Contact Information

I am not going to be dense and give out all of my personal contact information flat-out.

However, I will give out the email attached to this blog, which I check regularly. Please give me a couple days to respond.

If you would like to contact me, please feel free to do so!

Twitter: @RealTheoBrave
Gab: @TheRealTheo
Email: TheodoreBrave@gmail.com

Thank you!

Donate

The purpose of this post is to connect you, the reader, with a mechanism in which to support me and my intellectual endeavors. Mainly College.

I am currently enrolled in my first year at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
I am a business-economics major.

Here is a link to my GoFundMe campaign, where a little more information can be found.

https://www.gofundme.com/FundTheo

Book Roll

This Post is to document some of my reading endeavors.
There will be a couple of categories of books:

Books I have read
Books I am reading
Books I will read and currently own
Books I will read but do not own

If you have a book suggestion, feel free to email me about it. Bonus points if you buy it for me. Obviously, books that I do not own will not be a priority on my reading agenda.

I do not have as much free time as I would like, but I do read inhumanly fast, and I read for comprehension. This list is not all-inclusive. I am starting this list when I am 20 years old, so almost all of the books that I have read before now will not be on the list.


Books I have read
Art of the Deal by Donald Trump
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath from Gallup
Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer
Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich

Couple of hundred misc. books

Books I am reading
The Bible (perpetually)
Influence by Robert Cialdini

Books I will read and currently own
https://www.scribd.com/document/37053680/The-Garbage-Generation-by-Dr-David-Amneus

Books I will read but do not own
The Byzantine Empire by Charles Oman
Cuckservative: How Conservatives Betrayed America by Vox Day, John Red Eagle
Ideas have Consequences - Richard M. Weaver

Blog/Website List

The links provided in this post do not reflect the views of myself, Theodore Brave.

These links differ in nature. Some are scholarly, some political, some Christian, some pagan, some scientific, some insane, some 'deplorable', and some literally deplorable.

That being said, there is a quote that is attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald that goes thusly:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

I use a diversity of worldviews to sharpen my own. This is not an all-inclusive list.

Feel free the browse around, but don't complain to me about the content, I am not the one producing it.

In no particular order:

http://voxday.blogspot.com/
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/
http://www.dangerandplay.com/
http://blog.dilbert.com/
http://www.breitbart.com/
http://www.drudgereport.com/
http://news.infogalactic.com/
http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/
https://dougwils.com/
http://www.returnofkings.com/
http://www.rooshv.com/
https://www.menofthewest.net/
http://www.zerohedge.com/
https://www.infowars.com/
https://freedomainradio.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/stefbot/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/PrisonPlanetLive/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse/videos

Book Review: The Art of the Deal

Donald Trump has given us peasants a pleasant read, detailing his super secret awesomeness. How charitable. Truly. There are 8 main things that I have outlined in the book.

1.) Think Big

Fear exists in the unknown, but who gives a crap? You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so take them all.

2.) Know your market

In his book he says he doesn't like to hire a lot of number-crunchers or analysts, as he trusts his own instincts more. This way of management is also obvious in his very successful bid for the Presidency, considering his ridiculously small number of personal political operatives.

3.) Enhance your location

Location, location, location. Buy you don't need the best location to be successful. Trump frequently has settled for the second-best, and improved it through what he calls promotion and psychology. Why pay a stupid amount of money for the best, when you can pay a smaller amount for the second or third best and with a little effort make it into the best?

4.) Deliver the goods

You can talk the talk all you want, but if you walk like a baby, you're not going to get very far. If you say you are going to do something, do it. Trump's past history of the implementation of this philosophy gives him incredible credibility.

5.) Get the word out

The media loves a story. Be bold, be ambitious. When you are asked a question, try to frame a positive answer no matter what. Promotion is a big deal when it comes to deals, and a few examples in his book demonstrate how you can use the media as a weapon against your opponents to get a better deal.

6.) Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself

If you are prepared to accept the worst possible outcome, then anything that happens afterwards is a positive result.

