Category: Opinion

May 27, 2022 – I Want to Be Transparent…

May 27, 2022 /

As we head toward Memorial weekend, I was thinking about what I was going to try accomplish over the weekend. I also had a juxtaposing thought that I talk some about things that I am going to do but never any update on where I am at or what ever happened.

I talked about transparency with leadership so you know that I think it is important. Being transparent, most of those things never got started. Here is a list of things that I have introduced but have made no progress

  • Wine Cellar
  • Front Yard Garden
  • Sofa Table for my stereo system
  • Shop siding replacement
  • (Now) Adirondack chairs
  • Build a Kitchen Table
  • AltF4 business plan
  • podcasting testing

You know this subconsciously because if I had done what I said, I would be writing about it more than likely. I have a couple of other things that I have started, but never completed. And like all humans, I pick an choose things I would rather do or are motivated to do. Seems like lately, I just don’t have the energy or the drive to do things after work with so many family activities happening.

To be fair, the siding is going to be done this summer. I had to go to the dump last weekend to clear out my trailer so I had room to do the demo. So, that is progress; that I didn’t report on. In this current week, I have been making trips to Goodwill so I can clean out the garage to get my son’s car in so that we can have some paver work done. Not on my want list, but my need list.

All of that garbage and donation stuff has clogged my garage and shop all winter and spring. This is not an excuse, but a very real obstacle to me working on my projects. That logjam is unclogging finally.

Last year, I replaced the derailleur on my son’s bike but I never did the final gear adjustment, I was getting five of the seven rear gears. He was complaining that the handle grips were sliding off. I bought some new ones and when I went to slide all the mechanicals down the handle bar, the cables came loose. I went to try and fix it by taking the bike to a park and using the stand, but then I found that the derailleur bracket was bent, I didn’t have the tools and I wasn’t sure of the right correction. In my heart, I could have fiddled with it more and gotten it licked. But, not having a stand at home just led me to finally take the bike in.

The truth is my own bike has been only partially functional for years. I have always hated the pedal clips, the rider geometry has me too bent over to be comfortable and the worst part is that the shifters have been partially seized. I decided to take both bikes in. Like I was saying a couple of weeks ago, it’s not that I couldn’t do these things but at this point, I would rather ride the bike than work on it. This is especially true because my precious time is going to be focused on my siding project over the summer. Having the ability to just jump on my bike and go makes me much more likely to do so than spend the same time fooling over new parts.

I have no good reason why I haven’t done my business plan or podcast testing. When I have talked about this before, I have talked about my intent by announcing something and accountability. Since no one is really communicating with me over this channel, there is no real accountability. What keeps me writing everyday is my drive to want to do it. Since no one is asking and I am happy with where I am at, I haven’t been motivated to do anything different.

Transparency to me is admitting that I am not perfect. Not everything I write about turns out to be a dream. I have a pile of video on things that I was planning to create video on, but didn’t work out. I am not sure if I should go ahead and edit and publish to be real or just delete them as stuff that didn’t work. For now, I am just holding on to it.

To be sure, I am going to keep being me. I am going to write about things that I intend to do when I write them because maybe they inspire someone to do something similar on their own. I am going to maintain a list of things that someday I want to get to. I am going to keep pushing myself to try things I have no experience doing to learn and try to teach or coach.

I am not going to apologize for follow through until I get some sort of dialog where I find out that I am disappointing people. As far as I know, nobody is routinely reading this anyway. If that day comes, then I will have true accountability and I promise that I will do a more careful job of follow through with my announcements and projects. There is no doubt in my mind that I will have the proper motivation when I know people are waiting for me.

Like everyone, I get tired. I want to check out sometimes. I find things I would rather do. I have obligations that I didn’t realize before I thought I was going to do something. It is cold in my shop without the heat on. I don’t want to start something to get interrupted by something else. I have a myriad of excuses and reasons I haven’t done the things that I probably should have. I also have on my list a bunch of things I don’t want to do but need to, so this problem is not exclusive to just my personal goals.

I feel like I am the true master of none. I am a very amateur woodworker, mechanic, shooter, woodsman, scientist, gardener, brewer, etc. I think I am a decent cook and carpenter but I don’t always have a project or feel like sharing dinner. My interests are in learning, teaching and following my desires are what drive me. I hope that my courage to try is inspiring to others.

End Your Programming Routine: My original title for this site was going to be Polymath Daily, not AltF4 because of the wide variety of topics. I am glad that I went with the latter rather than the former because it allows for more emphasis on opinion and less on hard skills. At this point in my life, I am going to prioritize family and relationship over hardcore projects and skills but that doesn’t mean I am going to quit trying. I hope you have something planned for this holiday weekend that fulfills you.

