Category: Musings

There was a nationwide “No Kings” protest.

Apparently, the turn out was substantial in many cities. Surprisingly, at first glance it appears the violence was kept to a minimum.

I didn’t tune in to any of the news coverage. I just don’t give a shit anymore.

Here’s what an AI had to say about it.

“The “No Kings” protests aimed to highlight opposition to President Trump’s policies and advocate for democracy and individual rights, but their immediate impact on policy changes remains unclear. However, they did mobilize significant public engagement and awareness around issues such as immigration and government accountability.“

The AI noted that it might be inaccurate, so as usual take everything an AI says with a grain of salt or an entire salt lick.

It was very quiet up here, I think most of the locals stayed home. Who can blame them? A lot of the folks up here commute to LA daily.

They must have been exhausted with the protests after a week of slugging through traffic that was wadded up by multiple road closures.

I spent part of the day looking for a job. I was also looking for places to live where the demographics were more favorable to people like me than California.

I think I want to live someplace inexpensive, probably rural, where the values I have, are shared by most of the people surrounding me. Not everyone has to think the same way I do, but I want to be around people that understand having differences of opinion is not tantamount to emotional violence. A place where discussion of those differences doesn’t result in physical violence.

In other words, I’m ready to check out. I’m tired of the insanity. Try as I might to avoid the news, the politics, the incessant wailing and gnashing of teeth, it’s getting more difficult all the time.

I just don’t care. Deport people, don’t deport people, love The President, hate The President, believe Congress is doing their jobs, or don’t. Reparations for black people (again) or not, looting isn’t a crime, or looting is a crime, have police, don’t have police, It’s all the same and has been for decades.

I just don’t want to hear about it anymore. 

I’m sick and tired of failure. No matter how we vote, we are not in control of the institutions that subjugate us. The powers that be, are not, and probably haven’t acted in the interests of anyone but themselves for decades, possibly even for my entire life.

For years in my 20’s – 30s I had no interest in politics. I was just trying to survive. My whole life has been about trying to get a leg up, trying to be a responsible individual, and being a good upstanding citizen. You know being a good guy…

My work history is a testament to not being in control, I served only at the leisure of people and corporations that viewed me as nothing but a cog in their machinations and who thought nothing of discarding me and 100s of other people just like me, at the drop of a hat.

What has it gotten me? A lifetime of holding on by my fingernails and for what?

I begin to understand one of my Grandfathers once saying, “There may come a time when you envy the dead.” At the time I thought he was just being old, cross, and cynical. 

Now I’m starting to see what he might have been talking about. He was looking at years of unrest, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Hippies, Yippys, the Cold War, mutually assured destruction, protests, violence, increasing taxation & regulation, government scandals, corrupt politicians, breakneck technological innovations, and social engineering, that ultimately seemed to make things worse and more complex, rather than better.

For him there were a constant stream of golden dreams, that always turned out to be lead painted with cheap gold paint.

I think my father felt it too. It might have been why for a time, he lived on a farm and only re-entered the rush of the world because of a family disaster. For my Dad, that re-entry cost him everything, and he still had the strength to pull it together and stand tall and proud right up until the end. I don’t know if I’m anywhere near as strong as he was.

Both of my Grandfathers, and my Dad, used to say the system was rigged. Generally speaking, they tried not to contaminate our childish dreams of better lives. They’d send us kids out of the room, or the house, to go play in the sun and enjoy the security they provided for us, when they were talking about “adult” things.

I recall my Dad being in favor of rebooting the government every 20 years or so. His theory was to strike all the laws, and restart from ground zero with The Constitution, Bill of Rights, and commonly accepted laws about thieving and killing. He was in favor of putting every politician, judge, and bureaucrat on trial.

He thought those trials should be held by the people and that the people should be the ultimate authority. He was in favor of marching the guilty straight to the gallows or firing squads as an example to other politicians and those with political ambitions.

He eventually mellowed, but maybe he had a point. He was about consequences, and in my lifetime I’ve seen where “no consequences” has led us. We have hundreds of thousands of laws, but they’re selectively applied or perverted to allow the “desired” outcome. Is that law?

I’d love to have a conversation with my Dad & Grandfathers about that philosophical question.

I wonder if my Dad & Grandfathers would be laughing their asses off at the “No Kings” protestors. Not because the protestors are saying no kings, but because the protestors are so clueless. If you think about it they and all the rest of us are serving, and have been for most of their lives, a diaphanous imperial model.

The people pulling the strings, are the same powers that have always been behind the thrones.

My Dad once said offhandedly, “The King isn’t the guy to watch, he’s the distraction. It’s the advisers and members of the court that are the real threat.”

Well Dad, it’s taken me 40 years to figure out what you meant. I guess I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

To my Grandpa’s on both sides of the family, and to my Dad. Happy Father’s Day. You’re missed, loved, and thought of often. I wish I could talk to you.

