08/30/15

I just put in my order for my mogado hi Oliberte shoes for this winter. I'm always thinking about what kind of world I'd like this to be and how I can impact the world to make it that way. I listen to Bernie Sanders and I hear him talk about what we are entitled to. What is owed to us.

Yes it is wrong for Colleges to cost so much for education. Yes it is wrong for the Government to charge so much interest on loans...

But at least there is a way to higher education. And there are cheaper options for college. There are state schools, there are community colleges, there are trade schools, there are online schools. There are scholarships, there are grants, there is free money out there as well.

Yes it is wrong for McDonalds to not pay their workers. Yes it is wrong for Wal-Mart to have children make the stuff in China then under pay your retail workers in America.

But who says I have to buy McDonald's?
Who says I have to support Wal-Mart?

We vote with our dollars and we are clearly voting yes to private expensive colleges and yes to slavery and underpaid workers with huge money going to the 1% at the top.

the 99% pays and supports the 1%. This is the truth.

Bernie Sanders preaches a message of envy.
A message of fear and scarcity. That there isn't enough and that because of them we can't or won't have enough.

But the power is in our hands. We control the market. We control the economy. We make the billionaires and we can destroy them as well.

Do I buy Folgers coffee for $3.94
Or fair trade from Lucky's Market for $10.99

Do I buy the Hanes T-Shirt Value 8-Pack for $12.46
Or 1 American Apparel Fine Jersey Short Sleeve T-Shirt for $18.00

Do I buy the Daxx Mens Square Toe Slip-on Dress Shoe for $36.99
Or do I buy the Mogado hi Oliberte for $140.00

Do I buy the 24 pack Coca-Cola Dasani plastic water bottles for $4.98
Or do I reuse my Nalgene bottle and fill it with tap water for $10.99

We make these decisions every day. Dozens of times a day.

Do we buy what is cheap to us but very costly to those who make it?
Or do we buy what costs more to us so that those who made it get paid what they should?

When we choose the simple selfish choice of the low price to us it not only costs the worker their freedom but it also inflates and grows the profit lines for the 1% corporations who are selling the stuff. We pick the convenient disposable option which costs our planet space in a landfill.

We make the billionaires and we can destroy them as well.

Even if we can't afford the price it takes to pay workers what they deserve there are other options such as thrift stores, garage sales, the options are out there.

Do I think it's messed up that the 1% owns so much of the wealth in this country? Absolutely!
Do I think our government should solve the issue? Nope.

Do I think it's wrong for college grads to have so much debt? Absolutely!
Do I think it should be paid for by the government taxing people? Nope.

We have the power, we have the choice.

I'm always thinking about what kind of world I'd like this to be and how I can impact the world to make it that way.
What kind of world do we want?

twenty one pilots: Goner

08/23/15

It’s a lot more pleasant to hear “yes.” That, in a nutshell, is why so many people struggle with this problem.

Confirmation Bias

This disappointment is a version of what psychologists and economists call confirmation bias. Not only are people more likely to believe information that fits their pre-existing beliefs, but they’re also more likely to go looking for such information. This experiment is a version of one that the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason used in a seminal 1960 paper on confirmation bias.

Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias — and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. It hasn’t.

We’re much more likely to think about positive situations than negative ones, about why something might go right than wrong and about questions to which the answer is yes, not no.

Sometimes, the reluctance to think negatively has nothing to do with political views or with a conscious fear of being told no. Often, people never even think about asking questions that would produce a negative answer when trying to solve a problem. They instead restrict the universe of possible questions to those that might potentially yield a “yes.”
-David Leonhardt, NY Times

I saw this article on Facebook this morning and I tried it out. Pretty interesting to think about how we can only see through our own lenses. And how we don't care to attempt to look through any other.

It makes me think how Atheists only look at information that continues to prove there is no God.
How Christians only look at information that continues to prove there is a God.

How do we honestly seek truth? How do we see it in it's truest form without a limited lens of senses like not seeing the color blue or hearing the words of another language?

Each day I grow closer and closer to death. Each day I learn more and more. The more I know the more I know I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. But I do know that I am getting older as each year passes me by and I do know that with death comes all the answers.

My hope is in You Jesus. This much is true. No matter what the evidence points to, no matter the lenses that look at the evidence. My hope, my hope is in You Jesus. I hope you defeated death. I hope you made a way. I hope for life after death. My hope in that life is in You Jesus.

Bear's Den - Elysium

08/15/15

I hate American politics.

The entire structure of it makes me sick, confuses, angers, and saddens me. Do I vote for the republican party that doesn't seem to have a heart, or do I vote for the democratic party that doesn't seem to have a brain?


There are 318.9 million Americans living in this country each one of them with a different view and life style. We are all told to choose between two confining parties that both encourage more laws, more rules, more control, more limitation. Meanwhile as each new law is passed Americans find loopholes and ways around the laws they don't like making all of it even more pointless. So we write more laws and we find more holes.

A mass shooting happens in the country and two sides are formed. One says we need more guns to fight the guns, the other says there should be no guns so there is no shootings. And Those are my options to choose from.

Employees of large companies aren't paid well while the CEO is paid a stupid amount. One says we need to force the CEO to pay the employees more. The other says that employee just needs to work harder to earn more money. And those are my options to choose from.

