Consider for a moment what it means to stop deciding what is true using your own mind. There will still be things you hold as true, but for what reason? Most likely for this reason: some important authority on Earth, present or past, has claimed certain things to be true, and you accept that authority as your guide. Now, since it is clear to all who pay attention that there are “authorities” of all types who will say all kinds of things, isn’t it also clear that it is YOU who decide which one to follow? You decide that this or that political party is right. You decide which kind of doctor to go to. You decide which “holy books” to follow; there are many to choose from after all.

In other words, there is no complete escape from the responsibility of thinking for yourself, since you must do so at least as far as choosing who to do your thinking for you prior to your relinquishing this responsibility. Add to this the obvious reality of your fallibility (not one of us is perfect), and it becomes very clear that it is extreme arrogance to ever think that you can rely on your mind to decide that this or that person or system or set of words is infallible for now and for all time. What’s the difference between saying you are perfect in your knowledge and saying you know how to choose the perfect purveyor of truthful knowledge with certainty? There is no difference. Either way you are claiming some kind of perfection.

To claim your own responsibility to think is not arrogance. It does not imply that you believe you’re always right (which would be arrogant). It is simply the recognition that nobody else is always right either, and to the extent that you follow any guidance outside of our own experience and mind, you do so by taking responsibility for choosing that guidance. If that choice is your responsibility, then all of your thoughts and beliefs are as well, right? To say otherwise is like saying that a drunk man has no responsibility at all for his actions because he is under the influence of alcohol–while ignoring his choice to be under that influence.

Intellectually there is no difference between a concentration camp killer saying he was just following orders and you saying you are just following the words of this or that holy book, guru, or savior. And morally, at the point where you sacrifice your mind to the claimed infallibility of any authority, it often becomes random coincidence and circumstance whether you happen to give up your mind to a good idea or a bad one. After all, you have openly declared that you will no longer judge such matters for yourself.

You may call me arrogant for saying that I think for myself, but I readily acknowledge that I can make mistakes. It is arrogant to think you are infallible, even if that infallibility you imagine is limited to choosing who or what system will think for you. Is there truly no chance that you are mistaken in your choice? Is there really no further thought required of you? And does that approach suggest humility, or just another insidious form of arrogance?

It is assumed there there is little discrimination against non-believers in western democracies, but is that true? Consider this recent quote from presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (during a televised debate in Las Vegas): “How can you have judgment if you have no faith? How can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?” Gingrich is essentially proposing a religious test for public office, something expressly forbidden by the Constitution (at least if done on more than an individual level).

According to a Wikipedia entry on the subject of discrimination against atheists, there are seven state constitutions which officially include religious tests that can prevent atheists from holding public office. In some cases the laws in these states also preclude a non-believer from being a juror or even a witness in a criminal case. These laws are from more than a century ago, largely unenforced for the moment, but that does not mean they couldn’t be, and to be honest, even repealing them is probably too politically dangerous for most lawmakers to consider.

The Boy Scouts of America does not allow atheists to be members, and though this is a private organization, this is certainly still discrimination. The pentagon, in response to legal challenges against this discrimination, had to stop sponsoring Boy Scout Troops. Whether or not the discrimination is by private organizations or even individuals, it is real. It is clear, for example, that a declared atheist cannot be elected to national public office even if he or she is the most qualified candidate.

A recent study showed just how much the believing public dislikes atheists. Reporting on this, Daisy Grewal of Scientific American starts with; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-atheists-we-distrust

“Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to. Will Gervais at the University of British Columbia recently published a set of studies looking at why atheists are so disliked. His conclusion: It comes down to trust.

Gervais and his colleagues presented participants with a story about a person who accidentally hits a parked car and then fails to leave behind valid insurance information for the other driver. Participants were asked to choose the probability that the person in question was a Christian, a Muslim, a rapist, or an atheist. They thought it equally probable the culprit was an atheist or a rapist, and unlikely the person was a Muslim or Christian. In a different study, Gervais looked at how atheism influences people’s hiring decisions. People were asked to choose between an atheist or a religious candidate for a job requiring either a high or low degree of trust. For the high-trust job of daycare worker, people were more likely to prefer the religious candidate. For the job of waitress, which requires less trust, the atheists fared much better.”

Yes, we are ranked right down there with rapists. Perhaps even sadder is the fact that even those who claimed to have no religious affiliation said they distrusted atheists when surveyed. Self-hating atheists? Or is it the psychology; do even atheists feel that people are more trustworthy when they feel that a god is watching? There might be some truth to that. Studies–and experience–certainly show that when people are watching we behave better, so it makes sense that belief in a supreme surveiller could affect our behavior in positive ways. But the history of crime, war, racism and genocide show far more perpetrators who are believers rather than atheists, so maybe this argument is weak.

Yes, there is discrimination against atheists, and most Americans are guilty of it.

The Value of Things

This is an article about the contextual nature of value. We tend to think about the value of things in currency terms and in terms of “market value,” and that’s a useful perspective. But things are worth something different to each of us in reality. Gold coins would be just another toy for a baby, for example, and vacation to France might have a value of $10,000 to one person while having no actual value to another. I further explore what it means to have value.

Deep Thinking

This is a how-to article from my brainpower website. I start with the assumption that anyone who can read the page has what it takes to think very deeply. Then I explain a few simple techniques for doing so.

Too Smart for Your Own Good?

We are all too smart for our own good at times. Our intelligence is used against us by our fears. Thus we can easily and logically explain why this or that goal is not possible, or why we are not able to do something which would be beneficial to us. I look at this common human problem and suggest a few solutions (this is also on IncreaseBrainpower.com).

The Cheapest Homes in 2012

Every year I try to update HousesUnderFiftyThousand.com with new information on all the towns and cites previously covered. It has been interesting to watch over the years as prices have risen and fallen–and risen again in some locales. I think we have about thirty places covered now, with some quick notes about how many cheap houses are available, and what has changed.

Body Language

I recently added this page to TheSecretInformationSite.com after reading the book Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman, which covers research about body language and how it affects us, among other topics. Did you know that if a man sees a woman with dilated pupils he will judge her to be more attractive, even if he is entirely unaware of the dilation?

Raw Luck – Does it Exist?

A customer who bought my book, “Secrets of Lucky People,” e-mailed me to asked if I believed in what he called, “raw luck.” I used his letter and my response for this page on GoodLuckSecrets.com.

For example, this morning I wrote a new page for my website on how to remove carpet stains. You can see it here if you care about the ongoing debate between carpet lovers and those who prefer wood floors: Carpet Versus Hardwood Flooring. No, I am not thrilled about writing on the subject of carpet, but that little website pays all the household bills, so I figure I should devote thirty or forty minutes to it every week or two.

Fortunately it is easier than ever to write about anything now. This is, of course, due to the internet. All the information you might need is right at your fingertips. That article/page would have taken a half day of research using the phone or local library in the past. With a quick search or two online I was able to research it, write it, format it, and publish it on the website in thirty-five minutes.

Now you might think this is just hack work (well it is sort of), but the truth is you can quickly create a decent and useful article in this way. In this case I was able to glean the best insights from several different sources within a few minutes, and then combine them all to write a page which had a little more information than any one of those sources had. That makes it a good quality resource for people searching for information on this topic.

I happened to be a carpet cleaner many years ago, which is why the site exists. It does help to write on a topic you know something about. But that prior knowledge and experience is less necessary than ever for writers. In any case, whether you are writing content for a webmaster or hoping to get that novel finished, start writing every morning. This will be the second thing I publish online today, and it is 8:25 am. People have asked how I make a living–this is it.

Or is death certain? That’s one of the many things I explore as I fall to my death all day long in Chapter One. This is an extended version of the classic “thought experiment” used by Albert Einstein and others. In Einstein’s case, he imagined things like running alongside a beam of light, or a man falling from a building. He used these exercises in imagination to change the face of modern physics.

In other chapters I look at many ways to think deeply and creatively about almost anything.

The book was really finished more than a year ago, but I got busy with many other projects. In order to get this one out there I finally decided to skip the paper version for now. The book  has been published only on Amazon Kindle. You can get a copy here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006U1OQ2Q

Fortunately, if you do not have a Kindle reader, it costs nothing to get the version that you use on your computer, which is available here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

And I have a website dedicated to the book, with excerpts and more, here:

http://www.thethousandmilehole.com

If you want to really add depth and creativity to your thinking, check out this book.

1. Negotiate

It may seem that as a first time author you should just take the deal given to you, and in general that may be true. But there is always room for negotiation. When the contract was sent to me by Wiley and Sons, I had problems with four or five relatively minor parts of it. They  agreed to changes in all of them. The details are unimportant here, since they will be different in your case, but I didn’t ask for  more of an advance or higher royalties. I suspect that first-time authors would not often be able to negotiate higher royalties or advances unless they are famous or in the news.

2. Buy Your Books Online

Should you buy your own copies of your book from the publisher? Maybe; but check the price that you pay and if it only pennies more to buy online, get your copies there. Many publisher/author contracts will require that the author purchase a certain number of books. This is not so much to boost sales as to ensure the publisher that the author has enough faith in selling the books to justify the offering of an advance. This is negotiable, however, and if you assure the publisher that you’ll be buying books as you need them (especially if you plan to do book signings or speeches), you can probably limit the required number of books you will have to buy initially.

The reason to do this is that books purchased directly from the publisher using your author discount will not be counted as sales by Bookscan and other sales tracking services. If you buy them from Amaazon or Barnes and Noble online they will be counted. This may makes sense, because the difference in cost could be negligible.

For example, if I buy copies of my “101 Weird Ways to Make Money” from Wiley right now, I pay the same 50% that bookstores typically pay, which is $9.98 (the retail price is $19.95). Then I pay for the batch to be shipped, and I get no royalties on these books. My net cost would be about $10.25 per book. Meanwhile, at one point early in the book launch, Amazon was selling the book for $11.76, and with no shipping charge on orders over $25. Since I get a royalty of $1.50 for these sales, my net cost was just $10.26–just about the same. But these sales are counted by Bookscan, pushing the book up the lists of best selling books. So if I buy 15 or 20 at a time I can crack into the top ten for the week in some categories like “business books.” That brings more visibility and potentially more sales.

It may save you some money to get your books from your publisher, but at least check the numbers to see if the difference is worth not having the sales counted.

3. Get Your Affiliate Commission

As soon as my book was available my editor sent me a link to the Amazon.com sales page. I used this in my newsletters and on my websites. I noticed that included in the link was the Amazon affiliate code for Wiley and Sons Publishing. In other words, they were selling the books to Amazon, but then also earning an affiliate commission on each sale I made using that link. I can’t have an affiliate account with Amazon (they closed all affiliate accounts in Colorado to avoid dealing with new laws that required collection of sales tax), so I leave the Wiley code there. It costs me nothing to help Wiley make a little more with my book.

On the other hand, if you have or can have an affiliate account with Amazon or other online book vendors, why not make more money on each sale? It isn’t a lot, but it adds up. At the moment my book sells for about $14.50 on Amazon, and if I could get that 4% affiliate commission when I sent buyers there, that would be an additional 58 cents on each sale. That’s 38% more than the usual royalty of $1.50.

Reasons for the US government debt downgrade:

• Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• Debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Remove eight zeros and pretend it’s a household debt and budget:

• Family income for the year: $21,700
• Amount the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit cards: $16,500
• Total credit card debt: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385

This is a dramatic way to present the current state of affairs in Washington. But although the analogy makes it seem very clear, it also over-simplifies in some ways. For example, if we were to follow the logic suggested here, the government should just declare bankruptcy and stop paying on the debt. Certainly a family making $21,700 has no way to pay for routine necessities and to pay down a debt of $142,710 (interest alone would eat up all income at credit card rates). But I doubt the originator or sender of this email meant to suggest the US government stop paying debts.

I really liked this one, and I will always use analogies myself to make things easier to “understand.” But I will also try to keep those quotation mark around the work “understand,”–at least in my mind–because we never completely grasp anything in life, and our desire to do so is often weaker than our desire to simplify.

Chapter 8

The Business of Chasing Criminals

Bounty Hunting Careers

I was a skip tracer many years ago. Sometimes confused with bounty hunting, skip tracing is simply finding people. I did this primarily by phone when working for a collection agency, and I had to actually physically locate the person being sued when I was a process server. Bounty hunters, also called “bail enforcement agents,” use skip tracing techniques, but their job is more interesting and dangerous than simply locating someone.

They are primarily hired by bail bond agencies. Suppose a court sets bail at $50,000 for someone charged with theft. A bail bond agency might charge the accused $5,000 (and sometimes require collateral), and then give or guarantee the court the $50,000, which is forfeited if the defendant doesn’t make it to trial on time. In this case, rather than lose the $50,000, the bondsman pays a bounty hunter 10 to 15 percent of that amount to find the defendant and bring him to jail to await his next court date. This can be difficult and dangerous work, but bounty hunters catch as many as 31,000 bail jumpers per year, with an almost 90 percent success rate.

Money

The question of how much you can make is a difficult one. It obviously varies with your success rate and how many cases you handle. If you work for a bounty hunter as hired help, you might be paid by the job, or a percentage of what he makes. Several websites estimate annual income at between $50,000 and $80,000 for bail bond agents, but without reliable sources. Suffice it to say that some full-time bounty hunters pay all their bills with their work.

Bigger money is made with running your own bounty hunting business, and is also a function of the size of the bail in each case. A job that pays 10 percent of a $200,000 bail bond can make for a good month. Of course those larger fees usually come with more dangerous bail jumpers. Finally, other revenue sources include starting your own bail bond agency, writing about your work, or getting famous. Dog the Bounty Hunter, of the television show by that name, certainly makes more from his program than he ever did as a bail enforcement agent.

How to Get Started

You need a license in some states, while others don’t require any formal training or licensing; only a contract with a bail bondsman is needed to start working. California requires a background check and training courses, and bounty hunting is illegal in Kentucky. Ask a local bail bondsman what the laws are in your state, and what you can do to train for and get hired to do this work. These jobs are not typically advertised.

