our heads then we can worry about toying with theoretical puzzles.

 

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October 20, 2017

Everyone Is A Little Racist, And What To Do About It

By wise sloth

I’m a blonde haired, blue eyed male, born and raised in America. At the age of 20, I  moved abroad and spent 10 years living overseas. I left for a lot of reasons, and although escaping racism wasn’t a deciding factor, it was a fringe benefit. I liked the idea of living in a country where racism isn’t a major issue, and where nobody would blame me for hundreds of years of racial oppression.

10 years of traveling the world taught me my assumptions about racism were naive. It’s true that while living abroad I wasn’t subjected to any more white guilt for killing Indians and enslaving Africans, but I did have to deal with being stereotyped as a fat, loud, ignorant, arrogant, militant American who is personally responsible for the American government covertly destabilizing weak countries and invading large ones under false pretenses to steal their oil. I was never the victim of a hate crime, but I visited a few countries where I would have been robbed and/or killed just for being an American if I walked down the wrong side street at night. On the upside, some foreigners stereotyped me as a rich American who knows every Hollywood celebrity, neither of which is true, but the misconception made some people excited to meet me.

I was already aware that Americans’ reputation preceded me. So I expected to be the victim of a little discrimination from the most simple-minded foreigners. I didn’t expect to discover that every nationality I encountered was a little racist against someone. In places with the least diversity, the locals found groups within their own race to be prejudice against.

I never spent any time with hate groups. The acquaintances I made were regular, non-violent, decently educated middle-class folk. They all had friends from other races and cultures, and they all believed in equality, but in private, especially after a few drinks, they would quietly utter the same passive-aggressive stereotypes about whichever race they felt was committing the most crime and mooching off the taxpayers the worst.

Initially, this discovery depressed me, because it meant there isn’t a magical land of tolerance and equality to escape to. On the upside, it helped ease my white guilt a little, because looking back at race relations in America, I realized white Americans aren’t the exceptional villains my history books taught me we are. We’re just like everybody else.

You could say I was becoming more prejudice as my perception evolved since I’d come to stereotype the whole human race as racist. Being a vigilantly self-loathing white man, these secret thoughts weighed heavily on my soul until I’d visited a few more countries and taken a few more psychology classes. Specifically, it was Introduction To Child Psychology that brought me to my final way of thinking about racism.

The human brain, especially in children, is designed to mimic adults. It’s a quick, easy way to adapt to one’s environment without having to think deeply. In adulthood, we still use subconscious mental shortcuts to navigate our way through life. We can transcend these base instinctual habits to an extent, but the architecture of our brain will always be wired to use the least amount of thought to understand and react to the world around us.

Mimicking cultural norms and making generalizations is what we do. Punishing yourself for doing this is like beating yourself up for feeling horny. You’re designed to do that too, and you need to acknowledge that reality before you can find a healthy way to manage your libido. Sexual urges only become a problem when they control you and negatively impact your life or other people’s. Censoring your sexual thoughts and forcing other people to do the same will only accomplish suppressing an instinct that will never go away. You won’t defeat it. You’ll just lose control over it, shut down society’s dialogue on the subject and create a new reason for people to fight. The same is true for racism.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that racism is okay. Racism is illogical, and we should all be vigilant to curb it within ourselves, but the world can’t unify as long as we belligerently police each other for generalizations and microaggressions. Social justice warriors are just as guilty of using mental shortcuts to find a reason to hate as any hardcore racist who accosts other races in public. They’ve just found a way to hate that’s politically correct on the surface.

Society would achieve more unity if everyone was allowed to be 10% racist. If we acknowledge that dirty little urge and teach ourselves to keep it in check, we can understand, accept and love ourselves and others better. Then we can just get on with our lives.

The most important reason to be honest about one’s own micro-racism and to accept a certain level of overgeneralizing from others is because every group creates the stereotypes outsiders attach to them. It’s true that you can’t make blanket statements about any group, but if you spend enough time in any group, you’ll eventually see members doing the things they’re stereotyped for. Pretending those tendencies don’t exist forces you to warp your perception of reality to justify your preconceived conclusion, which is the definition of cognitive dissonance and is a form of insanity. When everyone is in denial of their own group’s dysfunctional behavior, and everyone militantly excuses and defends everyone else’s problems, nobody improves. Then everyone keeps repeating the same mistakes and teaching them to their children for the rest of the future.

Before you go shouting at other people to check themselves, you need to check your own culture, because you’re just as good and bad as everyone else, and you’re just as slightly racist. If you believe nobody else has the right to criticize your group, then you’re the only one who can improve the arbitrary segment of humanity you’ve decided to identify yourself as. If you won’t acknowledge your flaws, then your arrogance and close-mindedness are causing more harm to your group than any outsider.

Humanity wouldn’t be so fractured if people weren’t so proud of their race, nationality or culture. On a long enough timescale we all came from the same country, and we all go back to the dirt after we die. In the meantime, our biology is 99.9% identical. It’s just as ignorant and divisive for anyone to be proud of their race as it is for the KKK. Fanatical racial pride leads to fanatical racial prejudice. Accepting that everyone is family, and nobody is perfect leads to sanity and harmony.

 

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October 20, 2017

An Open Letter To Conservative America

By wise sloth

I’ve written a collection of comic strips called, “Two Conservative Ladies” that sort of pokes fun at conservative beliefs and behaviors. I say, “sort of” because the way I came up with all the comics was by visiting conservative internet forums and watching Fox News. Then I just transcribed what I saw there into comics that stripped away any pretense. If those comics come across as funny, it’s just because the behavior I witnessed conservatives doing is a joke in-and-of itself. Having said that, a lot of my “Two Conservative Ladies” comics aren’t funny. One person even told me that, far from being funny, they made him feel “disgusting.” I agree, the beliefs and behaviors those comics are transcribed from aren’t funny. In a lot of ways, they’re disgusting, even frightening, but the point of the comics isn’t just to be shocking. The point of making the comics is to raise the issue that conservative America is in dire need of an intervention.

It’s impossible to have that intervention without making some generalizations about conservative culture, but if you’ll allow me to make a few that are true enough to be worth saying, it’ll help you understand how the rest of the world sees you. Hopefully, you can use that information to take a critical look at yourself and recognize some areas you can improve in.

For what it’s worth, I should start by saying I was born and raised in the Bible Belt. I come from the deep, dirty South. I lived in a trailer. As a child, I believed country folk had more horse-sense than city slickers, and Atheists were evil. I was baptized in a Southern Baptist church when I was 17. I’m also a veteran. The point is I know where you’re coming from because you raised me.

I’ll be fair, I know your actions are motivated by good intentions, the best intentions. You believe Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, and on the third day after Jesus died he rose from the dead; His blood sacrifice atoned for the sins of mankind, and whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. Therefore, as Paul stated in the Great Commission, it’s every Christian’s duty to spread the word of the Gospel to redeem as many of God’s children from the broad path of wickedness that leads to the fiery pits of eternal Hell. Therefore, allowing homosexuality, Atheism, and every false religion to have an equal, protected (much less celebrated) place in society, would make you complicit in sin.

