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Last night was a late one for my fiancee. I have probably mentioned it before, but she is a teacher. She currently has a student teacher in her class, and had to write his report last night (on top of all the work that she already has to do). I spent last night doing what I usually do – researching anything and everything.

When I had the chance to catch up with her for 15 minutes before bed, we just talked about everything going on in the world and how people handle this information. While she is just too busy to research “the truths” of the world, she hears most of it from me. I always try to provide unbiased information, and let her form her own opinions. She is oblivious to most of lies and deceitfulness of the world, although when I do give her information she takes it on board and processes it as she sees fit.

Others however, just don’t want to hear it. Intentional ignorance? I don’t know.

There’s a hundred different examples I could pick, but to name a few:

• Diet – meat, milk, etc. Unnecessary products that do us more harm than good.
• Finance – the sham industry. Built on debt, and fudging numbers.

They are probably the two most important to me, but even small things like Internet censorship I fear is for the wrong reasons.

Like most people, I have a fairly diverse group of friends. I went to a private school and have some VERY well off friends from there, but after working and spending more time mountain biking, many of my friends are now from the lower socioeconomic side of town. I know people from all sorts of different backgrounds, and with differing life stories. Regardless, a good 90% of them, appear to simply not be able to use their brain. Their life is purely about money, possessions and all of the ridiculous issues that go along with it.

I have mentioned in the past about how I try to get people to think. Trying to tell someone that eating meat will give them cancer is unfair. Not only will your average meat eating Australian bite your head off and disregard what you were trying to tell them, it is only my opinion that our diets will give us cancer. Until the World Health Organisation states that eating meat will in fact give you cancer, you can’t expect people to believe it. Rather, I try to produce the facts and let people do with them what they please.

My main aim is just to make people consider things. Whether it be about diet, or property values or whatever. Just consider it, and then research it. Better your life with the truth!

From the Global House Price Crash Forum, “maveri” wrote:

As we grow up we leave behind our childish view of the world and form our own opinions and source our own data for ourselves – we move on from our parents view and form our own.

What our parents told us about the world is viewed in a different light than what it used to be. We realise that their perspective is limited and designed to portray a certain aspect only and at times, the view that they portray is for their benefit in large measure, either for control or for protection or worse, for harm.

I find that the majority of my friends, and specifically my best friend (who just about disregards everything that I say as a conspiracy theory, even when the statistics are there to prove it) who have trouble “believing”, usually hold the same opinions of their parents. They are the sort of people that vote how their parents vote, and couldn’t tell you why, they eat how their parents eat, sleep how their parents sleep, and work and live and everything else – just as their parents do.

So talking to my fiancee last night, I said “either I have some uncanny ability to be able to open up my mind, and consider the extremes (not necessarily believe them, but entertain the idea), or others are extremely close-minded”. This probably sounds very arrogant – it’s not intended to be that way, it’s just born out of confusion from myself. I genuinely don’t know if others are ignorant because the truth is so scary, or if they just genuinely are oblivious to everything going on, because they just can’t compute it all.

Either that or I’m just going insane and everyone else is right.

I had some mates over on Saturday night, and the topic of property came up. I was half pissed at the time and lost my cool at one of my mates who decided to antagonise me over my opinion about house prices and the oversupply of housing in Australia.

You know those debates that you just can’t win? I don’t cope when having them. It frustrates me how you just talk to a brick wall and there is no give in their argument whatsoever. This particular argument was with someone who has never taken an interest in property or economics, and bases all of his opinions off of what his family has done in the property world (another speculator family).

The issue is, people rely on statistics and charts and newspaper articles to believe everything nowadays. From a statistical point of view, in 2006 (the last Australian census) 10% of Australia’s dwellings were unoccupied. The stats prove my point in a very basic sense, but are they really unequivocal?

When I go anywhere I see for sale signs all over the place – houses, cars, even things like sofas sitting on the foot path! I think garage sales have gone through the roof, and on the whole people are trying to free up their cash. Times are tough for a lot of people. If you are one of the lucky ones who has escaped the bad times, good luck to you, but make no mistake that there are a lot of people are out there hurting very bad.

Talking to friends in real life, or reading forums – people ARE losing their jobs. Some are working part-time now instead of full time, others just suffered a few grand pay cut. Statistics don’t prove this that well, and when you need to take averages into account, it’s often very hard to prove a lot of the things that you argue for.

…in 2006, 10% of Australia’s dwellings were unoccupied.

When you suggest to someone that there is an oversupply of housing in Australia, they absolutely scoff at the idea. It’s hard to get your head around something that goes against everything that everyone had told you when it comes to investing.

The most direct situation is when a tenant loses their job, another tenant will move into their house. As far as the landlord is concerned, there couldn’t be an oversupply in the market, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to fill his property with another tenant. While this can be true for a lot of people, if you look at it from a “whole of Australia sense”, the number of tenants decrease, while the number of properties stay the same.

When in dire straits, people will lower their standards – maybe sleep two to a room. You might find a family home with 10 people living in it. They split the cost of the rent and in the mean time two other investment properties sit empty.

In a deflationary environment rents can back peddle. After all, if people cannot pay your price, they simply cannot pay your price. It’s not a decision, it’s just blatantly not possible. As rents re-adjust and come back down to a reasonable level, the oversupply problem eases and people start to rent on their own again rather than sharing. It’s a very similar situation with the house values themselves.

When faced with this oversupply argument, most people just say that it’s not possible. When you link it to a house price crash, it’s just disregarded as a conspiracy theory or something along those lines.

As always, I just ask for people to consider the fact that I (and the others hundreds of thousands of people), may be on to something here. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t need people to take my word as gospel, I just want to see my friends and family consider it and do their own research, before committing to a rather large uneducated decision.