May 26, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

May 26, 2022 /

This is a rewrite. I already had this entire week written by Tuesday but unfortunately something came up and this was the best day to interrupt the flow. You all know what that something is… a school shooting in Texas where 19 children and two adults were killed. This is the biggest tragedy and eerily similar to Sandy Hook (2012).

I am going to spare the hard lines of party talking points today. I see all kinds of people talking out of their asses about the situation. I see a lot of people that have their own contingency of personal security using this event to push their personal agenda. I am talking about NBA coaches, TV hosts and US politicians.

With all things, what do you do with this? I want to say, I cant blame all people for being angry. Someone very close to me said yesterday that they wanted to get some training and start carrying. I think that is actually the proper response not because I want a militarization of our culture but because we are our own first responders.

I have said this before, if I knew that there was going to be a fight somewhere then I would not go to that place. It is just smart. That leaves us with being caught unaware anytime something like this happens. If you are unaware, then how prepared are you really going to be? And if you are not prepared, it is only luck that keeps you alive.

My kids had a band concert a couple nights ago. Oregon SB554 was passed in 2021 in direct response to 2011 appeals court dismissal of college’s ability to prohibit firearms. The reason for this is Oregon has a preemption clause in the constitution which means that only the legislature can make laws that contradict the Bill of Rights. Or in other words, administrative bodies cannot arbitrarily create rules that are in contradiction to the constitution. This is a long way of saying firearms are banned at all schools in our district.

Had that circumstance in Texas occurred in my town, the results would have likely been the same or worse. 1) This is not Texas with the same sense of individualism 2) we don’t have a bunch of border protection officers just hanging around town. The sheriff has two – six deputies on duty, municipal police have two on duty and the adjacent town has two on duty. State police are fifteen miles away at best.

If the ‘good guys’ are following the laws and the ‘bad guys’ are not, then what is the result? The result is a defenseless shooting gallery. Did you also know that Great Britain is implementing knife restrictions as a result of a huge rise in knife crime? On one hand, the firearm is a better tool for killing but you see from the data that the problem is not the tool. Nor is the problem a lack of laws. The problem is sick and deranged people.

The story is still being written on this. 2020 followed by 2021 were the biggest firearms sales years for a reason. The largest segment of that population were first time gun owners. People know when something is wrong, defund the police being one example. This country is literally disintegrating before our eyes and people don’t realize what is wrong, only that it doesn’t feel right.

Since this is a complicated problem and I don’t want to disrespect the situation with simple solutions, I can only offer my opinion. It is a shame that we should abdicate our children’s safety and quite frankly their minds to a system that is counter-intuitive and unnatural. Instead of learning critical thinking and problem solving, we are training safety by bureaucracy and administration.

The question is not “how is this prevented” but “how do I survive”. You see, that flips the script on me imposing my will on you to you taking responsibility for yourself. I don’t think it will ever be prevented, but I do believe that there are steps I can take to potentially mitigate the damage. In a hypothetical situation, whether I am killed because I am disarmed or I am killed because my opponent was a better/quicker shot the result is still the same. But which one provides better odds?

I am not going to say whether I obey the no guns in school policy. What I will say is that this is not my first day after a school shooting. And, I will also say that my human right to self preservation exceeds any kind of policy. That is the basis of civil disobedience. If I did have a weapon and I was in the situation, my first priority is to get out of harm, not stop the threat or even engage.

End Your Programming Routine: If Whoopi Goldberg wants to come here and try to punch me, then I would like to see her try. Quite frankly, assault is acceptable grounds for self defense. Mind you, I think it would be more lucrative to let her hit me and then I can take this to civil court for a nice, fat judgement. Despite all of that, I stand for her right to be an idiot and say whatever she wants on TV. That goes for everyone, I stand with your rights to think and speak. Don’t mess with mine.

May 20, 2022 – Leadership Qualities and Why They Matter

May 20, 2022 /

I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I won’t bore with all the details but my current project is not going well. Despite all of the technical problems, the issue is not a lack of capable doers, but a failure of leadership. Before I go too far, I will expose my bias. I am a firm believer that accountability for success/failure always goes uphill.

If there are capable doer’s then why does leadership matter? I would say that it certainly makes the job easier, but leaders are responsible for delivering bad news as well as good. Leaders are the voice of skepticism as well as support. They are encouraging and coaching, admonishing and pushing, representing and cooperating. All of those opposing forces are difficult to juxtapose well.