7.) Fight back

Don't be a wuss. Anyone who voluntarily gets beaten up without putting up their hands is a total loser. Even if you end up getting knocked out, you went down swinging.

8.) Have fun

Trump derives his enjoyment from winning. For him, money is a good way to keep track of just how well he was winning.

I would rate the book:

B

This book was a wonderful peek into the inner workings of one of the most successful Americans ever. Whether you like him or his politics or not, the book provides a great guideline for how one's outlook should be if they wish to climb the ladder of success. I noted ONE typo. His outlook is very masculine, typical of an Alpha-type. His detailing of a week in his life is very surprising. It is very stream-of-consciousness oriented. Probably Ghost-written though.

I would like to note now that my rating is completely arbitrary, as I do not have an organized system for rating books. I liked the book, okay? Especially his personal frame. There may be a little bias in my completely meaningless rating.

Thank you for your time,

Theodore

Book Review: Strengths Based Leadership

I recently finished a book lent to me by a friend, Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie from the Gallup Press.

It has strong data-based analyses of what makes a leader Great, a Team exceptional, and a break-down on why it is that people follow.

Here are four things that I got out of the book.

1.) 4 Domains of Leadership Strength

Those are Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. The moment I read this, I immediately made a prediction that I would be mostly a Strategic Thinking leader with maybe a little Influencing thrown in. As it turned out after I took the Strengthsfinder 2.0 Test, my top 5 Leadership Skills are:

Strategic Thinking:

   Input

   Analytical

   Intellection

   Learner

Influential:

   Competition

2.) Individuals need not be well rounded, but teams do.

This is self explanatory, I've always known that my natural inclination to want to fill up a team with a bunch of stat-nerds and math-geeks is potentially self-destructive.

3.) Members of strong teams are as committed to their personal lives as they are their professional lives.

Some individuals have the impression that as long as you work hard you can be lazy at home and live a good life. Alternatively, they view their work as a chore that sucks the energy out of them and so when their attention is brought to their personal lives, their own mindset hamstrings their ability to live with natural happiness. Mindset is everything.

4.) Followers Four Basic Needs

Trust, Compassion, Stability, Hope.

I tend to think of how other people act unempathetically due to my high IQ. I am socially awkward in any type of new or unpracticed situation. That being said, having large statistical studies to understand what drives followers is useful to someone like myself. 

I would rate this book an arbitrary:

B

The book is incredibly data-driven and fact-based, but it lacks any kind of emotional drive to action and their example stories of successful people who used their Strengthsfinder strengths wasn't a very compelling persuasion attempt. I was disappointing to find that there was only about 100 pages of actually book material, despite the book being about 300 pages. The rest of the book was mostly explanations, data, research, and references. It would have been more fitting to fit all of this information into a more compact paper and release it into the community that way. But hey, Money has got to be made somehow.

Thank you for your time,

Theodore

Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome

Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome: The lethal disease that strikes female pioneers. Named after Kara Hultgreen and Madame Curie, the syndrome has struck down numerous brave women on the frontiers of female innovation, including the first woman to use a washing machine, who tragically drowned in it, and the first Roman woman to eat reclining on a couch, who choked to death on a grape.

This is a very serious disease. As a morally functioning member of our modern society, I simply cannot allow this pandemic to be untreated. Some of our mostest bravest Women are being sacrificed needlessly on the front lines of civilizational progress. 

This guy over at Didact's Reach gives us another definition:

Based on what I can see, Curie-Hultgreen Syndrome might best be summarised as "a cognitive impairment disorder which results in the victim assigning undue importance and privilege to a woman in any given field of professional, scientific, academic, or martial excellence simply because she is a woman".

History does not repeat itself,  but it does have patterns. Let's hold off on the first female US President. It would be a shame if this debilitating disease were to take hold, and the country were to suffer catastrophic consequences as a result.

Thanks for your time,

Theodore

Mind-Reading Technology

This article detailing an advancement in reading people's minds is interesting.

