Saturday, December 9, 2017

Island Halls Xmas Carol

A parody to be sung to the tune of Deck the Halls.

Deck two halls with boughs of money.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Tis the season of sly robbery.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Don we now our cloak of blackmail.
Fa-la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la
Gull the trolls – avoid a downscale.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
See the twits that sit before us.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Strike a blow for them that’s for us.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
If you want to take your pleasure.
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Tax away the other’s treasure.

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Monday, July 17, 2017

Win Any Argument Any Time against Anyone

Maureen Bader talks to Doug Randall on KGAB 650 am about the five rules to win any argument. You too can argue effectively against annoying people who think they know everything.

 

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

How to Argue Effectively

Winning arguments is easy. I win them all the time. Ask any of my former employers. I can win an argument on any topic against any opponent. People know this and out of fear and admiration, avoid me at political functions. Also, showing their great respect, they often don’t invite me. I can show you too how to win arguments. All you have to do is follow these five simple rules.

1. Drink Excessively

Let’s say you are at an evening political function and some famous pundit is emitting hot air about the Green Party Platform, a document you have never read.

If you imbibe some faddish drink like Kombucha, you’ll linger at the edge of the crowd, hiding your ignorance, while this guru intoxicates your date with his apocalyptic guile.

Instead, if you drink several glasses of wine – large ones – you’ll find you have refined opinions about the Green Party Platform. Now an argument powerhouse, you’ll warm the room with your heated genius, possibly melting ice cubes. Jaws dropped, eyebrows raised, people may be driven from the room.

2. Cook up fake facts

Suppose, in this Green Party Platform argument, you are trying to prove that a family’s home heating cost will go through the roof, a position based solely on the fact that your home heating cost is currently through the roof, and you’ll be damned if other people’s home heating costs are not also going to go through the roof. Don’t say, “Home heating costs will go through the roof.” Say instead, “The average family’s home heating cost in 2015 was $15,471.26, adjusted for the two-tier billing system, that is $7,475.75 higher than 10 years ago.

Note: Always cook up exact figures. If the date-stealing pundit asks where you got the information, cook that up too. Say: this information comes from Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s study for the B.C. Electrical Commission, published on April 5, 2016. Of course you’ve read it?” Say this last bit with the same tone you’d use if you were asking, “Did you just fart?”

3. Use vague and meaningless but deep and meaningful sounding words.

Commit this list to memory:
In other words
Going forward
In such a way that
Be that as it may

Also memorize this list of Latin words:
Non sequitar
Caveat emptor
Ipso facto
De facto
Ad hominem

These mean, “I went to university and you didn’t.” Here’s how you use them. Suppose you want to say, “Families would prefer to wear thermal long underwear only outside the house, not inside, but home heating is too expensive.” Face it; you will never win an argument talking like that. You will, though, if you say: “Going forward, in such a way that long underwear is ipso facto normally worn outside, not inside, the cost of home heating, be that as it may, is, de facto, too expensive. Caveat Emptor.” No one but a dogmatist would question such a profound sounding statement.

4. Use snappy but irrelevant comebacks.

When the date stealing bottom dweller makes a valid point, you need to have a list of irrelevant phrases ready to throw him off his game. Some of the best are:

That’s a straw man.
Don’t appeal to authority to me.
You are being defensive.
What are your basic premises?

The last one is particularly useful. Only philosophy majors have any idea what a basic premise even is. Use these comebacks as follows:

You say: “When Al Gore was president, …” He says: “Al Gore was never president.” You say, “You are being defensive.”

Or, you say: “Monrovians, like most Europeans,” and he says, “Monrovia is part of Africa,” you say, “That’s a red herring.”

5. Compare the pundit to Adolf Hitler.

When the date stealing pundit is completely right and you’ve gone terribly wrong, it’s time to pull out the big gun. Raise Hitler’s name tactfully. Say, “Didn’t Hitler say something like that?” or “You sure remind me of Hitler.”


As you can see, arguing is easy as long as you remember these five simple rules.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Dr. Tim Ball on the why of climate deceit

Dr. Ball
Listen as Dr. Tim Ball and Glenn Woods discuss why climate hysteria continues to plague families in both Canada and the US, on KGAB 650 am in Cheyenne Wyoming. They also talk about why President Trump was right to take the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.


Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Bullshit - A discussion on KGAB radio, 650 AM in Cheyenne, Wyoming

Maureen Bader and Glenn Woods discuss what makes a statement vacuous, meaningless, and to put it plainly, just plain bullshit, on KGAB, 650 am.


Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Are you a sucker for bullshit? Take the test!


You've read my article Don't bullish!t me baby and may now be wondering if you can recognize bullshit. In the list of 10 statements below, five are profound statements made by well-known scholars and five are pseudo-profound bullshit, created using the new age bullshit generator (www.sebpearce.com/bullshit). It puts random buzzwords into syntactically correct but meaningless and vague sentences. 

Take the test to find out if you are susceptible to bullshit!  (Answers below - but no peeking!)



1. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.

2. If you have never experienced this spark devoid of self, it can be difficult to live.

3. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

4. Consciousness consists of psionic wave oscillations of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a deepening of the spatial. By deepening, we heal.

5. It is in invocation that we are recreated. It is a sign of things to come. It is time to take synchronicity to the next level.

6. Before you embark on a journey or revenge, dig two graves.

7. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is science.

8. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. 

9. Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

10. We must learn how to lead cosmic lives in the face of discontinuity. The grid is approaching a tipping point. We must beckon ourselves and recreate others.



Answers:
x. Bullshit
ix. William Penn
viii. Aristotle
vii.Bullshit
vi. Confucius
v. Bullshit
iv. Bullshit
iii. Abraham Maslow
ii. Bullshit
i. Thomas Jefferson


Don’t talk bullsh!t to me baby

The other day I saw a couple of interesting phrases. One was: Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is non-locality. Now, does that mean the buy local movement is over? I’m not sure. How about this: By maturing, we live. This life is nothing short of a summoning reintegration of high-frequency intention. By maturing we live seems super obvious. I mean, if we don’t mature we stagnate and when we stagnate, we die. The second part of this is quite undecipherable but we’ll come back to it later.

So what is going on here? A statement might sound deep and meaningful but when we stop and think about it, we quickly see it lacks depth and insight. If something sounds really profound but can mean anything, does it have any actual meaning at all?

And if a profound sounding statement has no truth or meaning, what is it? Could it be bullshit?

If it is bullshit, are we likely to fall for it and even more important, how do we arm ourselves against bullshit?

A 2015 study by a group of Canadian researchers tried to answer these questions (Barr, Nathaniel; Pennycook, Gordon; Cheyne, James Allen; Koehler, Derek J.; and Fugelsang, Jonathan A., "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit" (2015). Faculty Publications and Scholarship. Paper 1 http://source.sheridancollege.ca/ ass_huma_publ/1).

Researchers first differentiated bullshit from lying. A liar is someone who knows what is true and intentionally says something else. A bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care what the truth is. He just wants to sound good. They go on to clarify pseudo-profound bullshit as statements that suggest but don’t contain truth or meaning. They imply depth and insight but don’t have any.

Researchers tried to figure out what character traits make us more susceptible to bullshit. To do that, they created a bullshit receptivity measure by first making up profound sounding statements with random buzzwords put into grammatical phrases. Then they asked study respondents how profound the statements are based on a five-point scale, with 1 being not profound at all and 5 being extremely profound.

The study authors used two bullshit generating websites (www.wisdomofchopra and www.sebpearce.com/bullshit).

Let’s go back to our examples. The phrase: This life is nothing short of a summoning reintegration of high-frequency intention might suggest profundity but I made it up by putting together a series of random buzzwords in a syntactical way. So what we really have here is a vague and ambiguous statement that lacks meaning. To put it plainly, this is bullshit.

Let’s make another one: You and I are messengers of the quantum soup. We exist as chaos-driven reactions. The goal of pulses is to plant the seeds of gratitude rather than dogma. Nothing is impossible.

You get the idea. 

So who is likely to fall for bullshit statements? Two factors make people score higher for bullshit receptivity. One is the tendency to accept what they hear as true or meaningful. They take the ‘keep an open mind’ notion so seriously their brains fall out of their heads. 

