Thoughts on Labor Day 2018

This is a little tradition of my own, Labor Day is my favorite holiday for reasons I have written about in the past and I like to take a few moments and reflect about things.

This year is especially relevant for me personally as I will be starting a new position the next day and this follows, for the first time in my life since leaving college, a break from being steadily employed.

I started work at my first job when I was 15 and kept working or being in school or doing both until... well actually until about this February when I am quite a bit older than 15.
My oldest son turns 15 in a few weeks.

In those years I've worked Fast Food, Retail, Temp Agency, Tech Support, Army, Drug Rehab, Community Support, Firefighter, BodyGuard, Accountant and other stuff I am sure I have forgotten about. Eventually in 2015 I returned to Kansas City and worked for the Geo Group full time in an office and it was.... steady. In February I could no longer work for them in good faith. The comapany is ultimately about imprisoning/monitoring people for profit - and to that end - pushing the levers of power for more people to be imprisoned or under some legal monitoring. It took me a while to see it, but they would lock up the whole world if they could (even faster than we are locking up ourselves).

I had to move on, and am blessed with family who supported my decision. I took a short contract doing accounting work for a financial advisory, then supporting technology for a local tech consulting firm, but between gigs I had some downtime where I.... lived.

I helped my older boy with study habits and taught him about respecting women (he has his first girlfriend) and living a life beyond playing video games and it was great.

We swam and caught crawfish and threw the football and flew our drones and watched meteor showers. We cleared brush with a chainsaw and my son keeps making me a little more proud with what he can do each day.

I spent many, many, many hours with my younger son. We swam and built with legos and spelled words with blocks and explored the woods and made little worlds with cars and action figures, drew maps of streams, watched the airplanes take off the runway, grew tomatoes and squash (he liked to water them each day and observe that little bit of growth) and it was great.

I spent every Sunday with my Dad doing the kind of things that a bedridden man needs done and some of it was alright. We watched a Brad Pitt movie where he is a tank commander, like my father was, in Germany, like my father was, in the same kind of Sherman tank my father commanded... it was nice for him. We watched an Italian Opera on PBS and, for a moment I remembered the open and witty guy my father used to be.

I kept things well enought with the rental property (fingers crossed) and sold some land for my Dad so he will have funds for when he inevitably needs invalid care.

I got to go on a road trip with my wife and kids and swim in the ocean and eat cajun food and look out over the Oklahoma hills and so on. I got to take care of my boys and let my wife take a cruise and have some time alone for the first time since she has given birth to the oldest boy.

I got to LIVE. I've always had such a work ethic that most of my travel has been for work, most of my learning has been for work, my clothes and so on... it was nice, really really nice, NOT having an inbox or firetruck to restock or weapon to clean waiting for me.

The Summer came to an end. My son is back in school, my little guy is in Pre-K, I'm going back to work, but maybe I am a better man if I work to live a little more and live to work a little less. I'll still do any job to the best of my abilities and take pride in what I do... but I what I do includes being a father, a husband, a son, and a human being.

Happy Labor Day.

Death is terrible. Not just the end... but while some of us are lucky enough to expire with relative speed and peace, modern medicine and the tenacious manner at which we cling to life makes it horrible. It's naturally horrible, but we add horror to the process.

We do not die all at once. We lose pieces of what we love most. Our strength, our patience, our clarity, our independence, our senses, our memories, our loved ones..

Many of us will sentenced to confinement in a bed smaller than a cell in solitary confinement for the last weeks, months, years of our lives. An ever shrinking world of purposeless pain. I don't fear death as much as I fear a decade of nonambulatory pain. A decade of enslaving a loved one (or several) as my physical and mental needs demanded round the clock care. I fear watching my own failing health cause their health, careers, marriages, lives to fail one by one...

Death takes most of us piece by piece and takes the best parts of us first. I understand the nearly universal human need to believe death isn't the end but that we transition to some paradise forever. If we can't pump the dying full of morphine we can at least give them pleasant fictions.

This is dark but anyone reading this either has or will likely watch someone who means the world to them degenerate into a mess of pure suffering at some point and never come back.

My nightmare is our life extension technology gets more advanced without advancements in quality of life or cultural introspection about what we want out of existence and we all live to be 150 with the last 55 years writhing in pain, wallowing in our own shit, and begging for it to end.

Working the Refs

This is a bit about how we are trained to waste our time entertaining nonsense and how it works to our detriment. Written while I am waiting for the SOTU to start...


In football, there are officials on the lookout for cheating the make sure the game being played is “Football” and “Team who sneakily put more players on the field wins!”.

Some teams cheat more. Some teams are notorious for doing this*. These teams tend to garner more penalties and get called out more for their cheating... And managers and coaches have a strategy called “Working the Refs”

The premise is that after being caught and penalized for cheating far more than the other team, the manager will have a fit and raise hell and such implying some level of unfairness towards their team or unacceptable bias is the reason why they are getting penalized more. The reason for working the refs is to encourage future leniency regarding the next penalty when the cheating team cheats again, or to encourage harshness in calls against the opposing team.


We as humans are weak to vulnerable to this idea of “balance” when it is not applicable to all things and all people.