I get that. I also get why you’re so patriotic. I proudly stood up every morning in school, put my hand over my heart, and said the Pledge of Allegiance. My classmates and I even said prayers and thanked God that we lived in the greatest country on earth. I learned in school that the Founding Fathers forged the first nation in history built on the principles of truth, justice, freedom, and equality. Sure, America had a few blemishes in its history (like slavery), but we put our primitive ways behind us and evolved as a culture and a country because that’s what Americans do, and that’s part of why Americans tend to believe America is the best country in the world.

Americans do have a lot to be proud of. We did, in fact, build a world superpower from scratch. So in the small towns where I grew up we took it for granted that if the government would just let us have our freedom, we all formed strong families and didn’t complain when things got hard we could work our way through any difficulties life could throw at us; if every American just returned to their roots and embraced the beliefs and behaviors that built America in the first place then America could fulfill its potential once again.

When you lay out the reasons for conservative beliefs like that, it sounds so wonderful. It wraps up the whole world in a pretty package that gives you a sense of identity and purpose you can be proud of. It sounds so good, that anyone who disagrees with it must either be completely stupid or evil.

Unfortunately, as I grew older I came to realize this perception of reality is unrealistically oversimplified. Ultimately, it translates to the belief that whatever you’ve been doing is the only right way to do things, and whatever anyone else does is evil. This way of thinking isn’t the product of divine instruction or manifest destiny. It’s called being a cognitive miser; you just refuse to think about anything outside your preconceived beliefs. You reverse-engineer illogical excuses to dismiss evidence that conflicts with your biases, and the more your beliefs are challenged, the angrier you get.

I’m not saying this to be mean. It’s human nature. Everyone does it, but some cultures measure maturity by how little someone behaves this way; conservative America measures maturity by how much someone celebrates and defends this behavior. The reason some cultures view this kind of behavior as immature, is because it has objectively measurable negative consequences, and it’s immature to keep doing things that have negative consequences.

The best example of this is far-right wing conservative Republican Christian’s extreme hatred of liberals, or “libtards,” as they’re often called.  As proof conservatives hating liberals, tune into any Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly program. While those individuals only speak for themselves, they have a huge, loyal following. Conservatives tune into those charismatic personalities for the same reason liberals tune into “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:” to hear someone say the things they want to hear so they can have their biases reconfirmed. We can point fingers at both audiences and say they’re guilty of being cognitive misers, but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make just now. The point is there’s a huge population of conservative Americans who hate liberals, and you can prove that there’s some truth to this by looking at the ratings conservative shock jocks get for bashing liberals. Or you could visit any conservative internet chat forum.

The problem with bashing liberals is that liberals aren’t the problem; they’re a scapegoat. There’s no liberal agenda or conspiracy. There’s just a bunch of people in the world who don’t think the same as you, and that frightens you; and you respond to that fear with hatred, which is all you really wanted all along; you weren’t looking for logical solutions to the world’s problems. You were looking for an enemy to blame.

You can beat the liberal straw man to death for the rest of your life, and it’s not going to solve any of the real-world problems that are having real, negative effects on your life. If you go far enough down the path of blaming another group of people for all your problems you’re eventually going to end up gassing innocent people in death camps. That’s where that path leads, and I have no doubt that some of Fox News’ most loyal fans would love to repeat that failed solution to the world’s problems.

That’s not going to happen though, because the world is too small, and America is too diverse to let that happen. All liberal-bashing is actually going to accomplish is derailing all logical conversation about the world’s problems and thus enabling the continued existence and exacerbation of those problems. Even if that doesn’t lead to the collapse of modern civilization it’ll keep progress stagnated and trap millions (if not billions) of people in miserable poverty and oppression.

If you listen to your opponents, you’d realize you share the same hopes and values as most “liberals.” You’d also notice most Democratic politicians act the same as Republican politicians because all politicians only answer to their financial sponsors, and they all have the same financial sponsors. Indiscriminately hating politicians who call themselves Democrats and indiscriminately loving politicians who call themselves Republicans allow the overall political system to continue business as usual, and the businesses who sponsor politicians’ careers are in the business of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Your indiscriminate support of the upper class, aka “job creators,” as you’ve been told to refer to them as, isn’t making the world a better place. All you’re doing is indiscriminately supporting economic inequality. Indiscriminately opposing welfare, pensions, and social services isn’t making the world a better place. It’s making the poor poorer so that the rich can get richer, and that wealth isn’t trickling down. The only thing trickling down is the blood and tears of the poor who have to resort to more desperate measures to stay alive and enjoy a moderate standard of living. If you want to solve America’s problems you need to focus your energy towards fixing campaign contributions and lobbying that allows big businesses to buy a monopoly on political influence.

What’s not going to help solve America’s problems is oppressing everyone who doesn’t share the same values as you. If all sin were legalized tomorrow do you know what would happen? Nothing. Everyone would keep sinning at the exact same rate they’re currently sinning. The only difference is sinners wouldn’t have to live in fear of oppressive Christian laws. That… and we could actually focus on the real issues that are driving America to the brink of collapse.

Sure, in some ways allowing sin makes you complicit in it, but at the same time, punishing sinners puts you in God’s shoes. God didn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner. You were tasked with being God’s envoy’s not his right hand of judgment. To that end, your witness would carry more weight if you weren’t famous all around the world for dogmatically oppressing everyone within your borders who doesn’t think exactly like you while gleefully bombing people outside your borders who don’t think exactly like you. I encourage you to seek out people from other countries and ask them what they think about Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and other conservative shock jocks. You may be surprised to learn that the entire world is either laughing at you, scared of you or they pity you. No outside, objective observers perceive you as the heroes you perceive yourselves to be.

It’s blatantly obvious to everyone but you that Fox News and all the celebrity conservative shock jocks who make a living off of bashing liberals are in it for the money and they’ll tell you any lie they can to make your blood boil, because the higher your blood pressure goes the higher their ratings go. The higher their ratings go, the more money they make. The conservative leaders you look up to treat you with complete and utter disrespect and contempt. They must hate you because you wouldn’t lie to someone you love and trick them into blaming all their problems on an innocent scapegoat while manipulating you into defending the real source of your problems with blind, dogmatic faith.

On one level, my heart goes out to conservative America. Sure, we have our differences, but we agree on far, far, far more than we disagree on. Plus, we’re all humans. We’re all stuck in this life together. We all have to share this world. We come from the same evolutionary tree. On every level, we’re brothers and sisters. It hurts me to watch selfish sociopaths manipulate you into hurting yourself and wasting your life fighting a phantom enemy.

 

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October 20, 2017

Right Wing Entertainment News Is Making America Worse

By wise sloth

The 2016 Republican presidential candidate is Donald Trump, a racist, xenophobic, sexist billionaire with the maturity level of a child. His campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again,” and his plan to do that mostly involves blaming minorities for all of America’s problems. His platform is disunity, and his rhetoric takes this philosophy to a fascist level.

