Destined to Repeat It

I've had fantasies about going back and talking to my younger self. One of the things I regret that I was going to counsel younger me on was the lack of confidence with women. I had several attractions over the years that I did not act on, and older me always thought younger me was a bit of a coward and should have stepped up more often. Carpe diem, what's to lose?

Now I'm newly single again, and find myself in the same position. If I see someone that I'm interested in, I immediately think of all the reasons why this can't happen and I leave it as a mental exercise, without ever approaching someone. So it's easy to intellectualize a needed action or position, it's just hard to live it.

So I was thinking about the old adage that those that are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it. What about the inverse corollary? Those that know history too damned well may still be stuck repeating it?

I've heard speculation by neurologists that lead you to believe that we can't really change our nature, that in some ways we don't have control of ourselves. It's depressing to think about, because we assume with a little counselling or training that we could become whatever we want to do. That we could break bad habits or addictions if we chose to.

I can see how this happens at the unit level in military conflicts. If you're scared, you can't understand that the situation requires courage and just conjure some up. What about politics? You might be faced with undeniable truths, but still unable to accept new policies, or enact new laws, or embrace new candidates that are better suited to address those truths. What about economics and business? You might see a technology or business model dying, but find yourself unable to let go of the old ways.

So, is it hopeless? Are we trapped in ourselves and unable to change, even it it's to improve? Maybe just being aware of the resistance is the way to overcome it.

Story Time

I was listening to Mike Pesca's podcast The Gist on 8/12/15. He had Matthew Dicks, a Moth Grand Slam champion. He talked about a storytelling exercise, which is to put ideas down in text message/twitter length bullets each day. It's supposed to be little kernals of the most story-worthy moment of the last day.

It's an interesting concept that he created to help kickstart ideas for stories from his own life. He said that one of the things that it does, unexpectedly, is to slow time down. He said the act of contemplating and reviewing each day makes time seem different.  That in itself is worth the effort.

See: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gist/2015/08/the_gist_storytelling_with_matthew_dicks_and_male_vocal_fry.html

Guaranteed Privacy

If you really want to be able to express yourself in complete privacy, just write a blog.

It's odd to "publish" something that you have to admit you don't expect anyone to read.  It's kind of a fun format.  I mean, someone could easily find the blog and read it, but even if I wanted that to happen, it's improbable.  I could send people the link, but that's not really why I write it.

Why do I write this?  It's sort of like singing while you run or posting the only comment on something online.  It's fun to express yourself, but you're not communicating, you're just broadcasting.  No, that's not the right word.  Broadcasting supposes that a broad audience is receiving it.

I think it's a little like putting a letter in a bottle.  There is a very remote chance that someone may open it up and read it one day, but if they do, you'll be nowhere near and you'll never know it.

Is it ego?  Is it self-indulgent?  I guess it would be ego if you expected people to read it and follow it.  It is definitely self-indulgent, but there's a funny twist.  It's different than a diary locked away somewhere.  It's different than writing on a Word document, password protecting it, and keeping it on your computer where no one can read it.  When blogging, you realize that someone could see it, you just don't expect them to.

I guess it's a lot like sunbathing in the nude in your back yard with a privacy fence all around.  It's possible someone will be able to see in or will come up and pop their head over the fence, and that's part of what makes it kind of thrilling.  The risk of exposure.

I guess the other part is that when you think there's even a remote chance that someone will read it, you write the content to that quasi-fictional someone.  I heard a person say that they wrote blogs or did podcasts or some activity, as if they were writing an email to a good friend (and they kept a particular person in mind).  I guess I don't have a fictional audience in mind.  If I think about who might read this, I think it is just as likely to be someone that doesn't like me as someone who is either neutral or a friend.  Actually, if I had to make a list of people that I know don't like me, it would only be one name long.  But you have to consider that there are people that know you that really don't like you, and you'll never find out.  I believe that's just a condition in life, you grow enemies that you don't know.  People out there that are routing for you to fail.

To those people I have one thing to say: I don't know shit about you, but you're reading my blog, so who's the one having to put up with the other?  Just keep reading and don't ever let me know you're out there.  Better a silent and theoretical enemy than an active asshole in my life.  I hope you have a good day!

Love's is Everywhere

After almost running off the exit because I was so sleepy, I pulled into a Love's Convenience Store, Gas, and Truck Stop.  Love's.  WTF?  Where did this come from?  I sure as hell don't love Love's like I love Quik Trip.  That's a store to love.


Realized I needed oil and went inside.  Weird.  There was a wall dividing two halves of the store.  One side was supposedly for serious trucker types and all you civilians just stay the hell out, y'hear?  I thought it looked like a parts store, so I wandered in and looked for motor oil, which it did not have.


It did have a clerk or cashier, not sure what the title to that guy is.  He looked kind of lonely.  Said this section was for truckers and the motor oil was up front.