There are hungry poor people in our country. One says we should force everyone to pay for a government program. The other says they should work and take drug tests in order to eat. And those are my options to choose from.

Abortion, One says a woman has the right to choose if she wants the child to live or not. The other says the child has a right to live and the woman has no choice. And those are the options to choose from.

Assisted dying, One says if a person is uncomfortable they should have the option of ending their existence. The other says they must remain alive as long as possible no matter the pain. And those are the options to choose from.

Social Security, One says we should force everyone to pay for people's retirement. The other says people should save their money and receive no help.

Climate change, One says we should force everyone to limit how the use energy. The other says people should be able to use as much as they want.

War, One says we shouldn't have such a large military, the other says we need to keep fighting or we will be destroyed.

Our justice system is based more on money than justice. If you have the time and money to pay for lawyers and hearings then you will win. It has nothing to do with who is right who is wrong, who is guilty who is innocent. A guilty man can walk free because of a loophole. An innocent man can be murdered because of lack of evidence. And those are the options to choose from.

I could go on and on and on. I don't agree with any of this. It has been my experience that life has never been black and white for me yet our government is asking me to choose red or blue. Life isn't red or blue. I refuse to settle or compromise for the lesser of two evils. I refuse to choose red or blue.

I want people to have freedom. I want people to have choices. I am not okay with debt. I am not okay with war. But other people are so should I force the government to do exactly and only what I think our country should look like? Or can I be okay with compromise, disagreement and people living a different way than how I would?

And those are the options to choose from.

Noah Gundersen - Oh Death

08/08/15

Newborns are language universalists. Able to learn any sound in any language, they can distinguish all the sounds that humans utter. But adults are language specialists. Exposure to their native language reduces their ability to perceive speech sounds that are not in that native tongue. An English prototype sound is the vowel linguists write as "i," pronounced as in the word "fee." When an adult English speaker hears something very close to this "i" sound (as when the sound is spoken by someone with a head cold), the listener will hear the prototype "i" and not the slight variation. The prototype sound acts like a magnet, pulling all similar sounds into one mental slot for language processing. But the same is not true of foreign languages. Because English speakers have not memorized the prototype for a foreign vowel -- like the Swedish vowel "y" (an EE-sound pronounced with front-rounded lips), they can discern when the vowel is pronounced slightly differently. They have no "magnet" that makes the sounds identical. Using identical computer equipment to generate prototype Swedish and English sounds tested this magnet effect on 64 6-month-old babies in Sweden and the United States. American babies routinely ignored the different pronunciations of "i" because they heard it as the same sound. But they could distinguish slight variations in the "y" sounds. The exact opposite was true of the Swedish babies.They ignored the variations in "y" because they sounded the same, while they noticed the variations in "i."
-Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle

But do you really see something if you don't have a word for it? A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green. When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square. But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English. When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it. So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they did not know they were seeing it. If you see something yet can't see it, does it exist? Did colors come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them may have.
-Kevin Loria

Over the last 70 years, American animal and plant breeding has focused on yield, pest resistance and appearance — not flavor. The pleasure of an ingredient’s taste did not seem to have practical value. The national Chicken of Tomorrow contest sponsored in the late 1940s by the grocery chain A.&P. Chickens were bred and judged for uniformity of size, volume of breast, hatchability and feed efficiency. Their taste was not considered. The story has been repeated with tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli, wheat, corn and more: all bred for size, speed of growth, pest resistance, shelf life, appearance — not taste. In nature, flavor never appears without nutrition. Flavor means nutrition. A Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis foster-parented 15 babies in 1926 who’d never been exposed to ‘the ordinary foods of adult life’ and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including water, potatoes, corn meal, barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage. They chose balanced diets — sometimes strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never encouraged, he drank it 'irregularly and in varying amounts’ of his own free will until he was better. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently studied in goats and calves, showing ­repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist.
-Mark Schatzker

There are sounds our ears cannot hear.
There are things our eyes cannot see.
There are our flavors tongues cannot taste.
There are scents our noses cannot smell.
There are objects our hands cannot feel.

It makes me wonder are there things being spoken to us we cannot hear? Things before our eyes we cannot see? Flavors that go un-savored? Beautiful scents that go un-enjoyed? A reality that goes un-touched?

Are there messages, signals, that are being expressed that our senses cannot interpret?

Are we looking in the wrong places, or in the wrong ways at this reality?
What sort of language does God speak?
What sort of form does God take?

Are we missing her? Is she right in front of us and our eyes can't see because we don't have the correct vocabulary? Our ears can't hear because our brains have closed off all sounds but our language? We can not longer taste the goodness of God because we have turned the world away from God's values and to our own: size, speed of growth, pest resistance, shelf life, and appearance.

Are there more light spectrums?
Are there different sound ranges?

What we humans can perceive is very, very limited. Microscopes and telescopes are still limited to the filter of our eyes. An X-ray must be printed, converted, to a form our limited lens can interpret.

Sounds outside of the range of any organism.

What sort of wavelength would a spirit appear on? What sort of range would a spirit speak on?

Wore It Deep - The Tree Ring