r0dman.com

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.

It must be nice to pick up a copy of the local paper, read it, and believe 100% of what is written. Maybe I’m just too cynical.

I read an article today about the Victorian state government buying 10,000 hectares of grassland, with an additional 50,000 hectares being considered. The land is being purchased “to compensate for rare grasslands lost with the expansion of Melbourne’s urban boundary”.

So land that the government sold off years ago for a song, now is being purchased back by the government at top dollar no doubt. When everyone is told that there is a “shortage of land”, clearly having the government buy it from the developers is just going to create a greater shortage, right? Either that or the government are trying to encourage a shortage – dare I say, to prop up the housing prices?

If your intentions are just to keep house prices high, it makes sense I suppose. Encourage population growth, limit new land developments, and force people to cram into the cities – it will force land prices to stay high.

Our good friend Obama plans similar things. Fifty cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore, once industrial boom towns, are now abandoned by business with no future employment in sight, and as a result most residents have followed suit. The neighborhoods are now filled with abandoned homes, and some low income families.

Decaying houses are bulldozed, and with the removal of existing residents, entire neighborhoods will be levelled, returning the land to nature. There’s not much information on how the displaced families are compensated for losing their house in this process!

I just can’t see information like this without ulterior motives staring me right in the face. The way I see it:

• Either there is a huge surplus in land (which it’s alleged that there isn’t) so it is ok to reclaim the land for nature, or
• Property values are far too high, and a shortage needs to be created to prop up these values.

I’m all for “greening the earth”, just not when it is an underhanded attempt to keep a bubble inflated.