PIANO'S AND CRITICAL THINKING
Now that I'm retired I've considered several activities to engage in. Engage in at my leisure and in a way that suits me. Hmmm. That sounded kinda selfish, but there it is and I can't really change the statement substantially and still say what I wanted to. So, one of the things I would enjoy would be to teach begginner guitar and mandolin to those who have a desire to learn how to play them. When teaching these instruments I try to include some music theory, (as much as I feel the student can stand), because music theory is applicable to any instrument they may care to learn in the future and will help them be a more complete musician. As it happens, the piano is the best way, in my opinion, to teach music theory. It's kind of like a physical representation of music theory and can open up a deep and effective understanding of music in general. What I've leaned in my music theory classes, and piano lessons has been invaluable in my advancement on other instruments I have learned to play.
    Critical thinking is similar in another area of our lives. If we learn to analyze things systematically we can apply that process to situations as they present themselves in our lives. We cannot use this process to make decisions, but we would be silly not to use the process to HELP us make good decisions. If I may offer a quick example. We may not have delt with new car salesmen before but even on our first encounter we can benefit from analyzing the process. When a salesman says your used trade-in car is worth 3 times more than your friend was willing to pay you you may think your friend isn't as good a friend as you first thought. But if you are appropriately skeptical of the amount of money the salesman is offering you you will likely learn that your car's value is actually more in line with your friends offer. A new car price often includes a significant markup to allow the salesman the chance to offer you the excessive amount of money for your car to give the illussion that they are being very generous to make the sale more likely. They may offer you 3,000 for a car that they will wholesale out for 1,000 while still making a nice profit on the deal. These facts are there for the learning but are seldom discovered. If we know the value of our car before the negotiation we become skeptical of the process and can learn how the new car selling game is played. Then we can negotiate from a position of strength. Strength provided by our knowledge of the process we are engaged in.
    This ability to reason is something our schools use to focus on. Unfortunately we have entered a time when colleges are more interested in advancing a particular ideology rather than teaching the ability to form an opinion based on the logical analysis of the available facts. Just like music theory can help us with our endeavor to learn any instrument, so, too, does critical thinking help us in all aspects of decision making.

RUNNING SCARED

Well, now. I can't for the life of me remember what the subject of this blog was going to be. This is why you should always finish what you start. Being the creative sort I've decided to compose a likely unrelated blog of the same name. Again, being the optimistic type I will look into my rose colored crystal ball and offer some predictions about my AGW friends. What will become of them and their supporting industry as the global temperatures begin to cool or possibly rise at the very slow pace which they have been over the last century or so. I mean, talk about running scared. At some point even people who didn't take Earth Science class in High School are going to start putting together the obvious inconsistencies in the climate "models" compared to the reality of the situation. Sure the media can extend the game a bit longer with all the "first time" stories about weather events and such. But at some point someone is going to look back at all those interesting, "on this day in weather history" scenarios and see that they are only "firsts" for a particular location. Weather has been quite unruly for millennia and we are not experiencing an odd collection of phenomena but in fact are experiencing the intrinsic nature of weather. It's truly fascinating. Look up something called a "Heat Burst". Middle of the night, the high for the day was maybe, 95, and some location in Oklahoma has a hundred mph wind and temperatures of 102. Geepers Wally. And if you hadn't heard of them before the media could blame it on AGW and most would believe them. How about those Mesoscale Convective Complexes of thunderstorms. There's another cool weather phenomenon. In my life here in Wichita, Ks, (I'm 60), I remember Summer's with over 40 days above 100. I remember a winter where the temperature was below freezing for well over a month. Peoples water supplies were freezing up because the frost line went so deep. Anyway, it may take a while, but the Climate Change profiteers will begin changing their story and then will eventually disappear. I just hope there is a semblance of economic activity left when they finally come clean and tell the truth. And the truth, just so you'll recognize it when they finally tell it, is that man's effect on the climate is real, but minimal in scope compared to the effects of the sun and the oceans.
    So, to summarize, in the future, the Al Gore types will indeed be "running scared"
Thanks and have a great day.

