The Hardest Job That Isn't a Job

Over my career I worked for some pretty demanding bosses and clients. When I started my career in Information Technology I was still a full time student taking 16+ semester hours at BYU. I was expected to put in an additional 40-60 hours operating data centers and developing software for government and government agencies. Usually this included an hour commute between home and the client site. I flourished. My grades were fantastic and I was learning every second of the day (and night, and weekends). Later in my career my client list included companies like Nintendo, IBM, Armstrong Flooring and Coca Cola. These clients were demanding and required performance. You didn't just sort of do something, you did it completely and precisely. I flourished and my income was fantastic. I was still learning every second of the day (and night, and weekends).

Now I don't have a job. I can't follow a precise schedule and there are too many things I just can't do because of the physical pain resulting from my auto crash. My mind can't work like it used to. My fingers can't type like I used to and my left hand is somewhere between useless and a huge impediment to what I'm trying to do. Two to three times a day I break out in massive sweats that usually necessitate a change in clothing, often a shower. At any moment my energy can just drop to nothing, zero, absolute nada. Even breathing requires the help of a CPAP machine. You know you've screwed up when you need a machine to help you breathe.

The hardest part is that my new boss is my wife and my non-job job is watching after her parents. The are both octogenarians with dementia. Papi is pretty much deaf. Mima has Parkinson's and a number of neurosis and psychosis that she has cultivated throughout her life. Every day is different. What worked yesterday may not work today. What worked five minutes ago may not work now. Lately their slide into dementia has turned into a free fall with all sorts of radical behaviors.

The problem is that when your client/patient/customer is your wife's parents every thing you do, every word you say is evaluated at a level you have never encountered before. You can't follow her lead because using the words she uses would be "inappropriate for you. When you criticize them it's different." Your voice can't be too loud or too soft. This is really fun when one of them is almost stone deaf, but if you are too loud you will be chastised and if you're too quiet how can you expect them to hear and understand you? Your tone cannot be too adamant. This is a slippery, moving standard. If you have had a full day of difficult compliance you may have gotten to the point that you recognize you have to provide instructions in drill sergeant  mode for them to understand what to do. Even then you have to watch to make sure than don't completely do the opposite of their instructions, for example "It's not time to go to bed, don't go to bed" is interpreted as "go to bed", that being the only snippet of what you said they chose to process. Further just because last time you told them to "put on their pajamas" they actually put on their pajamas with no further participation is simply unacceptable. "Where do you come off telling them to put on their pajamas without getting their pajamas out for them?" The response, "it worked last time" is considered argumentative.

My day starts at 7 AM. Usually Mima is awake and the moment I walk past their door she begins asking for things, usually things she doesn't need. You repeat a hundred times "breakfast will be at 9 o'clock" and when she asks 10 seconds later where her breakfast is you try to calmly respond "breakfast will be at 9 o'clock". You are dealing with a toddler mentality, but instead of getting better, they are getting worse. On top of that they still retain all their adult conniving, resistance and disagreeable nature to thwart any attempt to help them. They still feel that they are entitled to complete obeisance, so when you prevent them from doing something their hours watching Caso Cerrado empower them to become at home lawyers accusing you of abuse.

With my supervisors and clients they demanded perfection and mostly, I was able to give it to them. The rewards were empirical. In this new job, there is always another way it could have been done and if you didn't do it they way your boss expected, you will find out between 0.1 and 1.0 seconds after you have done it. You see, when it's somebody's parents that are at stake, there is no allowance for human frailty. After six, eight or ten hours of effort trying to make their lives as livable as possible you are expected, despite your fatigue, pain and frustration to do nothing that might be insufficient. The worst part is that I want it to be perfect, I want it to be always good enough. This is the first time in my life I have faced a challenge that has resulted in constant criticism of my performance.

So what do you do? You try again. You fight the fatigue, the pain and the anxiety and you try to help two 80 year old Cubans feel that their life is perfect.