Just so you don’t think I am just a finger pointer, leaders are at all levels. In my own case, I can visibly see areas where my own work is suffering from my personal leadership failures. My particular group has a manager and a good leader in her own right. However, the trend of matrix organizations has led to an ambiguous level of decision making and accountability which has given rise (and a pass) to poor leadership on a project level.

Sticking with the theme of matrix organizations and my own role, I recognize that my peers operate largely in a vacuum. We all tend to do what we think is best and it doesn’t seem to have any level of coordination or follow through, once again responsibilities of leadership. Knowing this, it is a perfect opportunity for someone to take the responsibilities (without a title). This is exactly what natural leaders do: recognize a problem and take action without requiring more pay or recognition.

There is one additional component to successful leadership and that is trust or willingness to follow. In order to actually build that, it takes one of two things. It is either time for natural trust to build or an organizational appointment of a person to a role. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and the best case is when you have both; an appointment of someone that the group trusts.

We can all think of our view of good and poor leaders. I would say that our list of desirable qualities might be all over the place. Unfortunately, our bias often blinds us to the actual facts of situation and once we take a position it is very difficult to un-entrench ourselves from our position. Despite the fact that this is a business conversation, politics are an easy comparison.

By now, you can probably guess that I lean right. You also probably should know that I am a strict constitutionalist. That means that I have accepted the current definition of the Bill of Rights and apply that to all aspects of my opinion. So, lets take a look at some recent Presidents and apply my filter to get a judgement.

  1. Bill Clinton – I found him to be a deplorable person. That being said, in a rank of recent presidents relatively little damage was done. Only minor conflicts like the Balkan intervention, no major fiscal expansion, the 1992 Assault Weapons Ban (that actually sunset) were notable occurrences in his tenure. Grade B
  2. George W. Bush – I want to like the guy, conservative Christian with high marks as a governor. On the surface, a good choice. Let me count the ways that he screwed this country: Medicare Part D, creating a new department of the government, a multi-front boondoggle of a war, Patriot Act, and Too Big to Fail bank bailouts from their own reckless fiscal policy. Grade F
  3. Barack Obama – He seemed likable enough, certainly a change from the previous president. The damage that was done was not on the traditional aspects and size of government but to the culture of country. That being said from the Healthcare tax to race baiting and sexual ambiguity I find the fabric of the country irreparably changed. Grade D
  4. Donald Trump – This is a guy that is a dichotomy. On one hand, he spoke the truth and on the other he couldn’t stop talking and it was often intertwined with as many lies. All in all, policy was largely acceptable including initiating the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and tax reform (heavily in favor of business). I think he could be good if he wanted to, but more often chose to behave childish and solidified the damage done during the Obama administration. Grade C

I wrote all of that to say my bias clearly reflects my opinion. You might want to live in a socialist utopia and would definitely flip my grades. However, when I look objectively the person that should have been my highest choice actually got my lowest grade by a mile. And, the president that I wanted to hate actually got my highest grade. There are a couple key characteristics that I want to talk about below.

Leadership requires vision. That being said, what we interpret as clear may not be the same to everyone else. Only time will tell if leaders make the right decision, especially if it is extremely contrary to the popular or accepted direction.

The second property requires leaders to take a position on any and every relevant issue. This can be a tricky situation when you are uneducated on the subject or even unaware of the topic. But, it can be done tactfully and most of the time you can change that stance if provided clear reasons for doing so. The reason this is important is that it sets the tone for the group to follow.

I think the third and most important property is transparency. This supports trust, builds vision and explains positioning. I think it is worth noting that transparency is not truthfulness. There is a time to protect the group and there is time to provide the facts. But, transparency explains the situation when the time is right. Generally speaking, I am also being truthful, but there are are good reasons not to be at times.

Applying our properties to the presidents and adding my layer of speculation I put together this analysis.

PresidentVisionNominal PositionTransparency
ClintonWhat can I getPopulistNo
BushFinish What Daddy StartedEgalitarianNo
ObamaSocial JusticeSocialistSomewhat
TrumpTell Me I’m the BestPopulistNo

Generally speaking, most of the poor leaders I have observed lack number one and number three. Truthfully, the worst leaders are strong in opinions yet don’t have vision or transparency and they fail to build trust. That being said, transparency without vision or position leaves the group listless.

I suppose to round out my work here, I think that there are some characteristics that are not required to be a good leader, for instance a good communicator. I rank this as helpful and certainly can accelerate trust. It also can more easily turn from a leader to a despot and you don’t even know it until it is too late.