SOMETHING IS AMISS`

Have you ever had that gut feeling that things were not as they seem? That the alleged facts of a situation didn't seem to jive with the attitudes being exhibited? Or there was a feeling that you were missing the punch line of a joke you didn't know was playing out? Can it be that so many very intelligent people are being sucked into the AGW idea. Do we actually have to believe that the best argument for gun control is the horrible, recorded murder of a TV news personality and her cameraman? Are there really a significant number of leaders in our country that believe the 14th amendment bestows citizenship on a baby born to alien parents who are here in defiance of our laws? Really? REALLY? I'm a proud C student of both high school and college and I'm looking around at ostensibly the best and the brightest to whom we have entrusted the leadership of our country and am increasingly struck with the idea that we are a great country in decline being led by a bunch of idiots. Or are they? Climate change. Gun control. Open borders. Arguing these positions if one is inclined to believe in them is fine, but do we have to enter the twilight zone of dialogue to approach them? If you want to argue gun control why pick and choose an event every several months and milk it for all the emotional energy you can while ignoring the fact that in Chicago alone we have already had over 200 murders this year? Most of which are carried out with guns. Isn't this worth mentioning in a discussion? I guess not. We have to wait for a nut to kill a bunch of people at a school or in a movie theater. What gives? And climate change. Wow, you mean to tell me the climate is changing. What genius figured that out? Not only are we prohibited from questioning the computer models and the incomplete and shaky data that the models are using but the only way to fix this earth-ending cycle is to end the world as we know it. Nothing less will do. News flash. The Civil War didn't end discrimination as if you'd flipped a switch. The South and North did not immediately shake hands and say, "good game" after the war. The union was spared, and I'm so glad it was, but several amendments were introduced to help lay the foundation for the freedmen. A legal tool to try and encourage the assimilation of the blacks into the fabric of society. This is the spirit and intention behind the 14th amendment. Trying to expressly declare citizenship on the freed slaves. 
    Back to my original contention that something is amiss. The only way really smart people might say the things they are saying and do the things they are doing. The only way the media would use the template they are using to decide what stories to cover and what not to cover, is this. There is a class of people, many of whom darken the halls of Congress, and many who reside at influential positions in media or on university campi, (thank you Rush), who feel like a Utopia is coming within their reach and they are trying to move us away from our Constitution and Democratic Republic form of government. They are already acting like a ruling class and are working together, Republican and Democrat alike, to continue seizing power so that they can implement what they know to be best for us. While you may find fault in my theory, you can not deny that smart people are acting like idiots. And I think the safest way to deal with them, regardless of their grand scheme, is to kick the bums out.
    If you've been waiting for a sign, here it is.
LET'S WAKE UP AND TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK! 

CLIMATE CLIMATE

I was pondering the AGW conversation the other day and it hit me how odd it is that we are so worried about what is commonly referred to as climate change. It would seem to me that the real test of man's effect on the climate would be if he could keep it FROM changing. Now that would be truly incredible and much easier to prove man's involvement. We could argue that for many millennium our climate has been changing and now that man has arrived on the scene it is no longer changing. No more ice ages followed by periods of warming. Changes that the sun would have brought to our climate are being counter-acted by the by-products of man's existence. Cycles of warm and cold ocean currents are no longer measurable due to the many climatological changes we have brought to bear on this poor, impressionable, delicate cosmological flower we call Earth. Now that would be front page stuff. That should certainly be deemed "fit to print" by any self-respecting newspaper in the world. (if there are, indeed, some left). But no, we are treated on a daily basis with vague and ambiguous notions of how man has so negatively impacted his environment that we are doomed to destruction. If I may quote an old TV show here, "just the facts, ma'am." We cannot restrict our discussion to the facts because the facts do not decidedly point in the direction the ruling class would like to take us so we are left with seemingly intelligent people spewing what you could call propaganda except that the true propagandists would take exception to being lumped in with such a laughable community. It would seem their strongest argument is simple, "oh yea, well what if it's true?". That game becomes real interesting real fast and can quickly unravel even the strongest of societies. If we throw out 5 or 6 carefully chosen what-if's and then took particular action to counter- act those things which might occur we could quickly bring the world to an end even faster than if the what-if's turned out to be true. For today's research assignment please read the children's story of the Three Silly's. This will give you some insight as to the dangers of piecing together a string of what-if's.

As for climate change, the choice of words to frame this discussion should tell you something about the IQ's of those who are driving the fear-mongering. In case you didn't know, climate is change. The two words are all but interchangeable. It could just as accurately be called climate climate.