If a workman only has a hammer everything looks like a nail. It has come to my attention the poor quality of work done in MS Repairs and new construction are not the high quality you would expect paying the high prices they demand plus tax. Many businesses lack the proper tools equipment skills and materials to do a job the way the engineers designed it to be done. This lack of concern and motivation extends to what is exported from MS giving it a poor reputation to the outside world. This reputation extends to being last place on many measures and keeps the state in poverty. The politicians are no exception.

I read DAVID P RUMBARGER wants an exemption for the furniture industry from Chinese tariffs. The whole idea of the tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Many of the parts and covers are manufactured in China where the workers get paid slave wages and have very few benefits or protections from hazards and industrial wastes. China is destroying the environment and people’s health. All this so the furniture company owners can make a profit from the low costs of the parts and pay low wages here in Mississippi.

A better solution is to manufacture all the components here in Mississippi using automation and high skilled employees. Being more efficient can bring down the costs to be competitive with the China made products. Mississippi does not have the employee skills to build the robots to make the furniture because the organizations like CDF keep wages low for its members. If the industry trained the employees to design and maintain automation everyone wins in Mississippi because the citizens will have more disposable income. We can export products rather than import them.

This solution requires lots of hard work and a tenacity to move Mississippi off of the bottom income of states. I suspect it will cause a big change in ownership of business which does not sit well with the CDF membership.

CDF and CREATE hold the power in Tupelo. There boards and membership is the Who’s Who of Tupelo, all the people that own the businesses and hold the economic power. These people are the big fish in the small pond. They do not want to be small fish in a big lake. The world is always finding out new things and ways to change life. People in local power do not want the completion of change. Many are second and third generation wealth holders that do not have the abilities of their ancestors. Mississippi is ranked last or close to last in many polls that add up to the quality of life. Health suffers as well as crime and education. Beliefs drummed into our children have trained them to obey and not create new and better ways to live. The dogma of the powerful controls the citizens to be workers for the elite. The leaders will do anything they can both legal and underhanded contrary to the morals they profess to hold to maintain control over the other citizens. Many of these leaders are not even aware of the ramifications of their actions as they too lack the view of a bigger picture of what quality of life is.

Scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have developed a way to use spinach to grow human heart tissue. Why has MS banned cloning? They have cut off their noise to follow the past to no progress. All tools can be used for good and bad so why focus on banning tools that have the keys to the future? Religion has good and bad results so why is it not banned also? Teaching morals, ethics, responsibility and manners does not have to be tied to faith in something that has no, evidence or high probability for a better future.

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

This book explains the mind better than most. The spiritual event can be created with manipulating the brain with chemicals. Each individual has a perception of reality and forms shortcuts to evaluate experiences so the body can survive and comprehend the information the senses are providing. Drugs fog the learned shortcuts and open the mind to more imagination that seems so real.

We have much to learn about the brain and its functions. Let the scientists do the testing and leave the Tim Leary’s to manipulating politics.

From the news: “DNC chairman Tom Perez said in the statement, “we recognize that America’s founding promise remains out of reach for too many families.”

Adding that “everywhere we look, our most fundamental values are under attack,” Perez referred to problems surrounding low-paying jobs, health care, immigration, injustice to people of color and members or the LGBTQ community, a recent Supreme Court decision on public unions, and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.”

Nature never made everyone equal as each has unique DNA and human body. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Some are enhanced with modern ingenuity, hard work, knowledge, abilities, environment and some luck. The government can not give you the life you dreamed of but it can treat you equal when applying the laws. Has this happened in reality, not exactly. Bias, selective enforcement, personality, connections, values, contributions, etc. make each life different and are treated differently. Government can not, and will not fix these differences. The more people expect government to make up for each person’s deficiency, the more corruption we will experience. The democratic republic will fall apart.

The best first step is expect nothing, everything you do to make things happen depends on yourself. Next be responsible for your own actions which lead to your experience in life. No one has control of luck.

Trying to predict what happened in the past is like finding a puddle of water and trying to determine the shape of the ice chunk it came from.

From Tupelo Talks Facebook;Tuesday night the City Council passed by a 4-3 vote legislation to make the Tupelo Transit system a reality. Factual research paid for by Toyota, thank you Toyota, shows 42% of Tupelo’s population are potential users of this service.

Do we believe that 16,000 people in Tupelo would take a bus up and down Main street and or up and down Gloster? Exactly how did a consultant arrive at this figure? What interest does Toyota have in the project? If the project does not turn a profit who is going to fund the shortfall? What is the benefit value the average taxpayer who the City Council spent their tax money on.

I understand much of Tupelo is in poverty and have a difficult time traveling to and from work. But this system is not going to do any better than those people riding a bicycle. By the way the taxpayer paid for bike lanes. The disabled, elderly, etc. would benefit better from rezoning residential areas to provide the food stores and services they need, in walking distance like most cities have.

Perhaps the City council and or the Newspaper need better information before spending money they did not earn. It must be nice to not have any skin in the game.

There are several drivers for the mammal declines. The introduction of invasive species that outcompete or spread disease to native animals is a big problem. Road deaths also take a toll as does pesticide use. According to previous studies, hedgehogs are suffering because people in urban and suburban areas keep their lawns and gardens too tidy—the animals need overgrown bushes, leaf litter and other habitat to survive. In rural areas, increased use of pesticides is killing off the insects the hedgies nibble on. “We are concerned about the lack of food in sterile fields where lots of pesticides and chemicals are used – there are also larger scale farms so there are less hedgerows for hedgehogs to use,”
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com

In 1900 world population was 1.3 billion. The North American continent had 100 million natives before the white man brought disease. In 1964 the U.S. population was 200 million.

Most of the world has a pecking order based on different factors. Wars have killed millions of people as clashes between values and cultures reached boiling points.

In today’s modern world we have almost 8 billion fighting for a better quality life and who gets to populate the world with their genes, values and culture. As the better educated realize that a better life depends on quality health and a limit to our ability to provide our children with the best chance for survival, we try to be more efficient in our use of resources and our ability to create those resources. Today a child costs $250,000 to raise to end of high school not counting the parent time spending with that child to provide the knowledge needed by them for a future. Add college and you have a sum few people in the world can provide their children much less 5-10 children.

The U.S. tax payer simply does not have the resources to provide these services to the billions of refugees who want a better life. How would you solve the problem?

It is getting more and more difficult to be a father in modern society. Being the head of a family responsible for raising children and supporting the family in so many ways have drove some men to an early grave. It costs $250,000 just to get a child through high school and much more through college. Then we have coping with the changing morals and ethics or challenging income skills. Hardest of all is finding time for the love and attention all children need. Forget being a pawn manipulated consumer by buying cards or presents and focus on how valuable time is being together.

Life is not easy and requires sifting through lots of information and experience which is filtered through our perceptions. Then we have self generated feelings, emotions, senses, memory, unconscious, imagination, unknowns, etc. Much of the brain’s activity is formed by neuron connections formed by habits.

We view the world in these individual ways as the genetic code makes our unique combination of brain chemicals the skew brain operations. Life is only as we know it and practice behavior that encourages good subjective feelings.

On the other side we have reality that is cause and effect of some factors we are aware of and many factors that are unknown. Nature that uses laws both know and unknown to produce cause and effect does not have the human qualities each of us is endowed with. This means most all the perceptions of fairness, morality, equality, etc. are human constructs. Human constructs form both politics and religion. Some human constructs define intelligence.

Intelligence allows us to have better probability to affect things that happen. Keep all this in mind the next time you take an action of any kind including eating, voting, working, consuming, thinking, believing, and any other human activity that continues humanity.