Republican voters chose Donald Trump over 21 other candidates because his message of race-blaming and fear mongering resonated with them, which has made the rest of the world ask themselves, “How can so many Americans be so naive?”

To be fair, Donald Trump took conservatives by surprise. His financial success and candor were a breath of fresh air from all the corrupt insider politicians they’ve come to distrust, but the more conservatives heard him talk, the more the educated ones distanced themselves from him and his message by labeling his most fanatical followers “the alt-right.”

Wikipedia defines the “Alt-Right” as: “A segment of right-wing ideologies presented as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in the United States. It has been described as a movement unified by support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as well as by opposition to multiculturalism and immigration. The Alt-Right has no official ideology, although various sources have said that it is associated with white nationalism, white supremacism, antisemitism, right-wing populism, nativism, and the neo-reactionary movement.”

Look, everyone is a little racist. Our brains are wired to make generalizations and fear the unknown. Growing up in an isolated town in the middle of a giant country sets you up to hold onto your in-group and distrust outsiders even more. When you hear about outsiders doing bad things but you never meet any in person, it’s easy to blow their deeds out of proportion. These factors set Americans up to think like Trump, but the people who became the Alt-Right would never have drunk the Kool-Aid without coaching.

American conservatives have been indoctrinated with xenophobia by the right wing entertainment news industry. Its flagship is Fox News, where 47% of conservatives say they get their daily news. The next most popular conservative news sources include The Independent Journal Review, Breitbart, The Blaze, and The New York Post,  The most popular hosts conservatives tune into for news are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.

There are thousands more outlets and personalities in the industry, and every one of them uses the same business model. They make their money selling merchandise, memberships, and advertisements, and the way they draw viewers in, is by appealing to their basest psychological instinct: fear. They inform the viewer there’s a major threat to their safety or way of life, and then dramatically blame the problem on a group of outsiders (including white liberals). At the same time, they appeal to the viewer’s desire for confirmation bias by celebrating and promoting conservative values like “personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values and a strong national defense.”

These “news” organizations might claim they’re just giving their customer what they want, and it’s not their responsibility to censor their content. The problem is they go out of their way to construct a specific narrative and censor out information that contradicts it.

Creating the worldview they’re selling requires them to censor, bend and cherry pick facts, which they present using subjective and manipulative language. Presenting facts in a fair and balanced manner would be anathema to their business model. But by demonizing dissenting thought, they indoctrinate viewers to believe the in-group doctrine with cultish devotion.  By branding and selling ignorance as truth, they gradually and systematically warp the perception of their viewers until the Alt-Right narrative is so familiar to them they can’t see the world through any other lens.

No country has ever been made great through indoctrinating its population with ignorance. Right wing entertainment news has eroded America’s greatness by eroding the minds of impressionable Americans, and the popularity of Donald Trump just goes to show how they’ve succeeded at grooming the minds of America. As long as they’re steering the nation, it will remain on course to electing the next Hitler and/or igniting the next civil war.

America will never be great again until our information is great again.

 

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October 20, 2017

My Theory On Why Fox News Acts So Biased And Evil

By wise sloth

I recently posted a blog titled “My theory on just about every conspiracy theory,” which was twelve pages long. So I doubt many people read the whole thing. Towards the bottom of the list was my explanation of why Fox News is so crazy. The section is important enough that I decided to post it again here as a stand-alone blog.

The majority of conservative Americans get most of their news from Fox News, which claims to be fair and balanced, yet is bombastically pro-conservative, pro-Republican, pro-Capitalism and pro-American. It’s equally anti-liberal, anti-Democrat, anti-economic equality, anti-science, and anti-immigration. Fox’s news segments contain slander, logical fallacies, misdirection, false-flag scares, emotional hype, misdirection, and lies. This doesn’t happen because Fox is full of amateur journalists. Bullshit is the product Fox sells, and it has bullshit broken down to a science.

Fox news is so consistent in its agenda and dishonesty, it looks like there’ s a conspiracy among its leaders to create a civil war between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. It makes you wonder what’s really going on, and what’s the mastermind’s end game? The truth is easy to deduce if you look at the history of its founders Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

Rupert Murdoch was born in Australia in 1931. He inherited a fortune from his father and spent the 1950’s and 60’s buying up tabloid newspapers in Australia, which he consolidated under a parent company, News Corp. In the early 70’s, he bought up the major tabloids in Britain and the United States, adding them to News Corp. roster of sensationalist, fake news magazines. News Corp. was convicted of criminal charges for corruption, hacking and stealing in all three countries.

Image showing all the tabloids owned by New Corp

Roger Ailes was born in America in 1940. He started as a production assistant at a local news station in Ohio, where he was promoted several times, earning him the credentials to produce a daytime television talk show. In 1968, Ailes became a professional political campaign manager. He managed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns, and he advised George H. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

So Fox News was founded by an international tabloid kingpin who sells lies for a living, and the public relations manager of the Republican Party. When you put them together, you get sensationalist Republican propaganda with the journalistic integrity of a tabloid.

Basically, these two men pulled off a plan to create a television network that indoctrinates its viewers into basing their identity and beliefs on the Republican Party’s political agenda. This is corruption and treason at the highest level. It created a fake culture war that real people have died in. It’s driving the country to the brink of civil war. It orchestrated the launch of the longest war in America’s history. It’s the source of the war on science, which could destroy humanity, and it got Donald Trump elected president.

Why would two men do that? Are they trying to destroy the world? No. They’re just businessmen doing what they do. Rupert Murdoch wanted to sell newspapers and TV shows, and Roger Ailes wanted to produce TV shows. By teaming up with the Republican Party, Murdoch and Ailes got loyal customers, and the Republican Party got loyal voters. They all got a lot richer, and that’s what it’s all about.

 

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October 20, 2017

An Open Letter To Liberal America

By wise sloth

I recently wrote a strongly worded letter to conservative America. So it’s only fair that I send one to liberal America too.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my previous letter, there’s no such thing as “liberal America.” It’s a catch-all term conservatives use to lump everyone they disagree with together so they’ll have someone to blame all their problems on. This makes it impossible to write a letter to liberals, but to be fair to conservatives, I really need to say something. So I’m going to hazard some generalizations. If you consider yourself a liberal, then all/some/or none of the things I say may apply to you. If something that doesn’t apply to you. then it doesn’t apply to you.

END OF DISCLAIMER

The first thing card-carrying liberals need to understand is, voting for Democrats will never make the world a better place. At best, it’s voting for the lesser of two evils, but neither Democrat or Republican politicians are accountable to their voters. They’re only accountable to their financial sponsors. Those are the only people whose interests are represented in the government. That’s why both Democrats and Republicans consistently pass legislation that helps make the rich richer and the poor poorer. That’s why if you write to your Congressman, your letter will get read by a young intern who will send you a meaningless form letter. Your political leaders don’t represent you. They just endure you. If you continue voting for Democrats because you think they’re going to change anything other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer, then you’re part of the problem.