This just crossed my mind and I know you’d all laugh, “Do the Amish take in converts?”

As I’ve chronicled, I’ve been looking for a job, in my field for a long time.

I read job postings daily. 

This morning, before dawn I was having coffee reading job postings as I do every morning. I apply to those positions for which I’m qualified and comfortable my skills would be well suited.

Recently, I’ve seen a trend where the job posting is clearly misleading.

The most obvious is;

“Fully Remote” then further into the posting the requirement is that you live in the city the company is in. Further down the long list of requirements is that the company wants the employee to be in the office some number of days per week. 

That’s not a fully remote job, that’s what companies are calling a hybrid position.

It’s the old “bait and switch” and honestly probably creates an overwhelming response of resumes and applicants that the HR department has to filter.

A variation is where while filling out the preprogrammed application the prospective employee is asked if they’re willing to relocate, and what the relocation time frame is.

In other words they might consider you if you’re planning to move to their location on your own dime.

Again, this is a hybrid position at best, more likely, it’s a position in an office.

I’ve also been seeing a growing number of positions where the position title or description is completely different from the actual responsibilities delineated other down the page.

For example;

“Manual Testing position“

Then further down, “Must create automated testing using (Program de jour) from user stories.”

Then there are the endless typos or AI generated nonsense sentences  describing the work to be done, followed by a list of every possible buzzword that’s ever been used in technology.

This made me wonder if I’m the only person who finds HR departments nearly useless.

So I did a web search simply asking, “Is any employee happy with their HR department?”

The results were interesting in that, most of the articles returned were talking about working in an HR department, instead of if employees liked or were happy with HR.

It reminded me of the results you’d get during COVID if the question you asked was about alternative treatments.

Rephrasing the question didn’t significantly improve the returned results. There was a peppering of >10 year old articles about dissatisfaction with HR but nothing current.

One Forbes article (from 12 years ago) flatly stated, “Employees will ask for assistance from anyone but their HR department.”

I began wondering if the results were because the search algorithm was overwhelmed by negative articles and decided that it would “Improve” the world by masking reality.

There are people who seem to believe that sweeping the issues under the carpet is better than presenting the truth. The theory goes something like, “We shouldn’t reinforce the negative because that will compound the issue and cause more people to pile on to the beleaguered party.“

You see similar results if you specifically look for images of black folks trashing or looting stores or fast food places. What you get is results of anyone but black folks engaging in these activities.

I know this because on the one hand “X” sometimes presents incident after incident, literally showing black folks fighting each other in Walmarts, Targets, or McDonalds.

But when I try to search for the actual incident to find out what the specifics were, why this happened, or who provoked who, there are few, if any results.

This leads me to wonder, is what I’m seeing on “X” some kind of AI hoax, or is the algorithm suppressing reports of the events?

I suspect the latter.

What this suggests to me is that truth may be entirely subjective. This is not because true is variable, but because either people can’t handle the truth, don’t want the truth, or the powers that be choose to obfuscate or shape the truth for their own ends.

3 days ago, entering “Senator Van Hollen” brought up article, after article, about his “Brave” fight to bring a ‘mistakenly deported’ man home from El Salvador.

Now that same search parameter displays Senator Van Hollen’s record in the senate and his biography. Adding “El Salvador” to the search and articles are presented about the Senator’s trip to El Salvador and that he’s defending “Due Process”.

It changed shortly after revelations that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a standing deportation order, restraining orders against him, from his wife, and that El Salvador counts Garcia among the membership of MS13.

Senator Van Hollen has egg on his face, the public opinion polls regarding the Democrat party and its leadership dropped over the good Senator’s publicity stunt.

Taxpayers are not thrilled that the Senator used their money to demand that we waste more taxpayer money to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, put him before a judge (spending more taxpayer money) only to have a hearing that will in all likelihood result in Garcia being deported again, (spending yet more taxpayer money).

We could have that hearing in absentia, or via zoom and then decide if Garcia should be returned to the US or remain in his home country.

The good Senator, with the help of the Media is trying to reframe the “Truth” in order to shore up both the Senator’s polling numbers and those of the Democrat party.

There are a few diehard media outlets like MSNBC that still maintain Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “mistakenly deported”. That’s just because their hatred for Trump is so strong that even in the face of a standing deportation order, they must paint the Trump administration as sitting at the right hand of Satan.

I find all of this amusing. It exemplifies the old quote; “This is how civilization dies, not with a bang… but with a whimper.”

When all data sources are tainted, facts are obfuscated, people are divided or polarized by falsehoods and misrepresentation, when truth is entirely subjective… Civilization as we’ve known it, is circling the drain.

The weakness of old age and infirmity means that a younger more aggressive and probably more authoritarian civilization will sweep in to fill the vacuum. 

We have historical examples. Rome, Greece, The Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, all stand as sign posts.

Issac Asimov’s Foundation touched on these themes. Even though it is science fiction, The opening chapters ring true.