Bottled Water and My Next $illion

Bottled water has been the most incredibly profitable thing that ever happened to Pepsi and Coca Cola. As Americans, who have the safest water in the world, became enamored of bottled water the opportunity must have seemed ridiculous. By removing the carbonation, the flavorings, the preservatives and the sweetener from their products they could sell the water they were putting into bottles for the same amount as they sold the bottles with the carbonation, flavorings, preservatives and sweetener. I would guess they delayed doing this for months not believing that Americans would be stupid enough to by their filtered city water back at 10,000 times their cost. You pay $1 for what cost them twenty cents to produce and distribute.  I want a piece of this profit.

I will call my product  "Cloud Juice" with the assertion "This product contains 100% juice from all or some of the following: cumulus, nimbus, cirrus and stratus clouds." The FDA doesn't require the bottler to include the warning that there might be traces of the solvent they used to clean the filters. My lab may create different mineral supplements to affect the acidity and taste of the water. Different labels would brand various PH values. The label would include a string of detachable PH paper that you could test your specific bottle. We might need to add a thermometer strip as the temperature of the water can affect PH and other characteristics that determine flavor.

When I say bottled, I mean truly bottled. Glass is pure. It does not react with the water. It is completely air and water tight. Maybe I could get a Chihuly design. Glass is environmentally correct. It is the ultimate representation of silica. It is 100% natural and does not degrade like plastic and aluminum. Water is the universal solvent. Glass will protect it and enhance it.

Now for pricing. Despite the fact that I'm just following the lead of megabottlers using filtered city water, this is going to be a designer brand. I'm thinking $5 a bottle. A dollar of that will be deposit on the reusable designer bottle. It will be the water of the rich and famous. Of the richer and infamous. Celebrity endorsement will be the key. Status is so much more important than taste. After all, Mencken laid it out, "Nobody has gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

Who's in?

Science & Religion/Time & Eternity

I have come up with a resolution of the whole science vs religion arguments and as usual it's a simple agreement on vocabulary: scientists will agree to replace the noun "boson" with the noun "angel". When science claimed that the planets were pushed through their crystal spheres by “propulsion angels” the Church was fine with that. It was only when people wanted to start calling things “elliptical orbits” around “gravitational forces” that the Church got upset. Eventually, they've gotten over that, too. Now, if we can cooperate as believers and explorers instead of spending billions of dollars to understand secular sub-atomic particles at the LHC they can spend trillions to understand subatomic God. The evangelicals will dig deeper into their pockets to help us identify the Higgs angel and then measure how many can dance on the head of a pin!

Really it's all the same wolves in aging fleece with one significant change: scientists don’t have to admit they think a god created anything and believers don’t have to accept that no god was involved. Why is it so important to atheists to convince believers they are wrong if their belief doesn't affect their lives? Of course, this means that believers can’t make laws and try to control behavior on the grounds that “God said so!”, but then, God doesn't make anybody behave in any way even though He says so over and over again. How can believers justify restricting agency when God’s example is strictly and completely hands off?

Instead of science saying "See, this is how it happens so we don't need a god and therefore a god doesn't exist!" they compromise with "If there is God and we can't prove there isn't, well if we want to get to know HIM we have to know better how He does things." It's not a total surrender to "intelligent design" or celestial breath on a lump of clay, it is just recognition that God's omnipotence must be His omniSCIENCE. We drop the whole Scientology assertion that everything we experience is a sham of "the egg man", a figment of our spiritual imaginations. We admit there might be God and if God created everything and if everything includes the physical world we are experiencing (which makes it "good" instead of "bad" by virtue of provenance) then all we have to do is quit calling things "subatomic particles" and call them "subatomic angels" with the caveat that these angels may not be representations of humans or even human like matter. We admit that there MIGHT be spiritual matter of all sorts that we haven’t sorted out yet. We already admit that there might types of matter we can’t measure or define, so why not something called “spiritual matter”?