So I’m at a crossroads.

I have a lot of free time.. too much probably, and in that free time I like to read websites. Alternative media, whatever you want to call it, so I actually read the news that I want to find out about, not what the papers write just to make money.

Over the past year I’ve really been into the Global Financial Crisis and the housing bubble. When I started delving deeper though, I started to see the cracks in the stories and began to read up on related conspiracy theories, to get a better idea as to what is really could be going on in the world. The problem is that now I just don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. Have these sorts of stories been around for hundreds of years, or has each generation had these sort of “scares”? Have our parents heard this sort of bleak news when they were younger and everything has worked out for them, or is this just a new thing? Do I really pay attention to this information or do I ignore it?

Ignorance is bliss no doubt, I believe that on so many levels. Finance, diet, lifestyle, and so on. I know corruption is rife worldwide, and often it’s so rife it’s actually unintentional in a lot of cases. But organised corruption on a massive scale – do I just keep on riding my bike and push it out of my head?

I’m so stoked with life on so many levels, but just so lost went it comes to what I should believe in.

I’ve finally made one decision – I’m over religion. Growing up as a kid with an atheist father and a true Catholic mum (by true Catholic, I mean one that doesn’t go to church), and being sent to a Catholic school, I had religion in my life but never forced upon me. I’ve always had the option to believe in something but the option to believe in nothing. Nowadays I see religion for the ponzi scheme that it is. Good luck to those that have found God and choose to believe though, I have no issues with it. That’s out of the way now, but there’s more to decide on.

Do I choose to believe that the New World Order plans to create a global government, and make our countries states. Is the Global Financial Crisis an engineered crash by the Global Elite? Is population control a reality? Who really attacked the twin towers?

Obviously not every conspiracy theory is true, but why are we always so quick to assume that they are false? There are a lot of truths out there once you start to look into them. What is crazy and what isn’t?

This is where I’m at.

New World Order is everywhere at the moment, just check out Google News. It’s as though something that has always been labelled as crazy is now actually happening. This video abbreviates some info into a more professional presentation.

[pro-player width='490' height='230' type='FLV']http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHvTy_fVdJ8[/pro-player]

Ugh, I don’t want to be going insane. What should I believe in?

I was talking to a friend last Friday via email. Things were winding up for the weekend and we obviously both had time to talk.

Specifically, I mentioned having an argument with my future mother-in-law about weddings, and how my personal opinion of them is that they are a blatant waste of money, and the stress of the whole thing just erodes the actual meaning of the day. In the end, I believe that they have very little to do with the marriage, or the love that two people have for eachother, but moreso about the image that either the couple, or their parents want to portray to their friends and family. They want to be seen as the people with the really nice wedding, that “must have cost a LOT”, just in the same way that they need a nice flashy car, or a McMansion by the beach.

My ranting continued for quite sometime, as it usually does, and ended up going into the financial side of a wedding.

…fact is that the average cost of a wedding in Australia is $28,700 (or was 4 years ago.. it has probably gone up since then). The average household income is “$91,300″. In reality though, the median household income is more like $50,000 before tax. But lets say it’s $91,300. That’s $63910 after tax, assuming they are both being taxed at 30%, which they probably are.. both earning around $45k or something.

A LOT of living expenses are coming out of that figure. Chances are they’re still renting, driving two Australian made cars with poor consumption and require servicing frequently, which also drains their wallet. It doesn’t leave a whole lot of money. Most Gen Y’ers can’t save for a deposit for a house.. the government is giving them free money to get into debt which is a whole other topic which I shouldn’t get into now.

But the thing is, they just don’t have the dollars to pay for a wedding.

Now what I realised when I was explaining all this, was that there is a black and white difference between the facts, and an opinion.

When I have these “arguments” (or disagreements, or so forth), I usually end up very frustrated. I make a point of providing facts, and then afterwards explaining my opinion, which is derived from those facts. Unfortunately when I usually have these conversations though, the person I’m talking to isn’t interested in facts, only their opinion, and they have nothing to back their opinion up.

I’m happy to be told that I’m wrong, but if you’re going to do it, please have a reason why.

I don’t like to push my views on people, but from reading another blog on the internet, I have come to the conclusion that if you know something that can help others, tell them. It’s not always easy, in fact it’s very hard to be in the minority (being educated), but given a reversed role, I’d like someone to tell me if I was about to make a bad decision, or if I could do something to better my life.

The truth is in the facts.

I’ve realised that the facts are what I need to tell people, not so much my opinion. I try and drop them in everywhere now. (The rate of increase in the number of dwellings in Australia exceeded the rate of growth in the number of people in Australia by 41%. The rate of increase in the number of empty houses was 2.7 times the rate of population growth. *)

Facts are provided everywhere, and once you have verified they are in fact correct, you can make your opinion. Finance, diet, so on and so forth. There are facts, and they are all relevant for you to hold a view on the topic.

If I said to you..

“I think the healthiest way to live is to be a raw vegan, so you should be one.”

Who am I to tell you what to do?

But what if I said..

“Did you know that casein in milk has been proven to be a major cause of osteoporosis and other bone diseases in humans?”

You could then form an opinion from that fact. That opinion could be to believe it, and an action from that opinion may be to stop drinking milk.

Conspiracy theories are a perfect example of where facts can hold some vital information, but where the opinion of some presenters/producers/etc can take over and effectively turn a lot of people away from the original message that they wanted to send. Often there are facts that “the people” should know, but waking up one day and telling “the people” that “Obama is 21st century Hitler” is hardly going to go down well with the majority of people.

Stick with the facts. By all means let others know your opinion, but make sure they know it is your opinion.