256. You Want Me to Explain? You must be kidding.

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Thor

There is an expla­na­tion for every­thing. You know that’s true because some­body always has an expla­na­tion. The world was surely cre­ated in seven days because some­body impor­tant wrote that in a book. Last week a young woman of twenty was burned to death as a witch in Papua New Guinea because a child in a nearby hos­pi­tal died. In PNG vil­lagers are taught by elders from child­hood that death and sick­ness is always caused by sor­cery: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/woman-burnt-for-sorcery-20130207-2e19f.html. From the 1929s to the 1959s Amer­i­can med­ical doc­tors endorsed adver­tise­ments say­ing that smok­ing was good for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI . Who was my father to ques­tion med­ical doc­tors? In 2013 doc­tors are say­ing that LDL cho­les­terol causes plaque which causes heart attacks. This infor­ma­tion comes from very impor­tant estab­lish­ment sources like the Amer­i­can Heart Foun­da­tion, which hap­pens to be packed with shills for large chem­i­cal com­pa­nies which flog statins. The doc­tors duly ped­dle the expen­sive statins to patients who believe their respectable doc­tors. Actu­ally there isn’t a shred of exper­i­men­tal evi­dence to show that LDL cho­les­terol causes plaque, and the statins raise, not lower, the death rate. Crack­ing that racket is about equiv­a­lent to tak­ing on the arma­ments indus­try: http://thepeopleschemist.com/does-the-family-really-need-lipitor-and-aspirin/. But the under­ly­ing pat­tern has never and will never change. Remem­ber, in 1633 Galileo was almost put on a bon­fire by a supremely author­i­ta­tive Catholic Church for deny­ing the sun went around the earth. It is all your fault. You demand expla­na­tions. Yet you are not really inter­ested in gen­uine evi­dence. You are inter­ested in what impor­tant, respectable peo­ple say is true, because they can give you jobs and make you respectable too. Even if you die from smok­ing, like my father did at fifty-seven.

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255. Age, Ambition and Secret Knowledge

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Thor

He used to be a fac­tory man­ager. They booted him out, “too old” at 40. Some­one with an MBA said he wasn’t fol­low­ing best prac­tice. Best prac­tice was what a text book said it was, appar­ently. Actu­ally it wasn’t. The book writer had never worked in a fac­tory. The too-old-at-40 fac­tory man­ager had started on the shop floor. He knew what worked, and his staff knew that he knew. They were a team. The ambi­tious new MBA fac­tory man­ager talked a lot about teams, but he didn’t know about fac­to­ries, and his staff knew that he didn’t know. He was in trou­ble, the fac­tory was in trou­ble. He had to lie about both of those things because he was ambi­tious. If you are ambi­tious you can’t share what you know and don’t know. You can’t give your per­sonal com­pe­ti­tion any advan­tage. The too-old-at-40 ex-fac­tory man­ager looked into his beer sadly. He had always shared his knowl­edge. That’s why he had a work­ing team. That’s why he was now an ex- . Some­thing was crazy in the world. This is a true story.

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254. Life’s Big Tests and Petty Minded Creeps

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Thor

Life’s big tests are mostly less about fight­ing real mon­sters than find­ing a way past petty minded creeps: their shadow mon­sters are built from stu­pid­ity, igno­rance, greed, incom­pe­tence, jeal­ousy and cow­ardice. Some­times the tough­est part is not being a petty minded creep too.

 

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253. The Magic Law of Thirty

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Thor

Thirty is a magic num­ber. By 30 Alexan­der the Great was mas­ter of his known uni­verse; (but dead at 33, dummy). So we are sup­posed to be mas­ter of what­ever we are going to be at 30. Well, at least of our bod­ies. Isn’t a woman forever an old maid if she hasn’t bagged her man by 30? A man? Sigh, I had hardly even found an ambi­tion by 30. But I had learned how to do 30 push-ups, not such a small thing, and later 300 body presses in sets of 30 before get­ting out of bed every day. That kept me alive to 60, when you find out about pain in unex­pected places. There­fore – my dis­cov­ery and gift to the world is …  the magic spell of 30 to ban­ish pain. Here’s how to use it. When­ever the pain trolls creep out of dark places – a lit­tle toe, a sore shoul­der, an aching back – exper­i­ment, press and poke, find the mus­cle angle that brings it on. When you have it, gen­tly rock in and out 30 times, stretch­ing a lit­tle. Abra­cadabra. The pain has gone. You have joined the immor­tals. Hey, it works.  Bet­ter to be me than Alexan­der.