This raises the question, “If voting doesn’t work then what can we do?” It’s been my experience that 99 times out of 100 when someone asks, “Yeah, but what can we do?” it’s not because they’re looking for actual solutions that they can put at the top of their priority list of things to spend their free time on. They’re saying it as an excuse to give themselves permission to throw their hands up in the air and quit thinking before they even started.

Let me ask you this, “What were you going to do?” Statistically speaking, you’ll probably spend less than 1% of your time or money on humanitarian or activism-related activities. You’re going to spend more time shopping, watching TV and looking for “the one” than you’re going to spend helping other people or trying to solve the world’s problems. You’re going to spend most of your time working for a business that makes the owner, C.E.O. and investors filthy rich while the rest of the employees drown in debt and worry.

Sure, you may volunteer at the recycling center on the weekends. You may plant a tree on Arbor Day. You might even have a recurring direct deposit to feed an African child. But you just punch your humanitarian time card enough to feel smug. The real guiding star in your life is chasing a higher paycheck so you can buy more shit you don’t need that was made in a sweatshop by a child laborer in India, Vietnam, China or any of the other countries America exploits for its human resources.

The 1% you hate so much are so fat because you’ve dedicated your life to feeding them. To the human beings who make all the cool stuff in your house that you don’t need, you’re the 1%. Your liberal beliefs don’t make you a part of the solution, because 99% of the time you don’t act on them. You spend that time being a part of the problem.

What can you do? Look around you. The American people are on autopilot. All they care about is eating, shopping and watching movies, and they’ll defend their arrogance to the death. America is Idiocracy. There’s no reasoning with these people. The best advice I can give you is to build a bunker and try to survive the apocalypse the American public is working so hard on bringing down on itself.

 

If you really want to do something productive with your life, here are a few other suggestions:

 

1. Donate to free online schools like the Khan Academy.

The world sucks because people are stupid. Enlightened, educated people translates into an enlightened society. If everyone in the world had free education they could all help themselves. Nothing will bring the world closer to utopia faster than free education.

 

2. Boycott the pop culture that’s making you dumber.

Turn off Jersey Shore and watch Stephen Hawking’s Universe. Turn off Lady Gaga and listen to an audiobook version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” When you’re finished with that then ask yourself what the next most important thing you can possibly learn is. If you can’t figure that out then devote your free time to figuring it out. Keep learning the most important things in descending order until you die.

 

3. Educate others.

If you know something really important that other people don’t then devote your free time to telling people about it. The problem with the world isn’t that we’re talking too much and acting too little. We haven’t talked enough yet. If we’d talked enough about the most important issues then everybody would be on the same page and we’d all be ready to act in unison. We’re fractured because nobody knows what the hell is going on. If you’re not talking about the world’s problems, identifying their causes, figuring out solutions and advocating them then you’re part of the problem.

 

4. Don’t go into debt buying junk you don’t need.

Debt is slavery. If you’re a debt slave then you have no leverage to stand up for yourself. Spending your money responsible will free you. Of course, in a debt-driven, consumer economy we live in this will lower demand for products and thus lower demand for workers, and the whole system will break down. The solution to this problem isn’t to keep eating your own tail. It wouldn’t matter if there were no demand for products we don’t need if we lived in sustainable cities instead of unsustainable suburbs where everything is expensive as possible. Make your home and your city self-sufficient and you’ll free yourself from the fear of destitution that keeps you locked in a cubicle dying inside every day.

 

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October 20, 2017

My Theory On Social Justice Warriors

By wise sloth

Wikipedia defines “Social Justice Warrior” as “… a pejorative term for an individual promoting socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, multiculturalism, and identity politics. The accusation of being an SJW carries implications of pursuing personal validation rather than any deep-seated conviction, and being engaged in disingenuous social justice arguments or activism to raise personal reputation, also known as virtue signaling.”

The tone of Wikipedia’s definition illustrates how underwhelmed the general public is by social justice warriors. For the most part, nobody takes them seriously, and we just try to ignore them, but they keep popping back up in the news and social media feeds. You may be content to wait until the SJW fad fizzles out and disappears, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you may be wondering what makes these people tick? Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they want? Why are they so angry? Why do they hate men so much? Are they right or wrong, and why?

Mild curiosity aside, there are two very important reasons people need to understand social justice warriors. First, conservative culture has a tendency to stereotype social justice warriors as typical liberals. Anytime an SJW flips out over nothing, conservatives flood social media with posts saying, “Look at how stupid libtards are.”

This is preventing conservatives from having rational discussions with the rest of America. Stereotyping anyone who isn’t conservative as an unhinged feminazi is as absurd as stereotyping every conservative as the Alt-Right. It would be as horrifying to live under the delusion that every conservative is a racist troll as it would be to believe every liberal is a social justice warrior. Luckily, neither of those assumptions are true. So we can all get along and have civil discussions. At least, we could if both sides would stop stereotyping the other by their most extreme members. Until that happens, America will remain divided.

Like most Americans, I don’t fit neatly into the conservative or liberal dichotomy, and I resent the minority of conservatives who lump me in with social justice warriors. But I resent social justice warriors more for creating the stereotype in the first place.

I also resent social justice warriors, because I’m a white male, which makes me public enemy number one in their eyes. This is the second reason it’s important to understand and talk about social justice warriors. By passively ignoring and not standing up to them, we legitimize their agenda, which on the surface is to achieve peace and equality, but their call to action tends to revolve around demonizing white men. We wouldn’t passively ignore KKK rallies on school campuses, but the social justice warrior movement is equally racist and almost as aggressive.

As a white man, it’s insulting and degrading to hear how much these people hate and blame me for everything wrong in the world. Part of me feels bad for them spending their lives in a twisted reality where I’m a demon, but the rest of me is frankly scared. I keep expecting a feminist to go on a shooting spree targeting white men, after which I’ll have to hear social justice warriors throw a tantrum and scream about how the shooter wasn’t a true social justice warrior because they don’t advocate violence. That’s bullshit. They advocate hatred, which can only lead to violence. Even if it doesn’t, blaming the world’s problems on “the patriarchy” is a waste of everybody’s time that does more to distract us from the root of our problems than it helps solve anything.

So who are these people, and how did they get so extreme? Are they just stupid? Do they deserve to be ridiculed, pitied, feared or accepted? I don’t believe they deserve to be hated any more than people with autism who can’t function in society. If it seems crazy to flip out over nothing, that’s because it is. They act like crazy street preachers because they suffer from a similar mental disorder.

Social justice warriors are literally disconnected from reality to begin with, but the problem is compounded by the fact that they tend to come from upper-middle-class families with enough disposable income to send their snowflakes to college. You never see social justice warriors in the ghetto, because poor people are too busy struggling to survive to worry about gender pronouns, safe spaces, microaggressions and emotional triggers.