'We want to develop an implantable device that decodes the signals that occur in the brain when we think about a word, then turn these signals into a sound file that can be reproduced by a speech device.'

Such a novel device would communicate people's intended thoughts via an electronic speaker or writing device, but the team still has a lot more research to conduct.

They have been able to reproduce a word a person has just heard on a machine, by monitoring temporal lobe activity in a neurosurgical setting. 

Using electrodes placed on the surface of the language areas of the brain of awake patients, they monitored the pattern of electrical responses of brain cells during perceived speech.

The scientists then created a computer model that could match spoken sounds to these signals.

'We recorded electrical signals directly from the human language areas when a person heard words,' Knight explained.

'We then decoded these electrical signals and were able to turn them into sound files that reflected what the person heard, with remarkable accuracy.'

The research is being conducted for the use of individuals who may be unable to speak due to a neurological disease or are in a paralyzed condition. The article focuses on the positive aspect of quite literally reading people's minds. Another upside to this kind of technology is the potential to make irrelevant torture techniques, as a military entity could theoretically just strap some electrodes on a prisoner and tell them "don't think of a pink elephant", at which point the prisoner's brain would naturally begin thinking about the elephant, the shade of pinkness, how large it is, what it would sound like, its last known exact location, etc. 

But then again, the military is the government. And government doesn't exactly have a nice bright and shiny track record of treating it's own citizens very well. The State would have a cookie-cutter way of pulling information from any resistance fighters' minds. They don't even have to be resisting physically. They could simply be committing Thought Crimes, and The State could find out about it. 

This technology also introduces a grey area into law, where if you aren't a Free Speech fetishist, then you have to deal with the idea of whether or not an individual thinking something and a machine repeating what they think as speech is a violation against the individual or not.

It's always good to imagine the dark side of all these cool and futuristic science fiction becoming reality. One day, you may have to deal with it.

Thank you for your time,

Theodore

How to be transparent

Mike Cernovich does a little magic number on Journalists.

You aren’t as smart as you think you are.

I’m a published legal scholar and author. Compared to a physicist, I’m not that smart.

You’re a tier in intelligence below me.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do a good job. I write better than nearly every physicist because writing and analysis are separate skills.

But you do need to get over yourselves. If people disagree with you, it’s not because “Herp derp they are stupid!”

People disagree with us for any number or reasons unrelated to IQ. Some have a different filter on life. We are all biased.

I especially liked his thoughts on who journalists should really go after, speaking truth to power and all that.

Mike is doing incredibly well in such a short amount of time. This is due to his general talent stack and mindset. People should take the time to learn from him.

If you want to know his secrets, there is a way you can do so. It's a very closed-doors service called "The Internet", in which some website called Dangerandplay.com literally has explained everything Mike has done/does to become successful. I mean, it's almost as if he is literally telling his enemies what he is going to do and then does it.

Thank you for your time,

Theodore

Cartels as Terrorists

Brandon Darby of Breitbart throws out one of those sticky ideas that no one thinks of until it is said, then everyone is like "ohhhhhh! yeah, of course!".

“Most of the politicians in the border states are actually surrogates or have been surrogates of the criminal organizations that control those regions,” Darby said during a live taping in the border city of Laredo of the C-SPAN show Washington Journal. “Ultimately it going to take that (declaring cartels as terrorists) to stop them.”

As a terrorist organization, the U.S. could go after the corrupt politicians that protect them, the banks that funnel their money and other entities that the criminal organizations rely on. The measure is the same that authorities eventually did with narco-terrorist in Colombia such as the FARC, he said. While there are drug cartels like the Sinaloa Federation that tend to leave the public alone for the most part, in the case of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, the brutality with which those cartels victimize the innocents is enough to warrant the tittle.

I've always wondered why the US hasn't actively tried to defeat these Terrorist Cartels. With this idea out on the free marketplace, maybe we can get to a point where we can properly defend ourselves and our borders from the Terrorist Cartels that smuggle all the drugs into the US and take advantage of young women who choose to migrate.

Thank you for your time,

Theodore