Tuesday, January 31, 2017

A Growing Obsession

Imagine a breakfast omelette filled with everything you would put on a taco, with Jalapenos, Guacamole, Sour Cream, and maybe topped with Salsa or Salsa inside. Not your typical "Western" omelette you'd find at IHOP or Denny's. Not a Breakfast Burrito either, Although they are good, the tortilla itself kind of ruins the party for me.

Would it be possible to bake all that in a Taco Salad shell as a kind of Quiche?


Monday, January 23, 2017

Anger Management

Is it true that in a normal emotional state we make rational choices? No. The word 'normal' should be thrown out because it forces us to think in an 'either-or' fashion, also called a False Dilemma, where things are either one way or another. Normal or abnormal, angry or not.

What does this have to do with anger management? To get control of our emotions, we must first understand them. We have many words that describe emotions, but in literature they are used out of context and often incorrectly. Words like happy, indifferent, sad, ecstatic, outraged, furious, etc.

Our lives are constantly under many different forms of pressure that make us frustrated. When we know what frustrates us we can often do something about it, but there are things we cannot control or don't yet know how to change. They stay with us and make us agitated.

If our real sources of frustration stay with us long enough, we tend to forget them, then any other little annoyance will cause us to overreact. This is called misattribution of arousal, where we mistake something or someone close at hand as the cause of our pre-existing frustration from another situation.

People frustrated by their own economic circumstances tend to blame others. Typical targets are political parties, minority race or religious groups.

Stress increases activity within the more primitive parts of our brains, revving up our Fight-or-Flight response centers.

We fall victim to logical fallacies, especially appeals to our emotions, because we are under enough psychological pressure that we do not think rationally.

We must train ourselves not to think using logical fallacies. Here's a list of resources for learning proper critical thinking skills:
*Arousal defined as any increase in activity of the Limbic System caused by stumuli or long-term operant conditioning.

Monday, January 16, 2017

The Last Week of Obama Presidency

This is it folks, From what I gathered around the Web it looks like things are about to go totally insane.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Empathy, Dignity, Compassion, Respect, Love and Deference

There is a special language for the way people behave toward each other. Once you learn the words you can call-out people who misbehave.

The definitions below are Google search results.

  • Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
  • Dignity: The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.
  • Fairness: impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.
  • Compassion: Sympathetic pity and concern for the suffering and misfortunes of others.
  • Respect: A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
  • Love: An intense feeling of deep affection.
  • Deference: Humble submission and respect.
  • Obedience: Compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority.
  • Kowtow: Act in an excessively subservient manner.
  • Genuflect: Lower one's body briefly by bending one knee to the ground, typically in worship or as a sign of respect.
  • Prostrate: Lay oneself flat on the ground face downward, especially in reverence or submission.
  • Fawning: Displaying exaggerated flattery or affection.
  • Obsequious: Obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree.
  • Flattery: Excessive and insincere praise, especially that given to further one's own interests.
  • Sycophant: A person who acts obsequiously toward someone important in order to gain advantage.
    • "He was a sycophant" is like saying "he was a scheming, fawning flatterer."
  • Magnanimous: Very generous or forgiving, especially toward a rival or someone less powerful than oneself.
  • Passive Aggressive: 
  • Insincere: Not expressing genuine feelings.
  • Disingenuous: Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
  • Hypocrisy (Hypocrite): the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
    • Christians praying in public while ignoring the Bible passage Matthew 6:1-2
    • Christians being against abortion while ignoring the Bible passage Leviticus 27:6 where God puts no value on life earlier than one month after birth. At the time, not many were expected to live that long anyway.
  • Deceitful: Guilty of or involving deceit; deceiving or misleading others.
I was waiting for a phone call which never came so I decided to just sit here and piddle about. I hope these words come in handy.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Spinning our wheels again?

LinkedIn posted an article about getting a raise in 2017 with an image of a $100 bill as a jigsaw puzzle. I remembered spending time working on jigsaw puzzled and I wondered 'why the Hell was wasting time putting puzzles together?'

It got me thinking about a lot of my activities, none of which had any elements of productivity. I thought about the wider scope of our society's involvement in such activities.

How did we fall into these traps of wasted productivity and who is responsible for creating these self-destructive, distracting novelties? Apparently we humans have much less control over our own lives than we believe.

Since meaning is in people, not in things, some people are capable of changing the meaning of things for everyone else. Changing the meaning, changing the value, changing the purpose. These people know how the human brain works.

While you probably studied "abnormal" psychology, they studied "normal" psychology, the kind of psychology considered unethical by most public universities. The Ivy League wouldn't dare give away these magicians' secrets.

The best examples of what they've done to you is right in front of you, but completely invisible.

You're going to movies, watching TV, playing games, solving puzzles, voluntarily consuming toxic substances, paying good money for environmentally destructive future garbage.

Can you create something useful that can later be re-purposed after its usefulness expires?

Is there a community workshop in your area where you can go create your own things? If I had the money and the land I would certainly love to build such a place and hire a team of fabrication specialists.

Notice I used the word 'puzzled' in the first paragraph instead of the word 'puzzles?'