Bullshit and Willful Ignorance

22:04 Monday, 17 March 2014
Words: 1557

Happy St. Patrick's Day! It's a miserable day here in the Sunshine State, so instead of wandering around with my camera, I figure I'll just scratch an itch here and ignore the liquid sunshine falling all around me.

So we'll begin with a disclaimer, and then you can sort of decide whether you want to stick around or not. Blinding glimpse of the obvious: This is my blog. These are my opinions. I like to think they're informed opinions. I'm not trying to prove anything here, because those standards would be impossibly high. I'm not trying to change your mind. I don't have the power to do that. At the most, I hope I'm giving you something to think about, perhaps look into some more on your own. The only person who has a prayer of changing your mind is you, and the odds are against you doing that anyway. Seriously.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing, I make all this shit up. You're encouraged to do your own thinking.

When last we spoke, we were debunking the notion that the internet is some unique artifact that has some special utility for sharing "knowledge," or that that utility is in some way especially virtuous in terms of enabling the advancement of human values. It's not. It's merely another artifact; a bigger megaphone, if you will. When everyone has access to the same megaphone, and nobody is really listening anyway, it doesn't matter. Worse, if people are listening and the person with the megaphone is wrong, or willfully misleading the listeners, well, it's worse, isn't it?

Technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do. Chiefly, it expands our activities in space (in both directions, bigger and smaller) and compresses them in time. Our problems, in the main, lie in the realm of the what far more than the how.

What we do is often not strictly rational. Our cognitive abilities are vastly overstated. We've evolved a sophisticated central nervous system that allows us to function in a complex technological society without really doing much thinking. Much of this behavior is governed by what we would probably call the emotional center of our brain. Kind of "our gut." If you want to read some fascinating things about why this may be so, look up Dr. Antonio Damasio. I'm pretty sure he'd disagree with how I choose to characterize his work, but basically, we reason backward from our feelings.

That is to say, we have a feeling about something, and we use some small part of our cognitive ability to fashion a narrative around that feeling. This is what mostly passes for "thinking" these days. And, mostly, it's harmless, indeed often useful.

Together with a limited and somewhat compromised cognitive faculty, we have intellectual blind spots. I suspect these are a consequence of relying on the more emotional centers of our minds to do much of the heavy lifting. If something "feels" right, ("sounds" right, same thing), we don't "feel" the need to question it. Because we're social creatures, attuned to some degree to each other's emotional state, these blind spots are often shared, and only become apparent when an unwanted result occurs. Experience then encodes the data in the emotional processing centers, and we often don't repeat those mistakes. It seems that, most often, it's the truly novel experiences where we have these intellectual blindspots. In hindsight, the data was all before us, showing that the unwanted outcome was possible or even likely, but because there was no emotional valence to the data, it didn't trigger any warning for a closer examination. Or, if it did in some, they were unable to overcome the feeling of the group that the data bore further study.

Some famous examples are probably in order.

The Apollo 1 fire. A group of really smart scientists and engineers, (Rocket scientists fer chrissakes!) are trying to get man to the moon. They built an incredible machine to do that, but there were, as there always are, design constraints dictated by physics and the state of technology. The result was a choice to test the spacecraft in a pure oxygen environment in a sealed capsule pressurized above ambient pressure. The resulting fire, which killed three astronauts, was foreseeable. But they didn't foresee it. Really smart people, with the safety of the flight crew always uppermost in their minds, didn't foresee an accident that was, in fact, foreseeable. Hindsight is 20/20. We have blind spots.

The loss of the space shuttle Challenger. Rocket scientists, again! The failure of the o-ring seals on the solid rocket boosters in cold weather launches had been observed before. Engineers were aware of the possibility of failure and catastrophic loss of the orbiter. In this case, the blind spots weren't as much technical as programmatic, and managers choosing to ignore the advice and warnings of engineers with knowledge of the potential risk. Again, these are intelligent, able people.

The loss of the space shuttle Columbia. Sensing a pattern here? Rocket scientists! Again, we had the data. We knew there could be a problem. We knew the results would be catastrophic. We went on. We didn't change until the catastrophe happened.

Rocket scientists, engineers, are smart people. They're good people. They don't go out of their way to be willfully ignorant; but they are people, and therefore fallible. And bad things happen when smart, good people ignore the data.

Smart people often disagree. The rest of us, who aren't so smart, have to kind of try and figure out which ones we want to believe. That's a choice. Much like the choices made by rocket scientists, they're often flawed by the process we use to assess risks, options and potential outcomes. That process is chiefly an emotional one. It varies by individual, and it often depends on what you're invested in, emotionally. George B. Hardy, the solid rocket booster manager at NASA was invested in getting shuttles launched on time. He didn't want a disaster, but his emotional investment in success impaired his ability to hear and process the information the manufacturer was giving him. We are not rational beings, we are emotional ones.

So about this climate change thing. I'm not a climate scientist. Chances are, you aren't one either. We have to kind of listen and choose to believe one side or the other. There are people who know what the data say, and what the implications may be for our world, and they're trying to be heard. Most of the people, climate scientists, who know about these things seem to agree. Earth's climate is getting warmer, and it's not because of "natural variability" or any other "natural" phenomena. It's because we're altering the content of Earth's atmosphere, increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, through the combustion of fossil fuels.