We also see this in public discussions. There are notorious liars and cheaters influencing public policy. Project Veritas is an example of an organization whose entire premise is to create deceptive videos to back attacks against institutions, public figures and journalists. There exists public policy groups that have existed only to promote falsehoods and doubts about if smoking or sugar was hazardous to one’s health, if changing out atmosphere would change our climate, if certain leaders were speaking in good faith about weapons of mass destruction and so on. After getting caught in lies again and again, some groups and speakers are dis-invited to participate in discussions, or only with disclaimers about the other times they have been using coverage to lie to their audience.

I recently was in a discussion started when I responded to a complaint about how "The Media" and journalists were biased against Conservatives because they had flagged groups such as the U.K. Institute for Economic Affairs. Google them if you like, or if you know PR imagine a British Version of the Heartland Institute. This group has been paid by groups such as RJR Reynolds Tobaccos, Exxon Mobil, and [SECRET NONDISCLOSED DONOR] to always have an... """Expert""" at the ready to advocate stopping anti-tobacco education, arguing against the science of climate change, and in favor of Brexit.

It turns out smoking is harmful, actions HAVE been able to decrease smoking rates, changing the makeup of the atmosphere IS changing the climate, Brexit DID inflict economic pain on the British People and so on. If you are looking for someone to contribute in a smart and meaningful honest way to any discussion, you can probably do MUCH better than someone from the IEA.

So when (smartly and rightly) folks flagged IEA ....""Experts"" and invited them less (along with other think tanks with similar histories) someone wrote a piece decrying the "BIAS!!!" of Journalists, the Media, and so on.

This is an attempt to Work the Refs. Someone will sent an angry email, someone will write a letter, someone will threaten to never tune in again or cancel a subscription and so on. Hearing an accusation that another is being "Biased" against you group produces a strong emotional response to "Defend" your group against some outside threat. It often moves the discussion from deciding what objective truth is to making sure your particular group isn't being mistreated.

Groups such as Young Earth Creationists, "Vaccines Cause Autism!", Supply Side Economists, Phrenologists and others all have felt their laughably and obviously wrong ideas and experts were the victims of unfair bias and not given equal time compared to their non-wrong opposition. Eventually, we decided that evidence and truth was more important than seeming "unbiased" and so truth moved forward.


"Test Everything, Hold on to what is good" - 1 Thessalonians 5:21

To move forward, in terms of knowledge, wisdom, good decisions.. we must not only seek out and find new data, ideas and interpretations, but we also must discard ideas and practices that are explicitly wrong. It wasn't enough for Ignaz Semmelweis to theorize and demonstrate that properly washing hands before surgery reduced infections and saved lives, but the "Handwashing Sceptics" had to be persuaded, cajoled, or mandated to clean their hands as well. Today there is a strong "Bias" in Medical Schools towards cleanliness in operating rooms and if you wish to advocate the abandonment of these principles, you will likely not be welcome to teach in a credentialed medical school. This can be viewed as either progress and the triumph of truth and a great victory for the health and well being of patients the world over, or as an example of academic snobbery and an attack on the free exchange of ideas. It wasn't enough for Dr. John Snow to learn theorize and demonstrate that contaminated water was the source of Cholera, he had to remove the dirty well's pump handle. People fought Semmelweis's and Snow's ideas for quite some time but we now know to wash our hands well before putting them into a human body and to avoid drinking shitwater.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Plank

We are blessed to live in a free, open, and technologically advanced society where ideas from the world over can be expressed and examined with ease. We are also drowning in a deluge of bullshit. "Fair and Balanced" can NEVER produce progress. At some point those espousing clearly wrong ideas, proven again and again and again to be lying, acting in bad faith, and demonstrably wrong - need to be pushed to the margins.

We still have flat-earthers, people who don't believe in viruses, supply side economists, and people who voted for Blake Shelton as the sexiest man alive. It is not in the nature of man to have EVERYONE to discard an idea when it is wrong and harmful. We hoard - sometimes nearly discarded ideas turn out to be useful, but usually not. Every time we take a step forward and former a point of contention becomes the common wisdom, it will appear as "Bias" to those who are for some reason emotionally invested in their ideas.

Conservatives, as this particular time and place in the history of the United States, often claim to be the victims of Bias by those who study history, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, journalists, entertainers, academics, researchers and so on. In a way, they are probably right - some tenets of conservatism are more and more objectively wrong (given more and more history to observe) and - as progress is made - any idealogy that clings to demonstrably wrong ideas is not going to be rejected by thinkers more and more, often culture leads common wisdom and policy, but over the long arc of history, the bend is towards progress.

I've had some really, really wrong ideas in my life. I most certainly still do. But I am making a sincere effort to try and be open to the ideas making progress and to give a greater weight to those advocating out of understanding, duty or urgency, rather than for a check or out of self interest. As I approach middle age, I will likely feel my "side" is under attack from biased people more and more. May I be blessed with the wisdom to weigh a "Bias" against my ideas with eyes open to the possibility that some ideas may not be true enough to merit further discussion.

Also, Fuck the whores of the Heartland Institure, The Institute for Economic Affairs and Project Veritas. Y'all are selling bullshit and you know it.

*-Sometimes those football teams go to the Superbowl.