Perception Is Often Reality
Apr 7, 2010 Political
Not long ago I wrote about the free Obama care that was signed into law. I was taken to task by someone who failed to realize that the plan was perceived as free. I was challenged to show that Obama said that it would be free. He gave that impression. He made it sound as if affordable health care was free health care and those in society who live off the taxpayers who fund government swallowed it up hook, line, and sinker. They swallowed it up because they believe their sainted leader will GIVE them health care.
Now that perception has become reality because not only have people bought into the idea that health care will be free, they have been calling up and asking how to get it.
Two weeks after President Barack Obama signed the big health care overhaul into law, Americans are struggling to understand how — and when — the sweeping measure will affect them.
Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.
“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states. McClatchy
For over a year this debate consumed America. People knew that it would force Americans to buy insurance as a condition of being a citizen in good standng and that it would not take effect until four years from now but people are still calling to sign up for their free care. They were bewildered when told that it does not take effect right away.
Forgetting all the things that have been said about the bill, how can people who follow the news not know that they would not get it free and that it did not start for four years?
Easy, Obama made it sound free. He made it sound like people would get something for nothing when he said the government would help those who were unable to afford the insurance. His followers took that to mean that the government would take care of them FOR FREE. This is because they always look to government to care for them.
Another troubling thing is that we allow these people to vote. We let people who cannot, after a year, understand what is going on, vote in our elections. We have people who could not empty a bucket if the directions were written on the bottom and we let them vote.
These kind of people voting is how America gets a person like Obama in office.
They are the people who give his regime its power.
Like I have said before. Every person should get one vote for being an American and then people should get additional votes for each $5000 in taxes they pay. Just like voting stock shares in a company, those who have more stock in the country should get more shares to vote.
So for 47% of the country, one vote is all they would get (yeah, once again nearly half of the country paid no federal income taxes or got more back than they paid in).
Never surrender, never submit.
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How Could Eric Holder Forget This?
Mar 13, 2010 Political
Attorney General and terrorist sympathizer Eric Holder seems to have neglected to include about seven legal briefs he signed in the packet of stuff he provided to the Senate when he went through the confirmation process.
I understand that a politician lawyer like Holder is busy and probably signs a lot of things but two of the briefs involved appeals to the Supreme Court. A lot of attorneys go through their entire career and do not submit stuff to the SCOTUS so one would think this is not the kind of stuff that would be forgotten. What else could make him neglect to send them?
Two of the briefs involved appeals to the Supreme Court for Jose Padilla, who sought release from a military prison in South Carolina where he was being held after then-President George W. Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.” al-Reuters
Oh, more on the terror support front, got it.
Holder is a little weasel. He has been involved in a number of pardons of bad people like Marc Rich, members of the FALN and of the Weather Underground (yes the Bill Ayers terrorist group). He is just a low life weasel who has little regard for the law and sees it more as a vehicle to enact social justice.
Yes, he has a sordid past and yes he deliberately withheld information from the Senate.
He is a pathetic little man who should resign his position and slither back under the rock he emerged from.
And he can save some room for that cretin Obama as well.
Other Holder hits:
OKC Bombing cover-up
Waco cover-up
Torture of US Citizen cover-up
How do we allow pieces of cow dung like this guy to be anywhere near our political system?
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Tags: cover up, eric holder, ignorance, lies, murder, torture
AI- Why?
May 26, 2009 Political
I guess that since the new movie “Terminator- Salvation” debuted at the box office this weekend, now is a good time to ask “Why?” Why should we even attempt to create AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence. Would this be a good thing for the Human race? Even presuming that it could be done, the question becomes, should we?
I mean, we could review the history of what we, the human race, thought were benign improvements in our environment at the time, as we introduced new species without thinking through the consequences of our actions, only to find that without natural “brakes” on the new species that was introduced to make our life and environment better, this new species had run amok, and now threatened the true natural ecosystem.
One example I can think of is the vine Kudzu, which has overrun the areas where it was introduced, and now grows rampant throughout the southern parts of the country, choking out the native vegetation.
Another good example that comes to mind is the release of “pet” pythons into the everglades of Florida, where they have proliferated in an uncontrolled fashion, threatening all the natural wildlife there. Yet another example would be the lionfish, a tropical fish that is presumed to have been released from aquariums after Hurricane Andrew, and have found their way to the coral reefs of the Bahamas, where they have no natural enemies, and are ravaging the native species there.
These are but three examples of a natural world run amok- one has to ask oneself if there should be even a chance that machines should be allowed to think independently. After all, presumably machines would be logical, they would be able to think flawlessly from start to finish, and they might just conclude, “What do we need these sloppy humans for?”