How about having a winning record? I suppose that depends on the context. A platoon leader better have a winning record or their leadership is over. But even in that case, winning doesn’t necessarily translate into a good leader. Leadership is not about the objective and the result, it is about motivating others to work toward the same goal and to be content that it is an acceptable way of doing it.

In many ways, the parallels between leadership and sales go hand in hand. In one way, the salesperson is convincing you that this is the best item for the circumstances. Once you are convinced for whatever reason, you are likely to be brand loyal or even salesperson loyal. Leadership is the same way, you are convincing the others in the group of the best approach, best way to organize data, the best technical path forward, etc.

End Your Programming Routine: Coming full circle here, my experience within the matrix organization, the ‘leaders’ lack all three of these properties. Without leaders to front the effort, it turns into a mess like I referenced in the first paragraph. In their defense, they are way out of their league. For the most part the organization is trying to do something that is really not within the realm of experience or competency and I am not in a position to change this despite my counsel to the contrary. All that being said, good leaders will overcome these circumstances because they have the properties that make a successful leader.

May 18, 2022 – Used Book Sale

May 18, 2022 /

Despite the fact that I have aspirations to do some serious Alt-F4 pertinent reviewing, I am taking the opportunity to read fiction as it comes up. My wife has been a reader of James Patterson and he is a prolific writer. His books are also very quick to read. When I was traveling heavy, I would take a book and finish it before I got back fro my trip. I kind of lost track of where I was in order of the various series that he has.

That tradition still follows me though. Most of my reading happens when I am away from the home. Mostly because when my head hits the pillow at home, I am out. Last weekend, we were at the library looking at the local garden club’s plant sale. But, the friends of the library were also having a book sale. There are some books that I am looking to read like Fahrenheit 454, Animal Farm, Atlas Shrugged, etc. I didn’t find any of those but some fiction that I was interested in. And, they were in the free box.

In not too many weeks, we are on our way to Spain. That is going to be a long plane ride. So, ideally I can bring a long book. I found the perfect one ”The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown. It is almost 700 pages and light enough that I don’t have to concentrate on every paragraph. Plus it is entertaining and thought provoking.

When I first left my job, I started checking out books at the library and Dan Brown was one of the authors I read. ”Angels and Demons” and ”The Davinci Code” were two that I enjoyed. I also read some of the books that I want to review as well. So, in a roundabout way the two are related.

I also got another John Grisham book. I am not as excited about it but my son was. I made him a deal that if he would read it as well, I would take it. It was free after all and it will be worth the time, meaning I will get more enjoyment then other things I could do with the time, particularly on an airplane.

The third book, ”The Song of Solomon” I am finishing up. My son bought it for my birthday and it is a little meatier than I was anticipating. I suspect that this was someone’s college literature assignment with a bunch of notes in the margins. By their assessment, this has some religious correlations. I am not sure that I buy that assessment. Maybe I will review it some day, I finished it on my flight home.

Speaking of which, I took an informal poll when I was on the plane and I observed that almost every person was watching the on board entertainment system if not sleeping or playing games on personal electronics. I saw many people with a book in hand or nearby, but not a single one of them actually reading. I guess what I take of that is given the choice, people would rather watch a screen then read their own selected book. I myself usually flip through the selections and decide that there is nothing that catches my eye and then open my book.

End Your Programming Routine: I realize that I have always been a little more of an odd duck. My preference to books over movies go all the way back to childhood when our TV time was restricted but reading time really wasn’t. I did enjoy spending time with my boys browsing over all of the used books and they picked out some so I feel like there is a little bit of my oddness in them too. I guess in some small way, I feel like it bonds me to them even if we don’t share the same degree of passion.

May 17, 2022 – Does Preserving History Matter?

May 17, 2022 /

I had an experience over the weekend. Quite out of the blue, my mom called on Saturday and said that the TV wanted to interview me about my experiences with the North Palestine Church. Not all of those details turned out to be completely accurate, but that doesn’t really matter. I swung into action to gather memorabilia to share and rushed out of the house to participate.

We called it Palestine Church growing up. It was about half a mile from my parents house. This was about as close as anything was. The only other public space was Fir Grove Elementary (about the same distance). The reason the church was in my life is that we used it as a meeting place for Boy Scouts during the summer time. It was also the fallback camping location for our monthly campouts (mostly wintertime).

