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Showing posts from 2016

Love Actually <3

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Hi! Happy Tuesday! Irreni World Scale is about solutions and not punditry. Today's solution is about love actually. Or, about a philosophy of win-win as opposed to winners and losers as has been ushered in by Donald Trump. I mentioned Trump but this topic is love actually. The criticisms herein are mostly not about Trump,  but rather targeted at the Democratic and Republican parties, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye the science guy, Barak Obama and pretty much any thought leader in the world today. First, just because picking on Trump has been abused to death, I'm going to pick on a couple of scientists: Neil deGrasse Tyson and the value of philosophy By Massimo on May 12, 2014 It seems like my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson [1] has done it again: he has dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise, and actually advised bright students to stay away from it. It is not the first time Neil has done this sort of thing, and he is far from being the only scientist to do

The Intelligentsia Problem

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Hi! Happy Friday! The US and the World governments have an intelligentsia problem that has long been predicted so often that it is a trope in speculative science fiction. What has gotten lost amidst all of the demagoguery,  sensationalism, click-bait hate and histrionics that is Donald Trump has been Trump's complete and total incompetence. The odds of Trump succeeding at being President are exactly the same as the Infinite Monkey Theorem : The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Or, as John Oliver stated, the odds of Trump being successful are the same as a wombat successfully piloting an airplane. There is a lot of punditry that could splayed here. For example, people assume that a billionaire must be competent because a billionaire has a billion dollars. To which one can easily point to

How To Treat Trump

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Hi! Happy Saturday! Irreni World Scale is about solutions, not punditry. Problem: How do we treat Trump, his supporters and his voters? Should we give Trump a chance? Should we condone but not approve? Should we put the country first? Should we work with his voters but not him? What's the right answer here? Solution: Treat them like terrorists. The reason we don't negotiate with terrorists is we don't want to encourage the behavior. Trump is a bully. Trump said on national TV during a Republican primary he would kill not only the terrorists, but their families.  Trump's go-to methods are insults and threats. If anyone anti-Trump is thinking about "reaching across the aisle" or "Ameri-cans vs Ameri-can'ts" then they need to ask themselves: are you encouraging future political campaigns in America to use the means of hate to get elected? This is definitely an "ends doesn't justify the means" argument. The same as wit

Election Joy!

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Hi! Happy Election Day! Today we are having an American melt-down, an Ash versus the Evil Dead level of anxiety...  Irreni recommends: Try Buddhism, or, or, cut off your hand and strap on a chainsaw! :-0 Wait, what? Why is Irreni recommending a non-scientific solution? It's true, Irreni is about science. However, any government solution is a human management solution. Human management solutions for which the science today is still very early on. So we still need to manage unknowns and sometimes those unknowns have well established practices handed down through the ages that work simply based upon trial-and-error. I don't have anxiety about this election...because I practice Buddhism. In fact I don't have anxiety about anything out of my control. I never worry about things out of my control. Why not? Because in my early twenties I discovered the practice of Buddhism. Key word here is practice. I'm still an atheist and a militant anti-theist. I do not

The Day The Music Died

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Hi! Happy Tuesday! Nov. 8, the day the democracy died. A long long time ago All Presidential election talk =  Congress overlooked and re-elected. I can still remember how Plea deal for all felony charges = no jury trial. That music used to make me smile Arbitration replacing small claims court = can't win at trial at all.   And I knew if I had my chance Sworn to secrecy = arbitration hidden. That I could make those people dance Banks shopped State's with laxest laws = health insurance companies soon will too. And maybe they'd be happy for a while Banks consolidated to too big to fail = health insurance companies soon will too. But February made me shiver Clinton polled win in California the day she announced =  my vote is nothing except to spend a year talking about. With every paper I'd deliver 1999 Telecommunications Act = media companies consolidated to a few. Bad news on the doorstep For profit news = sensationalism lowest hanging frui

The Axis of Evil

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Hi! Happy Sunday! I was reading an article today that struck me as more than a wee bit of Hunting The Snark : From this Quartz Article : "It’s easy to dismiss those [Trump voters] who disagree with us as either ignorant or malevolent. Oxford moral philosophy professor Robinson is neither. And nor, ultimately, is each and every one of the millions of people who’ve chosen to support Trump. Anyone who hopes to understand and address the concerns of those backing the Republican candidate will need to set aside such simplistic preconceptions." Just as a reminder, Irreni World Scale is about solutions and not punditry. The Irreni model of governing is inclusive, everyone belongs. There are no outsiders with Irreni and all seven-billion people on this planet are welcomed. That's the solution. You might say, "love everyone" by asking people to voluntarily reject demagoguery. Fear and shame define demagoguery and so there is no mystery, none whatsoever,

A Teaching Moment

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Hi! Happy Friday! If you wish Information and Improvement from the Knowledge of others and yet the same time express your self firmly fix'd in your present Opinions, modest sensible People, who do not love Disputation, will probably leave you undisturb'd in the Possession of your Error; and such a Manner you can seldom hope to recommend your self in pleasing your Hearers, or to persuade those whose Concurrence you desire.         --Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of B.F. Trump is boringly average as a CEO and represents a teaching moment to  clean-up corporate America. Just as a reminder, Irreni World Scale is not about punditry but solutions. The solution here is to clean up corporate America by using Trump's nomination as CEO as a teaching moment about corporate America power behavior. Trump will continue merrily along as a CEO after this election. If by some off chance he does get prosecuted for sexual harassment the origin will have been d

No Party, No Government

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Hi! Happy Thursday! <3 An excerpt from The Hitchhicker's guide to the Galaxy* Chapter 36           The flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world  [and] there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.      It held up a hand.      "I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."      Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.      "It comes from a very ancient democr

Fate

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Hi! Happy Friday! This post is dedicated to my friend Dave. Dave recently asked me a simple question: do I believe in fate? Also I'd like to dedicate this post to the millions of people around the world who are new to the non-religious community. Folks who have recently shed the shackles of religion and declared themselves non-religious. Perhaps these folks are also looking at questions like fate to fill the religion void. Irreni World Scale is about providing solutions and not punditry. The solution here is to acknowledge that oft times the facts are not enough. Emotions need to be satisfied. Those of us in the social policy business have a responsibility to address the emotional needs. This is especially a concern for Irreni. Irreni promotes science as politics and science is perceived as unemotional and uncaring. The emotional needs of humanity need to be met forthright and with respect. Mark Twain once wrote, "Logic is the justification of ones own feelings.&qu

Tryants, Bullies, Ceremony and Tradition

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Hi! Happy Tuesday! Colin Kaepernick made a minor splash in the slow summer news cycle this week. Colin is the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers football team.  Quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem to make a statement about racial inequality. On Friday evening, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick stayed seated during the singing of the national anthem prior to his team's preseason game against the Green Bay Packers . It became a national story on Saturday after someone tweeted a photo of Kaepernick seated during the anthem. It became arguably the biggest NFL story of the preseason when Kaepernick explained that he refuses to stand during the anthem because, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid