The New Ideas Blog

Somebody asked me what was in my ebook “99Lies,” which comes with The Secrets Package. Here are some samples, but I have to warn you. These are “teasers” - meant to get you interested in the package. For the “rest of the story,” you’ll have to check out The Secret Information Site.

Lie # 1 - You Should Change The Oil Every 3,000 Miles

Why has 3,000 miles become the standard for oil change frequency in cars? Is it because that’s what’s best for your car? No! It is because it has been effectively promoted by the oil change industry. This lie makes them Read the rest of this entry »

I used to argue against government welfare programs on moral grounds. My reasoning? Here’s the short version: If you don’t have the right to take my money to pay your bills, you don’t gain that right by having a government do it for you. Now I tend to favor limited welfare because survival is a higher value than my right to keep all of my money. But there’s another reason to be critical of welfare programs: They don’t work very well. Welfare that works should not just feed people, but help them to feed themselves.

I come from a background that not only included a very low income for years, but also included Read the rest of this entry »

The idea of disposable religions came to me during a conversation about the difference between spirituality and religiousness. It seems that whatever the spiritual origin is, a religion cannot help but become stifling and anti-spiritual. A true spirituality should allow for truth to enter whatever it is, after all, and religions uniformly claim a final and unchanging undertstanding of the truth.

The dilemma here is that it’s helpful for people to join together to share love, lessons, and teachings, but any regular gathering based on spiritual ideas has the tendency to Read the rest of this entry »

Note: The following is a quick rewrite from my site www.TheSecretInformationSite.com.

You may think you’re getting the true election results when you watch the evening news. You might think that outright lies from reporters are uncommon. They probably are rare. But there are many ways to hide the truth without lying.

News networks report their “projections” long before the votes are counted, so there is room for error. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. The fact is that Read the rest of this entry »

Here are two more random ideas that I have been playing with, starting with an invention idea for insect control.

The Bug Vacuum

I was once in a Bonanza Restaurant in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and they actually had a “bug zapper” inside. It’s distasteful enough to have listen to insects being electrocuted outside on a patio, and to have a pile of dead bug bodies below the zapper, but inside a restaurant? In any case, I recalled this the other day and it got me thinking about what kind of devices could be used to control flies and other flying insects inside buildings.

The “Bug Vacuum” would be a relatively simple device that detects an insect near the entrance and then Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This post on political manipulation is a quick rewrite of a page from my website www.RadicalNewThoughts.com

There is an old joke that starts by asking you, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Whether you answer yes or no it sounds like you are admitting to being a wife beater. It’s a practical joke based on the use of an implicit premise - that you beat your wife. The technique is used for more than a laugh though. It’s also a favorite of politicians, who use it to manipulate public opinion.

You see, political manipulation is accomplished by Read the rest of this entry »

Of course there are opportunities during a recession, including those listed below. In fact, many “lucky people” will prosper in these tough economic times. If you want to be one of them, you have to start to think like them.

To begin with, you might want to turn off the stream of bad news on the television. You get the picture, and there isn’t actually that much “usable” information that you can get from these sources. Believe me, you’ll hear about Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading Tim magazine the other day, and they had an article titled; “10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now.” They ranged from the “reinventing” of the highway system (about using the right-of-way for new trains and power lines) to “repurposing” of suburbs (for example, by making empty shopping malls into new town centers). The first on the list though, was about the following idea:

“Why Your Job is Your Most Valuable Asset”

It got me thinking about jobs (thinking about them is fine, but I wouldn’t want one). I even wrote a page about the topic for the site. You can find that here: New Job Ideas. The Time article had suggested that  people are beginning to cultivate their job skills and experience in the way they used to lavish attention on their retirement accounts and home equity loans. In other words they are Read the rest of this entry »

You may recall my recent post titled, “Public Lies,” which took a look at the fallacy of licensing as a necessary function of government. The advantages of licensing clearly are on the side of the industry licensed, not the public. This is why businesses band together to call for such regulation. While looking into this further I found some more statistics and stories that are very interesting.

As union membership has fallen over the years, licensing has become the method of choice for those seeking government force to protect them from competition. 43 million U.S. workers are now in licensed professions. In 1981 there were less than 100 occupations in the United States that were licensed (a recent article in Forbes Magazine estimated the number at 80). Now there are 1,100 occupations for which a license is needed. Contrary to what some might think, there has been no Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I was checking out some of the recent inventions involving bicycles in a magazine. I’ll tell you about a few of them in a moment. It occurred to me that there are almost endless ways to use bicycles and the related technologies to innovate and invent new devices. In fact, I have had many of my own ideas for inventions for or involving bikes, and I use bicycles for examples when explaining how to use certain problem solving techniques.

Anyhow, here is some of what I found Read the rest of this entry »