To be fair, their hearts are in the right place. Their desire for progress and equality comes from their overactive maternal instincts, which I could overlook if their solution for world peace wasn’t to wage war on white men.

The reason they blame white men for everything is because they’re too privileged to have experienced the real cause of the world’s problems: poverty. In their insulated bubble, they just latched onto the explanations fed to them by their feminist professors, who have also spent so much time in academia they don’t know what’s going on in the real world either.

It should seem odd that highly educated college students could see the world in such an obviously oversimplified and incorrect black and white narrative, but it makes sense when you realize social justice warriors are a product of a broken schools system that doesn’t teach students critical thinking skills.

Blaming all the world’s flaws on one group of people and addressing the problem by screaming is the epitome of intellectual laziness… and so is screaming back at them. A more lucid reaction would be to accept responsibility for helping create the conditions that allowed the social justice warrior movement to happen in the first place.

If the entire country had been talking about poverty more than cats, sports, and television, then everyone would already understand the source of our problems, and social justice warriors would be directing their energy in the right direction. As it stands, they’re filling the need for justice in a typically American way: by demonizing a scapegoat. They’re an inevitable by-product of America’s collective intellectual laziness.

Social justice warriors are mentally unstable, privileged, lazy Americans riding a convenient bandwagon. I believe that if there were a better alternative, they would take it, but it doesn’t exist because Americans are preoccupied with sharing baby photos and selfies. If everyone raised the intellectual bar for themselves and talked about the right topics, then the social justice movement would be swept up in the cultural momentum.

As long as nobody is talking, the only people we’ll hear are the loudest, craziest extremists in society. This will make them look more prominent than they are and cede control of the national dialogue to them. The only way to stop this madness is by talking about more important ideas louder and more frequently than them.

 

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October 20, 2017

26 Things I Wish People Would Invent

By wise sloth

Below is a list of things I wish people would invent. If you want to steal any of these ideas, feel free. Just make them so I can buy or borrow them.  I’ll be adding more items to this list as I think of them.

 

1: Toilet seats with pedals that lift the seat.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to invent a toilet pedal, and you don’t have to invent a whole new toilet. Just build an attachment that connects to existing toilets. Every day millions of people press a pedal at the base of their trash can to lift the lid to throw garbage in. Move that pedal into the bathroom and have it lift the toilet seat. I don’t know why the people who make pedal-operated trash cans aren’t mass producing these.

(Update: It turns out someone has invented a pedal operated toilet seat lifter, but it’s only sold on Amazon as far as I know, and it’s been out of stock for several years. Plus, some of the comments from people who have used it say that it doesn’t lift the seat up all the way. So if you could solve that design flaw you could easily establish yourself as the market leader in the untapped toilet pedal market. Somebody is going to get rich improving on this existing product. It could be you.

 

2: Laser/Sonar walking sticks for the blind

Blind people carry walking sticks so they can tell what’s directly in front of them, but they need to know how far the next wall is before they get there. Blind people often have friends and family tell them how many steps they’ll have to take to get to reach the edge of an unfamiliar environment like a restaurant. You can solve this problem by putting a laser or sonar device into the handle of a blind person’s cane.  When you press a button on the cane it’ll measure the distance between you and a wall or object you’re facing. Then the cane tells the user how far the object is. The cane could have a speaker in it that beeps the number of steps or it could say it in a sexy British voice. You could even have the cane transmit the distance to a hearing aid device so the distance just gets whispered into their ear. Or the handle could vibrate once for every step.

 

3: One website to rule them all

I go to Reddit to get most of my news because it’s the only place that offers most of the world’s news in a convenient layout. I go to Facebook to see what my friends are up to. The only other site I go to on a regular basis is WordPress to do my blogging.

Back when Myspace was the premier social media site I was able to do my blogging and keep up with my friends on one site. If Facebook offered blogging, I’d spend a third more time on Facebook. If Facebook stole Reddit’s wall of crowd-sourced news articles with its robust comment/karma tracking system I’d spend even more time on Facebook. If Facebook provided E-mail and cloud storage then I’d never go to any other site unless I needed to buy something.

I’m just saying, the first person to combine the functionalities of Facebook (networking with friends and strangers), Reddit (news feeds of user-generated web-content where you can discuss content, create your own forums and message other users), and WordPress (a strong, versatile blogging platform) and Myspace (the ability for friends to see your blogs in their news feeds) into one site is going to become a billionaire. To this, you  may reply, “Hey, Google + can do all that.” That’s true, but Google + accomplishes that by clumsily tying together multiple web services that each have their own site. I don’t want to have to jump back and forth between web pages. I want one web page that does everything. If this website had an 8-bit virtual office somewhere in there too, so much the better.

 

4: An 8-bit virtual office

I want a fun virtual office, and I can build one in Second Life, but I don’t need or want to use the software or bandwidth that would require. Graphically, all I need in a virtual office is an environment like Final Fantasy 1 or Dragon Warrior. I need a game like Farmville, except instead of wasting time I can walk around a fully functioning virtual office where I can interact with other real users in real time using real project management software.

 

5: A rechargeable solar-powered car battery in a box with household electric sockets on the side

Take a small box and put a car battery in it. Then mount a solar panel on the lid. Then put a regular household power strip on the side of the box. Then install whatever electrical conversion devices you need to charge a car battery with a solar panel and provide power to a standard 110 or 220 electrical power strip. Then let me buy that so I can power all my household appliances when I go camping. Also, people in third world countries may find this useful.

Update: I saw a product sort of like this in one of those shopping catalogs you find in airplanes, but it was the size of a standard family  BBQ grill. If someone could bring the size down to a hibachi grill that’d be great.

 

6: Tea bags with powdered cream and sugar in them

You need three things to make a good cup of tea: tea leaves, sugar, and milk. This means you need a box of tea bags, a bottle of milk and a bag of sugar. If they made tea bags that already had powdered creamer and sugar inside the bag (possibly in a separate compartment) then I wouldn’t need to carry a box of ingredients everywhere I went just to make a simple cup of tea… and neither would the millions of people raised in the British Commonwealth.

 

7: Memory foam pillow lifters

The pillows on my bed always seem to be too big or too small. So I usually end up stacking two pillows that are too small, but their combined size is still usually too big, and they get separated when I toss and turn at night. If I want to roll to the other side of my bed I have to take both pillows with me and restack them, and that’s a nuisance when I’m trying to sleep.  I’ve solved these problems by folding up a thin blanket and laying it under the fitted sheet at the head of my bed. That lifts my pillow up just enough to be comfortable even if I roll from one side of my bed to the other and back. My solution to this problem was free. So I’d be stupid to spend money on a product that does the exact same thing, but if I saw a thin strip of memory foam pad specifically marketed as a pillow lifter I’d probably buy it, and I bet a lot of other people would too.

