Called Out on Quotes

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Anonymously Autistic has nominated me for the Three Day Quote Challenge. I am torn here, because after a lifetime of avoiding denomination I now have no means of wriggling out of nomination. Except maybe to blame AA for choosing such a great quote that I know that I will never be able to equal her inspiration.

So “Thank-you,” Anna.

Here is my favorite quote, penned by George Bernard Shaw when he sent Man and Superman to his friend Arthur Bingham Walkley:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I have many reasons for returning to this quotation.

First, the distinction between joy and happiness, the first being something that arises from within while the second is a response to temporary external stimulus.

Secondly, the wisdom (as Jesus suggests in the parable of the talents) that power is not awarded to self-seekers, but only to those that serve. When we honor that compact, we do indeed become like unto a force of nature, causing others to move in sympathy with our purpose, sometimes even against their conscious intention.

And finally the sense that the body is simply an adjunct to spiritual service. I wear my scars without shame.

There are some people that I would like to get quotes from, so I think that I will propagate the challenge. As Anna, I will not be offended if any among you decline.

The challenge rules are:

  1. 3 quotes in 3 days
  2. Thank the person who nominates you
  3. Nominate three more people each day.

Hoo-hah on the last one!

Annointed One, She

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I had a beautiful dream this morning.

Pale, so pale, the fires of desire
Languidly pooling within.
I would see you wind-swept, tresses
Streaming, roses in airy worship.

Cool quencher of men’s passions
Once enflaming, merciless burning,
Surrendered also to misused wood,
Be so intemperate in your pity!

For surrendering life for Life,
Heart hungering for life, and
Life answering, passionately reaching
Filling, stretching, pulsing wings of joy

Stream through you, through those tresses,
Aloft in the sunlight amidst feathers and petals,
Each strand adored and adoring, eyes
Aglimmer in fertile futures.

Oh, let me worship at the well of Life
Within you, surrender my Power
Into the waters and soil of creation
Sustained, gentled, tempered protecting.

Shield me, dearest guide, shadow me
Cast the wisdom of your knowing over me
Rising above and over, meaning,
Oh tender breasts caressing, my mind

Guide into your heart, let me serve
You, part you, fulfill you as tender –
Yet with awed tears streaming –
Paroxysms of witnessing.

Live Oaks Matter

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When dealing with a problem as large and diffuse as anthropogenic climate change, many of us have a Rubicon to cross. As recently as five years ago, I had practicing engineers tell me that there was no way that our individual impacts could combine to affect a system as large as the Earth. The escalating frequency and power of destructive storms has changed the minds of many of those doubters.

For myself, I never doubted the science, but it was an abstraction until I observed the changes in the Oak Trees when I returned to Livermore in 2004 after being away for ten years. Persistent drought had reduced the level of the Del Valle reservoir by almost thirty feet. When I finally found the opportunity to hike the hills rising from its western shore, I was astonished and dismayed by the battered look of the oak trees. Flaking bark and fallen branches littered the trail, and the sturdy equanimity of forest was replaced by a beaten weariness. When flying into Oakland over the reservoir in the early evening, the rust-colored crowns were evidence that the ecosystem was facing the loss of its keystone species.

These observations were magnified when I visited the IONS retreat center in Petaluma. I had seen isolated instances of sudden oak death along the freeway, but the trees along the ridge around the retreat center were decimated by the scourge. The branches and leaves were coated with a choking fungus. Recent rains had brought new buds that twisted as they suffocated. I reached out to offer a compassionate touch, until a voice warned me that the contact would coat me in spores that would travel with me.

The death of the oak forests was not so visible in Southern California. The coastal ranges come right down to the shore north of Santa Barbara, which seemed to act as a barrier to the spread of the fungus. And the trees in the Thousand Oaks area often line waterways sustained by treatment facility discharges. Even so, my thrice-weekly runs along the Chesebro trails confronted me with evidence of trees in distress.

Other factors also brought me pain: all throughout the West, the native scrub is being wiped out by the European grasses that now sprout up in the aftermath of wildfires. Even on old growth hillsides, shrinking brush has left exposed ground that is overrun by verdant lawn after rains. Where water gathers on fields, the invaders are thick stands of mustard plant. The weeds last only long enough to choke out the native sprouts, then die off, leaving soil at the mercy of the wind. In many places, the chalky lime of the range peeks through under the burnt stems of the sage.

When I took up Bikram yoga to combat my chronic back pain, my contact with these realities lessened. Even moderate exercise causes me to perspire profusely, leaving me in a dehydrated condition that forces me to break posture early in class. So I have given up hiking to refine my posture and prana flow. The disconnection came to the fore when one of the other students remarked that it was nice to see the hills greening again. I had to hold my tongue – I had observed over the winter that the lime green of European grasses was spreading on the burnt ground.

But I had been hooked. As I walked back to my car this morning, I felt the call of the green world. It seemed to say, “Yes, it’s not the way it was. But it is new life. Come and see us!” So when I arrived home, I put on my hiking boots and headed up the trail.

