If you are friend of Kwame, the former Mayor of Detroit, his family needs your help. He was forced to leave his position under federal government pressure.

http://friendsofkwame.com/

@gerald re #29 post, I would have to say I agree with your post almost in its entirety. Your rant doesn't seem so acrimonious this time, far more reasoned and provoking then decrying all of America. However, I would say that the Con's are far more lock step and focused, whereas the left is scattered and busier with infighting then forming a unified message. As group-think goes, yeah the right is more effective, it is one of their strengths (nice to see the T-baggers f that up for them too).

N

@maxrot: very entertaining, none the less..

@Gerald..the neo-cons, esp. Karl Rove are brilliant, but even worse is they are amoral and lack ethics; at least outside their circle of friends and family. They;re great at denial and not thinking about the basic rules of life most of us learned in Sunday school. or they think "a rising tide lifts all boats" or some other such slogan.

Conditioning and Modifying Behavior

I want to start by saying that the conservatives are brilliant. Yes, they upset me but they are brilliant. Democrats are stupid. The late Robert Novak said that the Democratic Party is the stupid party.

What makes the conservatives so brilliant? They are conditioning the American psyche to modify their behavior. They use both conditioning and behavior modification. You can modify behavior by repetitive deeds and words. For example, if the conservatives fling enough crap on the wall, some crap will stick. You keep flinging crap and more crap will stick. Conservative tactics are brilliant and we must give them credit for their creativity.

I do a lot of ranting and venting with the hope that some of my rants and vents will be embedded into your brain. I rant and vent with truthful articles and words. The conservatives are effectively changing American behavior by conditioning the American psyche with nonsense.

Make no mistake the conservatives are brilliant.

Americans are on a roller coaster ride with this boom, bubble, bust economy.

If you want to understand how the conservatives are using conditioning, you will need to gain more information from B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning and the use of behavior modification to shape Americans’ behavior. The conservatives are using reinforcement to shape our behavior. We can deprive people of their needs to shape their behavior. Reinforcement or lack of it will shape behavior.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Hey! Every day listener, first time blogger.

Yesterday you were caught off-guard by what, someone you were interviewing about the whole immigration thing. He was making the case that Whites built America and it's the superior White people who built modern society, yada yada, european exceptionalism. (Meanwhile of course, the same people are claiming that Europe is melting cuz of their economic policies.)

Anyway, you should read this book (in your copious free time): <em>Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies</em> by Jared Diamond. ISBN 0-393-31755-2 for the first edition, wwnorton.com publisher. Pulitzer prize. They made a TV series on PBS but it was mostly different topics and not the same.

It's a bit cerebral but describes, for instance, why the Spaniards came to America and captured the kings of the Incas & Mayas, rather than Inca boats arriving in Spain and conquering Queen Isabella. He studies nine cradles of civilization and how fast they advanced relative to each other.

Basically, the eurasians were lucky: they had wheat, they had horses, they had flax to weave into cloth, and they had a wide variety of other plants and animals they could domesticate. And they had a continent where domesticated species could move east and west and survive in similar climates.

Meanwhile, the Africans had zebras: nasty and can't be tamed. The Mayas had corn, which had to be bred, over thousands of years, to reach a usable cereal crop. They also had no Iron, so they never had an Iron Age. North America had no weaving plants. Nobody in the americas had pack animals, and therefore never had wheels, so anything transported needed human backs. All these were a significant limitation on their civilizations.

He has a chapter, 'How to make an Almond', where he describes agriculture and how humans slowly developed it, and how it gave such a big boost to the Fertile Crescent. Wild wheat was edible as-is, and was high in protein. Rice was all carbs, as was corn. Etc.

So this book ought to give you some more ideas on how to counter claims of white superiority, undercutting its foundation.

Keep up the good work! Thanks!

@Maxrot: re:greed and sociopathy: welcome to the 21st century

I thought generosity was the opposite of greed, and empathy was the opposite of sociopathy.

N

@maxrot: you scamp! perverting me like that...where's the internet police when you need them? oh yeah...you just showed me. :)

@Mstaggerlee re: grammar: the funniest sign I ever saw was an immigrant family's attempt to translate the name of their chinese restaurant into english, and they used a computer translation program. Here's what they named their restaurant in huge letters:

"Translation Error Exception" :D

@maxrot..can you add nipples?