Went up front and found the oil and went over to the line.  It was that scene you dread.  The guy in the front of the line was hunched over, scratching off tickets, and the clerk was hunched over some machine, processing the ream of scratch-offs the inconsiderate douche was scratching off.  Cock blocked!  I watched for about a minute, not really getting mad, just noting that it was an unacceptable situation, when I remembered the lonely clerk in the back.  I went back and asked if a civilian like myself could give him money for something from the front of the store.  Yep.  Perfectly permissible.  He warns me to hold on to the receipt in case the clerk in the front mistakes what I'm doing walking out with my purchase.


2 minutes later, I'm out the door, and scratch-off douche and dim-witted clerk are statues, in the same positions as before.  While I am confident that I'm doing nothing wrong, and the clerk is several notches below the minimally alert level, I am thinking that it's good that I have a receipt.'


Hey, I've got nothing to hide, I boldly pop the hood not 25 feet from the clerk and pour the oil into my engine.  Right out in the open.  No attempt to conceal my seemingly criminal actions.


I close the hood of the car and a police car rushes into the lot with lights flashing (no siren, though - perhaps he was in "silent but deadly" mode).  Whoa.  That was fast.  Cop flies past and blocks a couple of cars at the far end of the lot in with that patented "diagonal park" move.


Not sure if it's a case of mistaken identity or a strange coincidence, but not really wanting to stick around, I casually get back in the car and drive off.


Why is a cop zipping in to confront a couple of cars in a gas station parking lot?  Will there be gunfire?  The route back onto the highway takes me in a wide spiral around the scene.  The cop is between the cars, talking to someone through the window.  Doesn't look like gunfire will be featured.  Doesn't look like mistaken identity, he seems to have business with these guys.


Why does a cop zero in on two non-moving vehicles?  Why does a cop "stop" someone in a gas station parking lot.  I'm not sure I've seen something like this before.  I imagined that there was a child custody struggle, a domestic violence incident, or an aggressive campaign for the policeman's ball, but I'll have to live with the fact that I will probably never know.

Gunning for You

I went on a weekend trip to my Uncle's cabin with my brothers.  I took a handgun that my brother gave me, as we were going to have an opportunity to shoot (but we didn't).


I was driving the next day on I-70 toward Salina and saw an oncoming State Trooper quickly pull into the turnaround lane.  It seemed that he was aiming for me and I might get a speeding ticket.  I was going 7 over, but you never know what will trigger something like that, and there were some construction zones ("am I still in it?" you think).


While I passed the police car and watched to see if I was busted, I realized something that made it suddenly much worse.  I had the loaded handgun in its case on the floor behind the passenger seat.  It was in a case, but the case was in plan view.  I shoved it under the seat and took a more keen interest in what the Trooper was up to.


He was cruising along behind the guy behind me, not trying to bust anyone.


What the hell are the laws about transporting firearms?  You know hunters drive with weapons in their car, so it can't be illegal.  Does it have to be out of reach?  Does the ammo have to be separate from the gun?  Oh shit.


Pulled into the Russell Stover Outlet after about 20 miles of fretting and realized he was no longer back there anyway.  Shoved the gun into the "trunk" in back.  Bought chocolate and thought about how bad that could have gone.


Sometimes it doesn't matter if you're a "law abiding citizen".  One wrong move and you are no longer in that category, are you?

Invisible Man

Last year, I ran the Konquer the Konza 25k run near Manhattan Kansas.  I was training for it, and doing quite well, but on Labor Day, I injured myself water skiing.  The event was 4 weeks later, and I was a little healed, but had slipped on my training and still hurting.  I ran the event anyway.  I felt OK until the last 3 miles, when I really started hurting.  I finished, and felt triumphant about it.  However, the two marathons I was going to run in the following month were put out of consideration.


This year, I signed up again.  I got some kind of cold-like respiratory infection that cut about 5 weeks out of my training, and put me behind.  Then I started really packing on the training, trying to accelerate the process.  I was still behind, but determined to go through with the run.  The weekend before the race, I did a 12 mile training run, and did something to my calf at the 11.5 mile point.  I hobbled around for a week, tried once to run on it, and decided to let it heal and see how I felt.


The day of the race, I felt pretty good.  At the start of the race, about a half mile in, my leg started to hurt, and it didn't seem possible to finish.  I had 15 more miles to go.  I reasoned that I would simply run as long as I could and see what happened.  I figured I could quit at any time.  The pain lessened, but I was not really operating at any kind of normal level.  I accepted a 2 minute per mile drop in my pace and just gritted my teeth and plugged along until it was over.


It was a completely different experience.  My iPod was out of battery (must have had the button pressed while it sat in my luggage - my fault for leaving the switch in the on position).  So I didn't have inspirational music or the audio books I was going to listen to.  I did have my iTunes on my iPhone, but beyond listening to one podcast and two songs, I didn't use it.  For once, I ran just listening to the trail.


People talked to me, but only because I was wearing the t-shirt from the run the year before.  One woman told me "Congratulations sir, I think you're the oldest one out here.  You don't see many people your age doing this." You can't tell someone to fuck off when they think they are giving you a compliment, can you?


