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In my continuing efforts to improve mental health, I was referred to a mindfulness clinic at the VA. At this point in my life, I’m willing to try just about anything — even things that I can’t apply a rational basis to. In this case, mindfulness has a reasonably robust basis, supposedly supported by research (for what that’s worth… most published “research” is fundamentally flawed and total crap). I know people who have benefited greatly from the practice (a much stronger argument). And, it costs me nothing but my time, so I agreed and signed up for the online class.

At this point, I’ve attended two sessions. So far, it’s nothing new. I’ve attempted meditation in the past, going back as far as my childhood. I’ve never found it particularly soothing or useful. In fact, I’ve always found it frustrating. My mind refuses to be “present.” My mind refuses to release control. My mind refuses to set aside the litany of things that constantly bombard it with tasks to do, problems to solve, frustrations unresolved, random bits of music and lyrics, odd quotes picked up along the way, and the seemingly infinite stream of other mostly random crap that occupies my consciousness.

I’ve always assumed that the practice (mindfulness) would help me, but that I’m just doing it wrong. I still believe that. However when I have to spend energy trying to figure out what the hell it means to “be my breath” and wondering why I should tell myself “may you be well” without conjuring up images of Sylvester Stallone reacting to the deliberately ridiculous future in “Demolition Man,” my willingness to keep trying comes perilously close to inadequacy.

Why does meditation need to have it’s own lexicon of terms? In most settings I can think of, a custom lexicon comes from one of two places: a need to communicate complexity precisely and efficiently, or a need to keep the unwashed at bay. My background in science and technology, and extensive time in the military, taught me several custom lexicons developed for the first purpose. These communities have found that standard English either fails to adequately describe something, or it takes too long to get a point across in a time critical environment. Consequently, they’ve made up new words, or re-purposed old ones, to facilitate communication. It can be daunting to outsiders who venture into those communities, but that isn’t the real purpose for the jargon.

The second form of jargon is more insidious. It masquerades as the first, but has none of the virtuous motivation. This Jargon serves only one purpose: distinguish the initiated from the uninitiated. It provides a sense of exclusivity. I’ve found this kind of jargon in soft-science academia. Take some time to read any journal article published by someone with a PhD in ethnic studies, English literature, or similar focus and see if you can mentally translate the abstract into ordinary English without losing meaning. With the exception of terms describing a specific analysis method or it’s results, I’d challenge you to find a case where the jargon or non-standard phrasing is justified. It exists to make the authors and consumers of the publication feel special and exclusive.

To be completely honest, I don’t care if all of these clubs have their secret handshakes and code words, as long as I don’t have to learn and use them for no other reason than to comply with group norms. However, in trying to figure out mindfulness, I am faced with jargon that appears to serve no purpose and that strongly distracts from the very purpose. The magic words don’t make any sense to the unwashed like me. Assuming I know what they mean, I can come up with thoroughly descriptive and simple phrases that wouldn’t require the average person to employ a decoder ring. The rest of them — like “be your breath” — seem utterly meaningless, and nobody has bothered to offer enlightenment on the topic. Rather than achieving the sought for mental state, I get irritated by new-agey catch-phrases that ask me to do or be something that is undefinable or unachievable.

Maybe I’ll figure it out and join the club of initiates. Or maybe I’ll just suffer through this class and come out the other side no better than I was before and more skeptical of the snake-oil like promises that brought me here in the first place. Time will tell.

Today: an angry rant. Read no more if you know what’s’ good for you. If I heeded what I knew was good for me, I’d not write this. Today, I don’t care.

I have always striven to take people for who they are, and generally judge them only when I have to — and even then, only based on the outcomes of their actions. I couldn’t care less where, when, to whom, how, or what you were born. Unless you are a surgeon about to cut me open, or in a similarly specialized field, I don’t care how much education you have or where you got it if you can make a positive contribution. Your monthly gross income means little (if anything) to me unless it comes with a sense of entitlement or expectations of special treatment, in which case I don’t have the time or patience for you. Everyone has a potential for insights, ideas, and contributions. I will give you the benefit of the doubt until you give me empirical data to disabuse me of my trust in your ability.

Now… to my point. There are probably a thousand things in the last few sentences that my daughter and a million others would label as “problematic” — a term she uses to dismiss things that make her uncomfortable. This text is evidence of my “isms.” Ableism. Racism. Sexism. Elitism. Etc… I’m likely to be labeled as intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and an angry old white guy. I’m supposed to bow down and apologize for the fact that I was born with testicles and yet am somehow attracted to women. If I don’t worship at the altar of, and publicly and loudly endorse, everything that isn’t what I am, I am invalid and a burden on an otherwise enlightened society. My contributions are somehow invalid because I was somehow privileged — apparently because I was born to a relatively stable household that taught me to work, and because I was privileged enough to sell my soul to the Government for 20 years in trade for an education. That makes me privileged, and therefore I should kneel down and offer all my success at the altar of the oppressed.