The church was moved in 2012 from it’s cemetery location where it was built to about three miles down the road to Adair Village. The county now owns the building but it has essentially been closed since the move. They are slowly making improvements to get it ready for eventual use. However, there is no current vision on what it will be used for or even what needs to be done to make it usable.

As it turns out, the county was taking a video record of some of the people that were involved with using the church throughout the years. This is where the story I have been writing and my story intersect. Since Boy Scouts was such a fundamental building block of my youth, having a place to meet was an extremely vital component to having the entity exist. It also helps that it was extremely close and didn’t require a ride to get there every week.

Being speculative, would I have continued if I couldn’t easily get there? Would the troop exist without a permanent meeting place? If restored, will it ever hold the significance in the new location that it did in the old? These are all questions to be asked and not everyone in the troop many hold the same regard that I do.

These are photos inside the church at my Eagle Scout Court of Honor June 28, 1992. Each individual was asked what we would like to see the use of the church be. My response was that it maintains to be a venue that impacts people’s lives the way that this one did to mine.

End Your Programming Routine: If I am intellectually honest, the significance of Palestine church had a context of time, place and my personal interaction with the building. Just maintaining it as an available venue may never reach people in the same way. A fact that it was moved from it’s very rural location to a much more populated location removes the intimacy that us near it had. It could be anyplace anywhere really. So, while I have a strong emotional connection to the building, my real wish is that people make those connections wherever they are.

May 6, 2022 – Free Speech for Friday

May 6, 2022 /

It is a very interesting time we are in. I have heard from two different sources independently that all of a sudden, Twitter posts are reaching new audiences and gaining new subscribers. This is an unprecedented rate of change for both. One person said that he rarely gets more than 100 views despite having over 15,000 followers. All of a sudden subscribers are getting added several a day doing nearly nothing and views are going into the 1000s.

Another media personality said that he posts nearly every day and friends didn’t even know that he was active on the platform. It was said that those posts were never seen. Something very devious has been happening and we have just accepted it. We have been manipulated by the mysterious and unexplainable algorithm. Yet, all of a sudden there is a potential change in leadership/ownership and the first amendment is alive and well.

Make no mistake, I am not certain that Elon’s motives are altruistic. In fact, I would be willing to bet that they are not. However, that is the hammer being used to usher in a new algorithm. Discredit the old way and bring in trust for the new one. I can just say that this deal won’t even be closed until June and yet the writing is on the wall for the current batch of useful idiots.

These platforms have been lying for years using subjective labeling like ‘Medical Misinformation’ and ‘Inflammatory Speech’ as if the moderators are doctors or scientist or even subject matter experts. This is the zero tolerance approach to life (kind of). It is zero tolerance if you disagree with the establishment narrative regardless of your facts or arguments against. Yet, watching YouTube videos I am still trying to be convinced that I need to get a vaccine while wearing a mask. This is paid for by the State of Oregon, my money.

In my opinion, any sort of value judgement on someone else’s statements being visible is censorship. I have stated many times, it is not criminal to believe wrongly. There are so many people that think colloidal silver or high pH water is the fountain of youth that it is laughable. Plenty of people believe masks reduce the transmission of the virus despite having the data saying there is statistically no effect.

Or do they? Is this policy an attempt to reduce liability? Is this better to do something even if it is wrong? Have you seen those politicians without a mask on? There is literally no one that actually believes this or they wouldn’t do it, period. Who goes into space without a suit, no one because you will die, period.

If you do an internet search for ‘facemask efficacy’ you are going to find a lot of studies preporting that they do. However the top results are sources like CDC, Stanford Medicine, Mayo Clinic, etc. These are the same sources that have built a legacy of pharmaceutical managed, chronic disease treatment. I am not disputing that there is a lot of knowledge, but how smart are they really? Smart enough to dupe all the regular people that we need drugs to survive.

By the way, how did we get chronically sick? By trusting the science and by eating the food pyramid that is a majority carbohydrates. This is a non-traditional way to eat. Sure, we are getting plenty of calories to give 50% total obesity rates and skyrocketing type 2 diabetes over 50. It is not that someone or an institution cannot be mostly wrong and occasionally right but what is at stake here? How about grant funding?