Then I noticed something else.  I was the invisible man.  The race volunteers would be cheering the people in front of me on, then fall silent as I ran by.  Then they would cheer the people behind me.  The course photographer did not photograph me.  I finished the race and did not talk to anyone.  I simply left.


What did they see?  What did they not see?  It was an eerie feeling, even to the point of being distracting from all the pain.

Root Causes

I listened to a podcast recently (can't find the reference, sorry) that had as its premise the idea that being greatful was a cause of happiness, rather than a result.  Counting your blessings and being appreciative were not always the result of experiencing something that made you happy, but a path towards happiness.


On the other hand, there was a guest host on Savage Lovecast 8/26/14, Mary Martone who made the following comment:
The largest indicator of whether a relationship will be successful is not if you're angry with somebody or not if you don't trust somebody, but if you have disgust for your partner, or if you have distain for them in some way.  You need to make sure that someone that you commit to for the long run is someone you can look at with some kind of love in your heart and respect for the rest of your life.  Disgust can be transferred, if you are disgusted about your partner's sexual interests, you might express disgust about their eating habits, for example.


It's amazing how much complexity there is in just figuring out what's going on in this life.

Blocked

[Originally written 12/11/12 and published after noticing it was just a draft]

Listening to Freakonomics (and reading the book) has reinforced an idea of mine.  They often talk about the fact that a real analysis of some situation or system in society gives us answers that we don't like to hear.  They site examples and raise questions like, "is college worth it?" and "did the legalization of abortion lower crime?"  Things that may be reasonable and true, but that people repel away from.

Society is built on a lot of erroneous assumptions that we are more comfortable with than the truth.

I see a lot of problems that have solutions that are Soloman's baby solutions.  If you'd just be willing to cut the baby in half, you could solve the problem, but no one would be happy and no one is willing to do it.  The difference is that some of the solutions I can come up with are not going to sacrifice any babies.

Take abortion, for example.  The problem is that some people find abortion to be equal to murder and feel that it should never be allowed.  While you would have a hard time finding anyone that would tell you that abortion is a great thing, you have a lot of women each year that choose to do it as a way to prevent other problems.  While there are probably some that do it because they were not wise with birth control, and this is the whoops method of birth control, that's pretty hard to defend.  Many do it because they are not ready and feel they would not make a good parent, and trying to raise a child would limit their ability to get an education and place themselves firmly in the middle class.  Other's should not even consider bringing life into the world, as they are completely irresponsible or addicted to drugs.

My thought is that in an ideal world, there wouldn't be a need for abortions, but there also would not be any unwanted children brought into the world.  We talk about human rights, and I believe one of the most elusive human rights should be that each child should know that their parents really wanted them to come into the world.  This follows one of my other theories that one of our primary problems is that there are just too damned many people to begin with, so saying life is precious clearly is not how we're treating it.  Life is common.  We should treat it like it's more precious, and we should make it more rare, rather than more common.

My solution to the abortion divide is that we put children on birth control as soon as they are able to conceive.  Once they are 18, married or in a stable relationship, and financially secure (or in a position to expect to be financially secure), then they can be taken off birth control.  And I don't just mean women, I mean men, too.  My fantasy solution would solve another large problem, solving a lack of male control over procreative decisions.  This imbalance must be responsible for a portion of the divorce rate for men who are pressured into having families that they do not want.  The default should be that you're not able to have children until everyone involved is ready and agrees.  Then you could plan for the timing make it happen without undue complications or unwanted circumstance.

If you follow the consequences of this line of thinking, it solves a whole host of problems, not the least of which is teen pregnancy and children having babies.

Enacting a public policy that makes birth control mandatory for all pubescent teens under the age of majority will never happen.  The problem is that everyone feels their position has to be respected and because of this, no compromise is possible.  The "do nothing" option is the default.  I'm not saying that solutions such as these do not have problems inherent in them or will not need to be administrated fairly and subject to modification or exception in some cases.  I'm saying that you have to be careful doing these things, and you have to state up front what your intent is, and then you have to monitor the unintended consequences and adjust your approach along the way.  But over all, you have to make some decisions and put some policies in place that will seem strange at first, but solve the problem in the long run.  Good solutions will take into consideration objections from each end of the political spectrum, and find answers that address most concerns while moving society forward.

I do believe a world in which every person is brought up knowing they were planned for, had high hopes pinned on, and were loved before and after they were conceived would be a much nicer place to live.

The Value of an Individual: A Thought Experiment

I hate politically divisive subjects.  I hate the thought that people pick sides, stop thinking about the subject critically, and actively resist any information or argument that does not already support their position.  I find it more interesting to be able to disagree with someone, and yet exchange points of view and discuss the subject.