But, there are many, many people, most of whom are not climate scientists, who are absolutely certain this is wrong. They used to say the climate wasn't changing, the atmosphere wasn't warming. Some of them are still saying that now, because of the way they choose to regard the data. But even if they acknowledge the atmosphere is warming, they deny that its human activity that's causing it. Economic human activity. Changing that activity will impose costs or losses on some people, inconvenience them at the least. They're emotionally invested in denying climate change, or the human basis for it.

They get to use the internet too. They get to shout just as loud as the people who are suggesting we're in trouble and we should probably be doing something about it. And the sad truth is, they're winning.

They're more skilled at crafting emotional narratives, since that's the chief way we use to sell anything in this culture. Scientists are emotional beings, but their skill isn't in manipulating the emotions of others, so they're naturally disadvantaged.

The people who are denying climate change, or its human basis, aren't bad people. They're willfully ignorant though. They can see that there is nearly universal agreement that we are altering our atmosphere and our climate. They're making an emotional choice to ignore the data. They're just like George B. Hardy, the NASA SRB manager who told Thiokol, "I am appalled. I am appalled by your recommendation," when they recommended delaying the launch of Challenger. Smart guy making strong statements that were just wrong. He wasn't a bad man, he just couldn't see what was before his eyes because the emotional filters, the emotional processing system we rely on to orient ourselves in the world, and place our choices in context wouldn't let him. He was blind.

Didn't make him a bad person. But to the extent we choose to believe that we are rational creatures and responsible for our choices, he was willfully ignorant. And we have many such people today, on any number of matters, not just climate change. People are willfully ignorant about their personal health, their mental health, the state of their personal relationships. It's a challenge we all have to grapple with if we wish to bring about meaningful change in our lives.

How do we open people's eyes? I don't know. Seems like the only thing that's 100% effective is a disaster.

So we're going to get one.

Check Flight

18:48 Thursday, 17 March 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 59.61°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 411

Well, walk. Check walk.

This was the first morning where our schedule and the weather aligned to let me get a walk in with all my new "gear." I walked in the Oboz yesterday and they seemed fine. Sole is definitely firmer than my usual Merrill's.

But I wanted to walk early in the morning, when it's dark and nobody can see me looking like a dork with all my stuff strapped on. So I got up at 0530, put the 40-150mm/f2.8 lens, the power bank, two bottles of water and the heavy duty Joby Gorilla Pod on the lumbar pack. It's not full, by any means, but it's fairly substantial. I put the OM-1 with the 12-100mm/f4 lens mounted in the Cotton Carrier and stepped outside.

At first it felt like I'd made a mistake, this was too much. But half a mile into it, I began to get used to the weight and my legs felt fine. There's something going on my right side, near the illiac band; and it's probably related to my lower back. I wondered if I might be at risk of over-doing it, but pressed on.

Did our normal 2.5mi loop, pace was a little lower at 19:39/mi. We've done it as fast as 16-something. I don't anticipate maintaining a significant pace on any hike where I'm using the camera. Even around here, where I'm only shooting stuff I've seen before it's usually 24 minutes or more.

Got home, took everything off and here I am. We'll see what's sore later. The good news is that there is no pain between my shoulder blades, and the sensation on my right hip isn't painful, just like a tingling. I take that as a warning sign, so I'll pay attention to it; but the pain between my should blades would be very distracting and uncomfortable and there's none of that.

So it looks like this is a workable solution. I've also got an Osprey 22 liter Talon I'm going to try. I think that'll be my carry-on bag with the laptop, the 40-150, power bank and headphones. I'll put the OM-1 in a small Domke bag as my "personal item."

I guess this is just another sign of our "peak civilization," where we have so much crap we carry with us, we devise multiple means to carrying it. C'est la vie.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

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Philosophy of Command

13:40 Sunday, 17 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.46°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 61% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 700

It is in the way of mystery, how this world works. In my experience anyway. Parts of it.

We just had a trial conclude here on Friday and the former CEO of JEA, Aaron Zahn, was convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud in an effort to enrich himself to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from the sale of JEA to FPL. JEA is among the largest publicly owned utilities in the country.

I'm a member of the United States Naval Institute, I get their emails and from time to time the title of a piece catches my eye, as this one did. I wasn't enamored with it overall after reading it, but I genuinely do agree with the premise.

And it made me think about the "philosophy" of other areas of service, particularly in the context of the JEA debacle. What was the "philosophy" of the politician who put Zahn on the board, which then chose Zahn to replace the departing CEO?

Why do people enter politics? Is it public service, or personal ambition? Is it being attracted to the trappings of power? Is it the desire for personal advancement? Maybe it's just a job.

I think that many people in public service positions don't understand the value of service or the opportunity it presents. They don't understand the relationship between the responsibility that goes with the office or the position, and the public they notionally serve.

On this morning's walk, I thought I'd blog about this; but one thing led to another, breakfast, call Mom, and next thing you know it's the Tinderbox meetup. Great session with Dr. Beck Tench. We had a little back and forth toward the end, and she related the story about how she came to change her feelings about her wedding ceremony.

That brought to mind my experience with navy retirement ceremonies, so I offered a little sea story.