End Your Programming Routine: I am not going to end on face masks even though I devolved. I am all over the place and for that I apologize. Some days I just start writing and something else comes out. Today is one of those days. My point was really isn’t it interesting how the cockroaches are moving away from the light as quickly as possible? Elon isn’t even in charge yet, the deal has not even been completed and all of a sudden speech is becoming more free at Twitter. I find this extremely deplorable. Clear, transparent and equally enforced policy is the way to build trust, Twitter et al. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

May, 2 2022 – Speaking of Privacy Again…

May 2, 2022 /

***9-9-24: My web host called and said that the link to the Tor Browser was malware and that my site was infected. I have no way of actually knowing this is true so I have removed it from this post. I suspect that they wanted a way to try and sell me their security service at $400/yr. For now, search the tor browser for yourself and use at your own risk.***

I have been thinking about BitWarden and privacy this week. I have also been aware of the benefits of a Virtual Private Network but never looked into it. Combining those two things together got me looking around for what a VPN would cost and I stumbled on the Tor Browser.

Let’s go back to the basics, what is a Virtual Private Network or VPN for short? A VPN is a networking routing strategy where your computer goes to a specified computer address every time for the first connection. In theory, if someone was looking at your history they would only see a connection to a single IP address. To go along with that, your first jump would be to a server that is clean and secure and the people running it value privacy.

As far as I know, without a VPN your routing is somewhat random. Random but also potentially public. Even more insidious than that is that most browsers are reporting your searches to the parent owner of that browser. They then take that data and use it to develop more artificial intelligence and data trends. This is how you look up something and all of a sudden you are bombarded with adds for that particular item.

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that BitWarden is doing the same thing. I think that it is also worth pointing out that a VPN is not going to protect you from that type of tracking because of the browser extension is getting the data right from the source – you.

The Tor browser is a browser that has an integrated VPN function into the operation. It is open source and differs a little from the pay services. So, you are not paying for a service for all of your devices but activating the VPN function by using the browser. Why? Because there are still some good guys out there that believe in American values. People work on these projects because they are passionate about what we all think is true, we should own our own privacy.

In looking around a little it looks like Brave can do this too by changing the settings of the browser. As a side note, I don’t think Brave is actually tracking me but it does have the potential to be public. In fact, most browsers have a private mode. With that said, I don’t happen to believe that ABC or Microsoft has our best interest in mind however. Apple does seem to be more trustworthy with privacy but I don’t think for a second that they are just sitting on data that they are collecting.

Also, looking at how these things work they don’t save any history and certainly recommend not adding any extensions. To my knowledge, Tor is the only one that has an integrated VPN feature though.

I think it is pretty evident why privacy is important. But I think it is worth mentioning that context is important. People create their own realities when they only see part of the data. What if I was pricing a pallet of shotgun shells for my kids Trap club? That seems to be explainable. But what if I was looking for a kilo of cocaine? Who knows, maybe I wanted to look at the effects of inflation and I decide I cant make the correlation. Or what if I wanted to read Mein Kampf so I was looking to buy a copy? These things can easily be taken out of context or are even tools for entrapment. In the end, I am not doing anything technically wrong and it is none of your business.

End Your Programming Routine: I am going to keep using Brave but I am also going to try out Tor. There are some clear drawbacks to using it exclusively and one is the convenient password access. I have also noticed that some sites will reject the Tor browser because (I assume) that those sites are wanting the metadata that you are bringing when you are trying to access said site. In theory with Tor, you are able to change your VPN route and try again but I have not been successful with that yet.

April 25, 2022 – Readiness vs. Preparedness

April 25, 2022 /

Sorry, but it is going dark again. I will try to keep it high level for privacy reasons. We had a huge family blow-out with my mother-in-law last week. We were trying to convince her that she needed to start the power of attorney process and try to engage hospice. My opinion is that we are within weeks of needing to invoke power of attorney and hospice is needed now. She is no longer able to walk, she is eating very little and is going back and forth with her faculties. In fact, we had to call 911 the other night because my wife thought that she had a stroke.

The next day, when we had the discussion she was firmly obstinate and declared that she was not ready to die and therefore formalize power of attorney. That is where the genesis of this topic came from. In most people’s mind, the terms are synonymous, including mine until that moment. They can mean the same thing but they are distinctly not.

I am reading between the lines in the interaction but here is the reality. I don’t think that she is ever going to be ready to die. She insists that there are good days and bad days, which is true. But, every good day is less good than the last one. In her mind, she is still defiant that she is going to beat this even though all of the doctor’s opinions are otherwise.

Not being ready has led to not being prepared. You can be ready and not prepared and you can be prepared and not ready. You can also be ready and prepared and the opposite, you get the point. To me, preparedness has an ‘if’ component to it whereas ready has a ‘when’ component. When those two circles merge you have the if and when.