I hate all the debate about health care.  Is it a right or a privilege?  If you can't afford it, should you do without it?  If you provide it to people that can't afford it, how does society afford it?  What do you do about end of life care, where costs usually explode in the last months of a person's life?  If there is a concensus that a person is terminally ill, and no matter what you do they will still only life a short time, do we (assuming society has anything to say about it since they are paying the bills, or assuming an insurance company has anything to say about it because they too are paying the bills) still throw an extreme amount of effort at someone just to try to be doing something?

Well, I have a mixture of opinions, confusion, and ambivalence about these questions myself, but it's not really important what I think (to anyone but me - which is my point: who cares what I think).

I was pondering immortality (or near immortality).  As a counterpoint to overpopulation.  I believe our current medical studies will provide treatments that will reverse general aging in humans before much longer.  I crafted this thought experiment in my mind after listening to some opinions about three weeks ago, and today a Dan Carlin Common Sense Podcast came out that pondered a similar question and reminded me about my thoughts.  His point was to ask what happens when a human accumulates 500 years worth of experience, how does that change them?

My point was looking at how we would manage immortality treatments.  I'm assuming that this would be a one time procedure (possibly not a valid assumption, as it could be something that required maintenance) and that it would be expensive.

I imagined a debate about this treatment.  Assuming that it would be in great demand, and assuming that some form of governmental regulation or oversight of the procedure would be enacted, how would this work?  Who merits the treatment?  From a simplistic point of view, I was thinking in terms of a simple cash balance sheet.  Who is contributing to society and who is taking from society.  This debate comes up from time to time when people are discussing taxes, unemployment, and welfare.  I have heard the opinion that we should limit people who are a net drain on the economy or the government taxation versus benefits equation.  From a simple cost control and regulation of the benefits of health care, would the same question be applied to immortality treatments.

Think about it from a practical standpoint.  If you had to limit this in some way, if this was not something that was possible to provide to everyone, how would you determine who you provided it to?  What if some prominent party or person was rallying to prevent the "takers" from being immortal and thus permanent takers, a permanent drain on society?  What if simple planetary survival dictated that this was necessary?  As a side note, would it be reasonable to require that those that requested and were granted immortality would also have to give up any future procreation?  Would this be another separation point, a class of people who would live and die limited lifespans, but would procreate?  They would continue to mix genes and promote our evolution, so there would be some value to have a separation, the price of making a family being eventual death.

But let's say that the notion that one had to be a net contributor took hold and was determined to be a requirement.  Can you imagine how that would work?  How would you determine net worth to society?  How would you determine who was a drain?  Some might suggest just looking at a tax return, but if you used wealth as the only dividing line, wouldn't that be a recipe for a world with an increasing number of people incapable of doing ordinary labor?

How do you measure the intangibles?  Stephen Hawking would not be someone you would want to keep around forever from a standpoint of his physical contributions, but what would a few hundred years of life extension do to his ability to discover new things?  What about love?  What about people with no commercial or capitalistic success that are nevertheless loved more intensely than many are?  You have to admit that many people have a higher emotional value to society, like Nelson Mandela, for example.  Or Mother Teresa.  How would you value them?

Who gets to be immortal?  How would you answer that question?  What other answers that other people may come up with would be offensive to you?

What would you require of people who opted to be immortal?  Would you limit their wealth, because compound interest is often heralded as the vehicle to wealth, and if you live forever, does your wealth just keep increasing without limit?  Would they have a retirement age?  If you didn't, you'd have a perpetual social security drain on the system, far beyond the amount the individual ever put into the system.  What if your price for immortality was that you could never rest, relax, slow down, take it easy?  What if retirement had to be sacrificed to justify immortality?

I think in reality, as a practical matter, people would not want to live forever.  I think some would try for it, but I believe that rather than accumulating more and more experience and becoming uber-wise, they might tend to get burned out and tired of learning and working.  Many would become depressed and decide they were tired of life.  If life wasn't always threatening to be withdrawn from you, would you tend to cling to it less tightly?  Would dangerous pursuits be more attractive at some point?  Sky diving or climbing mountains would suddenly seem more attractive, or perhaps something truly dangerous like shark wrestling.

Are we even equipped to handle an extremely long life time?  Would we tend to go insane from cumulative stress or pain?  Perhaps it wouldn't be immortality, but just doubling or tripling your life span.  Would that change all the calculations?  Could materialism be lessened by immortality?  Could it be that the pursuit of experiences, achievements, or accomplishments would start to be more important than things?  Of course, if you lived long enough, your things would be rotting and breaking down and would need replacement.

I don't know my answers to any of these questions, because each answer I've proposed to myself has good and bad points to it.  I don't know if immortality would be a good thing or a terrible thing.

I do know that I would want to try it myself.  I would want to see where we are going with this life, with our global society, with the planet we inhabit.  I want to see flying cars, free energy, a restored environment, space colonization, ocean colonization, and a possible collective intelligence.  I assume that if humans were going to live a long time, they'd take better care of the planet, themselves, and each other.