In a moment I'll post something I wrote late in the night on September 5, 2005, in the midst of the Hurricane Katrina debacle. The sea story will be in there, but you've probably heard it before.

I found that post looking for something shorter. It's terribly long for 2024, nearly 4K words! So, I'll understand if you don't read it.

But it speaks to everything I was going to blog about, prompted by the JEA trial and an article in Proceedings.

I'm not especially proud of that piece. It's not great writing. But I believe every word of it, nearly 19 years later.

It is to our everlasting regret that we have a blinkered view of who we are in the world. To the nature of our relationships to one another. To the duty of care we owe to one another, to the responsibilities placed in us.

We are born. One day we die. Everything that matters happens in between. How it matters, why it matters, these are questions we should be asking ourselves, if we had the time. If we had the awareness that the answers might mean something.

You can get pretty far in life without ever asking those questions. And it seems like most people do. You can also go pretty far astray by never asking those questions. Either way, at some point you may find it's too late, and you didn't take advantage of the opportunities the questions might have revealed.

We're all in this together. All we ever really have are each other. Life is meaningless. We bring meaning to life. That's the opportunity we have. To make meaning.

Make meaning, or make money? Power, position, privilege? Empty. People that have all that are still empty. Still looking for something to fill the aching void. More power. More money. More privilege.

Faith and fear are the "harmony of binding opposites." Yin and yang. Every breath is an act of faith. Love is faith in action. Courage is love in action. Love one another. Keep faith with each other.

Do your best, and the rest isn't up to you. What is your best?

I guess pulling off a multi-million dollar scam was it for Aaron Zahn.

He'll have some time in a Club Fed to reconsider.

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Change

15:27 Sunday, 17 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.95°F Pressure: 1003hPa Humidity: 62% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 3844

[Originally published in Groundhog Day on September 5, 2005. There was a link to a WSJ opinion piece in the original. The link is now dead.]

There is much discussion underway in weblogs and in opinion pieces in the press regarding what changes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the dismal performance of the leaders of our government may bring. This is a good thing.

I'm not sure what I have to add to that discussion.

One of my most persistent frustrations with writing and maintaining first Time's Shadow, and now, Groundhog Day, is that I am not a disciplined writer. When I am motivated to write, it is often because of some emotion, usually negative. As a result, I'm often writing against some idea, and I know people enjoy reading more positive things, or at least the occasional respite from a constant litany of complaint. I have made at least one change in my writing habits, and that has been to file many of my more vituperative posts in a topic that never gets published, which I call The Cooler. Sometimes a post will make it out of there after I edit it a bit, but usually they just stay there.

This is another instance where the throbbing vein in my temple seems to compel me to put down in photons my thoughts about a particularly bad idea. If I wait to calm down, when I try to write, it becomes more laborious and I become more pedantic. I begin to bore myself. So, I'm going to struggle here to try and keep this piece out of The Cooler, try to make something of a compelling argument, and try to stay interested while doing it.

The thing that's got me rather exercised right now is a link Doc Searls pointed to in the Wall Street Journal. I'll go back to beating up the idea that markets are conversations some other day, but right now I want to beat something else up.

I went to the piece in the WSJ because Doc called it "instructive lessons," and I wanted to see what those lessons were. In fact, there are no lessons there. Instead, there is the usual justification for the predictable response of the Journal, and that is that we should outsource or privatize the business of disaster preparedness. This is a knee-jerk, ideological response that will gain traction among those who always seem to believe that the private sector has better answers than the public one.

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I've seen the private sector at work in things like Enron and Halliburton and Merck and Boeing and Microsoft and oh, I don't know, check with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, he might have a couple more he could name. But I don't happen to think that the private sector has a monopoly on virtue. And bureaucracies exist in the private sector just as much as they do in the public one, which is just one of the many reasons why markets are not "conversations." There is no immunity to inertia through incentivization.

For a while, after 9/11, some pundits opined that the event would mark some watershed in American history, that it was the end of the Age of Irony. They were wrong. We do have a problem in this country, but it's not going to be solved by a particular economic "sector." There's no faith-based program to address this particular need. There's no catchy slogan, no social software solution, no pill, no gene therapy, no stem cell, no Supreme Court decision that's going to fix what's wrong with this country. But then, there doesn't need to be, because what's wrong can be fixed by you and I. Indeed, it will only be fixed, if you and I fix it.

I'm not an ideologue. I don't have any particular view of the world that I want to promote, other than maybe two ideas: First, know thyself. And second, you must become the change you wish to see in the world.

I'll tell you a sea story. Maybe two.

I'm pretty sure I've told this one before either here or in Time's Shadow, but that's in the nature of sea stories, they tend to be repeated.

When I was executive officer of USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD-981), I had to perform my first burial at sea. Up until that time, I don't recall having ever done one before. I certainly hadn't participated in the ceremony. That was about to change.

My job as the XO was to commit the decedent's cremains to the sea. Cremains are what are more commonly called "ashes." There's a burial at sea ceremony spelled out in some navy instruction or another, and the Captain presides over it. It was conducted on the fantail (that's the ass-end of the ship) and there were people there to render honors and there was a gun salute, and the whole thing was videotaped to provide a record for the family. So at the end of this rather somber, somewhat elaborate ceremony, I ceremoniously marched to the stern of the ship, removed the top of the container and poured the cremains over the side.

