Author: bhayes952

August 9, 2023 – Americans Really Are Disgusting

August 9, 2023 /

I have spent too much time buying new clothes lately. It wasn’t because I needed them but because my look needed to be right. I am speaking specifically all the activities around my renewal party that we had. For my re-proposal, I was instructed to wear a white flowing shirt with jeans, which I didn’t have. I had to get a new wardrobe to wear to the party as well.

I don’t want to make myself sound better than I am but the truth is I have gotten too fat for much of my current wardrobe. So, the reality is I have been sucking it in for the past year as well as enduring bulging shirt buttons. Getting some new cloths was a opportunity to breath a little (and get fatter). I have probably gained 30 pounds since I started working again. When I was delivering packages for Amazon, I was logging 30,000 steps a day. Now, I am sedentary and I also generally hate exercise. I like a eat and drink too.

So, gaining weight is a me problem. If I really wanted to change that, I could get serious about it and I should before it is too late. I have unfortunately always been a yo-yo person. I am not naturally skinny and I gain weight until I can’t believe where I am at and set about changing that.

But I have also spent too much time in various malls lately. I shudder when I go in. I see a lot of people wasting away their lives looking for things to buy. We colloquially call it shopping. It is not just buying things we don’t need but it is spending money we don’t have which I think is more damaging. What makes me shudder is rampant consumerism for the sake of entertainment.

I do pretty well financially, but I think about the waste and resources that it takes to make things that we buy just to make us feel good about ourselves. With the rash of visibility in homeless, I see piles of trash that just follows their movements. It makes me think that items like clothing are literally disposable. I would say that it is so ubiquitous and inexpensive that it is really valueless.

Recently, I took the whole back of the car to the donation center. Yes, it was clothes my kids outgrew and that I have no fault. But is was also unwanted bedding because the color palette changed, same with the drapery of the whole house. It was many items of clothing for whatever reason. It was decorations that were used a couple of years and now no longer have earned our fancy.

The whole thing just kind of makes me sick. I know that these organizations are cherry picking out of our donations. That means the rest of it just gets thrown away. So while we fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing something good, the net result is still the same, waste.

I suppose that I would be remiss that it is not just home goods or clothing but a lot of our lives. Our cars get too expensive to fix, appliances have dated colors, TVs are not flat enough, curved enough or large enough and don’t have places to plug in more things that aren’t flashy enough. We are so busy looking to buy things that are enough today that we only have enough time to consume things made in factories to save time so we can look to buy more things.

Clearly, we are not all going to be in a position to grow our own olive trees and make our own oil or thresh our own wheat to make flour so that we can bake our daily loaves of bread. But surely chicken fingers and diet soda is not a proper human diet. In fact, it is a diet that actually adds vitamins an minerals to deliver any sort of nutrition at all.

End Your Programming Routine: This probably warrants more work on what should be done to lesson the environmental impact and be good stewards of the land. We live in a modern world with modern convenience. We can eat world cuisine because the ingredients are available. I can purchase an entire set of clothes in 30 minutes instead of waiting days for it to be made, that’s a good thing in my book. Let’s just make wise and future thinking choices.

August 8, 2023 – Coctel de Cameron

August 8, 2023 /

It has been a week since my wife left for France and I have not cooked yet, subsisting on leftovers (almost). On a side note, I think that it is pretty ridiculous that I would even have this quantity of leftovers in the first place. I opened the refrigerator and saw that there was a half pound of bay shrimp in there. Uh oh, not something to be hanging around too long,

I did have to do some prep and mixing to make this shrimp cocktail. This is why I said almost none. While technically it is not cooking, it is more than microwaving a plate or simply eating out of the fridge. This particular version is the Mexican one and my favorite style of shrimp cocktail.

You can find a number of different recipes for coctel de cameron. I will use my words in the basic groups for simplicity: shrimp, pico de gallo, cucumber and avacado in tomato juice. My wife likes hers’ on the sweeter side so that is where I gravitate. Ketchup and orange soda in the right proportions for sweetness and thickness go into my version. In addition to my mystery shrimp, I also had a side container of ketchup, tomato sauce and sliced tomatoes from burgers we made. So, I got to use all those things up as well.

Strict adherents to Mexican food would say things like use white onion in your pico de gallo. It is true that I think that it works better but I use what I have. The same goes with quantity. I mean who really knows what is 1/2 cup of diced onion? From my experience, I would say about a quarter of an onion, but don’t get hung up on things. I used the quantity I had leftover.

