Ignorance;

World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.

Poverty, diseases, corruption, crime, injustice, maladies and most human miseries originate in ignorance. Accessible knowledge and inspired life-long learning are the solutions.

It is part of human nature for some to take advantage of the weak and ignorant. Those with ill gotten and unearned gains fear competition from those who know more, are more capable and more powerful than they, and understand things they do not.

Human perception is severely limited by ignorance. Humans see, hear and understand very little and imagine even less. Without knowledge, access to information, and the skill to evaluate it, and a thirst for it, people cannot hope to imagine the future based upon current causes, or imagine how the future might be different based upon new choices

Many are incompetent due to mental deficiencies and illnesses and cannot see or understand that they themselves are incompetent.

Cultural ignorance and false cultural. Pregnant women eating river clay to nourish their unborn child, or that fertility spirits determine the yield of your crops, or demons make people do bad things, or that gods decide which women will bear children, or that an erupting volcano can be stopped by human sacrifice are cultural ignorance that still exists. Claiming that perpetual unemployment, theft, drug abuse, child molestation, mindless violence, gratuitous sex, irresponsibility and ignorance are cherished elements of your special ethnic culture is ridiculous.

Logic, reason, cause and effect errors; if you cannot determine with near certainty what causes what, or from this action what is the likely outcome, if you do this, this will certainly happen, if you cannot see probable events in advance by foresight, then you are truly ignorant. If you cannot choose correctly that this is likely, this is not, you have poor logic. If you cannot imagine the likely future results from current events, you are ignorant. If you do not think ahead, if you have not collected knowledge and some wisdom from experiences where you were paying attention, then you are truly ignorant and perhaps stupid. It’s important to figure out which one, ignorant you can fix.

Facts and beliefs, that’s all there is. Facts are known, provable, repeatedly demonstrated to be true within our perception and understanding throughout recorded history. Beliefs are structured guesses, feelings, improvable, not demonstrable, believed by groups of followers throughout recorded history and about the future. Beliefs are shrouded with magic, miracles, and mysticism, and writings and teachings by charismatic leaders believed by some to have special affinity with the spirit world, gods, or God. Much opportunity exists in the realm of beliefs for trickery, illusion, delusions, curses, possessions, mystic forces, paranormal, mental distractions and spiritual mumbo-jumbo; and therefore the perpetuation of myths, lies and ignorance by charlatans, psychotics, and the charismatically deficient of all kinds.  Human decisions are mostly or more often based upon beliefs

Encouraging ignorance and dependency has expanded rapidly the past 50 years. Government entitlement programs, required safety equipment, warning labels, blaming inanimate objects and third persons, allowing frivolous suits, not grading student academic performance and behavior, not keeping score in athletic games; if people are not compared to the most competent among us, how are they to learn what things they need to study and improve, and for what things have they become an acceptable person, and what things must be accomplished to become a human in good standing.

Louis D Brandeis said, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

I dislike nearly every view point and achievement of this intelligent and influential progressive Supreme Court Justice, except the most excellent insightful quote above. I doubt he ever understood the massive damage to human liberty his masterful persuasion brought.

Most programs and social systems in place today were ill conceived and hastily enacted without much, if any, thought as to their unintended consequences. Virtually none have been revisited, and nothing has since been created to evaluate their effectiveness or eliminate harm.

These programs and systems, safety nets, like Social Security, Medicare, criminal rehabilitation, Food Stamps, Welfare, Affirmative Action, the Drug War, Extended Unemployment benefits that gift or grant people excessive, perpetual, unearned benefits are promoting dependency, enshrining ignorance, and destroying self esteem.

You will get more of what you reward, and less of what you tax.

Achievement, forethought, conservation, responsibility, and self reliance are discouraged, taxed, and penalized.

Ignorance, incapability, carelessness, thoughtlessness, irresponsibility and dependency are encouraged, subsidized and rewarded.