And the first time I did it, the wind swirling around the stern caught the ashes and blew most of them back up onto me in my dress blues and the deck of the ship.

I was not a happy guy.

It's pretty creepy having some guy's ashes all over your face and your uniform. But I remained "in character" until the end of the ceremony. Needless to say, I was glad it was over and I sincerely hoped I'd never have to do it again.

Except I did have to do it again. It came as a surprise, but shortly after we did the first one, we were tasked to do another one. Then they started coming in twos and threes. I worked with the Officer of the Deck to ensure we placed the ship in a favorable position with respect to the wind such that I wouldn't repeat my first experience, and while it was something of a pain in the ass, it wasn't a huge deal either. Just one more thing I had to do, so I just did it.

After each ceremony, we boxed up a national ensign, a chart showing the location of the burial, the videotape of the ceremony, the shell casings from the gun salute and a letter from the CO and sent them to the family. My navigator, who was also the admin officer, was in charge of that. I don't know how many we had done by this point, but Murphy's Law finally made its appearance and at some point we sent the wrong mementos to the wrong families. They were, understandably, rather upset and they conveyed their unhappiness back through the chain of command, whereupon I received direction that I would personally inspect the contents of each package before it left the ship and it would be sealed in my presence. Which, again, is no big deal, but it was a kind of pain in my ass.

And for a while, that's pretty much how I regarded doing burials at sea, as a pain in my ass.

Except I kept having to do them. I don't recall exactly how many I did, but it was more than thirty, maybe close to forty. And there was a rehearsal for each one, and of course there's each ceremony. Plus the packaging up of the mementos, which had me reading these guys' DD-214s or other discharge papers, and getting just the barest glimpse of what had been a life. So I began to think about this whole thing a lot. I found out that the reason why we were doing so many burials at sea was because many of the families of these guys couldn't afford a casket burial. Some of the "families" were really fairly distant relatives who were kind of stuck with the disposition of the body after their relative died. A few were really old guys, most were veterans of WW II or Korea, a few more recent. But the more I thought about these guys and the fact that, for many of them, there was nobody available to see to their end, to the final disposition of their earthly remains, the more I began to feel as though I had some sort of responsibility to them, to these guys I had never known and who never knew me.

Now, I don't know if any of these guys had ever given any thought to how they were going to be treated after they'd died. For all I know, they didn't care. Maybe some of them did. I don't know. I don't know if any of the families thought that the Navy would do for their relative what they couldn't do themselves in a manner that they would care about. About all I ever knew about these guys was their date of birth, date of death, period of service and an address to mail the package.

But they became something different to me. I don't know, I guess I thought that if it were me, I'd like to think the guy doing the thing would do it right. I can't really describe what the change was, other than it was no longer a pain in my ass. I won't say that I felt like it was a privilege, because, truthfully, I didn't want to do it. But I began to feel like I owed something to that box of ashes, which is about as irrational a thought as I've ever had, and I've had a few. So while it wasn't a privilege, I did see it as a duty, and one to be taken as seriously as any other important duty, perhaps more so in some respects.

I don't know how many burials I did after coming to that, less than half I'd say. But that experience was to kind of play a role later on when I began to understand something else I'd never really thought about before.

So here's another sea story, although this one doesn't strictly take place at sea. I was on shore duty at the time. And again, I'm sure I've probably told this story before too. Hopefully, the inconsistencies aren't too obvious or damning.

I was the XO of Fleet Training Center, and at the time of this story, I think I was the acting CO. I had two periods of three months' duration when I got to be the acting CO after my boss had retired without relief. Didn't mean a great deal different for me, I still got the same paycheck, and I didn't move my office; but I did have to preside over the various ceremonies in the capacity of the CO, rather than the XO, which means I was usually the guy doing all the fun stuff, like handing out the awards and stuff.

Anyway, one day, one of our sailors was getting ready to retire, and we usually have a fairly elaborate retirement ceremony for them. As the CO, I'd be the guy to present the award and all the plaques and letters and stuff a retiree normally gets. Usually there's a guest speaker, someone from the retiree's career or life who gives a speech about the retiree's career and tells a few embarrassing stories and what a great person they were and all that, as you might imagine.

So this sailor comes into my office one day and asks me to be her guest speaker. Now, I've never served with this individual before, and we've only been together at FTC for about a year, but she wants me to say a few words about her at her retirement. It floored me. I'd been to dozens of retirement ceremonies before, usually as a member of the audience, a few times as the master of ceremonies, but I'd never been asked to speak about someone before.

So that was a hard one. Of course I said I would, but I really had no idea what I would talk about. I pulled her personnel record and reviewed her career. I thought about what I knew about her from our time together at FTC. And then I got to thinking about this whole retirement ceremony thing.

I'd never really thought about it before. Of course, my own would be coming up a couple of years later, but I wasn't thinking much about that at the time either. If you'd asked me what I thought about them before then, I'd have told you they were just another one of those things I had to do as a part of my job.

When I began to think about it, one of the first things that occurred to me was the burials at sea and what that ceremony ultimately "meant." And I went on to think about the nature of ceremonies and why we went to the trouble of having them. To be honest, I had never thought much about it before. They were always just a part of Navy life. You don't have to think about what it means, you just have to show up. But somehow, when you have some part to play in it, you tend to think about what it means, or what it is supposed to mean.