Hari Seldon, through the mathematics of Psychohistory told an Empire that it was doomed. Seldon said there was nothing that could stop the fall, but there were actions that could be taken to shorten the darkness between the fall of the current civilization and the rise of the next. 

In the twilight of the Empire, truth was subjective, people believed what was most comfortable or that which gave them purpose or comfort.

I’m amused because no matter where I look, I see evidence suggesting that history, or the fantasy of Foundation is playing out real time.

The “Empire” known as western civilization is falling. As in Asimov’s tale, it’s rotting from within.

Life is imitating art.

So perhaps it’s time to start thinking about creating the First Foundation. Perhaps it’s time to start preserving all that we’ve learned, and locking it away to protect it from the fall so that when our species is ready to reach for the stars again, science, philosophy, medicine, and a dispassionate record of history can guide our descendants forward quickly, instead of spending 1 or 2 thousand years in barbarism.

This line of crazy thinking has led me to wondering if our ancestors addressed this particular problem and how they attempted to solve it. Is there really a library of knowledge under the left paw of the Sphinx?

How would I solve the problem? Stone monuments attract attention. Various religious groups today will destroy monuments they perceive as antithetical to their beliefs. Our own people remove statues they find heretical.

How would I preserve knowledge? Books and libraries are subject to burning. Stone is more durable, but limited from a spacial perspective. A technological solution could work, but is inherently delicate and prone to malfunctions, power issues, or damage. 

Maybe I’ve found a project to fill the rest of my days.

My coffee cup and pot are now empty. Time to get on with the day.

And this is how I get sidetracked all too often.

Have a great day.

Up until March or April of 2020 I was suspicious of our Government but still naively believed that they were mostly okay, and that corruption was not the norm.

We had a new President, a supposedly novel and little understood disease, (turns out it was neither since Covid-19 is apparently a chimera virus built in a lab,) and 14 days to stop the spread.

At the time I believed that President Trump had been falsely maligned for attempting to close the border and the Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats were out of their minds fighting him on the subject. Then, as now, I think their fighting him was about nothing more than abject, bitter, hatred.

Either they knew that COVID-19 wasn’t a real threat, or they were colluding with other world leaders to make sure the whole planet was exposed. I still find it hard to wrap my head around the possibility that these politicians hated Trump so much that they’d rather burn the world down, than admit he was right.

I say this because the logic of quarantining a region where an unknown disease has originated is irrefutable.

If a disease originates in a particular region, and is essentially confined to that region, you prevent travel from or to the region. That allows time for the medical folks to suit up in biohazard suits to minister to the afflicted without contaminating the rest of the world. In no scenario do you allow travel by air to destinations around the world. 

This is actually something we’ve known since the 1950s when nuclear and biological weapons were a real possibility and our military ran endless scenarios regarding the outcomes of either, based on prevailing wind patterns.

If things had ended there, I would have written it off as a series of poor decisions and chalked it up to morons being elected to Congress.

But then it went further. Suddenly we had a vaccine, but vaccines take decades of clinical trials or at least they’re supposed to.

We had doctors suggesting caution regarding the vaccine, who were then censored.

As the situation went on, it devolved. President Biden claimed it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated and painted all those folks as pariahs for choosing to exercise their right to bodily autonomy.

It was the first time in my life that I felt completely and utterly betrayed by my government.

Worse was the sense of betrayal I felt when most of the country turned off their brains and many would gladly have seen unvaccinated people thrown into camps.

People from all walks of life suddenly felt like potential enemies, and some places went so far as to go “fascist” demanding to see your covid shot record. The NAZIs did that regarding people’s IDs and travel permits. “Where are your papers?” Was used to terrorize citizens of occupied nations.

Hospitals refused to help cancer patients or perform some surgeries on people unless they were “Cleansed” by an experimental vaccine.

I spent these years feeling more alienated than at any point in my life. What was being forced on the American people and indeed the world was absolutely, undeniably wrong.

I still feel alienated. The schism created by politics, the BLM summer of “Love”, lockdowns, and all the rest has made me feel very disconnected. 

Add the revelations of widespread waste, and potential corruption, throughout the government and, well, as the late Jerry Doyle put it in the title of his 2010 book “Have You Seen My Country Lately?: America’s Wake-Up Call” 

Have you seen my country lately? I seem to have misplaced it. Whatever this is now, it’s not the country I thought I lived in. 

Granted, Trump, Musk, Bondi, Hegseth, Vance, Patel, and all the rest claim to be working to restore our nation. They may in fact be doing that in every way but one of the most critical.

The soul of our nation had been very wounded for a long time. Thus far I’ve not heard a plan to heal that wound.  I still feel very alienated and mistrusting of my fellow citizens and more so, our government.

I don’t think we should live in the past. But I do think we shouldn’t forget how wrong things went, or how quickly. There’s a cautionary tale here, and something important to be learned.