The other is the tendency to confuse vagueness for profundity. In this case, a person doesn’t understand the statement so instead of questioning its meaning, he or she judges the statement as profound. This is the tendency for a person to think that if they don’t understand a statement, something is wrong with them, not the statement.

People with these tendencies are often more intuitive thinkers; they are less likely to be analytical in their thinking and more likely to base their responses to a statement on an initial impression. One protection against bullshit then is to take the time to think about the meaning of words to understand a statement. That would help identify a statement such as -- The goal of pulses is to plant the seeds of gratitude rather than dogma. Nothing is impossible -- as bullshit.

To defend ourselves against bullshitters and their bullshit, the first and most important step, and probably the more difficult as it involves effort, is to think analytically about the actual meaning of words in a statement, and their associations, just like we did at the beginning of this article. Another defense is to build some skepticism around the source of the statement. Just knowing we are surrounded by bullshitters is a defense against bullshit.

The serious point to all this is that bullshit is all around us so we need to understand it, recognize it and call it out for what it is.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Spockophobia hits the nation


  • Bought on by long-term reasonitis 

The US Center for Disease Control issued a warning about a sudden and massive outbreak of Spockophobia as a result of insidious reasonitis perverting the country’s thinking public.

Dr. Logia Call, head of psychiatry at the Center’s Center for Logical Studies, said the unreasonable fear of logic, so common among non-thinkers, has spread into the thinking population and threatens to mass strong minds into the same emotional muddle. The condition has now reached the final frontier, Dr. Call warns. 

Spockophobia, named after the timeless Dr. Spock character in the original Star Trek series, describes an irrational fear of reasonable thought and understanding. In the typical logical process, Dr. Call explains, people connect with reality, think about the facts of reality, look for evidence to support those facts, and make conclusions based on facts that actually exist in reality and support their thought process.

“When A=A becomes just too much to bear, the weak-minded reject the facts of reality and withdraw to a place where A=B,” Dr. Call explains. “When a non-thinker retreats into a fantasy world, little is lost. However, when thinkers start to draw conclusions from a place where A=B, Houston, we have a problem.”

Reason is the power of the mind to think, understand and form judgments using logic. For many years now, confirmed Dr. Call, more and more people are ducking their responsibility to think for themselves and yielding to those who are more than happy to do it for them, ultimately to their great cost and to that of everyone else.

“Reasonitis started it all,” confirmed Dr. Call. “The fear of thinking crops up from some of our most basic insecurities and in particular, a fear of making decisions. We want to withdraw into a childlike state and have an adult make decisions for us. But it’s one thing for the weak-minded to live in a fantasy world. It’s quite another for everyone to do it. If this lifts off, we will live short and dwindle.”

Research from the Center shows that government programs designed to keep adults in a childlike state are at least mostly to blame. Eternal childhood leads to a takeover by manipulative do-gooders and frauds that reap the benefits of power.

According to Dougald Goodenough, Racket Coordinator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Citizenry, almost half the population receives a check from the government. That could be anything, including Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, government schools, National school lunch programs, National school breakfast programs, housing vouchers, Woman, Infants and Children, Foster Care, Child Care Mandatory & Matching funds—the list goes on and on.

“Those who accuse government of corrupting the public are chicken littles,” said Manfried Pillraton, Senior Dependency Officer in the Department of Advanced Paradox and People Management. “We are helping those who choose to live in a fantasy world. Without us they’d have to think for themselves, make decisions and possibly fail. We ensure their self-esteem is never challenged. This is not a con game.”

But when the rational population lifts off, Spockophobia perverts the normal thought process and people come to believe the government is the solution to all problems. Need your snowmobile trail groomed? Calling the government becomes the logical response. Over time, government’s power becomes godlike.

“Fear of thinking can be overcome but it won’t be easy,” said Dr. Call. “It means taking responsibility for our decisions, overcoming the fear of making mistakes and finding purpose in our lives, something government discourages people from doing.”


Is a cure possible? Dr. Call said the condition could cure itself if there is no one to complain to or if people are just left to be self-reliant. In a world where everyone is a child, no one is a child. However, should a strong individual or group decide to become the father-like figure, we will go where we have oft gone before, with perilous results.