I began to think about the word honor, because we did these things, supposedly, to honor, the person who was retiring. And so I wondered what that meant, because I had never really thought about that before either. So I did what I often do, I consulted a dictionary. Honor, the verb, means to regard with great respect, or to fulfill an obligation, or keep an agreement. It was the second sense of the verb that I focused on, perhaps because of my experience with the burials at sea. I had, without really thinking about it, been acting to fulfill an obligation to those dead veterans, and I thought about what that meant to me.

And I thought about the retiree, who was, most assuredly, still alive at her ceremony. What was my obligation to her? What was my role? Why was I going to be up there in front of the rest of our command? And from those questions, I found answers that eventually turned into my speech for her. It must have been a pretty good speech, because afterward, a lot of people came up to me to talk about it and I ended up getting a lot more requests to speak at retirement ceremonies.

And that's probably enough sea stories.

What follows isn't that speech, but it's based on what I learned when I was thinking about it. There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We "honor" individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It's about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It's about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don't think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one's fellows.

Leadership is the act of renewing and strengthening that faith. Leadership is embodying that faith and living it, having it be a part of one's life, recognizing that each of us is a part of something greater than ourselves, and that's not our company or our corporation.

I couldn't be incentivized to care about the people whose ashes I consigned to the sea's embrace. I got the same paycheck whether I cared about them or not. I couldn't be incentivized to talk about things like faith and keeping that faith with one another. I could have stood up there and told a few jokes, highlighted the achievements of my retiree's career and gotten away from that podium without ever breaking a sweat.

It was easy, when we would be working hard training at sea, to understand why we were working so hard. If we didn't work hard during a main space fire drill, we knew many of our shipmates might die, and we might lose the ship. There's no place to run in a fire at sea. We knew when we were working hard during general quarters drills why we were working so hard, because otherwise shipmates, both our own and those on other ships, might die if we didn't get the job done. The fear of death is a pretty good incentive. But there are a million things we do that are inconvenient, many that are hard, that have nothing to do, directly, with staying alive. But they have everything to do with being a part of something larger than ourselves. We lose sight of those things too often. Indeed, for myself, I never had sight of them until I was put into the middle of them and had to wonder why I was doing this? Who cares about a box of ashes of some stranger? Certainly, he was beyond caring.

Being in the Navy, or any branch of the military, is a form of public service. Part of what some people call the public sector. Something we've lost sight of is the meaning and the value of public service. Like our infatuation with our clever technologies, we've become enamored with the many supposed virtues of the marketplace, and its rewards for efficiency. But where is there room in the marketplace for keeping faith with one another? Faith isn't a commodity that can be bought or sold. If there is a place, how does it compare in priority with things like maximizing shareholder value, or the bottom line? Who is the competition when it comes to keeping faith with one another?

What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was a result of each of us failing to keep faith with each other. Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said that people usually get the kind of government they deserve. I guess that's true, even if it is essentially blaming the victim; it often seems like most of our wounds, individual and collective, are self-inflicted. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

I've seen a lot of people calling for the sacking of Michael Brown, a political appointee and someone who is patently not qualified for the job, let alone someone who's ever had to exercise leadership. I'm certainly not opposed to sacking Brown. But sacking Brown isn't enough, and if we settle for that, it serves the interests of those whose failures were, in many ways, even greater. At the very least, we ought to demand of our president that he ask for the resignation of Secretary Chertoff.

But even more, somewhere out of all this hot air must come a discussion, an argument, (not a "conversation") about the value of public service, the role of leadership, an examination of authority, responsibility, and accountability. We need to take a close look at that "social fabric" that supposedly binds us as a nation. Is it nothing more than a blind faith in the "invisible hand" of the marketplace? How can what is presumably "the best of us," so grievously fail "the least of us?" What do we expect from our leaders in the way of leadership, at all levels of government? And don't look to our so-called "leaders" to lead this discussion.

I've seen a lot of folks wondering what "we" can do to address this situation, and, predictably, people are focusing on technological solutions, when what we have is not a fundamentally technological problem. It's something far less physical. It's a crisis of faith, it's a kind of identity crisis about who we are as a people and what we say we believe. Because there's a disconnect, an enormous chasm, between what we say we believe and how we manifest that belief in the leadership we choose and the other choices we make. So if you want to try to begin to "solve" this problem, I'd say your time would be better spent there than in advocating a particular technology. I will note that many of those who do will be doing so while angling for some competitive advantage in the marketplace.

I'd like to say I'm optimistic, or that I'm hopeful this will be the watershed event many thought 9/11 was. I'm afraid I'm not. I look back at the events that made many of these values meaningful to me, and maybe I'm just a slow learner, but I don't see very many people having similar kinds of experiences. I don't know how to articulate that meaning in a compelling way, to make it meaningful for others. I don't know how to resolve the incongruity between a culture that believes life was created by a creator, but which embraces a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" view of its fellow creatures. I don't know how to check the embrace of "self interest" over "public interest." I'm not a marketer, and I don't know how to sell the truth, so I just try to tell it. I don't know if I have enough faith for all that.

I don't know if any of us does.

