WIRED on Stupidity

 Stop calling Everyone a Tech Bro

Read this to update your HiTech vocabulary of Nastys. They are all here. 

For example: "Hope at least six girls sucked your dick last night."

The Church that Gradually faded Away

This Church was my family's church: the RLDS. 

It was the church of both my father and my mother, but I know so little about my father's family, I will not say much about them.

The RLDS church was formed after the death of the leader of the LDS church, Joseph Smith, was killed in 1844. 

The period between the LDS and RLDS is complicated, and I will not go into that. But will begin when Joseph Smith III became the president of the RLDS, in Lamoni, Iowa. Record-keeping was poor before the Computer arrived, but under his leadership, the church grew. But not as much as the LDS under Brigham Young, which was always a much larger church.

My mother's father's family was in Nova Scotia, but one daughter of that family immigrated to Boston and married into a rich family there, the Fishers (who were RLDS). She sent for her brother to teach at the Fisher's Business College. 

At the same time, another family (he Fairclouphs) immigrated from England and one daughter enrolled in the Fisher Business College. They were very RLDS. This daughter married her instructor at the college (Albert Sanford) who taught Shorthand. 

They bought a new house in a suburb of Boston, Summerville, where my mother was born. 

The RLDS church peaked out in the Fifties when I attended Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa. 

I went on to the U of Illinois and became an Electronic Engineer. And dropped out of the church.

The rest of my family dropped out too, but gradually, and in a complicated way. 

Tech and Greed

This is a strange combination, but one we need to take seriously because it puts strange people in power. 

What is behind these strange people? A new kind of greed, that is caused by powerful new technologies. The latest of which is the Computer. 

I can remember what happened in Silicon Valley in the Nineties, and I can see the same thing happening in Costa Rica now. Strange people are taking over. 

What are they like? This is hard to say because they are invisible. They are Organization people and only live in that environment. The bigger the organization gets, the more powerful they get. 

This would be fine, except large organizations are stupid. And stupid in a new way, we cannot comprehend, a new kind of greed. 

An example is Facebook. which is making billions of dollars helping people use their computers. Is this a good thing? Lots of people are not so sure. It may be helping users, but it is helping itself more and is helping the strange people, I keep writing about. 

Politics in America

The last election cycle should have taught us something about America. And I hope to contribute to that insight. 

Obama was president and we should have learned a lot from his failure. He made magnificent speeches that everyone listened to. But soon learned they were only speeches and meant nothing. 

What did we learn from that? Nothing, especially the Democrat party. They should have grabbed him by the collar, and said: "Get Real!". But they did not, and no one expected them to.

Americans (and nearly everyone else) no longer knew what this instruction meant. 

They were not aware of ordinary reality and expected something more exotic. Trump fit that bill, and they elected him. 

It is easy to say "Americans are stupid!" And there is a lot of df truth in that. But we need to say more, like how we are stupid. 

How did Biden become President?

In the US, a President is elected every four years. 

This meant the incumbent President Donald Trump (a Republican) would run against the Democratic candidate.

The Democratic selection process is strange. There are a large number of people who want to be the candidate. How they get this far along in the process is unknown to me. One of these people was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for example. 

They are all lined up on the stage to have a debate (we are told),  This is more like a series of speeches. Then polling is done to determine who will stray in the process. How this done I do not know. 

At some point, one person's speech will be convincing enough that he will become the candidate. He will then select someone else to be his vice-president running mate. 

Someone else must have described this process better somewhere else. Please direct me to it. 

Noodles For Breakfast

Or for any other meal, for that matter.

I picked up a package recently somewhere because it looked so pretty. Then I realized all the writing was in Chinese.

No problem, I just boiled some water and added it to the noodles - then opened the three little packages and added them to the water. I used a fork to eat the noodles and then drank the soup that was leftover. 

Not too bad!

China is Winning the Artificial Intelligence Race

Newsweek 

This is another must-read that no one is reading. 

It says China now has the money (because of its Manufacturing expertise) and knows how to use it. 

Fifty years ago, I could have said the same thing about my hometown of Ft. Madison, Iowa. Today it is part of the American Rust Belt.