I came across a very interesting idea in C.S. Lewis the other day (I'm on a marathon re-reading everything of Lewis I didn't understand in sixth grade which means everything Jack wrote). He accepts the concept of eternity and then flips on its head the general human interpretation of eternity being synonymous with immortality. Eternity is most like the present because the present just "is". We've gone Zen, everything “is”. The future is the concept at greatest odds with eternity because it absolutely isn't. It's all sorts of "might be" and "may be" and "could be" with the erroneous assumption that we shape it. In actuality we determine our future by what we have done and what we are doing. This is bound to make existentialists uncomfortable who are going to assert that all religion is “fatalism”, but the contrary is true. Fate is not determined by a god in the future or past or even us in the future or the past, it is determined by us by what we are doing with the past.

We accept the past as eternity, because it too has “been” and indeed continues to “be”. We never "un-become" what we've done and we never "undo" what we've done (this has problems with relativity in some ways and in other ways confirms it). Now we are saying that whatever we did in the past still exists, and only what we do in the present can have an effect on the consequences. It's not exactly debits and credits where we're performing offsets or "equally good" for corrupt, it is spiritual evolution that might take, well, forever. We don't un-lose the trust we lost, we do something to earn it back (and here is where we have to turn energy into spiritual matter or regaining trust would be as easy as it was to lose it). We know that healing some past consequences requires a great deal of energy on top of the material manifestations required to compensate for past corruption.

What I taught yesterday in the lesson on atonement were two concepts: sin is something that results in the corruption of spiritual matter (which we need the atonement to expiate) and that God does not punish us for our sins: He will allow us to suffer the consequences if we choose. The corruption is the direct consequence of sin (the actual definition of sin being something that results in spiritual corruption whether God said it or not) and while God might be able to loan us a cup of spiritual perfection, He just gives us enough to cover what we can't fix, and that only if we ask. What we're dealing with here is getting to a point where our spirits are strong enough to prevent us from making physical choices that result in spiritual corruption. We're stuck with these silly emotions to communicate between body and spirit and we have to learn how to prevent our bodies from dumping too much testosterone into the muck. We also have to learn how to determine whether something physical introduced dose of testosterone into the muck of our emotions (like the beautiful, half-dressed girl) and when our spirits did it (like when we connect absolutely while making love with our wife). We can usually tell by our emotions as the testosterone subsides and we feel incredible joy or start looking around uneasily to see if somebody caught us.

Unfortunately we are best at compensating for the physical corruption we caused while we may still be 90-pound weaklings when it comes to taking care of the spiritual damage. As a matter of fact our whole experience on Earth is learning how to control the physical to prevent damage to body or spirit. Since we are not fully capable spiritually (maybe our hands are tied or maybe that muscle isn't strong enough) we have to borrow a little spiritual atonement from the Savior to expiate our spiritual corruption. We know we already had a great deal of spiritual strength to get here. Nothing in life really "heals" in the sense of bad gets better and becomes good, it heals according to its etymology of "becoming whole". Physically, corrupt cells die or are surgically removed and are replaced by healthy cells. Since we can't leave a vacuum physically or spiritually we must fill that space with healthy spirit or prosthesis. Either the atonement provides us with spiritual stem cells that we grow into healthy progression, or in some cases we may just receive a transplant from the infinite atonement store that fits our particular need. In any case we have to deal with possible corruption and rejection of the new spiritual matter.

In the end our future is never about what we will do, because what we will do is determined by what we're doing. When we don't understand this we latch on to the lie that we can mess around now and fix it later. When we tell ourselves that, if we simultaneously turn off the spiritual nutrition by leaving scripture, mediation, love and worship we will never turn it around. Repentance for today's stupidity is only possible as long as we accept that today's stupidity is sin, leaving ourselves susceptible to the restorative power of those who love us and just humble enough to admit that we aren't making a good decision. Once we break those ties, our future is decided. Only one thing can avert total destruction when we separate ourselves from atonement. That is the love of someone else who can arouse our desire love them back; to reach into us and relight the fires of righteousness.