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This Morning's Moon 3-17-24

07:08 Monday, 17 March 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 58.62°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 63% Wind: 8.01mph
Words: 111

Broken clouds this morning, moving fast. Clear around the moon.

I'd say I don't know why I keep taking these, but I'd be repeating myself.

Watched Electric State on Netflix the other night. It wasn't horrible. Felt like someone said, "Let's do Ready Player One, but with robots!" With a garnish of The Matrix.

It was just the kind of diversion one would expect from the fascist corporate state in late capitalism. Irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, the audience stares at its screen as the characters are liberated from the screens mounted on their heads, oblivious to anything resembling meaning, message or moral.

The beat goes on...

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The Everything Bucket

07:17 Monday, 17 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 57.94°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 62% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 593

Made a couple of improvements to Captain's Log over the weekend. Tinderbox has a Tags attribute ($Tags), but it seems it was at least first intended to receive tag data from other applications when their data was imported to a Tinderbox file. There is no expressly designed tag management feature within the application itself.

Having been to enough Tinderbox meetups, I was confident there should be a way to manage a list of tags within the text of a Tinderbox note itself. So I raised the question at the most recent meetup and had a working solution within minutes. You can view that interaction here. (Link should begin 46 minutes into the meetup, when I raised the question.)

I mention this here for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the level support you can get from the community if you're struggling with something in Tinderbox.

The other improvement was just a bit of polish. Logs are broken down by months, and a month contains a list of days, each day's log page titled like this, Monday, March 17, 2025. (Happy St. Patrick's Day, btw.) If you have the outline focused on a particular month, then you just see a long list of day and date notes with little in the way of contextual cues to orient you within the list.

Not to suggest that it's hard by any means, but I thought it would be easy to just color weekend days differently to break up the monotony. That turned out to be a little harder than I expected, but a quick visit to the forum got me squared away.

The value, or utility of an "everything bucket," is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend working with it. The automations I've created are intended to make entries as effortless as possible, remaining within whatever application or effort you were engaged in at the moment when it occurred to you to record it. So, in that context, the log is largely invisible. It remains in the background and AppleScript handles getting the data from whatever you were doing into the log.

Where the real effort comes is the time spent reviewing entries, ideally not more than a day after I made them so I might rely on my fallible memory to fill in any blanks when I created the entry. And that's where tagging becomes an important investment. Once data is in the log, you have to have some means of finding it again.

Mitzi is up in Winterfell, and she's going to arrange to have our well water tested. But I did most of the homework about how to request that. Now I need to search my email for the conversation I had with the Watershed Protection Agency and forward that to Mitzi.

Well, I just did that. But I also made a log entry for it, so eventually it'll be in the container that gathers all the entries about Winterfell.

I used to have a (digital) copy of a paper written by Don Norman at Apple's Advanced Technology Group about a kind of experiment he made using a Hypercard stack as a kind of PIM (Personal Information Manager, the antecedent to the much more sophisticated "Personal Knowledge Management" of today.). He wanted someplace to store information "too trivial to remember, but too important to forget." I tried finding that paper on the web just now, but no luck.

Anyway, Tinderbox is Hypercard, in spirit if not in UI, and Captain's Log is Don Norman's little experiment.

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Further to the Foregoing

10:22 Monday, 17 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 56.75°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 45% Wind: 20.71mph
Words: 82

If you watched the video in the preceding post, you may have noticed some PII (personally identifiable information) appeared in a portion of the video. Michael Becker was kind enough to blur that data and re-upload the video, necessitating a new link. It's been updated in the post, though the RSS items may already be downloaded into various readers.

So if you get a broken video link, just visit the blog post on the marmot itself and all should be well.

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Weather

07:53 Tuesday, 17 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 19.8°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 17.18mph
Words: 953

Mitzi was supposed to get in last night about 2230, but she got stuck in Detroit. Not exactly stuck so much as her flight kept getting delayed to the point where she called an audible and booked herself on another flight out today, and then tried to find a hotel room.

Her flight was ultimately cancelled, so it was a good call. She is scheduled to arrive in Elmira today at 1330, which at least means I won't be driving in the dark.

Had a productive interaction with Claude yesterday regarding the new house. I'd made a spreadsheet with various size floor plans, from 28' to 30' wide, 44' to 46' long, and the cost of each at our quoted rate.

Then I described what we were trying to accomplish to the AI, and asked if there was a "sweet spot," regarding the "ideal" size. It offered some useful feedback and pointed out that a loft and a basement consume a good deal of main floor square footage just for the stairs, figuring 45 sq ft per stairwell. I don't know if that's a hallucination or not, but it does give me something to ask the designer about. I'm not dead set against a loft, but I wonder if it's more trouble (and cost) than it's worth.

Keeping the loft option open, for now, I started working on a 30'x46' floor plan. It's an exceedingly tedious program, and I think I'd really be better off with a mouse. I tried using the "room" tool, but I found that it merges the sides of the room with the exterior walls, which are much thicker than the interior walls, and that seems to cause problems that I don't understand. So I just used the straight wall tool to construct each room. It merges those too, but without the issues that the room tool seems to cause.

That gets a bit exhausting after a while, so I had another conversation with the AI, asking about budget. I gave it our contractor quoted rate for the work he will do, and the portions of the build that we will be responsible for, and asked if it could estimate the cost of our portion of the work.