 

8: Mousepad lifters

I use my computer a lot, and I also move a lot. I’m constantly finding myself sitting in different chairs in front of different desks, staring at my same old computer. None of the desk/chair combinations are exactly the same.The only variable that never changes is the optimal distance from my shoulder to my mouse. I’m constantly having to find creative ways to arrange and stack random home furnishings to lift my mouse as close as I can to the optimal ergonomic height.

This problem would be solved if I had an adjustable-height mouse pad. It could be a thin box with a mouse pad mounted on the top. Preferably, the box would be polished wood, and the mouse pad would be an imitation Persian rug. The box could raise telescopically. Or it could lift the same way most adjustable height office chairs change height, or the way some raise-able platforms extend.

 

9: Mini battery backups for desktop computers

I don’t need a giant, heavy battery backup for my desktop computer that holds a 9-hour charge. I just need 5-10 minutes of battery power to keep my computer from shutting off if there’s a power flicker in my house or I accidentally kick the power cord out of the socket. They already make power strips with a built-in battery backup function, but that’s still too big, and I don’t need all the electronics in my office on battery backup. All I need and want is one small battery that connects between my computer and the wall socket. Actually, in a perfect world, this battery would come pre-installed inside my desktop computer. If we can put a battery in a laptop, why not a desktop? To this, you might reply, “Because you don’t need a battery in your desktop.” To that, I would reply, “You don’t need one until you lose all your unsaved data because your computer turned off all of a sudden.”

 

10: Healthcare timeshares

Instead of me paying 100-200 dollars per month for medical care that I still have to pay a $6000 deductible for that effectively prevents me from receiving basic medical care, how about 100 people get together and pay $1,000 per year to a doctor. Then that doctor only sees those 100 people, and those 100 people can see that doctor anytime they want without worrying about any of the financial paperwork, deductibles, copay or any other bullshit we normally have to deal with when going through a health insurance company. The only out of pocket expenses would be the cost of whatever consumable/disposable medical equipment the doctor has to use on a client. If a large enough company oversaw 1000 doctors who sell their services at a flat rate for time-share-like access I believe the company could be profitable and both doctors and patients would be happier.

 

11: Sustainable eco office neighborhoods

The suburbs are unsustainable and inhumane. They’re destroying the planet and making us miserable. An architect named Jacque Fresco has already drawn up all the plans for a sustainable replacement for suburbia. I don’t know why everyone else hasn’t stolen his ideas and made billions of dollars off them while saving the planet.

I don’t need anything as fancy as Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project. When I was a kid I lived three blocks from the actual projects. The outside of my house doesn’t have to sparkle. All I need are sandbag walls, concrete floors, basic utilities and a greenhouse. If you built a sandbag building big enough you could house an entire sustainable intentional community with space to live and work Then the residents wouldn’t have to leave their house to get to work or the grocery store.

There are people who wouldn’t want to live in that kind of environment, but if the number of drug addicts and Emo kids living in suburbia is any indication of how frustrating and unfulfilling living in the suburbs is, I’d say it’s a moral imperative to try something different. Point in fact, since suburbia is unsustainable, it’s not a matter of if it will collapse but when. Sooner or later we’re going to be forced to try something different. So why not get rich doing the thing that everybody is waiting to happen… right now? I’d do it myself, but I barely have enough money to build a sandwich.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what I’m talking about, let me draw you a picture:

Occupy LOL Street: A Brave New Village

Secular Intellectual Monastery Designs

What I’m Going to do When I’m Rich

 

12: Floating island communities

We have cruise ships, submarines and aircraft carriers that can stay at sea for months at a time and sustain hundreds of crew members. Those are expensive as hell because they’re designed to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible in as much style as possible. I want to move out to sea and never come back. So I don’t need a floating vessel that goes anywhere. And I don’t need style. I’m used to austerity, and I think minimalism is aesthetically pleasing anyway. I’ll trade all the cannons and chandeliers for a garden. To fulfill my needs the island doesn’t need to be anything more than a really, huge floating drum with a garden on the top and an anchor on the bottom. That’d be really easy to make. You could make one out of cement using a cast cheaper than it costs to build a 5 bedroom house. And yes, concrete floats.

Rich people like to live on boats. There’d be an instant market for luxury floating drum islands. You could even make floating campgrounds and hotel chains to test the market first. And the best part about it is, you don’t have to buy land. I don’t know why Kim Dotcom isn’t hosting MegaUpload in a floating fortress in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or why Pablo Escobar wasn’t throwing a permanent Mardi Gras on a massive tract of floating resort islands or why every hotel in Waikiki doesn’t sell their property and build twice as many rooms off the coast of Hawaii. Or why the Red Cross isn’t building sustainable flotillas for refugees where they can live safely and sustainable while the warlords in their home country figure out what to do after all their farmers leave for greener pastures at sea.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what I’m talking about, let me draw you a picture:

How to Build a Trailer House Boat

Occupy LOL Street: The Freedom Flotilla

Monk and Punk: Book 2

 

13: A comfy eye pillow/audio headset headband

I really like sleeping masks that you cool down in the refrigerator and then put over your eyes while you sleep. I especially like them if they’re soft and smell like lavender. They cool down my eyes and help me relax and think. I like the sandbag type more than the gel type because it’s softer, gentler and more conforming. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find a sandbag type with a band to hold it on my head so I can roll around and bed without it falling off my face. So I’d really like a soft, lavender scented eye pillow with a soft, broad elastic band that holds it on my head as snugly as Bane’s mask. I want the bands wide enough to just wrap around my ears, and I want speakers sewn into the fabric where the band covers my ear. I want to listen to relaxing music in those speakers while my eyes are cooled under the soft, sandy eye pillow wrapped around my head like a plush halo.

Update: It looks like someone made something pretty close to what I’m talking about. But I wouldn’t buy that because it’s got hard surfaces and strings. I want something that looks and feels like an oversized sweatband.

 

14: The ultimate sloth chair

If you sit in a chair all day every day staring at a computer you’re going to develop back problems. We all know we’re not supposed to sit in chairs too long, but we do it anyway. We sit at our desks at work all day, and we go home and sit at our home desks there. And that’s how many of us are going to spend our entire lives even though it’s wrong. We need chairs that aren’t designed to sit in for 6-9 hours. We need chairs that were designed to sit in for 10000000000 hours. I’m not asking for a chair that you can sit in for that long without developing any health problems. I’m just asking for a chair you can sit in for that long and will minimize the inevitable damage as much as possible.

On a similar note, I’d also like rolling office chairs that are made from reclaimed car seats. Imagine sitting at your computer desk in a Lexus car seat.

 

15: Psychology for the masses

While there’s no one size fits all approach to psychological therapy, there are a lot of common themes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A lot of people have the same mental/emotional problems, and a lot of those people come from poor, broken homes. As a result of the social caste they were born into and their traumatic childhood they’ve grown up into poor adults who can’t afford to see a dentist much less spend $60-$250 per hour getting the counseling they so desperately need.