If you:

Tax jobs and reward unemployment;

Tax family life and reward out of wedlock child birth;

Punish achievement, and reward birthrights;

Punish conservation, and reward wastefulness;

Discourage savings, encourage over-spending;

Criminalize rights, celebrate crime;

Demean citizenship, idolize the corrupt;

Then you are truly ignorant and corrupt, and likely stupid!

Keep Your God

In your heart, in your home, and in your church.

Your beliefs are not mine. Our beliefs may not be like anyone else’s.

I don’t want your God or mine in our government, or in our schools, or using public resources; religions do not pay taxes, and even if they did, the constitution prohibits it. Your God or mine has no place on public property, using public money or acting officially for non-believers, or acting exclusively in official ceremonies conducting religious utterances that impose upon and compel others out of politeness stand quietly conscripted appearing to respect our beliefs.

I don’t want your God in my home, not on my mind, not mandated or made official, not with any of my money or using government resources.

Follow your religion, speak out courageously and use your resources and those of your church.

Don’t use my money, our government, our property, our schools, or my appearance falsely portraying it as my consent to foist your beliefs on anyone else.

Stop using history, celebrity beliefs or numbers of followers to try to compel anyone else to believe as you do.  Try using principles, concepts and good works.

Stop seeking official recognition for your beliefs.

Stay out of government meetings, out of taxpayer funded school, and off public property; and stop trying to use our public resources to market your religion.

If your beliefs are good and useful, those wishing to believe as you do will come to your door.  You should not go to theirs.

Use your and your churches tax-exempt resources to put your religious beliefs into the contest of ideas. You don’t need the cloak of official recognition or the popularity of politicians or celebrities; unless your religion is weak and has little merit, or needs to apologize for something, and you are trying to force your beliefs upon others.

If it has merit, willing followers will find it.

Unskilled and Unaware

"In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise.  He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three points.  The first two are noncontroversial.  First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue.  This is true not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study.

Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991; Story & Dunning, 1998), with varying levels of success.  Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others, like the lemon juice hypothesis of McArthur Wheeler, are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or dysfunctional at worst.

Perhaps more controversial is the third point, the one that is the focus of this article.  We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they
suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.  As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago,
"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
 
Note this quoted text taken in its entirety from;
 
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own
             Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

                    Justin Kruger and David Dunning
                             Cornell University
 
            Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
                     1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ] 121-1134

Stop Ignorant Unreliable Government

And Cut Programs That Endanger Sustainability.

Don’t start initiatives that can’t succeed. Recently there’s been talk of stopping economic fluctuations, avoiding recessions and depressions, eliminating risk, or squelching booms.

Are they nuts? They probably think they can predict the weather weeks in advance or change world-wide temperatures! Huh! Oh that’s right, they do.

We do not want to interfere in natural fluctuations. We don’t need economic fluctuation stopped; we need them anticipated.

I want preparation for economic inevitability's. Deposits set aside to pay unemployment during downturns, to spend to encourage economic activity from savings, not from a tax income stream we won't have. No amount of planning, or government programming, regulation or law will ever control the billions of individual purchasing and saving decisions made by people everyday, nor should they affect commercial activities of a free people.

I want preparations for global warming and ice ages, they will come. They have many times with little warning. Conserve some food, some things of value, some resources needed to sustain human life for as long a possible.

Conservation, preparation, and preservation require forethought and wisdom, something in short supply today.

If we do not prepare for bad times during good times, then no resources will be available to sustain us. There may be no way to secure funds that have accumulated, but as a country, as a society we must preserve surpluses and resist temptations to use them, to have resources available to survive inevitable hard times.

Trusting this vital task to ignorant, greedy, power mad, corrupt politicians clearly isn’t the best answer. A new, much more reliable system is necessary. preserving surpluses is so important that it may exceed the priority of all other human tasks, rights or authorities of governments, religions or peoples.

Nothing, no one, no business, or no government program is too big, or too important to fail, to stop, to modify, or to be eliminated if a free people chooses to use forethought and action to preserve their future well-being.