Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently part 3

I watched the film Ghandi with Sir Ben Kingsley.  It portrays Ghandi amazing.

If you’ve ever had your paradigm shifted you know that before it shifted you were ignorant.  Once shifted you may be angry that you were ignorant, then you may try and share what you learned with others, and unfortunately many people may not give a rats behind as to what you have to say, and when that happens you may get depressed.  What one would hope to happen if that happens is that someone in that situation would make the final step and realize they’re the only they can change/worry about and it isn’t their duty to force a shift in another’s paradigm.  Certainly one would help with the shift if there were curiosity or a desire to do so from another individual.  Hence why missionaries go out, schools exist, and life/business coaches exist. 

So I feel like things in the world are crazy.  News flash I know lol.  In the midst of the craziness and becoming aware of certain parts of the crazy I eventually came to the above realization, i.e. that I can only change myself.  Some advocate for that, but also think that retaliation/violence is a way to accomplish that.  My conclusion is that may only exacerbate the problem and extend the current paradigm’s way of doing things.  This led me to Ghandi and doing things a different way in the face of craziness/oppression. 

So I gobbled up the movie Ghandi.  Reason being is that I had been taught/told/portrayed to that he was a very strong proponent of civil disobedience, non-violence, and equality for all.  Then I listened to a show that discussed some of the not so known history of Ghandi. 

For starters the government of India actually funded a large portion of the production of Ghandi and of course the string that was attached to that was that he only be painted in a very positive light.  Turns out dude was crazy racist towards blacks and the very low class of Indians.  He was married at a very young age.  At that time he was caring for his father.  One time when being intimate with his wife he came back to find his father had died and apparently blamed himself for that for years and years and his intimacy with the wife either almost died off completely or was gone.  What wasn’t shown/portrayed at all about the guy is that he thought he needed to prove his strength for resisting sex after this incident by sleeping naked with people, family and very young girls included when he was really old, and he’d ask them to massage him and his goal was to not get aroused.  Turns out this so disgusted some of his inner circle that they left him.

Shortly after learning about this I also learned about Nelson Mandela and some of his craziness.  As disclosure I didn’t really look up to Nelson.  What I will say though for Nelson and Ghandi is that they’re both figures that are pedaled out to us as these great guys that we should look up to and admire and follow.  When I learned the other side of these guy’s lives, including the life of MLK, I realized that anything popular these days probably isn’t what it is all cracked up to be.  Which is kinda crazy to think about considering I’ve spent the past two or three years learning about things that aren’t really what they seemed and yet I seemed to gobble up Ghandi.  Well unfortunately I’m not really gonna let that happen.  I will continue to listen to all and follow none and try and take the good from the bad.

Thank goodness for the perfect example.

Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently Part 2

One thing I've learned about recently is the minimum wage and how destructive that is.  I myself was grateful for it at one time during my middle/high school days because I knew that if I got a job I'd at least be able to make $6.50 per hour, which I think was my first paying job wage.  What is unfortunate about the minimum wage is that it puts a floor on who you can hire.  If you wanted to hire people to say um pump your gas for you or bag your groceries or help you do you laundry you wouldn’t dare pay $6.50 per hour, but maybe you’d pay that person $3.00 per hour.

One thing I learned about the minimum wage is that it was instituted to keep blacks out of the work force.  People/employers/politicians know that you’re paid, typically, what you are worth.  Well if you have no skills then you won’t get hired.  If entry-level jobs and pay are always above your skill level then you can never get started and land that first job.  That is pretty disgusting that that is why they instituted the minimum wage. 

This becomes more apparent of a concept if you raise the minimum wage to say $50 or $100 per hour.  All things the same, i.e. $50 or $100 still buys the same amount right now as it does once the minimum wage gets raised, anything/job below those amounts will disappear and move elsewhere to get accomplished as they still need to get done.  When you consider that $50/hr is a 100k/year job and $100/hr is a 200k/year job that’d pretty well wipe out all lower/middle class jobs, which of course make up most of our economy here in the US.

What is interesting, totally disgusting, and another notch for why I want to home school my kids when it comes to minimum wage is that after 12 YEARS……120 months…TWEEEELVE YEARS of public schooling, i.e. high school graduate, how much are you worth in the economy?  Honestly you’re worth whatever the minimum wage is when you graduate.  You know that.  I know that/lived that.  The public system teaches you NOTHING economically pertinent that increases your abilities.  I was listening to a Warren Buffet thing the other day and he invested with this lady who was running a furniture store and she didn’t even know how to read or write lol.  He invested millions with her and she ran the thing.

12 years…sheesh…..you can go from not knowing where your hippocampus is to a brain surgeon in 12 years.  I crap you not.  You can go from knowing NOTHING about biology to commanding 6 figure plus income as a medical specialist.  If that isn’t a slap in the face for how colossal of a waste of time, energy, human spirit, growth, creativity, then I don’t know what is.  And yet currently we settle for 12 years of that shit and accept minimum wage as just something that makes sense and people do for their first job, even if it is just a short stepping stone to another opportunity where they’re making more than minimum wage.