Oh, and I assume immortality doesn't mean you live forever in the body of a 100 year old with failing physical and mental capabilities.  If you can't be in reasonably good health, there's no point to the whole exercise.  I'm not sure about pets.  Do you want your dog to live forever with you?

We're of an age.  This question may actually have to be addressed in my lifetime.

Folding Proteins

I recently heard a podcast about folding proteins.  It was an interview of a company that thinks their scientists have figured out a therapy to refold misfolded proteins in an animal's body.  Protein folding is a complex subject I won't try to pretend that I understand well.  What I do understand is fascinating.  I've been studying starch lately, and I know that when you heat starch up to a high enough temperature, it denatures, which means that the way it is folded becomes unraveled.  This is why your jello pudding goes from liquid to a gel.  DNA does this complex dance when cells divide, where it unwraps itself and rewraps itself back into a double helix that is wound around itself in a complex pattern.  I liken the close up view of a strand folding to the way a stream sometimes meanders in a valley, looping back on itself.

There are two other instances of protein folding that I know about.  One is prion based diseases like Mad Cow Disease and its human form, Creutzfeldt–Jakob's disease (also known as Chronic Wasting Disease in deer).  I once heard that the prion acts a little bit like a virus, except that it's not even RNA, it's just a protein, but its misfolded shape spreads once it's in a new host, and the misfolded proteins damage the functionality of the brain.  I don't think that is an accurate scientific description, and I'm not certain that the disease is even understood in that much detail at this time, but that's an approximation of some descriptions I've heard in the past, and I was impressed with the knowledge that the good protein and the bad protein are the same combinations of atoms in the same order, in effect the same molecular description, but just folded into a different shape, and therefore not chemically equal.  I find this to be fascinating.  It makes biology seem like a miracle when you consider that everything must work perfectly in order to work at all.  I guess it's not that surprising that shape matters, if you consider anything else you were going to make, just throwing the ingredients together in a pile means nothing, they have to be assembled into the right structure.  You couldn't just throw bricks and mortar together hap hazardously and expect to make a house.

The other protein folding disease I have heard about is Alzheimer's Disease.  Again, this may not be the correct understanding of the situation as it is now understood, and the scientific community will no doubt understand the biochemistry and mechanics of this disease much better some day than is understood right now.  From what I understand, there are amyloid plaques present in Alzheimer's victims that were thought to be related to misfolding proteins (I may be confusing this with tau protein tangles - I'm not researching this column, just writing it from memory).  One theory is that once the misfolded form is present in the brain that it spreads and disrupts the healthy function of the brain.

The company I started to explain about above is saying that they have come up with a way to refold proteins.  They claim that the body makes misfolded proteins all the time, and in most cases, the body recognizes the error and holds the proteins aside until it can break them back down into their building blocks and recycle them or dispose of them.  If they can perfect and target this therapy, there are many other diseases and conditions that could be treated.  It's really cool technology.

But the trivial reason I sat down to write this post is a bit different that folded proteins.

I was recently travelling, and one of the people at our meeting during the day begged off going to dinner because he said that he thought that his diverticulitis was acting up.  My understanding is that this means that there is a pocket in the intestines that forms a little closed off sack and gets something irritating in it, which then causes the intestinal wall to swell and further trap a portion of material.  This can cause breakdown of the intestine wall and subject that closed off portion to an infection.  This is why you should eat a diet high in fiber, kids.  Gotta keep things moving along and scoured out clean.

Anyway, I got very sick after going to dinner that night.  This started a gastrointestinal ordeal that lasted 5 days.  Did I eat something bad?  Did I have a shellfish allergy that I did not know about?  Did I catch some bug that was going around?  The guy I talked with that day was sick, maybe not with a chronic condition, but with something infectious.  Then I did something truly stupid on the way home.  While at the airport, I got a bag of Skittles.  I suspect that candies that have chemical thickeners in them could create partial blockages, creating a painful situation similar to Diverticulitis.  I had previously vowed to stay away from such foods, but unfortunately, had forgotten my vow and had not maintained healthy habits right at a time when I was already in distress.  So while feeling absolutely terrible for a few days, I spent a lot of time wondering if I needed to go see a doctor or if this was something that would resolve with a little time.  I read a lot of reports on the Mayo Clinic's site and wondered if it was possible that I had ingested some Salmonella (how could that be, and yet I was still somewhat functional - doesn't that stuff kill you?).  I wondered about the status or structure of my cilia lining my intestines.  You can really damage them, and within a few days, they will grow back.  I pondered celiac disease, and how that allergy can also damage cilia.

Then it all cleared up and I got better.  I was still thinking about it today, and I pondered the way the intestines loop around the abdominal cavity, packing such a long organ into such a tight space.  I was wondering how hard it is to have it get twisted or kinked and why it doesn't happen more often.  If you're out of shape with extra weight, it stands to reason that you're probably smashing or pinching your intestines, so why doesn't being morbidly obese tend to kill you?  How does being in shape help with the layout and routing of the intestine in the abdomen?  Does the routing change over time?  If you could trace out the path the way a kid traces a maze on a page, would it be different today that it was when you were little?  Would a group of 10 people each have different routing of their intestines, or would most people tend to have an identical route?