If a publishing company teamed up with a team of top-notch mental health professionals they could create fictional stories in the form of books and movies based on typical real-life stories of trauma and neglect that show the reader they’re not alone in their suffering, they’re not responsible for the actions of the people who hurt them and they can heal. These stories wouldn’t be an attempt to make professional therapy obsolete. They would be a way to help people understand the need for one-on-one therapy, and therapists could even prescribe them to clients as supplemental homework to be used in conjunction with therapy. For the poorest of the poor, who mental health professionals have told don’t deserve help because they can’t afford the extortionate rates therapists price their sessions at, it would be the only access to help they have. It would be a shame for people to replace one-on-one therapy with watching television, but it’s better than nothing, which is exactly what the mental health profession is giving them right now.

 

16: Modular injection-molded greenhouses

Greenhouses are very expensive to build, and the more durable of a greenhouse you build the more expensive it is. So if you want to build a greenhouse in a snowy region, you’re going to pay a lot of money for a structure that won’t collapse under the snow.

If the companies that make modular quanset huts or bow roof sheds could make a mold of one of their buildings and then use injection molding to fill that mold with glass, plexiglass or some other clear, durable material they could cheaply and easily mass produce super-durable, low-cost modular greenhouses. You’d have to transport them on a flatbed truck, but you’d probably need a flatbed truck to transport all the beams and windows it would take to build a traditional snow-proof greenhouse. If this product were available it would allow more people to be able to own and maintain a greenhouse (especially in snowy areas where flimsy greenhouses aren’t an option).

 

17: Good story building software

The technology exists to build elaborate databases easily in a day. Tons of specialized text editing software has been invented to help authors organize novels. There’s even a lot of freeware that does all of these things. What doesn’t exist is a program that walks you through the stages of a story by having you answer a series of questions that will then generate a story as well structured as an episode of The Twilight Zone. The plot templates exist. The right people just haven’t gotten together yet to build software around it, but they will.

 

18: Techno music played solely by orchestras and designed to facilitate thinking

Imagine sitting at your computer listening to rhythmic, softly rolling techno music played entirely by symphony instruments. That would pretty much be the most soothing, inspiring, alpha-brain-wave-producing sound you could hear. If someone made that there would be a lot of people who would buy it, and those people will probably get smarter by having quality background music to listen to while thinking and studying.

 

19: A physical model of the perpetual motion machine I designed

 

Perpetual Motion Machine

 

I don’t expect this, or any of the other perpetual motion machines I designed, to actually be able to run under its own power indefinitely. It should just sit there stationary and sad looking, but I put so much time and effort into coming up with this design that I’d really like to see and possibly own a physical model of it. Why would anyone build a machine that doesn’t work? Either as a novelty or out of the kindness of your heart. Would you please build one? Pretty please?

The concept is that the device is a wheel on a spoke. The wheel is shaped sort of like a water wheel. Solid planks or rails connect the center of the wheel to the outer frame. The wheel has no side walls, like a bicycle wheel. A rod-shaped weight longer than the width of the wheel is stuck through the area between each spoke. Then ramps are constructed on either side of the wheel so that the rods rest on them when they come in contact.

The idea is that the bottom ramp will guide the rods that are stuck through the bottom half of the wheel’s spokes to roll to the right,  pushing the wheel counterclockwise. Another ramp will guide most of the rods stuck through the top half of the wheel’s spokes to the left, pushing the wheel counterclockwise. In this configuration, there should always be more rods pushing the wheel counterclockwise than clockwise.

I’ve never taken a physics class. So I can’t explain the math behind why this won’t work, but I’m sure there is one. If any physicists would like to explain it to me, feel free to leave a comment.

 

20: A dismantle-able luxury cot

I like to camp, but I don’t like sleeping on the ground. Sleeping mats and inflatable mattresses suck, and portable beds are too bulky to travel with. Cots are a little easier to transport, but not much, and they’re not known for their comfort.

What I’d like to take with me camping is a cot that doesn’t fold up like a taco but is fully dismantle-able like tent poles. I want a bag that slings over my shoulder like a quiver that all the components of the cot can be stored in. I don’t want a cot that has a million moving parts that allow you to fold it up like a camping chair. Those kind of cots have too many breakable parts and extra weight. I’d rather just detach all the poles and throw them in a bag.

I don’t want to sleep on a canvas hammock or a thin, military cot. I don’t need something light weight enough that I can hike 20 miles with it on my back. I’m just carrying it from my truck to my tent. And I don’t need a heavy duty childproof/weatherproof cot, because it’ll only ever be in a tent, in my truck or in my closet. My only two priorities is that it’s portable and luxuriously comfortable. In fact, I want a portable cot that’s so comfortable it can be used as a guest bed in my house. To that end, someone should invent something like a super strong, two-ply, Egyptian cotton (or spandex) hammock that’s filled with memory foam and can be suspended from a cot frame or rolled up into a tube for storage.

 

21: Thick clothing with ambitious technological gadgets sewn into them

Technology has reached the point where this is possible. There’s no reason we shouldn’t all be walking around like Inspector Gadget with retractable propellers in our hats. Think about it. Every child who has seen The Goonies loved Data’s quirky, wearable gadgets. We would have bought clothing with completely impractical Walkman-sized gadgets in them then, and we’re still waiting even though technology has advanced to the point where legitimately useful gadgets can be manufactured small enough and durable enough to hide in clothing easily.

When I shout, “PANTS ACTIVATE!” I want something to happen. I want two-way speakers in my collar and a HUD that flips down from the brim of my hat. I don’t care what it does. I don’t care if shows me Google Maps, my heart rate or it just makes everything look all psychedelic.  I’ll buy one pretty much no matter what. I want to shoot Nerf bullets and breath spray out of my coat sleeves, and women should be able to shoot mace out of theirs. I want to be able to open my wallet, call a friend and have a video chat. I want LED lights around the rim of my coat sleeve. I want pistons in my shoes. I want a video screen on my back. I want every piece of clothing I own to do more than keep me warm.

Our pocket books are as deep as your imagination. I wonder who the first major clothing brand is going to make the Swiss Army Knife of leather jackets and become associated with extra-utilitarian clothing. You’d think the Swiss Army Knife company would have done that by now, but they haven’t. So the market is wide open.

 

22: Posture-correcting jewelry

Bad posture can lead to crippling muscle and bone dysfunctions that become more painful and, on a long enough time scale, potentially lethal. Good posture is something everyone needs to be vigilant of all the time, especially people who already have muscle and bone dysfunctions.

People use bad posture to begin with, because they either don’t know what good posture is, and they forget to think about it. They need a constant reminder. That means they need someone or something to constantly measure their posture and notify them when they’re not holding their body correctly.

The technology exists to put sensors in jewelry that measure distances between itself and objects around it. We can also make jewelry that measures the angle it, and objects around it, are tilted. We can make jewelry that measures your posture and notifies you when your body is off balance by beeping, shaking, flashing, texting, or recording the information in a database for you to look at later, like a Fitbit does.