To all those who wonder how someone as utterly repulsive and repugnant as Donald Trump can be elected President of the United States, you are BLIND if you don’t at least partially understand. He was elected by a mob who was tired of being told they didn’t matter. He was elected by people who were tired of being taken for granted. He was elected by people who were done with being marginalized because they happen to fall into the currently unfashionable crowd. He was elected because he was the “Fuck you!” candidate. He was elected because most people like me felt like the system didn’t value them, and they reacted in anger.

To be fair, I didn’t vote for Trump — in either election. He was a pill much too bitter for me to swallow. I vote Libertarian, even knowing that my vote is nothing more than a message to the two dominant parties that my vote isn’t theirs to divide between them. I vote my conscience, which won’t allow me to vote for the corruption and utter bullshit that is establishment DC.

To those who think that Biden won because the United States populace as a whole agree with his vision, you are wrong. For a large portion of his (Biden’s) voters, this election was a choice between a shit sandwich and a turd burger, and the choice came down to which was smaller, staler, and easier to swallow. Trump, by virtue of unbelievable hubris and political incompetence, was a huge, fresh, steaming pile of the kind of shit you get after a huge dog eats ten pounds of baked beans and manages to hold it in until they have fully fermented before exploding onto the kitchen floor, walls, and ceiling. Biden, by contrast, was a typical pile of shit that had been out in the sun long enough for the worst of the smell to wear off, while maggots are steadily chewing their way through the still fragrant middle. With that contrast in mind, it should give team Biden pause when they consider how close the election was. It SHOULD have been a landslide. A MASSIVE landslide.

Biden, and more importantly the mongoloid horde of social justice warriors and cancel culture raiders who believe that their opposition are just ignorant morons, should understand that the cultural tide that resulted in President trump hasn’t really turned. People are still angry at being marginalized for not being historically marginalized; and contrary to media portrayals they aren’t all mullet wearing, tobacco chewing, jacked up, coal rolling, diesel pickup driving, gun toting, toothless rebel flag waving racists. Quit trying to paint me with that brush. It isn’t who I am, and it doesn’t represent anyone I know. Would you have me paint your favored demographic based on a select subset calculated to most effectively stilt public perception in the direction of an unflattering caricature? (I can’t help but wonder if the SJW crowd will come to the defense of the distinct minority I just offended.)

Like you, my opinions are based on a desire to alleviate suffering. I too believe in the dignity of the human soul. We just disagree about the remedies. I have thought deeply, and my opinions have evolved based on my life experience and personal study. I believe I am an intelligent and reasonable person. Yet the strongest argument I hear, outside of a few honest “lefties” I’ve had the privilege to know and debate personally, are ad hominem attacks and pleas to emotion. I’m labeled as stupid because I interpret the situation differently than the socially acceptable dogma would have me do.

My experience working within the government has taught me that government is the worst possible way to accomplish ANYTHING, and should be trusted ONLY with doing things that have no possible private alternative. I am not particularly selfish, evil intentioned, or mean spirited. I am however extremely suspicious of the motives of the powerful, and flatly proclaim that the vast majority of government “experts” (and I have been counted among that crowd) are no smarter or better informed than an average small business owner. They are usually much worse in these regards. This viewpoint leads me to different solutions than the fashionable crowd, or occasionally an acknowledgement that there is no practical solution. That doesn’t make me inherently wrong, bigoted, cold-hearted, intolerant, or any other dismissive label you might apply.

I have vague hopes that my daughter will eventually come to see me as something more than a privileged oppressor who is too ignorant to celebrate the cause of the day. I hope she eventually remembers that I tried to teach her to think critically, and that almost no issue is simple. I hope she can eventually re-learn that reasonable, well-intentioned, kind, and intelligent people can look at the same evidence, and come to completely different conclusions. I hope she isn’t the only one to learn these things. I hope they don’t learn them the hard way.