And then I put the two subjects together and wondered about how similar the folding of proteins is to the folding of intestines.  Is this a macro example of the same kind of phenomena?  How much do we really know about the shape of proteins' folds?  There is a website that crowdsources examination of protein folding possibilities, I've heard about it and done similar websites like Zooniverse, but I've never looked at it.

This just proves that you have a lot of time to think about shit when you're sick.

The Army of the Future

Last night I had an epic dream.  I call the dreams that are massive and have a strong impact "epic" because that's kind of what they feel like.  Like they are in all caps or bold or something.  They are usually characterized by a memorable and bigger than life feel while they are going on, and they tend to last so that you remember them when they wake up.  They also make you think.

In this one, I was an older recruit for the Army.  I remembered my own real-life history in the dream, remembered the physical training and weapons training from my own era of the mid-eighties.  This was very different.

I remember looking around and wondering how these young people were going to handle it, they didn't seem very tough.  However, I quickly found out that I was the one being outmatched.  There were some similar issues, the whole BS of having to be in perfect uniform and the relentless scheduling that drives you nuts.

What was different was that this was an information based force.  These guys had electronics on everything.  they were controlling miniature and large sized drones and sucking in logistical and tactical information all while communicating constantly with peers and superiors.  I remember thinking, "what the hell is going on?"

It was my first distinct feeling of being too old to get it.  We've often heard people opine that the youth of today are better trained for combat in some ways because they spend so much time playing video games.  This was a twist on that theory.  In this version, these people were good at this form of combat because they were always plugged into their i-phones and social media.  The skill set was that you had to be able to constantly juggle all the input while keeping each individual thread as a distinct data stream.  I wasn't completely out of my depth, I could track a lot of what was going on, but I was totally distracted. 

One odd element to the dream was a strange representation of the uniforms they were wearing.  There was some kind of virtual screen each person was watching, so they looked like they were all watching their own computer screens.  At the same time, you could see other people's screens.  When I looked at other people's uniforms, and my own, for that matter, it was strangely pixelated.  There were little elements in it that looked like computer chips. But instead of being plugged into a fixed point on a circuit board, these chips were crawling all over you like ants or spiders, plugging into different parts of the uniform, then getting up and moving to another.  It was like those videos of the guys that smear themselves in honey and the bees swarm all over them, only it was in green/black/brown camouflage and they were little rectangular chips.

I woke up fascinated by the dream, and even had a strange experience of being able to close my eyes and plunge back into the dream a couple of times.  When I woke up, it still felt like the dream was going on.  It was as if it was in my active memory, but slowing down to a stop.  I felt like the dream was interrupted, we were going to go on a mission once we got our skills down, and I found myself looking forward to it.

I think there are a couple of things that melded together from real life that sparked the dream.  I'm turning 50 soon, and I've been thinking more in terms of being on the downward slide of life, where your skills and abilities erode and it becomes harder to keep up.  I was also listening to some programs that had combat zone scenes in them, which was more high tech than it used to be.  I was talking to someone a few days ago about powering equipment that soldiers carry, and this was similar to that.  We've been looking at cyberwarfare as a concern, and that, too has been on my mind.  We also had the Sandy Hook school shooting last week, and part of me was wondering if the spate of shootings these last couple of years had anything to do with young men's total immersion into computer games like halo, and the other first person combat games.  These shootings have a feel a little like that, as if the goal is to rack up a high body count, there's no repercussions for your actions and no morality or permanence to it.  We also had an office Christmas party this weekend, and for the first time, people were zoning out on their phones at dinner.  This trend of people not being there with you is something that I notice, something that I tire of, so it has been on my mind.

However, regardless of the inspiration for the dream, it seems to have a bit of prophecy in it.  I can see a time where controlling and communicating through your computer network would be highly integrated into a battle scenario.  It makes me wonder how much it already is, we just don't know about it.  Special Forces would be the place to flesh those systems out, and keeping a battlefield superiority with those skills would depend in part on keeping them secret until you had a chance to figure them out.

NYC Storm Shield

After Hurricane Sandy, I have seen proposals for a seawall to protect NYC from storm swells. This would be similar to the massive Deltawerken Dutch seawall project. Perhaps a good way to justify such a massive public works project would be to make the seawall a tidal generating station. The flow from the Hudson (as well as the tidal flow) should be enough to generate power across the entire face of the seawall. The generating sections would be locked down and form a wall in the event of a storm, and open and generating power the rest of the time. Making the seawall generate power would offset the cost of construction by providing a way of paying back the initial investment. The project would also allow public funds to be used for a model/pilot plant. The resulting R&D could be used for future tidal power projects, as it would be public knowledge. The project would keep people employed (economic stimulus now) with a lasting long term benefit of power generation. This is all in addition to protecting NYC from Hurricane Sandy-styled storm surges.