 

23: Exoskeleton pants designed to help you stand for long periods of time

In a perfect world, I’d ask for an exoskeleton suit like in the video game Crysis. That kind of technology is still a few years away, but they’re already making expensive, clunky, bulky mech suits, but honestly, I don’t need a mech suit or super soldier exoskeleton, and neither do most people for the same reason most people don’t need an all terrain vehicle: because we live in suburbia and don’t do much. One thing we do an awfully lot of in suburbia though is standing around. A lot of people have to stand around all day at work for decades. They would pay good money for an inconspicuous way to take the weight off their feet.

Make a pair of pants that has a strong, flexible tube sewn into the lateral side of the pant legs. At the ankle, the tube connects to specially designed footwear. At the waist, the tube connects to an underwear harness that’s attached to the pants. The center of the tubes are hollow and have a strong wire running through them. A wire pulley around the waist allows you to pull the wire taut, which compresses the tubes, making them hard, inflexible and able to bear weight. Then you basically hang by your underwear until you loosen the wire that’s holding the external frame rigid.

In order to distribute the weight more you could attach the tubes to your body with additional straps around the ankles and thighs. You could also extend the tubes up the torso where they attach to a chest harness. If the tubes went all the way from your ankles, up over your shoulders and back down to the dorsal side of your feet, you could have more attachments sites all the way up and down your body and have twice as strong of a frame. The most effective design may be to have a full body leotard suit with the exoskeleton tubes sewn through it, but that’s not as discreet as the pants. So if I had to choose between buying the efficient body suit and a less efficient but more inconspicuous pair of exo-pants, I’d probably pick the pants.

 

24: Utility vests with fully customizeable, interchangeable pockets

Every day millions of workers wear utility vests to work because they have to carry around a lot of stuff with them all day that they need to access quickly. Since every one of these work environments are different, there’s a demand for vests with different amounts, sizes and types of pockets. There are companies that sell vests with strategically placed pockets to meet this demand, but those vests are only perfect for one single type of work environment. Everybody else just has to settle for a vest that fits as many of their requirements as possible. In other words, they’re buying the vest that sucks the least.

Somebody needs to make a utility vest that has the entire front torso area from hip to shoulder covered in Velcro. Then sell a variety of different types and sizes of pockets that have Velcro on the back of them. That way you can buy as many of whatever kind of pockets you need and stick them to your chest exactly where you need them. There may be some combat vests that have limited rearrangeable pockets, but warehouse workers don’t need a tactical military vest that can endure wartime conditions. They just need light weight (and/or warm) vests that don’t get in the way. At any rate, there are no military or civilian vests that are 100% hip-to-shoulder customizeable anyway.

Velcro may not be the best way to attach pockets to vests, especially if you work in a dirty environment. The vest itself could have a magnetic sheet sewn into the front torso, and the pockets could have magnetic sheets sewn in the back of them. There are lots of ways these pockets could attach. Somebody find one that works and make this product so workers can have the right vest for their job.

 

25: Magnetic stretching gloves and bands

Everyone needs to stretch in order to keep their body working optimally and pain-free, especially couch potato commuters who work long hours at stressful desk jobs. Ideally, you would have a sports therapist who would stretch you out every day. In lieu of that, you have to stretch yourself. Many stretches require you to grab external supports and/or parts of your body. This makes self-stretching inefficient, since gripping, pulling and holding require you to flex muscles in your arms, shoulders, neck and back. Eliminating the need to grip and hold things will significantly reduce the number of muscles you have to flex while stretching.

To achieve this, you could wear hooked or magnetic gloves on your hands, and hooked or magnetic bands around different parts of your body and/or objects around you. You put your hands on the strips, and they hold your hand in place, allowing you to use gravity and tensegrity to pull your muscles without needing to flex the muscles required to grip and hold.

If these stretching devices came with instructions for how to use them to stretch while sitting in an office chair or on the couch, there would fill a huge consumer demand.

 

 26: Appalling Bible verse refrigerator magnet sets

 

"Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property." Deuteronomy 21:20021

 

Sell packs of refrigerator magnets that have the worst passages from the Bible on them. These would be popular with rebellious young atheists, and personally, I would buy a few extra sets of these to give to Christians as a way of helping them realize that Christianity is mythology.

 

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October 20, 2017

Why Did “Full House” And “Saved By The Bell” Exist?

By wise sloth

Most people can agree that children’s television programming should be mentally healthy. Very few people would be happy if children’s television programming contained footage of cannibalistic DVDA cosplay snuff action.  Very few people want the paperback versions of “Ichi the Killer” or “Old Boy” in middle school libraries.

If we’re so serious about protecting children from things that are potentially unhealthy for their tiny, fragile minds then why did  “Full House” or “Saved by the Bell” ever exist at all? Both of those programs depicted a straight edge version of reality that doesn’t actually exist and shouldn’t. And all of the main characters in those programs were depicted as role models to be emulated. They even demanded to be emulated.

Even if the producers didn’t know they were creating role models, psychologists have known for decades that children mimic adults and anyone else they perceive as an authority figure. So if you set a kid down and make them watch the same television show every day for 10 years they’ll incorporate that show into their perception of reality.

Neglected children who watch a lot of television may see more adults on television than in real life. They could easily get the impression that every adult is supposed to behave and think sort of like Danny Tanner. They might not have anyone in their life to look up to but Zack Morris. But Danny Tanner and Zack Morris aren’t characters one should emulate.

Pretending you live in a straight edge world isn’t optimistic and responsible. It’s  naive and unhealthy. Lying to children so they’ll believe they live in a straight edge world run by straight edge adults isn’t mature or responsible. It’s counterproductive and unhealthy. It misleads impressionable viewers the same way internet pornography misleads pubescent boys into thinking casual sex always ends with the guy cumming on the girl’s face.

I’m not saying there’s anything morally wrong with sex as long as you’re safe and exercise reasonable moderation, but the adults in Full House would never even admit to ever being naked. Married couples don’t even sleep in the same beds in Hollywood G-rated sitcoms. They’re plastic wrapped angels: boring, lifeless and fake. They don’t teach kids to be responsible. They teach kids to be boring, lifeless and fake, which sets them up for failure and stress.

Striving to be that lifelessly, joyously “good” doesn’t help people become or accomplish anything. It doesn’t impress deities. It’s just something to stress out over and feel guilty about. The alternative is to just get on with your life.

Why expose your children to detrimental role models? If you’re going to do that then at least expose them to fun, detrimental role models…like Bernard Black. Come on Hollywood. Create some intelligent, morally introspective characters like Dr. House who aren’t self-destructive drug addicts.

And come on parents. If your kids grow up watching Nickelodeon and Disney then don’t be surprised when they act like monsters… and don’t say you did your best to raise your children. You set them up to base their perception of reality on distorted information. In other words, by letting your children watch unrealistically straight edge television programming, you lied to them and drove insane.

No character flaw is more dangerous than stupidity, and when kids are raised on stupidity, they become stupid. Then they become a danger to themselves and others.

 

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