There are those who hope that the woke crowd learns the kind of unavoidable lessons that follow from the path they are on, like those learned under Robes-Pierre, Pohl Pot, Mao, Kim, Stalin, Chavez, Chauchescu, Honecker, and any number of others who couldn’t tolerate wrong-think and thoughtcrime. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

If not, my best hope is to leave this world before it gets to that point, and let the ones who made the mess clean it up. They clearly don’t want me to help in that process. I’ve been canceled based on biological and cultural traits I have had no control over — incidentally the very categories they loudly proclaim should be sacrosanct unless applied to the “dominant class” or some other glib generalization to that effect. My opinions are invalid, my motives suspect, and my reservations or needs dismissed out of hand.

Angry rant over for now…

Blick ins spiegel – was siehst du da?

weis ganz nichts.

es sieht allgemein aus

und recht bekannt

aber kann nicht sagen das ich ihn kenne

was will er?

was ist er?

wer ist er?

ich glaubte, ich konnte es raus puzzeln

ich glaubte falsch.

I wish I knew how it came to be
That various bits and parts of me
Creak and grind incessantly
as if I were full ninety-three

I’ve spent most of the last few months working with a customer to define a project. They came to us knowing that the scope and requirements weren’t well defined, and asking for our expert opinion to help them simultaneously develop the experiment they wanted to carry out and the hardware to conduct it on. And, do all of this on a very short time-frame. We signed up to the challenge, believing they believed in us and that we would be successful in overcoming the current shortfalls.

As the last several months have dragged painfully on, we have made almost no progress; all while spending over 7 digits on engineering and other support. At every turn, the customer has asked us our engineering judgement and expert opinion, only to belittle our world-class experts and demand detailed analysis and exquisite proof to support our positions that are simply based on the expert judgement they requested. This, all while they were insisting that we needed to go fast… really fast.

In their hurry to go really fast, they have sabotaged any potential for progress by requiring that they be intimately involved in all processes. Their involvement has generally led to nothing but discontent and confusion. We have spent hours listening to lectures that did nothing to bring us closer to resolution. We’ve done this repeatedly, and at length. The end result is that we are months and months into the project with only marginal progress in defining what the project is.

Yesterday, the customer sent an angry email demanding to be included in all of the sub-group meetings we were having. We aren’t having sub-group meetings because we haven’t been able to get the customer to agree to what any given sub-group needs to be doing. All of those personnel are off supporting other projects with better defined objectives. The project lead responded by telling the customer that we couldn’t do sub-group meetings until we had agreed-to objectives for the sub-groups to meet, and that prior attempts to integrate their team hadn’t been helpful. In short, he told the unvarnished truth.

Today, our big-boss was contacted by their big-boss who demanded that the project lead be fired. The deputy to their big boss (and worst instigator of uncertainty and inefficiency) had been offended at the project lead’s email. Add this to the fact that we just lost our very capable lead Systems Engineer because he couldn’t take the BS any more, and we’re in a bad place. The two people with the most capability, who were most invested in the outcome, and who had the most potential for bringing it to a successful close are gone. When I’m the last one standing with any real idea for what the customer expects, we’re in deep shit. All because of a fragile ego who believes the only way to get performance is to micromanage high performers, and believes all contractors are worthless pieces of crap who don’t know enough to fight their way out of a paper bag.

I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before I end up without a job because one of my less filtered thoughts makes it out into the public. I doubt it’ll make it more than 2-digits worth of days.

A little while ago, I came across a picture on the internet that showed a garage where the door had been opened to reveal a wall of snow completely filling the opening, and a snow blower sitting in the garage. On the wall of snow there were three letters in spray paint — FML. Shorthand for the rather crude phrase, “Fu*k My Life.” At the time I chuckled. All of us have that thought from time to time, I expect. Most people don’t actually believe it.

Unfortunately, much of the time I think that thought and mean it. At the moment, I’ve just been through a one hour long complete meltdown because we threw away a couple of cardboard boxes. The performance included screaming at the top of his lungs, throwing stuff, banging heads on the wall, treating everyone like shit, and yelling at me and Liz. It was as if we were performing open heart surgery without anesthetic; like we had skinned his pet dog alive in front of him.

The only advantage to today’s meltdown was that it only kind of spilled over onto one of my other kids. Usually it results in high drama across the board. My family acts like they hate each other. Whether that’s true or not, they sure can’t stand being together for more than a few seconds. My family is a wreck. Looking at the way things are, how they are supposed to be, and how they are likely to be; I’m ready to say it with all seriousness. Again. Today. And most days.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything outside of my day job. Life has been too busy and challenging to spend much time on anything other than getting from point A to point B. I expect I’ll write more on that later, when the terms of my probation/conditional release/whatever are actually expired and I am free to fully speak my mind. In the meantime, I’m saving a few thoughts for later.