After making the pico, dice the avacado and cucumber and dump all of the ingredients together. Salt, sweeten and bitter to your own tastes. I like to let it set together an hour or two. Serve with saltines or tortilla chips and enjoy with an ice cold cerveza.

Feel free to add your favorite hot sauce as well. It is also often garnished with additional limes. I think it is a little weird, but some restaurants offer you a choice of tepid or cold. I suppose that it is really an homage to the traditional lack of refrigeration in Mexico.

End Your Programming Routine: When you are sweating outside, eating a chilled serving of shrimp cocktail is refreshing. You know when you are hot and you don’t feel like eating anything? This changes that dynamic. It is also a good platform to use up little bits of leftovers juices, sauces and vegetables outside of prescribed recipes.

August 7, 2023 – 69, The Real Story

August 7, 2023 /

I don’t really want to give away the real story here, you will just have to listen to find out. That would ruin the schtick. Needless to say I talk about planning and balance and the fight for self-satisfaction.

End Your Programming Routine: The key is balance. Balance is the way to reduce stress and be happy. I believe that balance requires planning and planning requires decision making and priorities. That in and of itself can be stressful. Hence the yin and yang to make the chi flow in the right direction and 69 is one representation of yin and yang. Now we have come full circle.

August 4, 2023 – Lord of the Flies, Chapter 12

August 4, 2023 /

This is the last chapter in the book (You have been reading along haven’t you?) I have to say that it really didn’t end the way that I expected but I will talk about that in a minute. There are two more weeks of this, today and my wrap-up next week.

So, what to say… Ralph confronts Jack to learn that he is overmatched. As a result, Ralph flees but is chased by fire. As an ultimate irony, the fire that they were endlessly trying to keep going ends up signaling the Royal Navy who comes to investigate and finds all of the kids.

I have to say that I wasn’t expecting a rescue. My thoughts on the whole thing was that it was a convenient ending to a hopeless situation. Once found, it seemed like the boys took the whole thin in a mattter of course, not the savages that they became.

It was probably a mistake, but I read the afterward in my book. The whole thing was an interesting and unexpected take. The author said that she felt compassion or identity with Ralph. She felt sorrow for Piggy and Simon and disdain for Jack. But, over the years and that all waned to which she only felt anger for the man in the clean uniform and the shiny brass (the rescuer). More on that next week.

What do you say about all that transpired in the book. Again, most pundits would say that this is a commentary on society. I find it more interesting on the analysis of the afterword. But, if we stay on the surface, then it is constraints hold people in check. The hunters were all ready to kill Ralph until intervening with a higher authority.

Even the account of what and how it happened was downplayed or even ignored by the boys. I guess I say that doesn’t happen unless they knew what they were doing was wrong. People that are ignorant of what they are doing are not ashamed of the results. Sometimes, they are even proud of it especially when it is normalized.

I hate to go here but I will. This to me is very evident in the normalization of gender confusion. I talk to my kids to find out that some people identify as X or Z or non-binary or whatever. I hope that you know me well enough to know that I don’t care how adults want to associate, but I see in their body language that they see no shame in one of their peers wanting to use a litter box instead of a toilet. That is innocence that is truly genuine.

On the other hand, stories about peers drug use get a much more obtuse and subdued description. The school teaches whatever gender identification is perfectly acceptable, but drug use is not. Those stories’ significance and approach change in their telling depending on the social acceptance. This is another reason why I have a hard time buying the analysis of Lord of the Flies. It just isn’t believable.

So spoiler, the boys get rescued. All is good, what happened is a happy accident. All we need is authority to keep us in line.

End Your Programming Routine: We will get into the reasons why next week, but I have to believe that most analysis of the book is about what the critics want the book to say, not what it is really saying. If I am perfectly honest, then I dont believe that most literary types are conservative leaning. Not that conservatives are bastions of freedom, but they tend to not side with the jack booted authoritarians. In my belief system, conservatives are more likely to let people live (within their set of beliefs) and less likely to tell people what to do. And with that, they are significantly less likely to invent analysis that doesn’t exist.

July 31, 2023 – Life Moves

July 31, 2023 /

I am robbing Peter to pay Paul just to get this podcast published. I promise that things will get back to a routine soon but there are still a few hills to climb.

