Our weird relationship with 9/11 on the day it turns 18

Today, 9/11/2019 is certainly someone's 18th Birthday and is also a weekday. There is a very good, near certain, chance that some kid who was being born on 9/11/2001 is taking the Oath of Enlistment today. We have now passed that point where a non-zero number of soldiers fighting the vague "Global War on Terror" or training to do so were not born before the day that brought that conflict to the front and center of our military efforts.

I remember I was working at a tech center and I was getting into day trading and noticed I couldn't get online to check the markets that day and then, curiously, checked the news and - well - there it was. Tower one was hit, then tower two, then the Pentagon was hit, then one tower fell, then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, then another tower fell, then ANOTHER tower fell. Airspace was shut down, the National Guard was mobilized, eventually our leadership emerged, we donated blood or volunteered and eventually a story emerged about hijackings and training camps and so on.

I started to train my body to enlist, and raised my hand in front of that flag some months later - shipped out some time after that. This act of terrorism would be the defining image of the "Enemy" that has been the primary adversary of our deployed armed forces since that time. A soldier with Army Special Forces was killed in Afghanistan already this September in 2019, along with a Romanian and many of the Afghans around them. The war continues, a few thousand of our nation's of hundreds of millions are doing all the bleeding, but the war continues.

I had this silly notion that after 9/11 the ENTIRE nation would have been mobilized. Draft Cards and Victory Gardens, Balls to the Wall, everyone do their part, roll up your sleeves, "Let's get this done!" kind of a fight.

Most of the world had moved on to Representative Governments with legitimacy derived from the governed and so on, but a stretch of the world "Middle East North Africa" as we call it had only a few regions of stable democracy and instead were led by Archaic and Authoritarian Kings, Emirs, Military Dictators, Warlords, Ayatollahs... of COURSE this region grew misery and exported it - eventually to even our largest city and capital. We were no longer able to ignore that part of the world never was brought into the global consensus or the end of history or whatever we were calling it.

The task was huge, but I lived in a nation that had taken on huge tasks before. Once upon a time the Emperor of Japan was considered a living god, and after an astounding defeat he was transformed into a human constitutional figurehead. The Nazis believed they were destined to lead a thousand year Reich of Aryan Supremacy and were rebuilt into one of the most open and progressive societies on Earth. There is not that much Americans can't do when properly motivated. I thought this was the natural next step in our fight, a full mobilization of the United States, from Privates to Politicians to Brass to CEOs all throwing in to drag this holdout of barbarism kicking and screaming into the modern world.

I was wrong.

Before the embers of the fire were out people were planning on how to turn this tragedy into enacting their personal goals. Saudi Royals were being flown home on specially authorized flights, stories that would both cover up incompetence and fuel two decades of conspiracy theories were being formulated, maps of oil fields were being drawn up, contracts were being written. Previously suppressed ideas about rendition, surveillance, even torture were being elevated. Think pieces were being written about how dissent about any of this was unamerican. The folks that build mansions for Defense Contractors and Lobbyists have had a good 18 years. Now, the five highest income counties in the US are Louden and Fairfax in VA, Howard in MD, and Falls Church and Arlington in VA. those ring-around-DC places up next to Pentagon, NSA Headquarters, Langley, Dulles... the forever war is good for business. The Middle East is still full of Kings and Ayatollahs. A couple of the Military Dictators fell.

There was some unity. NATO mobilized against a common enemy after the U.S., a member state, was attacked. We served along Brits and Australians and Poles and Estonians and Italians and Georgians and a coalition so broad you would have to look up the flag that guy and the checkpoint was wearing later on down the line. Our enemy shifted from "Al Qaeda" who remained kind of global and vague and amorphous to "The Taliban" who had a territory and leaders and so on and that became the fight that we are still fighting today.

By the time my training was complete, Ft. Leonard Wood, Ft. Bragg, Monterrey... there would be a war in Iraq. I would end up spending four years in that place. I never went to Afghanistan. The "Authorization of Military Force" that was passed to fight Al Qaeda was broad enough to see American Forces deployed in combat in Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Syria, and eventually enough nations that members of the Senate Armed Services committee admitted they did not know how many countries American Forces had combat operations in. This has become the new normal.

The world kept moving. On 9/11/2001 there was no iPhone, no Gmail, no Android, no Youtube, no Facebook, no Tesla, No Segways (remember them?), No Xbox, no Trump University, no AirBnB, no "Marvel Cinematic Universe", and no Cracked.com, or a hundred other things we would notice as missing if we returned to that day.

I have always felt a certain hesitancy to join the "Never Forget" crowd. I don't know what that means, but the folks who say it sure know what it means. It is often used to tell critics of the forever war to quit trying to explore the idea that maybe our children and grandchildren shouldn't fight the same war. "Don't you remember that day?" as we fight people less and less related to the Al Qaeda that attacked our nation.

Germany and Japan became our allies. We never "Forgot" but we were allowed to accept a surrender and accept that things had changed and bring our boys home. Eventually those WWII era folks moved on and built that post-war prosperity America and enacted the Marshall Plan and led the civil rights movement and created Spider Man and went to the moon and built the world's coolest cars and so on. The world kept moving and that was OK.

Bin Laden was killed in 2011, Osama's son in 2015, Mullar Omar in 2013 (look him up), Saddam was hung in a basement before that back in 2006. Ayman Al-Zawahiri just released a statement today asking his remaining followers to kill Americans on the 18th Anniversary of 9/11 but Al Qaeda is so degraded that isn't front page news anywhere. The "Islamic State" fighters in the region are the children and grandchildren of these original folks. Many of their children want to have nothing to do with the fight of their parents. Do they want to move on too?

18 years. Kids old enough to vote have lived their whole lives in the post-9/11 world. Bombs dropped on live targets somewhere every single month of their lives. So common it isn't even news. Dog bites man. US forces dropped 40 tons of bombs on an "ISIS Island" this week and it's just another day. Further down my news feed below "E-Cigarette Crackdown". Hard to explain to my boys that there used to be stretches of American History where this wasn't always the case. Wars ended.

Mourn the dead, revere the heroes, respect the sacrifices, remember the history, but we can't keep doing this. No one wants their memorial to be a war that never ends.

We all remember 9/11, but how do we get to a world where it is history and not the present?

Labor Day 2019

I've said it before, Labor Day is my favorite holiday. If you are a commoner who wants to feel like a king, contemplate the hours of labor that go into things we take for granted as part of our everyday lives. The fish sandwich from sea and field making its way to our tummy. The fishermen, processors, warehouse staff, planters, harvesters, truck drivers, cooks, health inspectors, kid and the drive through window and so on.

We live like nobles!

I've been back in Mental Health for about a year now. Not bad work, lucky to have it. Probably headed back into tech again, lucky to have options.

Took my boys to the lake and served a dinner of ribs, potatoes, and vegetables from my own garden.

The world is full of madness at this very moment. Mad weather, fires, climate induced crisis, political struggles regarding if Britain is part of the EU, if Hong Kong is part of China, if American troops are to remain in Afghanistan, and of course some asshole shoots up a public place all too often.

I do my best to surround my loved ones in a cocoon of peace and happiness for as long as this world will alow me to do so. It's Labor worth doing.

Happy Labor Day.

PR, The Power of Bias, and Your Lying Eyeballs!!!

The events surrounding the Covington kids are why PR firms make the big money.

The Covington Kids are in D.C. videod being horrible for a few hours after their "Pro Life" rally.

The Native American Veteran they were being especially shitty to has a statement about "Man, those kids were assholes, nothing illegal, but I hope those asshole kids grow up to not be such assholes".

People start to wonder, "Hey, where were the chapperones?" And "Isn't it weird that school doesn't have a single nonwhite faculty member?"

Well the firm of Runswitch PR is to the rescue! First, here is two hours of the kids being assholes to various other assholes and nonassholes in the D.C. area. Nothing in any of it exonerates the kids from clearly asshole behavior, in fact in includes them doing tomahawk type chants and saying "It's not rape if you like it!" but PR firms know that no one is going to watch a full 2 hour video, we have lives and such, so they can say "This video shows the REAL villians!" And some folks will just gobble up that slop.

And the PR firm uses it's contacts to push this non story that is supported by non evidence to it's non critical thinking audience and it works.

What happened to all the Journalism grads? They work in PR.

This school is in the same diocese that hired a PR firm after they got caught harboring an inordinate number of child molesters. They aren't new to this game.

We will bend over backwards to "unsee" things if sufficiently well paid PR folks tell us too.

Courier story about the PR firm here

The PR firm had the school website shut down rather than folks find pics of all the various "Wow, what assholes!" and "Holy Shit is that a kid in blackface in 2018? Like with the lips done up and everything? Full on Al Jolsen level blackface?" photos out there.

They had the asshole kids offer an asshole non-apology by video. You see, they were "praying" for that kind man, and that's the kid's smug-ass praying face. Believeable!

And the PR firm KNEW that their target audience would disregard the accounts of the Native Americans who were actually there, because of course.

Great cartoon take on how PR to the rescue looks like in practice here

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.

NO ONE who inherited a large sum of money should EVER utter the word "Meritocracy".