One last point on minimum wage I learned the other day as it pertains to sound money.  Back in the day they paid workers minimum wage, but because of the silver metal content in the money, i.e. dimes and quarters, a minimum wage worker of today would have to make at LEAST $20/hour to equal what somebody was paid in the 1960’s.  How stupid is that?  

Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently

MLK, Martin Luther King was the leading proponent for blacks having equal rights.  Yesterday I learned that this figurehead, that is the only person to have his own national holiday in the United States, and is known for fighting for the moral rights of others, wasn’t quite all he measured up to be.  Turns out he slept around with tons of women.  He was being followed by the FBI and tracked to the point that they video recorded him cheating on his wife, and then sent the video to his wife. 

Also turns out he plagiarized the crap out of his works/speeches, including a portion of his “I have a dream” speech.  Apparently something like 60% of his master’s thesis was plagiarized from one source and the remaining percentage from another source.

Last but not least he was surrounded by and believed in communism himself, minus the atheism portion, which in spite of his rampant cheating went against his preacher beliefs.  The point was made, and I’ll share it here, that it would be like having a mother Teresa or some other figurehead surrounded by hyper Al Qaida informants.  Communism has killed hundreds of millions of people.  Way more than Nazism, not that either are acceptable, but it is just to illustrate how crazy it’d be to believe in and listen to those kinds of advisers.

Another thing that I hadn’t really thought about until listening to this philosopher is spanking and taxes.

As a society we don’t like evil.  We can bear it however when it is dressed up and made to appear ok. 

One example is the millions of photos taken during the Iraq war.  There aren’t laws forbidding them being shown, but our mainstream media doesn’t show them.  Nobody shows/talks about the depleted uranium rounds that were shot at tanks that have now radiated into the air and caused leukemia levels to skyrocket in Iraq.  We as Americans are happy we won the war, but we don’t want to see…at all, at what cost.

Another example may be voting for socialist ideals/candidates, but when shifted slightly we see how ridiculous it is.  For example lets say we put into practice socialist ideals when it comes to body parts.  How do you figure you ask?  Say someone is born blind or with two bad kidneys.  A socialist would say that all should be equal and what would be fair is to take one of my/your eyes/kidneys and give it to the unfortunate person.  Why this clashes so much with reality is that as beings and owning our own body we inherently understand self-ownership and “human rights”.   Yet when we impose taxes, by force of imprisonment at the barrel of a gun, taxes by the way represent US and OUR time and effort, we’re stealing from people what inherently belongs to them.  We’ve made it ok though because we’re ok with taking from those who can’t protect themselves from the very beginning.  Thus back to spanking.

When a child is spanked we are taking away from them.  We’re enforcing our will on them and they are helpless to prevent it.  We green light this form of punishment as a society and so it should come as no surprise that we also roll over/accept later on in life as adults that it is ok for our government to take away from us without us being able to do anything about it.

The good news is that spanking is slowly going away.  In the LDS church we often talk about and are taught that the family is the nucleus of the home and society in general.  What we allow or don’t allow in our homes will inevitably trickle down to our local, state, and federal governments.  If we want to stop being exorbitantly taxed then we must stop the rampant inequitable punishment that is occurring within our own four walls.

As info on tax revenue and fiscal health on a state basis see the following for a paradigm shifting experience.  The following 7 states don’t have a state income tax (HUGE amounts of extra income):

·                       Alaska

·                       Florida

·                       Nevada

·                       South Dakota

·                       Texas

·                       Washington

·                       Wyoming

The 5 states in the best fiscal condition from 1^st to 5^th are as follows:

Alaska (no state income tax), South Dakota (no state income tax), North Dakota (shale oil boom currently), Nebraska, and Wyoming (no state income tax).

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/17/state-in-the-worst-fiscal-condition-is/

You would think that the states that didn’t have all this extra revenue in the form of state income tax would be at the bottom of the list, but indeed they flush out the top three out of five spots.  To me it just shows that these states are showing restraint and are much more careful with their funds then those that have much more abundantly.

The last paradigm-shifting thing I’ve come across is marijuana and the war on drugs.  For years I’ve been told it is the worst thing ever and makes potheads and kills your brain cells.  While this may be the case I also know that alcohol alone kills 4 times as many people as all the users of drugs each year.  I know that the number of deaths from marijuana are almost 0 in the United States whereas I know the number of deaths from cigarettes and the cancer they cause is astronomical.  Were you to ask someone though which one is safer they’d tell you that a cigarette definitely is over a marijuana cigarette.  They’d be wrong. 

I wonder what other things I’ll come across that I think are ok and good and normal or are bad and evil are quite the reverse.

Share with me what paradigm shifting things you've learned about recently.