End Your Programming Routine: There is no programming tidbit. I want to say don’t let your life run you but that would be a little hypocritical. On paper sometimes things look tight and doable, then you find out the consequences of those decisions. All I can say is that I can see that I am on the other side of the hill, just not quite at the destination.

June 28, 2023 – Lord of the Flies, Chapter 11

July 28, 2023 /

Today is the day I marry… again. I am going to talk about some of this stuff on Monday. At least though this is the culmination of my wild and out of control schedule. I believe that things will start to become more routine after next week, where I have to travel again. No promises, but things are looking better for AltF4.co

I guess that I think this is the chapter that everyone thinks of with Lord of the Flies. I will say, I really knew nothing about the book other than the other kids kill the character Piggy. As it turns out, I really didn’t know anything about the book. While it is true that Piggy is killed, it is more of an unfortunate accident.

Spoiler alert if you haven’t read the book or this chapter. The hunters release a rock that is intended to hit Ralph. However, Ralph moves out of the way and Piggy is pushed over a cliff. The most graphic scene in the book describing his brains spilled out.

The phrase “fuck around and find out” comes to mind. It can also be said in multiple, more PC ways “like you are who your friends are” or “don’t do stupid things with stupid people”. All three of these things really mean if you don’t want trouble, don’t go to it. Did Ralph and Piggy really think that they were going to reason with now savages?

Maybe the only options were to join the hunters or try to reason? I suppose that I can’t really think of any others. I was listening to a radio program the other day and I heard an opinion. He was talking about people being nasty about rights on social media and the host made a profound statement. He said that public opinion is also crucial to maintaining your rights.

Think about it. If the entire country was against any amendment, say the 13th amendment (that is the abolition of slavery to you uneducated), then would that still be the law of the land? I highly doubt it. Either that amendment would be repealed or ignored. There is no political appetite to do hard things.

Remember when congress was going to repeal the healthcare act? I do. Politicians were only mad enough to use it to get elected. Once the supreme court said that it was constitutional as a tax, then we haven’t heard a peep about it in years. How this relates the Ralph versus the hunters is that momentum has swung. It is ‘Join or Die’ time. It doesn’t really matter what is right or best, the super majority doesn’t want what Ralph is offering.

End Your Programming Routine: I feel like Ralph sometimes. Not in the way that most people do (law and order) but in the way that you are paddling against a rising tide. I suppose that I cannot help that I have a strong compass of right and wrong and I call it out when I see it. I also feel like Ralph when I can clearly see that my beliefs are contrary to popular opinion. There is part of me that relishes being a disrupter but then there is another part that understands that part about public opinion. Being too much of a pain in the ass doesn’t help you cause (or keep your rights).

July 24, 2023 – How to Know News is Fake

July 24, 2023 /

Sometimes you hear or see things that just don’t sit right. This is one of those cases. The thing to watch out for is more of a subjective title like ‘best anything’. The thing to remember is that it is best based on the evaluation criteria. Hopefully each of the tests or characteristics are also objective which I doubt in this case.

End Your Programming Routine: I know that I could have done a better job if I had any sort of outline, but sometimes you just react. This was one of those times. I do need to get better at speaking without a complete outline. But at least when I have one, I don’t forget what I want to say.

July 21, 2023 – Lord of the Flies, Chapter 10

July 21, 2023 /

The calm before the storm in the book and in life. While I am riding out the storm, better days will be ahead not so much on what is happening in the book. The tribe has clearly split now and the recognition that they participated in the killing of Simon is in the recent past. Also, the asset of Piggy’s eyeglasses are the only means by which they can start a new fire figures to play a role coming up. The other tribe wants those glasses and they figure that it is their right to take them by force, because they can.

Bloodlust is what many critics say about what happened to Simon. I tend to think of it more like manipulation. I have a hard time believing that a bunch of 12 and under form any sort of mature society. By mature I also mean that they can tackle emotional topics. Kids can be cruel, but often it is because of ignorance or peer pressure.

Kids will be driven by primal desire as well. It is why they will not perform chores or eat candy until they are sick. But to say bloodlust to me suggests that this is our basest form as humans. I have a hard time believing that.

Some people are psychopaths or sociopaths. When my grandparents generation was alive, I heard story after story how they joined the Army or the Navy to fight the Japanese. Sure enough, when the true horror of war was revealed they wanted no part of it. There is guilt and a whole host of emotional issues like PTSD to prove that otherwise. Watch the movie ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ to get a little sense of how life is different that it is portrayed in popular history.