Contrary to popular religious and theological meandering, the atonement did not start in the Garden of Gethsemane or on the cross at Calvary. It started when one amazing spirit said, “Send me, and the glory be thine.” At any time, Christ had the agency to say, “OK, I’m done. Sorry guys, I quit. Only a partial atonement is all I’m doing. I know that is terribly insufficient, but I quit.” However, just as we become a certain kind of person through our personal, spiritual discipline and evolve to a point where it may become impossible for us to lie, cheat, gossip, waste time, anger, hate, or be prisoner to any other single mortal foible, at some point it became impossible for Christ to go back on His word. Just as it becomes impossible for a mother to feel nothing for her child, it became impossible for Him to abandon His mission. And He’s is still doing it. It is infinite.

I don’t know if ever a specific scientist might acquire faith, or if a specific fanatic, ignorant believer will admit that there are eternal laws that must always be obeyed by everyone. That we may someday accept that everything that is done, every world that is created, every blessing that is obtained is based upon the appropriate behavior dictated by that law.

For my point, I will do both. My faith gives me power to accomplish things that are physically challenging. It’s my faith that allows me to wake up in pain and smile at a new day. It’s faith that allows me to work to heal physical, spiritual and emotional damage I have created. It is faith that helps me to feel that maybe I am doing some small thing that is beneficial, maybe even essential for the happiness of someone else. It is faith that makes love accessible.

It is science that fills my day with excitement. As I better understand current theories of everything I want to live another day to understand more. Science allows me to enjoy music in a way that is more profound and poignant. Science proves to me that everything can be healed. There will be an equal reaction. Mass times the speed of light squared will become energy. I can’t wait till I know how that happens.

The Second Amendment

It’s trite, but I believe in our right to arm bears. Claws and teeth are insufficient in a modern age. Laughs aside, I would want a Taurus 454 “Raging Bull” in my hand if I were being pursued by an enraged Grizzly. The goal would be stopping power because I can’t run at all and nobody can run faster than an enraged grizzly. Everybody that has been pursued by an enraged grizzly raise your hand. OK, we have now identified the tiny percentage of people Charles Darwin spoke about. In the 21^st century if you are doing something that irritates grizzly bears the gene pool might be better off without your contribution. I concede, though, that a tiny percent of the tiny percent of you that would find yourself in that situation may have a legitimate purpose to be in a situation that a grizzly would find unwelcome. You should probably be packing.

I understand the passion of the NRA to see the second amendment as a grail just short of life itself. What I don’t understand is why the NRA stops at the “assault rifle”. As anybody who has ever gone hunting knows, you can’t beat the M4A1 when you are surprised by a whole herd of deer that need to reach the pinnacle of their mortal purpose, having their heads mounted on a wall (in this day and age I don’t want to offend vegans with the idea that meat might be good for you or that they may be legitimate reasons to eat Bambi). Of course I know that you will never see a herd of dear with 5-point racks. Bucks insist on being the only “man” in the herd.

But what about the times only an FN SCAR CQC with its mounted FN40L-GL is enough? The grenade launcher is a part of this gun, so doesn’t the NRA insist on the right to buy these? Most of this rifle is, well, rifle. And you still can’t beat a FIM-92 for those times when some criminally minded airliner may have chosen your house as its destination. At 33 and a half pounds it looks just like a big rifle. Then there’s the StunRay whose manufacturers say “… will blind you into submission” with a light flash 10 times more intense than an aircraft landing light (all from a 75 watt bulb!) that overwhelms your visual cortex causing complete paralysis of the body at a distance that a Taser just envies. There’s also the “hard sound rifle” which has given me a healthier respect for my headphones. I can’t confirm it as real, but has a loyal following with HALO players. And all of these are just considered “small bore weapons” by NATO. Everybody knows that no group is complete without the venerable, reliable M2. Any Humvee (American Motors last gasp?) worth riding in has its M2HB or its baby sister the M240G. Yes the SAW is just a small bore gun, but when you need to shoot somebody 740 times in a minute (just under 13 times per second) it’s hard to beat [note: most gunners don’t exceed 100 rpm for prolonged use or the barrel becomes a little soft]. Of course, the Marines now want something with a little more accuracy.