Clerical work in either a bounty hunter’s or bail agency’s office is a good way to get a feel for the industry, and for that particular employer. It is best to start with a team or at least one other bounty hunter, rather than trying this on your own.
Resources

Modern Bounty Hunting: A Real-Life Guide for the Bail Fugitive Recovery Agent, by Rex Venator – (Paladin Press, 2005): A book by a guy in the business.

http://www.bountyhunt.com/new_hunter.htm: A guide to getting started, put together by a professional bounty hunter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounty_hunter: A decent overview of the history of bounty hunting and relevant laws, plus a lot of links to more information.

They are collections of essays, some of which I wrote years ago, and many more recent ones. People think I am outspoken about issues, but the truth is they don’t know the half of it. If I’m not asked I rarely offer my opinion on a matter when talking to others. I do not want to offend people just to show off my own beliefs.

On the other hand, I do feel that writing is very different, and these books will be very offensive to some readers. The difference is that a person chooses to read something, and so the reader is effectively asking for the opinions or ideas. If he or she is then offended, the book can be put down; the reading can stop.

Yes, I am atheistic, but that’s just the start. I happen to think differently than most people about many common cultural ideas and beliefs. And yes, I intend to get attention with some of the titles of both the books and the essays contained in them (the title of the first radical book in the series will offend many people). It is necessary to get attention to find more readers, and if people are offended, they can simply close the web page and not buy the books.

I realize that I am being very vague here, but that is intentional. The books will not be out for another few weeks, and I want to generate interest now, but I prefer to wait for the nasty emails to begin (I already get some for what I write, and I have withheld the more radical stuff for a long time). Stay tuned…

Most of us automatically assume that we know who we are and that we control our lives purposefully and consciously, at least most of the time. Chances are you suffer from this illusion to some degree, along with the rest of us. The following short story might help with your disillusionment. That word usually has negative connotations for people, but it is typically defined as “a freeing or a being freed from illusion.” Isn’t that kind of freedom something exciting and desirable?

 

Bob turned on his computer one morning and it told him, “You have too much to do today, so you’d better start rushing.”

 

“Yes, I’d better hurry,” Bob agreed, moving faster as his blood pressure went up a little bit, and he thought about what he needed to do.

 

“You’ll feel better if you make a list,” the computer told him, so he did that, even adding things to the list that he had already done, and then crossing them off. The computer said this would prove his productivity. He then busied himself with the many tasks which the computer had assigned him, and put off working on other goals which may have seemed important in the past.

 

Bob didn’t even notice that the computer had changed the logo on his files. It had previously said, “Bob Bryce – Thinker of New Thoughts.” Now it said, “Bob Bryce – The Hard Working Writer.”

 

“Wars are necessary,” the computer told him, and he stopped making notes about how economic ties could prevent wars. He changed the article he was working on into an essay explaining why war would always be needed at times. It would be two more centuries before the idea of purposely engineering economic interdependence effectively brought an end to wars between countries.

 

“Walls are needed to hold up the roof,” the computer reminded him when his mind wandered toward inventing new kinds of housing. He had to agree. Someone else would eventually invent the Exterior Roof Support System, which enabled the development of homes with walls and rooms that could be rearranged as family needs changed. For now it was just a silly idea that floated through Bob’s mind.

 

“Send in that resume,” he was told. He sighed and put his resume in an envelope. It was true that the newspaper job would be safer than the alternatives, just as the computer had explained. He would have preferred to be a freelance writer and innovator and to travel the world, but the logic of the computer could not be argued with. He followed its orders and went about its business.

 

The phone rang and he saw that it was Frank. The computer reminded him what a fool he made of himself at Frank’s house. It told him it would be better if he just didn’t answer.

 

Bob eventually tired of his work and sat in front of the television to watch the news. In the background the computer reminded him how he was supposed to feel about each item on the news. It explained his opinions to him and defended them against any contrary feelings that tried to sneak into Bob’s consciousness.

 

When his mother called, the computer instructed Bob to lie about what he was doing. When a friend stopped by with an idea, the computer made sure that Bob could explain why it was a bad idea, making his intelligence very clear in the process. The friend left upset, and Bob felt bad about it for a second, but the friend should have appreciated the logic presented to him, the computer insisted.

 

This is how Bob’s day continued, with the computer telling him what to think and do every step of the way.

You have probably guessed that this computer puppet master represents the unconscious mind. The chapter goes on to explain how we mistake our minds for ourselves, and what we can do about it. I tried to make the book an easy read, and also very practical as a guide to thinking more clearly.

You can order the paperback from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982654707

You can get it as a Kindle book here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003LBRIZK

You can read more excerpts here: http://www.beyondmentalslavery.com