In my opinion, people are driven to do horrible things not because it is our native state but because we are confused about truth. When someone says your problems are caused by this party, we react out of perceived self defense. It is only the true sociopaths that derive pleasure from inflicting displeasure on others.

This chapter makes a deal about the interaction between Ralph and Piggy over their roles in the killing of Simon. It seems the Piggy cant or wont believe the results and his role in it while Ralph seems to accept it. The truth is, I don’t know what the role of this conversation is other than to acknowledge the fact that it happened. I reread the previous chapter text several times and the events were cryptic and described as highly nuanced.

Another aspect that supports my point is when the hunters are discussing the same subject. Jack insists that they just hit Simon and somehow he just died or that this was some unfortunate event. I say that this is classic sociopathic behavior. It is justifying other’s violence for his own gain.

End Your Programming Routine: I feel like I am running out of things to say and talking a bit in circles. Like I said in the beginning, this chapter is the calm before the storm. Yes, the hunters steel the glasses which setup the climax but a lot of this is just biding time. By my response over the last couple of reviews, I am foreshadowing here. I am probably not going to side with critics by the end of the book.

July 18, 2023 – About ADHD

July 17, 2023 /

I have been a skeptic of ADHD. When I see statistics that say 13% of Americans are on some sort of mood altering medication, it makes me skeptical of the entire system. After wrestling with my son over some important issues, I have begun to look into what ADHD really is. I still am skeptical of the overall discipline but not as much ADHD. I have to say that my mind is open.

End Your Programming Routine: My son is a good kid. He rarely gets into trouble. But, he also rarely follows through with things that need to get done as well and that is cause for concern. I don’t think any amount of yelling or punishment is going to change that. This is a journey, so we will see where it goes. Today was the basics.

July 15, 2023 – Lord of the Flies, Chapter 9

July 14, 2023 /

Last night, I got home from a long week of travel. While I had my iPad with me all week, I just didn’t have the energy to write. So, this was supposed to be published on Friday but it wasn’t quite finished. I am going to have several more weeks of this, mostly through the summer before life returns back to something more normal.

This is the chapter that things finally turn in the book. The tribe has permanently split into Jack’s group and Ralph’s group. The original tribe still has assets that Jack does not have, primarily Piggy’s glasses and the ability to start fire. This of course leads to conflict or more specifically theft.

The elephant in the room is what happens at the end of the chapter. Simon in some sort of reduced mental capacity is sacrificially killed when he stumbles out of the bushes and into the group of blood thirsty hunters. This is the big moment that all of the pundits have been alluding to throughout the analysis of the book.

I guess where I am at with this is it seems awfully cultish. I get it that this is an exaggeration but it is like the kids can’t help themselves. They seem to be in a trancelike state whereby ‘of course we couldn’t control ourselves’. It is not said explicitly that Ralph and Piggy participated, but the sure did not stop it.

I sometimes wonder what it is like to be entranced in some sort of blind following. The last thing I remember was when I was in college, there was a cult somehow connected to the appearance of the comet called Hale-Bopp. The cult was named Heavean’s Gate. It was discovered that near the end of the comets visibility, most of the cult members killed themselves.

From what I know, the surviving/former members really never talked publicly about how this could happen. Granted, this is the first time I have ever really researched it since knowing of the event. The fact still remains that I wonder what drives a person to move from considered normal to terminal, blind faith.

There is a difference between dying for your faith and dying as a result of it. When you analyze things like Wako, those are events where people died as a result of their beliefs. Many things went really wrong and ultimately they paid the price. I would say that they prepared to die for what they believed, but I don’t think that they thought it was a fact that it was going to happen.

Before I get too off track, what is the reason that people get involved in these endeavors? In my opinion, it is a few factors. One would be a belief that already leans toward the vision of the cult leader. The second would would be that they are lonely or unfulfilled and the social connections validates their beliefs. The third would be a charismatic leader (at least to the followers) that keeps driving the values or beliefs of the group. Huh, it kind of sounds like Jack is a cult leader.

End Your Programming Routine: Before I finish this review series, I think that I am going to end in a different place than most of the literary critics. Is that any surprise? Make the correlation to a group of people looking at the facts (or the book). Clearly each person’s bias is going to overlay on interpretation if it is analyzed in a pure vacuum. Said a different way, how could I look at a story and agree with a group of people that don’t have the same outlook as me? Nothing changes as a result of whether we agree or not, but don’t necessarily accept the status quo without doing your own research.