I’m not sure how you deal with ship traffic, as these seawalls usually have an opening in the middle that allows the transit of shipping. When that center portion is open, I believe you would have a lessening of power generated across the seawall, as fluid flows tend to follow the path of least resistance. This is a technical issue that could be solved, I’m sure.

Dutch Engineers are world leaders in this technology, so perhaps they would be willing to cooperate with us in the design. They would also benefit by developing the power generating technology, and may employ it in their own seawalls.

Perhaps the structure could also be topped with a motorway, as I understand that the condition of some of the existing NYC bridges is such that they will need to be replaced at some time in the next few decades anyway.

Politically, I believe that technology such as this that benefits so many should be government developed so that it can be freely shared, but that is another issue. I realize the political environment is not conducive to big government projects right now, so perhaps, once constructed, it could be turned over to a utility which would collect the fees from the power generated in order to provide maintenance. Perhaps other locations could be sited to copy the concept, which might find private power companies interested in repeating the project in other estuaries and bays that need tide surge protection.

NYC is such a crown jewel of our country, it is the perfect place to construct such a showcase of engineering. Projects such as this also generate public interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathmatics) disciplines, which furthers our competitiveness, similar to the boost STEM disciplines got from the moon shot.

Hogwash

I listened to some of the local news in Iowa over the Thanksgiving break.

They have a big debate going on over large livestock growing and slaughtering plants in the state.  On one hand, these operations are big and bring a lot of jobs and money to the state.  On the other hand, they create a lot of pollution.  The problem is when you get a huge number in one location, the waste becomes greater than the land can easily absorb or process.  It gets into rivers and streams and the high nitrogen content kills fish and other wildlife.  I'm familiar with the same situation in western Kansas where the cattle operations are so prevalent that they are polluting the soils with excess nitrogen.  The problem there is so big that the nitrogen is showing up in the water table and some small towns that depend on well water are not able to remove it.  In northern Missouri, we have some hog operations that were run so poorly that their waste containment dams broke and flooded the rivers with millions of gallons of hog waste, effectively killing the rivers.

Iowa's problem is similar and it's playing into the politics.  The corporations threaten to move out of the state if they are forced to comply with environmental laws they see as excessive.  The EPA and some citizen groups want the corporate farms to stop polluting.

It seems to me that the solution could come from a big government imposition of a separate entity to deal with the waste.  You figure out what the cost of treating the waste conventionally would be, and then you subsidize the operation to the extent that it becomes less of a burden to the corporation, and you force them to pay into the solution.  You take the solution out of their hands. The state government sets up a facility on the grounds of the corporate operation that will treat the waste.  You bring in State University researchers and managers, and their goal is to develop leading edge technology to convert the waste into a slow release fertilizer and energy.  After startup costs are realized, the energy is supplied back to the feedlot operation, in some equitable arrangement that offsets the cost of setting up the operation.  Perhaps you even give them the ability to take over the operation once it's set up.

The catch is that the Universities develop the technology and they own it and can patent anything they come up with.  However, this is done with the understanding that these are publicly disclosed patents that can be used for a nominal licensing fee to offset the development cost, then expanded and improved upon.  In this way, you use a combination of private and public funds to develop the technological solution to the waste problem in a way that keeps the waste out of the water, extracts usable energy from it, and provides a slow release form of fertilizer that can be used by farmers without putting as much nitrates back into streams and rivers as typical methods now do.  Another added benefit would be if the operation recovered water in a good enough condition that it could be cycled back into the feedlot operation.

The point is that the feedlot corporations don't want to deal with their waste. They are not experts in this field and they have no inclination to want to become experts in it.  However, past models have let them pollute without having to pay the costs to the environment.  This model, rather than forcing them to figure out how to deal with the problem, forces them to pay for some of the solution, and provides them with experts and a possibility of feedback.

I'm convinced that once the university scientists get ahold of this environment, you might find other technologies spinning off of it.  It gives graduate and undergraduate students some real world experience and provides a revenue stream for the university.

Sometimes the solutions is a combination of government, academia, and industry.

47 Percenters are actually 99 percenters

In the wake of their 2012 Election defeat, Republicans and conservative commentators were saying that Americans had selfishly voted their own economic self interest and that this was proof that the nation had suddenly changed into lazy people that just wanted to be given stuff. 

They claim that the election was stolen because a slim majority of voters are getting handouts from the government, while everyone else is working hard to create businesses and jobs.

It's a great story, but it's completely inaccurate.

Unforturnately, the rich vote Republican because they are keeping their taxes down and paying the big corporations subsidies, or giving them huge tax breaks. Alternately, they are proposing removing (or not enforcing) regulations on big companies.  This would tend to unburden corporations from a lot of additional effort in complying with regulations, and would tend to make corporations more profitable.  Some of those regulations are there to insure that corporations play fair and don't trash the environment, so throwing out the regulations would no doubt allow for some abuse of smaller businesses, workers, and the environment.  I'm all for some regulations being eased, we have some ridiculous laws in this country.  I wish they would pass laws removing the laws and regulations from the books rather than gutting them without review or through inaction.