Why doesn’t the “right to bear arms” extend to the Howitzer? Some of the best performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture have included the M198. And then there’s the world of smooth bore cannon. The Army realized early on that a 105mm round couldn’t do what a 120mm could from an Abrams tank. After all, it’s a  Chrysler. The original minivan is a Chrysler. Why can’t I have a 120mm RheinMetall on my Voyager? Anyone who has ever baked a pie knows how much more mass each millimeter gives you (for reference an 8” cake pan (assuming 1.5” inches high) gives you six cups while a 9” (same height) gives you 8 cups). Step up to a 10” and you’ve got almost 13 cups. Now instead of cake batter toss some high explosive and depleted uranium in there and watch the walls tumble down).

The point of this silliness is the same with all my friends in the NRA, and I have many friends carrying NRA cards. Except for the perspective terrorists, everybody will agree that the “right to bear arms” ends somewhere. In 1805 the standard musket in capable hands had a one in three chance of hitting a man-size target at 100 yards. This is the reason that you lined up as many musketeers as you could in a line. If you had 60 firing effectively you might bring down 20 of the enemy. The state of the art Baker Rifle, a flintlock, doubled that to 200 yards and Rifleman Thomas Plunkett is thought to have shot a French general at as much as 600 yards. With the improvement came a compromise. A skilled musketeer could get off 4 rounds in a minute while the time required to load and fire a Baker with its bullet in oiled leather (or more commonly linen) reduced the rate of fire to two rounds per minute.

Facts would indicate that for most Americans, the limit for the right to bear arms is in the neighborhood of what are characterized as “assault rifles”. I say this because it took most Americans agreeing with this idea for their representatives to ban them in 1994 (but only if that ban had a shelf life of 10 years). That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider the “Brady” camp has a budget of about $7 million/year while the NRA admits to between $100 and $300 million. They also seem to be able raise another $200 million with a toaster (I am not kidding). The problem is that whenever the characteristics of an assault rifle are defined someone can make some minor alteration (which can usually be unmade in seconds) to disqualify it.

I sincerely believe that if you took General Washington or President Jefferson and gave him an AK-47, the most prolific, most reputable, most reliable, most destructive bang for the buck they would say, “We had no idea people would want weapons of mass destruction in their closet. We were thinking muskets. You know a one in three chance at 100 yards maybe four times a minute.” FYI – An AK-47 on burst can fire 400 rounds per minute (600 rounds cycling rate). Yes, that is 100 times as many shots as the Founding Fathers had ever imagined. It is considered “inaccurate” by today’s standards because the stamped models only produce a 4” to 6” reliable target at 300 yards. Marksmen set its effective rate at up to 800 yards.

My point is that almost everyone recognizes that there is a limit, some limit somewhere defined as “the right to bear arms”. This is the crux of the argument about “constitutionality”. Once we admit that there is a limit to our right to the weapon, we have accepted that it is constitutional to set limitations on the right to bear arms without “infringing” on that right. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of “infringe” is “to transgress or exceed the limits of” indicating that limits must first be established for infringement to incur.

There are estimated to be more than 300 million guns in circulation in the United States. A law making it a criminal offense to possess a gun would be about as enforceable as Prohibition. At the same time, a law restricting the sale of firearms would lend itself to reducing the availability of guns to criminals. The existence of guns could not accomplished completely, maybe not even effectively for years, decades or even centuries. The question is not “how much good would regulating firearms accomplish” but simply if regulating firearms would result in a benefit to the majority of citizens.

