Friday, December 17, 2010

My Therapist and I

Well, we cleaned the house and then I saw my therapist. When I returned I met a realtor who took pictures of my house for the mortgage company.

My therapist mentioned that he had read the blog and liked how it brought up a different perspective. I always enjoy seeing my therapist. He provided me a safe place to be confused and someone to talk to. It is important to say things out loud and it is important to write them so that others can read it. Things sound different when we say them out loud. They sound different to us.

I have written a few posts that I never posted. After writing them they did not sound the way they had in my head. Still, it is important to think about what we say. One of the problems with the internet and blogging is that many people, because of anonymity, will say horrible things. They say things they would not in public. I say the same things in public that I post on this blog and anyone who knows me knows this to be the truth.

I do not consider what I do to be journalism, it is merely amateur writing. I do not seek to be a news source. Real journalists spend months investigating things. Bloggers would never have uncovered Watergate. There is still a place for big media. I don't like the fact that the media is now owned by about six giant companies; but, I don't want it to go away. When freedom ends it will be because there is nobody left to talk to all of us. The last nail in the coffin will be the elimination of big media.

We should fear monopolies. We should also fear that no industry can get the attention of government. Totalitarianism in the west will not be because of complete control by business, it will because no organization is big enough to contradict the government. In my opinion even government will be destroyed in exchange for direct democracy and individuals voting with their cell phones.

In order to have an empowered citizenry, there must be a process that forces compromise. Two parties forces compromise, thousands of parties mean endless bickering and no ability to change the status quo as consensus cannot arrived at. That is where I think we are headed and that is where Europe is.

Just for fun

I saw this video, it has the world's oldest photographs and I thought my readers might enjoy seeing them. The link.

Things are moving quickly

I had planned to go to work today but it just wasn't to be. I see my therapist today and now I have a realtor coming by to take pictures for the mortgage company. So, we are cleaning the house before he gets here. I took a quick peak at the news and had my coffee and thought I might do a quick post of something that has been on my mind for 40 years.

When I was a child we were told that oil came from decomposed dinosaurs. That is what we were taught, they even made a cartoon commercial with that explanation. Let me prove to you why it is a lie. In the ocean thousands of feet below the ocean floor is oil and lots of it. How did it get there?

Some will attempt to find any reason to explain it; but, they don't work. One person guessed that maybe it was from the ocean animals that died. Couple of problems with that, we don't find quantities of dead fish at the bottom of the sea. The other problem is that the oil can be found under bedrock in the ocean, how did the fish get under the bedrock?

So, we do know that oil was created from an organic material (or so we are told). What organic material could lay 1,000 below the ocean floor? If you doubt there is lots of oil there consider the gulf spill.

Let me ask the question again, "Where did the oil come from?" If the oil did not come from above then it came from below. I don't even like that answer. The other alternative is that it was placed there. That is a God answer and I don't know how I feel about it either.

Here is what I do believe, science has an answer and we have been told it. There are a lot of things that we (average people) don't get told the truth about. Wikileaks has pretty much proven that. We are kept ignorant, why?

Thirty-five years ago I was taught how to memorize anything in minutes, to speed read with no loss of comprehension (half a page at a time rather than a word at a time) and I watched seven year olds from Korea use their fingers like an abacus to do advanced math instantaneously. I have often wondered why these things are not taught in western schools.

Many years ago there was a class you could take from the Evelyn Wood speed reading school. I haven't seen a commercial for this in decades, why not? It works and I learned on my own, you could also. It is incredibly simple, you don't have to be smart to learn it and it worked the tens of thousands of people. Why don't we teach it in school?

Some will say that we don't need to know these things anymore because we have computers and calculators and smart phones. What a lousy answer that is. These things are simple to learn and allow us to think and do things without relying on technology or others.

Instead of teaching the Evelyn Wood method for speed reading, people are taught to skim and get the gist of what is written. The result is that they learn to avoid detail and believe that fully understanding a thing is too much work. The result is that they cry out for simplistic answers. Willingly uninformed.

Let me throw out a thought at you. Imagine you could read a whole page, every word and not lose any comprehension in the same time it takes to read a word. It is possible and it is proven. President Kennedy could do it. What if I could teach you to memorize exactly what you read in under ten minutes. Now imagine of a nation of people who were taught these things in school. Can you imagine how much they would learn?

If we taught kids the easy way they might actually enjoy learning. These kids could read 40 or 50 news sources a day and begin to see patterns. So why don't we do it? Why did they stop teaching these things in college in the early 90s, why didn't we teach it in elementary school? More kids would have gone to college.

If you doubt what I am saying, look up Evelyn Wood and go to their website. Ms Wood has passed on but her organization is still around. School is designed to make you miserable, it is designed to teach you the bare minimum and make you not want to learn more as you grow up. At a minimum, that is what it achieves.

Everybody thinks they understand the world but the truth is 99.9% of the world doesn't even understand how the world operates. Most people have no idea of what they are capable, they only know what they are not capable of and they are wrong about that.

I have been very blessed in many ways in my life. I was born smart (not bragging, I wasn't born retarded - credit goes to my parents and their genes), I was taught speed reading by an aunt where I was about 10, I was taught to memorize anything by an Uncle at 15 and I had access to books. I used to read two or three books a day at the same time. Anyone can learn these techniques. If you learn them all and read everything you will be surprised at how easy it is and what you are capable of.

Well, got to get back to getting the house ready for its inspection. Be well.