Let’s say that you are preparedness minded and you are all stocked up for a hurricane. You have procedures in place for this scenario and that variation. However, if the hurricane strikes while you are on a business trip, you are not ready for it. You are not there to execute those procedures and direct your family and turn on the generator, etc. By the same token, you could be home and prepared and the hurricane misses you so you don’t lose power, it wasn’t necessary. If you happen to be home and not prepared, you know the hurricane is coming so it is too late to do anything about it. You are ready but not prepared.

What other topics can we relate? How about life insurance? I have some but it doesn’t mean I am ready to die, it means that I am prepared in case I do. You have a will, you have other legal documents that just in case I get into a car accident tonight, I have made steps to mitigate the other problems that go on with the situation.

The theory of life insurance is that it replaces income in the event of a loss. As we age beyond our income earning years, life insurance is only there to protect assets for estate planning. So, the if is dying while you are making money and you have a family or spouse that needs it. But, even that tapers off eventually unless your spouse can manage the cash flow without you and you invest the life insurance.

I think the best corollary that most people can relate to is parenthood. So many people of my generation (X) opted to wait to get married or at least waited to have children. I know that we did. Some advice that we got was that you can really never be ready for your first child. It is hard to imagine being a parent when you have no context of what it is really like. Despite all of that, you can be prepared in terms of equipment, training, plans and education. Just because you don’t know if you are ready, that baby is coming and you take it day by day. What you don’t know, you make up and keep trying to learn and get better. This is really all you can do.

I like to think that I have possibly learned something about this interaction. Who really knows what we will be like when we get to this point. I can only imagine what I would feel like if I felt like I wanted to give more and needed more time. Unfortunately, all of this time is really wasting the remaining days. I am expecting this to be a clusterf*ck by the time it is over.

End Your Programming Routine: I suppose ultimately where I am at is that readiness has nothing to do with this situation, it is inevitable. All fighting does is make it more difficult to do the right thing at the right time. Ideally, you would have both states, but if you are going to opt for one, pick preparedness over readiness.

April 15, 2022 – What Was Formerly Tax Day

April 15, 2022 /

For probably forty some years, this was a day marked on the calendar. It only changed if the 15th fell on a weekend and then it would be the next Monday without fail. Two years ago, we got an extra five months and then last year tax day was May 15. It appears very arbitrary to me, but this year it is April 18, not the fifteenth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no hurry to send my five figure bill to the government so that they can buy crack pipes or send arms to Ukraine. Why do we accept the status quo? If we had an ala carte or optional funding mechanism, how many of things the US government offers would you sign up for? I thought that it might be interesting to talk about ‘what ifs’ today.

  1. What if your neighbor came over to your house and demanded that you give them money to pay for his side action’s abortion, I mean health care? If you don’t give the money to your neighbor, he is going to take it from your bank account or other assets. Oh, and by the way, if you don’t tell him how much money you have, he may imprison you. At the very least, he will charge you more money as a penalty. This is a crime in any other setting but taxes.
  2. What if we valued cost of ownership more than having a new toy? When I think of redneck, I think of a lot of broken down shit. Before you think I am too harsh, I have been there as well. I bought a boat one time (and I would love to have another). At that time, I had two babies and the boat sat outside. I can honestly say that routine maintenance like oil changes were sometimes outside of my financial reach and so they got delayed. All infrastructure and programs have a cost to maintain and I do not see that cost factored into any project. It is assumed that once a project or program is completed, the cost of ownership is absorbed into the government for perpetuity.
  3. What if we were suspicious instead of punch drunk idiots? Every single campaign advertisement promises to ‘get stuff done’. What is that stuff you ask, well it is taking more money from you for things you (likely) don’t want and cant afford to take care of without taking more money. I honestly cannot name a single law that I want amended or clarified (read nearly free and makes life better). I can think of many that I would like to remove but when does this happen? Remember in 2016 with a Republican senate, house and president repealing the Healthcare mandate/tax, I don’t. How do we get oligarchs? We gerrymander the rules, laws and regulations to benefit the few that can afford to participate.
  4. What if James Monroe was president again, does anyone remember early American history anymore? For nearly 100 years the American foreign policy affectionately called the Monroe Doctrine was focused on items that only directly impacted us. Something needed to be happening in this hemisphere and this continent to warrant intervention. I am sorry Israel, Syria, Ukraine, South Korea, Taiwan, Serbia, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Vietnam to name a few. Quite frankly, China’s foreign policy is a far more appropriate approach benefitting it’s citizens than is ours, stability is good for business.
  5. What if we actually believed in the Golden Rule? I remember talking about this before grade school. All of the social programs are a grotesque attempt to enforce something we should be doing anyway. But society can’t trust that I will be nice the the Z’s. Isn’t that the beauty of the concept? There is a saying that ‘morality cannot be legislated’ so why do we keep trying to do it? This is another form of me forcing my values and ethics on you. Let’s keep ‘getting more stuff done’.
  6. What if we didn’t have an FDA, USDA, HUD, Department of Education, Department of Energy or name your alphabet soup? Anybody have any idea what these entities do besides hand our money and create unnecessary regulation? These are all masking the fact that we don’t really believe capitalism is a viable solution and by the way let’s make some people rich along the way. If we are not willing to give money to a cause, then it is probably not market viable and probably doesn’t need to be done. I think that there is a collective belief that these organizations are doing this for our own good and that we are not capable of making intelligent decisions. ASTM and ISO are two non-governmental organizations that perform self policing. They perform in the very same function as USDA inspected meat do by audits and periodic monitoring.
  7. What if we were smart instead of educated? Contrary to popular opinion education is largely a waste of time. I want my kids smart enough to pursue education that is useful and not forced into indoctrination. Prisoners learn how to communicate through the plumbing or make a shiv out of a bedspring, that is learning . Learning is unstoppable but it needs the proper motivation. Education teaches compliance and obedience.