It commented that our contractor's rate was reasonable for the region, and then gave a low and high estimate for each of the areas we will be responsible for completing.

Using the midpoint estimate, we'd be busting our notional $500K budget by about $80K. That wasn't particularly shocking to me. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the driveway expansion and the new septic tank, which are together about another $17K; so, again, we're approaching that $600K mark. That's not entirely out of reach, but it is a significant stretch. I think it's achievable though.

I'm committed to ICF construction because of the weather we just experienced this weekend. We can anticipate more extreme weather, more severe extreme weather, in the years to come. For the purposes of my analysis, I'm assuming we'll have at least 15 years in the house, which should put me in my mid-eighties. Mitzi's mom lived well into her 90s, albeit with some form of dementia, and my mom will be 93 in September. Each of our fathers died younger, but my dad was 87 when he passed. So far, no dementia in my family, so I have to anticipate that I may be a caregiver for some time. Mitzi has long-term care insurance as well, so I think we're fairly well prepared in that regard. Of course, "People plan. God laughs."

But back to the house. ICF will withstand the most severe weather extremes. I'll have to talk to Brad about strapping the trusses down, I don't know if New York follows Florida's code. You can build an ICF roof, but that's even more money. So the roof will be the weak spot with regard to wind damage. In terms of extremes of heat and cold, the thermal mass of the concrete envelope acts as an enormous thermal shock absorber. If we had weeks of extreme heat or cold, that advantage might turn into a small disadvantage, but I think for the most part it's going to save us money on heating and cooling (mostly heating in Climate Zone 5).

We'll have standing metal seam roofing and siding, so no paint, no pests, burning embers shouldn't be a problem. ICF homes don't burn, per se. Apparently the EPS beneath the siding melts rather than burns, and of course the concrete isn't flammable. The biggest fire risk is interior, and beneath the eaves, so we'll want to keep flammable vegetation away from the house. You don't want fire entering from the eaves, and spreading into the roof.

I was wondering in the wee hours this morning how much of a Faraday cage the house represents. With metal roofing and siding, and all that rebar in the walls, how much of an EMP event would enter the house? Of course, everything plugged into the electrical system would be fried. And I'd have to think about whether or not the roofing and siding have to be grounded to be of any utility. Something to chat with an AI about.

But the important thing is, you don't want to find yourself homeless in your 70s and 80s, which is why we left Florida. Of course, no place is truly immune to climate disasters today, but I'm fairly confident the risks are more manageable here, especially if we build an ICF home. I listened to a podcast the other day, and apparently ICF is surging in California in the areas destroyed by wildfires. Likewise in Florida for hurricane destroyed homes.

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Tundra

09:48 Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 21.7°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 16.13mph
Words: 850

It's 20°F out there, but 20 knots of wind makes it feel like 8°. I've gotten some use from my ice cleats. Back porch is covered with rough ice. Probably not a slip risk, but you never know. Went out to the garage for some salt. Don't want Mitzi taking a spill when she gets home.

I'm feeling fairly unproductive, so I figure I'll just do some blogging.

I wonder if Paradise was really intended to be a "one and done" limited series. Because it seems to me that they didn't really have a long-term story arc. I mean, time travel? Really?

I still like the characters, and the survival stories, but it just seems like they were reaching for ideas off the shelf, The Man in the High Castle in this case. Though I suppose that wasn't time travel so much as a parallel universe thing.

Monarch is something of a profound disappointment. It has some good ideas, but the execution is sloppy and the storylines are too disparate and weakly developed.

I watched Cold Storage the other night, and that was delightful. It reminded me a lot of Tremors. A "buddy pair" protagonist, interesting supporting characters. I think Tremors has the advantage of a truly novel "monster." Cold Storage gives off some The Last Of Us vibes, which isn't entirely unwelcome. Just a great B-movie experience you won't regret watching if you're into that sort of thing.

And I am.

Today should be a workout day, but I'm giving it a pass due to lack of sleep and picking up Mitzi. But I've been doing pretty well overall. Sunday I did 20 minutes on the elliptical followed by an arms workout. My legs are still complaining this morning. I'll head to the gym tomorrow for more time on the elliptical and "leg day." Gotta get in shape to survive old age.

Speaking of longevity, I've also made some changes to my diet and beverage consumption. For most of my life, I've had a diet soda habit. It was my preferred caffeine delivery vehicle. To try to be a somewhat more responsible diet soft drink consumer, I switched to Soda Stream products, so I wasn't generating as much plastic waste.

I ran out of syrup back in January and haven't bought any since. I've switched to drinking green tea. Apparently you're supposed to have three cups a day to have any real health benefits and I'm only having two. That may change when it gets warmer. I was surprised at the extent to which a hot cup of tea will warm you up. I normally get up and put on a sweatshirt over my long-sleeved thermal undershirt. After having a cup of tea, I have to take the sweatshirt off for a little while. Other than that, I mostly just drink water or an occasional hot chocolate.

As for my diet, I've been focusing on fiber to feed my microbiome. For the past few years I've usually eaten the same thing for breakfast every day, with few exceptions. Two eggs, spinach, baby Bella mushrooms, black beans and occasionally onions. Often, but not always, topped with avocado and always Sriracha. Seems like a generous amount of fiber-rich foods.