My point is that you could accuse any side of an election of voting because the government was going to "give them stuff".  That's the unfortunate side effect of democracy.  Politicians certainly have learned it well.  Each election cycle is full of people being promised goodies by the government.

The biggest and best example of a government program that people on the right are in love with is our defense industry.  There are plenty of non-military people out there without defense jobs or defense contracts that support this.  Many people that genuinely believe that our military capability either keeps us safe or keeps bad people of countries in the world from doing bad things.  However, just as Republican President and WWII war hero Dwight Eisenhower warned, you don't want to build a defense industry that is so powerful that it becomes the tail that wags the dog (government).  People see defense as a jobs and pro-growth industry.  What people forget is that in order to justify a big defense industry, you have to actually use your military.  This means that there are ideologues out there that will push for conflicts given the slightest provacation in order to justify all the time and money spent on military power.  The problem with jumping into a fight at the slightest provacation is that after a while people realize that you are scary and dangerous and they arm themselves in order to protect themselves against you.  I can totally understand why Iran would want nuclear weapons.  It's the only way they could operate exactly as they want without fear of retalliation.  Think about Pakistan.  My guess is that we probably would have invaded them by now if it had not been for their nukes.  Where does this end?  If you look back on lots of wars in history, the best most recent one being WWI, you'll see that a situation where all sides are convinced that a war will come usually results in just such a war.  People spend a lot of time and money getting ready, and then some inevitable trigger occurs and the war kicks off to a grand start!  Hooray!  We'll kick there ass now!  However, the resulting war inevitably eats up a lot of lives, destroys a lot of property and environment, and then takes years for both sides to recover from.

War is stupid.  Defense spending is a waste.  Can you imagine any politician getting elected if he stood up and said such a thing?

I don't think the average voter cheers on war and wants massive military build-ups.  I think the average voter is swayed by a lot of public discource that makes it impossible to say otherwise.

Many people tell themselves that they are voting for a person because they trust them to run the country in the right way.  What they don't consider is that the "right way" has certain advantages to themselves.  Imagine people being told the truth, that we're going to have to pay more taxes and take less from government programs if we hope to get not just the deficit, but the debt under control.  Otherwise, it's like saying you are going to either diet or exercise, but you can't be bothered to do both.  You may make some marginal gains by hacking away at only one side of the problem, but you can't be expected to make dramatic results unless you attack both sides.

So before you level your accusations at the cursed other side about their selfish motives, please try to explain how your own motives are not so selfish.  If you are a Republican, are you willing to pay some more in taxes to get rid of the deficit?  If you are a Democrat, are you willing to control government programs that expand each year automatically without any restraint or controls?  We're like one of those Siamese Twins with one body and two heads.  One side wants to diet and the other wants to exercise, but it doesn't matter because the other side is blocking the body from doing both.  We're doomed if we can't realize we're all in this together and be motivated to work harder for less until the problem is fixed.

Debt Crisis

Here's another partially written post saved from 8/7/11 that I am just now getting around to writing:

A friend related to me the gist of an Atlantic Monthly article that told about how the debt was deliberately manufactured by GOP actions (see August 2011 article).

In 2011, the Republicans shifted their tactics and began to hammer the subject of the deficit.  The main reason they wanted it handled then was because they wanted to use it as a issue to help them defeat Obama.

I often think of the psychological term Projection when I watch the Republicans.  You have to watch what they say when they criticize their opponents, because that's a big clue as to what they do and what their plans are themselves. It seemed to me that they really did want the country to fail in order to get in power.  Enough Republicans came out and stated that this was their goal, that it's easy to project that motive onto the entire party.  After all, when parties vote as solid blocs, it's difficult to convince the public that anyone within the party is actually weighing the merits of any particular course of action to determine what's best.  They are simply adding their weight and voice to the issue.  It's bloc strategy (or block strategy, more like it).

On the other hand, Democrats are just as guilty in doing nothing when they are in the minority to slow down rampant spending, or going into expensive wars.   You saw no evidence of principles or personal courage in the years following 9/11, just a dejected and cowed mass of snivelling cowards with no voice and nothing better to offer.

The rest of the article talked about how bad the jobs situation was and forecasted a double dip recession.  While this was not true, the jobs situation did not get worse, but it did not improve.  Fears of what was going to happen still made stocks drop.

Then we had the downgraded credit "crisis".  The GOP said they would allow this to happen if we failed to control deficit.  The real reason we had to downgrade the credit rating is a lack of confidence in the ability of the US government to put together a budget and govern rationally.  Gridlock and political posturing is worse than bad decisions.

The irony of a downgraded credit rating is that this would most likely increase interest rates and that would most likely benefit the banks that got bailed out in the crisis that created this mess.