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252. The Moral Dilemma of an Average Man (or Woman)

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Thor

The Eng­lish word “moral” (adj. moral ; n. moral­ity; v. mor­al­ize) is not sexy. It is stained forever with images of self-right­eous old men say­ing wor­thy things, then rush­ing off (from church or wherever) to lie, steal and coerce the weak in secret. That has been the never-end­ing his­tory of poor lead­er­ship world­wide. The usual mis-used tools are pro­pa­ganda, rules, pun­ish­ment, ide­ol­ogy and reli­gion. Not sur­pris­ingly, more and more of us have said “enough of this crap!”. The trou­ble is, we do need some­thing like “moral­ity” to live together. That is, we need some com­mon sense rules for get­ting along, being fair, and putting some lim­its on what we do to other peo­ple, or even to our own minds and bod­ies. (Maybe some­body should invent a new word for this stuff). Most of the time, most of us do pretty well. Oth­er­wise we would have killed each other off long ago. How­ever, there is no doubt though that some peo­ple go off the tracks more than oth­ers, and at cer­tain times in his­tory whole cul­tures go a bit crazy. War is the worst exam­ple, but any cul­ture or sub­cul­ture may also have plagues of bad behav­iour. Amer­i­can mer­chant bankers come to mind. Main­land China at the moment is at a pretty low point (it is not alone of course). There is almost no pub­lic trust in China now, and the pres­i­dent of the Chi­nese Acad­emy of Social Sci­ences, Li Han­lin, has just con­cluded from a study that “fewer than 4 in every 100 peo­ple sur­veyed said they had a clear con­cept of what social moral­ity meant, while more than half believed that nowa­days China has no speci­fic moral stan­dards to be fol­lowed.” (http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013–01/01/content_16073536.htm). That cer­tainly states the fail­ure of “Chi­nese com­mu­nism”. The real fail­ure of course has been in moral lead­er­ship. Most peo­ple are not very good or very bad. They are swayed eas­ily by bad exam­ples, bad lead­er­ship. Human lead­ers often fail, from fam­ily level to national level. The idea of hav­ing a sin­gle, super­nat­u­ral God + a magic book (Bible, Q’ran, Tal­mud .. what­ever) is to have good lead­er­ship to copy, and which will never fail. As we know from a few thou­sand years of his­tory, that hasn’t worked too well either. More sug­ges­tions?

 

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251. The Customer is Always Stupid

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Thor

“The cus­tomer is always right” or “the cus­tomer is always stu­pid” – which one is true? Well, it is a bit like hav­ing two sets of account­ing books, one for the tax office and one for pri­vate profit. Any smart man­ager will say “the cus­tomer is always right” to a news­pa­per reporter. The facts more and more show that man­agers think “the cus­tomer is always stu­pid”. (Come to think of it, lots of mar­riages seem to fol­low this kind of game script too, or am I being cyn­i­cal?). Here are some links to make you think (read the com­ments too!): “Why we pay more for down­loads” (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/technology-news/why-we-pay-more-for-downloads-20120713-221fj.html ); “Why pay more? Because they know where you click” (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/it-pro/business-it/why-pay-more-because-they-know-where-you-click-20121123-29yus.html ); “Aus­tralians pay dou­ble for flights” (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/travel-news/australians-pay-double-for-flights-20121208-2b28q.html ).

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250. Broken Giants

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Thor

It is the fate of ene­mies and com­peti­tors to look ever more like each other. Carthage looked too much like Rome, impe­rial Britain too much like impe­rial Ger­many.  The United States now is a frac­tured and mil­i­ta­rized nation. In America’s cracked van­ity mir­ror,  Chris­tian fun­da­men­tal­ists want a per­ma­nent jihad against the world, and share views on gen­der which con­verge ever more closely with their veiled neme­sis, Salafist Islam. Mean­while America’s Wall Street pirates and law­less multi­na­tion­als sub­vert com­mon people’s labour to pri­vate, tax haven profit which ben­e­fits nobody. Their tools are pub­lic lies (spin) and the back­door coer­cion of sup­pos­edly demo­c­ra­t­i­cally cho­sen politi­cians. Across the Paci­fic Ocean, China’s pre­tend-lead­ers and grasp­ing bil­lion­aires sub­vert the com­mon people’s labour to casino binges and pri­vate, tax haven profit which ben­e­fits nobody. Their tools are pub­lic lies (spin) and the open coer­cion of any cit­i­zens who asks for real choice about the deploy­ment of China’s wealth. Amer­ica has a bro­ken sys­tem of democ­racy. One study of voter par­tic­i­pa­tion (1969–86) showed that only 45% of  Amer­i­can peo­ple con­sid­ered it worth­while to vote. As the blindly obstruc­tion­ist US Sen­ate shows, all the incen­tives in that sys­tem are  to block good gov­ern­ment. (Aus­tralia with 94% com­pul­sory par­tic­i­pa­tion, the world’s high­est, showed much more pop­u­lar atten­tion to major issues over the same period, with more ben­e­fi­cial out­comes). China, with no sanc­tioned pop­u­lar par­tic­i­pa­tion, has seen a lead­er­ship bru­tal in its dis­re­gard for the opin­ions of ordi­nary peo­ple, and con­se­quently faces almost 500 “mass inci­dents” (riots) every day of the year , and near uni­ver­sal cor­rup­tion amongst its pub­lic offi­cials. The United States looks almost inca­pable of gen­uine demo­c­ra­tic reform; ditto for China.

 

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