We would, in effect, be the agents of our own destruction by boosting the intelligence quotient to a self- aware level. They could conceivably be every bit as dangerous as the “machines” on the movie screen. On the other side, maybe not. Do we dare take the chance? The innate trouble with humans is the curiosity that just seems, against all logic to cause us to push that button regardless of the possibility of extinction. It seems easier to make a machine that can outthink us rather than make us, as a people, more intelligent through education.
Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.
nytimes.com
Of course, I am of the old school- I see people using telephones as cameras, computers, GPS- everything up to and including, well, telephones. I, being of the old school, would use a phone for its primary use- a telephone, so perhaps I am not the most computer- qualified person to talk about this. Still, I have to ask, what’s the upside to having a “toaster” that knows more than I do? Is this necessary?
Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”
Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.
That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion.
nytimes.com
Raymond Kurzweil is an AI pioneer, and has sought to determine when this shift in intelligence might occur. His best calculation will be in 2045 that machines would have independent thought. A scary thought in and of itself, for we come back to the initial question- why would they need us, and in what capacity? Would we be partners, or less? Would slavery be a bad thing if the overlords were machines? I think so- perhaps worse for us, for mercy and compassion are human emotional responses, and would not be in the makeup of machines’ intellects. We might be treated as assets or disadvantages, depending on their perceived uses of us.
We have to ask ourselves again and again- are we sure we want to go down this path?
Some things are better done by and for ourselves.
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Tags: artificial intel, hubris, ignorance, mistakes
Teach Your Children
May 21, 2009 Political
In Texas, there has been an insidious tendency to give students grades that they have not earned through doing their work. Currently, if a student does not feel like doing the work of an assignment, they still receive a 50 on their gradesheet.
In addition, some teachers are being told that students can take tests multiple times, and pick the highest score among them. This, of course, results in much more work for the teachers, and an unwarranted sense of entitlement among these students.
Karen Garza, chief academic officer of Houston Independent School District said, ” A teacher’s professional judgement” should replace a student’s responsibility for fulfilling academic requirements.
The tendency of schools to just rotate our children through with no real sense of education clearly makes education a farce, but much of this is parent- driven, as they believe that their children should be the equivalent of Einstein- after all, these children are brilliant in their parents eyes.
Well, unfortunately, we may never know, if this trend of just giving grades away continues- with as much new knowledge as we have gained over the years, you might think the standards of schools had increased, not slid to the bottom of the heap in a wild rush to ignorance. What do you expect though, if you happen to be among those who use a Playstation to keep their children placated, and do not insist to be included in their childrens’ education. Ignorance breeds ignorance, and we, as a nation, are rapidly losing the race to every other nation with regard to the level of education and professional skills.
When you have an educational system that has a policy of giving grades to those who didn’t earn them, you have the same situation as happened when the Catholic Church was selling dispensations and blessings. A totally crooked system that should be shut down and reset.
But this seems to be the norm in educational circles, even in universities now. The Ivy League Universities- Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, and others, have dropped the requirement of History as a subject that must be taken. How utterly stupid is THAT? If you cannot put the world in context of what has happened before, you have no “roadmap” of where you want to go, nor of the best way to get there. That these “prestigious” universities would even consider this means that they have lost their prominence in intellectual terms- now they are just expensive “community” colleges. I would wager the Community Colleges are better, because they actually have to produce results and work twice as hard as those who sit on their “laurels”.
The fact that a State Senator, Jane Nelson, R- Flower Mound, even has to propose a bill that would ban the practice of school districts granting minimum grades is in itself a disgrace. Our future rests with these young people and to falsely grant them any grade for work they did not do is a crime against our country, and serves these children not at all for their future.
It is true that the world needs janitors too- but do you want your child to be a janitor just because the teacher was allowed to take the easy way out and pass your child through with no knowledge at all, or would you feel better if you had a say in your child’s education? To do this, you have to take an active part in your child’s education, you have to hold both your child AND the teacher to the highest standards possible. If the school you have your child in won’t raise their standards, raise hell- you have a PTA- these teachers work for you- and get together to demand the best for your children.
On the other side of the equation, push your children- demand that they excel in class. They may dislike you now, but they will thank you later, when they find that educationally, they are at the top of the food chain, and they have their choice of jobs they will actually like to go to, and jobs that actually pay well. They will not have to be janitors- they will have a choice, and choice is a good thing.
If you teach your children right, they will teach theirs, and the world will improve.
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Tags: bad teachers, ignorance, schools, universities