This winter, I've been switching it up a bit with oatmeal with blueberries and walnuts. Sometimes bananas. About a tablespoon of buckwheat honey too, which is perhaps a bit too generous.

I've tried overnight oats for the first time this week. They're pretty good! The nice thing is you can make three servings at once the night before. I went out and bought a set of Anchor-Hocking 2-cup glass storage containers, which are a good size. I see a lot of folks using Ball jars, but I prefer a shallower container. I do a cup of whole, rolled oats, a tablespoon of chia seeds and some cinnamon. I shake that up pretty good to get the chia seeds spread out. Then a generous tablespoon of plain greek yogurt, a cup of milk and a generous teaspoon (I'm trying to show restraint now) of buckwheat honey. Stir all that up, cover it and stick in the fridge.

The first morning I tried it, it was great! I added blueberries, raspberries and walnuts and stirred them all in. The second morning it had thickened up quite a bit, so I added a splash more milk and stirred that in before adding the berries and walnuts. Just finished the third bowl this morning, still great.

Less prep and cleaning than the egg breakfast, and less risk of exploding oats in the microwave. (I've learned to keep the power at 40% to avoid that.)

I try to do something similar with lunch. Yesterday I did the egg breakfast and had the overnight oats for lunch. When I make a sandwich, I try to add a lot of veggies.

Am I any healthier? Who knows?

"Do your best, the rest is not up to you."

The beat that can be counted is not the beat, but the beat goes on...

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Not a Faraday Cage

13:10 Tuesday, 17 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 21.67°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 16.13mph
Words: 673

Claude dispelled any illusions I had that an ICF home with metal siding and roofing represented some protection against EMP.

Alas.

If you're interested, here's the response minus my prompt. (Please forgive the markdown detritus. I'm not going to clean it up. And yes, Mitzi's flight is delayed again. Hopefully taking off within the hour.):

[Ed note: Learn something new every day. Tinderbox renders markdown to html on export, so no detritus. Maybe it's done that all along. I don't know because I never use markdown, because "plain text" isn't so precious to me.]

Yes, I understand the question precisely. You're asking whether the passive electromagnetic properties of the structure itself — not any intentional hardening — would incidentally provide EMP attenuation sufficient to protect unconnected electronics from the E1 pulse component of a high-altitude nuclear EMP (HEMP) event.

It's a genuinely interesting physics question. The honest answer is **partially, but probably not sufficiently**.

1. What You Actually Have

An ICF home with continuous rebar, metal roofing, and metal siding does create **a partially conductive enclosure**, but it falls short of a true Faraday cage in several important ways:

• What works in your favor:**

- The rebar mesh in ICF walls is continuous and interconnected — if properly bonded at corners and intersections, it forms a conductive lattice throughout the wall assembly

- Metal roofing and metal siding add conductive surface area

- The overall mass and conductivity of the structure would attenuate — not block — an incoming electromagnetic field to some degree

• What defeats it:**

- A Faraday cage requires a **continuous, gapless conductive enclosure**. Your home has windows, which are essentially large holes in the conductive shell. The E1 pulse (the fast, high-amplitude component that destroys electronics) has wavelengths in the range that passes through window-sized apertures with relatively little attenuation

- The rebar is embedded in foam and concrete — it's not a tight mesh on the exterior surface. Effective Faraday shielding requires the conductive layer to be on the **outside** of the enclosure, and mesh spacing needs to be small relative to the wavelength of concern

- Metal roofing panels are joined at seams, not continuously welded — there are gaps in the electrical continuity

- The rebar in different wall panels may or may not be electrically bonded to the rebar in adjacent panels, and almost certainly isn't bonded to the metal roofing and siding as a unified system

1. The E1 Pulse Specifically

A HEMP event has three components — E1, E2, and E3. E1 is the one that destroys solid-state electronics. It's an extremely fast pulse (rise time in nanoseconds) with a broad frequency spectrum peaking roughly in the 1–100 MHz range. Effective shielding against E1 requires attenuation of **40–80 dB** depending on how hardened you want to be. A proper Faraday cage with tight mesh and sealed apertures achieves this. Your incidental building structure might achieve **10–20 dB** of attenuation — meaningful, but not protective in any reliable sense at 100 miles from a burst optimized for EMP effect.

1. What Would Actually Protect Electronics

A properly constructed Faraday enclosure inside the home — even something as simple as a **metal garbage can with a tight-fitting lid**, with electronics wrapped in a non-conductive layer inside — would be far more effective than the building structure itself. The key requirements are continuous conductive enclosure, no gaps larger than a few centimeters, and the protected electronics **not connected to any external conductors**.

Military and government EMP hardening uses welded steel enclosures with filtered penetrations for any necessary connections — a very different standard than incidental building construction.

1. The Short Answer

Your ICF home with metal cladding is probably better than a wood-frame house with vinyl siding — but that's a low bar. It would not reliably protect unconnected electronics from a well-designed HEMP event at 100 miles. The windows alone are a sufficient defeat mechanism for the E1 component. A dedicated Faraday enclosure for critical electronics, inside the home, is the appropriate solution if that's a genuine concern — and it costs almost nothing compared to the building itself.

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