As I write this, the world is deeply immersed in the mass-panic that is COVID-19. In the last week or so, politicians too scared to accept the risk of being caught doing nothing in the face of a crisis have done what politicians do, and reacted strongly. Unfortunately, that is almost never the best course of action to take. The strong reactions have included things like shutting down economic activity on a scale not seen in at least two generations. They have included measures to distance people from their neighbors who would otherwise be the natural people to identify and attempt to help those truly in need. They have included measures that have only deepened the irrational panic and despair that have gripped the general population. The people who have been elected to protect the interests of the general public have made decisions that unquestionably have done grave and (probably) lasting damage.

This behavior is not unique to politicians. It is a product of groupthink, fear, and intolerance. Headlines scream of apocalyptic outcomes, so people get fearful. In a panic to feel a modicum of control in this uncontrollable situation, they do stupid things like buy a year’s supply of toilet paper and trying to check out of the grocery store without using their hands. They worsen the panic as those on the fence see the herd moving that direction and feel like they must be wrong if they are being left behind. Those few free-thinkers who happen to have the fortitude to stand aside from the herd and walk a different path are forcibly rounded up and cajoled into compliance — not necessarily by physical force (yet), but by social constructs we’ve built and exercised through application of the “cancel culture” across a broad array of contentious and emotional issues.

We, as a society, don’t tolerate critical thinking. We don’t listen and evaluate in rational thought. We don’t tolerate those among us who do. We do, however, reward and reinforce those who overreact to sensational things — because they’re doing “something.” Because they say things like “if we only save one life, it’ll be worth it.” Because we don’t want to feel powerless. Because thinking and listening require us to admit we don’t know something and be willing to change our minds.

Death is inevitable. Saving one life at the expense of another isn’t a justifiable action unless the parties involved have consented to it. I doubt the brick mason who will lose everything in the coming months as the economy crumbles, drop into despair, and end his life would have willingly made that trade to extend the life of an elderly person with underlying health concerns who is already far along that path to the grave. While this is an uncomfortable thought, it is the truth. Saving one life comes with costs. And nobody (at least not those in control of the message) is considering those costs.

Families make those kinds of decisions all the time. As parents, grandparents, children, siblings, and spouses grapple with illness, they must evaluate the tradeoff between expensive treatments and the possible benefits and likelihood of success. Sometimes they decide to mortgage everything and proceed, other times they opt for hospice and to make the most out of the time left to them. We are capable of those kind of decisions. The policy makers dictating our current response are not. Nothing of what has been done has been done with anything close to sufficient logic, rational thought, or informed consent.

If I were wrong about all of this, there would be much more discussion about the relative impact of the various counter-virus measures put in place compared with the number and type of people who are predominantly affected by it. We would have an honest discussion about the fact that doing a trillion dollars of damage to our economy to prevent a million deaths would come out to $1,000,000 per death. We would further talk about the fact that there is almost no scenario where we end up with a million deaths, and that we have almost certainly already done a trillion dollars worth of damage to the economy. We would also talk about the fact that that $1,000,000 per death is taken from people who likely would not be directly affected or have an interest in the outcome. Unlike the cancer sufferer who is making a decision based on personal resources and desires, this decision has been made by those with the least to lose. They have decided to take money involuntarily from each of us, in the hopes of reducing the toll by some undefinable and arbitrary amount.

To make matters worse, the current discussion isn’t at all grounded in a sense of community and what the Germans call “Mitleid” (together suffering, roughly). If it were, we would also talk about how we accept tens of thousands of deaths annually from the flu and other related seasonal maladies without more than the occasional 30-second blip on the news encouraging people to get vaccinated. We would talk about the number of deaths due to preventable things like alcohol and drug abuse and the amounts we spend (or don’t spend) to stem that tide. We would talk about intergenerational poverty and the impact it has on families. We would talk about the failures of the prison system that leaves countless people unable to obtain the necessities of life in a legal manner. We would talk about a great many things with urgency. We don’t. We don’t talk. We occasionally yell at each other, but that isn’t talk; not really. Talking involves listening to understand and communicate.

This particular scenario is unique in that it is sensational, and is happening at a time when communication is near universal, ubiquitous, instantaneous, and rewards only the sensational at the expense of critical thought and dry and uncomfortable facts. When the sensation dies down, and we come to the realization that this virus is going to be an inconvenient reality in our lives for the indefinite future, we will relegate it to the unfortunately long list of inconveniences of modern life that we choose not to give any heed — but not before screwing up the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people.

Driving drunk is dangerous. Writing or saying anything while angry sometimes rises to that same level.