We frequently compare ourselves to Canada. We eat the same food, drive the same cars, speak mostly the same language and share a lot of our heritage. Canada has its share of deaths by GSW. Most of these are suicides. In the US 45% of gunshot deaths are homicide while only 32% are suicides. In terms of lives taken there is an obvious and proportionate correlation with the availability of firearms. There is also a correlation in the reduction of GSW with the increased control of firearms since 1991 in Canada, a 65% reduction. Obviously the number and percentage of lives destroyed by guns is much higher in the US.

A more appealing way to look at this might be the cost of gun violence. Who would not be willing to pay a little less tax? In 1991 GSW cost Canadians $6.6 billion. A similar study in 1992 showed the cost to Americans as $126 billion. I would be willing to promote a provision that gun ownership continue to be regulated as it is presently as long as all the costs related to GSW is paid by gun owners.

For those of you who reacted to the shooting of five and six year olds by creating more wealth for the makers and sellers of guns all I can hope is that you are not my next door neighbor. How sad it would be to live next to somebody who would rather shoot me than share a loaf of bread. . I assure you that you won’t have to hold a gun to my head to get half of my last loaf. How I would hate to survive in a world where the only reason I’m alive is because I shot you and my neighbors.

The gun lobby will tap into the lowest form of human manipulation to sell assault weapons. I don’t know a single gun control advocate who would find relevance or redemption in [NSFW] something like this, but it was one of the highest hits on “second amendment rights”. I think even the men of the world like General Washington and President Jefferson would be disgusted that their prayerful hours work is associated today with such an image. I hope I don’t know anyone who would pay $21.99 to own it.

Hiroshima

For the last several weeks I have been reading book after book about the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't know why I do this. I become frustrated, depressed and distraught when I read the details about the horrors of war, but since my earliest memories I have not been able to turn away from pictures and words of war while at the same time fearing such a horrible waste of humanity.

Some of the books concentrated strictly on the science, the physics of what happens when a small fraction of nuclear material is brought to critical mass. Some discussed the human and social tragedy that were direct results of the bombs, but did so dispassionately; strictly an empirical representation of death, disease and trauma. Many authors stated clearly in their introduction that their introduction that they were not going to address the morality or immorality of the bombs or try to assign blame. One, however, asserted that the whole question of blame is useless moving the argument from the citizens of opposed countries to the economic and social practices of those countries that brought people to put on uniforms and attempt to kill those who dressed differently. Eventually it all seemed to devolve to the point where one individual was trying to kill another because they would try to kill him.

I've mentioned before that I don't believe in the concept of innocent civilian bystanders. We choose to honor and support our executive and nation or we oppose it. If we pay our taxes and accept conscription we enable war. Weapons are rarely built by soldiers, they are built by citizens and every citizen from the school teacher who taught that employee math to the grocer who sold them breakfast is involved. The rations are grown by farmers and the money to pay for it all financed by bankers. Every one participates in the process, partly because of allegiance and patriotism and partly because of the need to pay for the necessities of life.

Some of the books were written specifically to address the morality of waging war with atomic weapons. This begs the question, "Is there a moral way to wage war?" This is where our irrationality stands up screaming. How is dying from a metal fragment through the chest more moral than dying from every cell of the body vaporizing? How can it be more noble to take a life with a rifle or a bayonet than it is with a Predator and a Hellfire missile? What we call "collateral damage" is killing the people who feed the soldiers, make their weapons, bring them information and generally enable war. How is killing as many people as you can in smaller batches preferable to killing them in one huge cataclysm?

To assert that there is a "immoral" way to wage war relies on the premise that there is a "moral" way to do it. War is about greed. Greed is always the primary cause. Someone wants something someone else has, which in the end all boils down to agency. Someone wants to impose their will on someone else in a way that will give them what they want. Any action, any method used is moral to protect and defend the exercise of agency. If we accept that "...all men are created equal..." this is the place where equality exists: We are all endowed by the Creator with the right to make our own decisions and choose for ourselves what we do with our resources.

There is no way to morally take away the agency of another. Efforts to explain it in terms of territory, money and resources are the details we use to obfuscate the motivation of the instigator to impose their will.