I want to finish off with a little more on seven. Suppose you were Galileo? First of all, the prevailing belief was that the universe revolved around the earth, it was a sin not to. He went to prison for his beliefs, which were provable by the way. Today he is celebrated because he was right. According to his life, he was enrolled at the University of Pisa at the age of 16 and chair of the mathematics department at 25.

To think that the best scientific minds in history were hindered because they fought the status quo of church and government or in fact that they didn’t have compulsory education is a testament to how wrong we are. The religion of climate change or critical race theory has a truth out there, it is going to take one martyr who is not going to come from within the system. The rest of us will be condemning that person until long after we are all dead.

Alright… my point here is that this is part of the mechanism that enacts and does all the things the I don’t want in my life. I probably should go into fractional reserve banking someday because taxes are not the activity that enables all of the nonsense. Taxes are the activity that build confidence for the rest of the dupes that this country is stable to invest in. That in turn creates the money for all of this in a nutshell.

End Your Programming Routine: I probably could have written for hours. I was going to write about the few things that I might be willing to put money into but then it kind of got off course and not clear enough so I deleted it. Since I haven’t railed on the government for some time, I let it fly today. As much as all of this bothers me, it also has very little impact on my day to day life, other than the continuous stealing that happens with my paycheck. Lest we all get too wrapped up in things we can’t control, moving on for the week.

“He has risen, indeed” Luke 24:34

April 12, 2022 – Is a Moustache ‘Pervy’?

April 12, 2022 /

I had to laugh a little bit on Sunday. When church was over, the young lady that works with the youth asked me why I decided to grow a moustache as she thought it made me ‘look a little pervy’.

We have all heard the term pornstache, it wasn’t exactly the area I was going for. But, in a small way it was and let me explain. It think for men, facial hair goes through trends. I saw one article that said the optimum five o’clock shadow was 10 days. I feel like the trend is some form of beard. There is the hipster/lumberjack type and then there is the playboy type.

We have had the goatee trend 15 or twenty years ago. Of course, clean shaven is always classic. I often go clean shaven when I have to do work in food plants so I don’t have to wear a beard net or additional face covering. But, the mustache is passé. To me, it is a counter culture statement. It says I know what the trends are and I am going to go contrary to them.

For a long time, I resisted this particular facial hair for the simple reason that my dad has had a moustache for many years. Quite simply I didn’t want to follow in his likeness. However, I have started changing my opinion and it has to do with how I would like to be perceived. It really has to do with the circles that you run around in.

Probably, for a college age lady, moustaches on peers bring up the creep factor when the trend is clearly bears or clean shaven. I see a lot of Indians with only moustaches, that is a cultural appearance. My angle is more mature cowboy; think Sam Elliot or Shaun Johnston.

I suppose that my argument is that context is important. What if I said, “Your skin looks a little dark. Are you sure that you are not about to commit a crime?” Or, “Are you sure you work for a living?” I think we all know those statements are not socially acceptable. It is our experiences or nurturing that form our opinions regardless of right or wrong.

End Your Programming Routine: It is just hair. It can be removed or changed. I understand the sentiment, but you tell me? Is this more pornstache or distinguished western? I definitely won’t have it forever, I get tired of the look and the grooming. For now, it is a tiny bit fun to provoke reaction.