WP_20160220_13_36_30_Rich_LITo be confronted with a large Valley Oak that had shed its lowest limb in a recent storm. The wound, so evocative of a screaming face, shocked me into recollection of the frightening dark forest of the Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz. The sight was leavened somewhat by the sunflowers propped up against the trunk. I stopped to place my hands against the deep bark, and willed the matriarch to live, but she was weary. It was time to let go. So I offered the hope that a new sprout would rise under her guidance to provide new expression.WP_20160220_13_38_33_Rich_LI

I wish I could say that it was an isolated experience, but not a hundred yards up the trail I encountered another casualty. This friend had lost its crown, probably more than a year ago. The lower limbs were thick with brushy twigs, made bare by the winter weather. This determined manifestation of the will to survive was contradicted by the evidence in the bark of a tree that stretched its lowest branch across Chesebro from the far side. The pattern of bark discoloration suggested that it, too, would be diminished in the near future.

While the Valley Oaks seemed doomed, the Coastal Live Oak, less grand in their ambitions, seem still to thrive. They lose their limbs, but even hollowed out, they channel water through the cambrium, reaching up and out to paint the sky with green.

But as I strode away from the arroyo to cut my way home along the road, the future was painted in bright green. After the last wildfire roared up Chesebro Canyon in 2004, the forest service attempted to demark and maintain native species restoration plots. Often no more than ten feet on a side, the chicken wire was often lost in a sea of mustard plant, and while steadfastly maintained, the drought yet murdered the native plants that had evolved to survive the dry months of our Mediterranean climate. The future was obvious on the slope above the trail head: stunted oak saplings, ringed by white plastic tubes to protect them from the deer, evoked a military graveyard against the backdrop of the European grass that coated the slope in a hyperactive green.WP_20160220_14_11_23_Rich_LI

Future Challenge

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During conversations at work this week, I was reminded of how fortunate we are in America. A Veitnamese engineer observed that he was astonished by the amount of emotional energy we build in our presidential campaigns, when in fact nothing changes when an new occupant sits in the Oval Office. In Vietnam, people would take their money and bury it out in a field, because they didn’t know whether they would be forced from their homes after an election. And those serving in high office might find themselves jailed or executed.

This sentiment was echoed by our Hungarian visitor, the majority owner who complained that US policy had transformed Syrian, Egypt and Libya from stable dictatorships into violent anarchies. Of course, that’s not what happened – we simply chose not to throw our weight behond the dictators when their people rose against them. And the anarchy that resulted is symptomatic of nations whose institutions have been weakened by purges. Without any experienced leadership, those assuming power have to build civil society from ground zero against the resistance of those that benefited from the cronyism used by dictators to spread influence from government into the economic sector. The economic elite knows that dictatorship is essential to its privilege, and works hard to justify its restoration.

Among American youth, the evidence of recidivism in liberated lands must be demoralizing. They fought and died to create the opportunity for change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the societies tear themselves apart in ethnic conflict and class warfare. Any such frustration would only strengthen the political anomie that I hear expressed by young engineers, hair-cutters and baristas.

What saddens me about this is that the coming generation, while facing enormous burdens, also has awesomely powerful tools available to it. My youngest son complains that modern educational standards far surpass those required of my generation, but I remember in high school having to drive down to UCLA to get source materials for my AP History reports. When he was struggling last year with a paper covering the prophetic writings of Verne, Asimov and Clarke, I shared my perspective, and he came back thirty minutes later reporting that he had been able to find supporting references through the search engines.

In social action, Facebook and other engines (some devoted solely to social action) allow organization across geographic and cultural boundaries. They have their defects – internet trolls have mastered the subtle sociology of fomenting hostility. But researchers at MIT and elsewhere are using network theory and content analysis to identify such actors. I expect that within the next three years we’ll see a blooming of collaborative social communities on the internet.

As that process evolved, particularly among business leaders used through years of social media to transparency in their relationships, we’ll eventually reach a tipping point in social control. The relationships established and maintained online will evolve so rapidly that they’ll be beyond the control of bricks-and-mortar tyrannies.

What is critical is that the youth of the world recognize that they are still working within systems dominated by relationships established through face-to-face interactions. They need to temper their expectations for progress until they have managed to infiltrate those systems. That may seem counter-revolutionary, but it’s simply the way of the world. While the opportunities of the future seem obvious to our youth, the world is not structured at this time to transmit power through those channels. They need to pull up their bootstraps and play the role of midwife to the future that awaits their children.

Secret Freedom

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The NY Times published an opinion piece today on the confrontation between the US government and Apple over the forensic access to the encrypted data on Syed Farook’s cell phone – Farook being the perpetrator of the San Bernardino attacks in solidarity with ISIS.

The bug-a-boo raised by Apple is that if the accede to the US government’s request, a legal precedent will be established that will allow any government to demand that Apple assist in unlocking the contents of a cell phone. Included is that suggestion that any hack provided by Apple could make it into the wild, allowing anyone to unlock the data on any cell phone.

Let’s be specific about the details: the iPhone has a security feature that automatically erases all of your data if you fail to enter the encryption password correctly some number of times in a row. Now this is an interesting feature – Allah forbid that you should forget your password. It would seem that it would be in the interests of the owner to have some recovery mechanism. And after the incident, obviously the US government has legal possession of the phone. So why, as the owner, can’t it recover the data it owns?

The op-ed once again raises the specter of Edward Snowden, claiming that Snowden demonstrated that the government was spying on US citizens. As I recall, Snowden did nothing of the sort – what he showed is that the US government placed inadequate controls on access to surveillance systems by unauthorized subcontractors.

So I find it disingenuous that Apple refuses to assist the government with its investigation. Apple doesn’t have to release any code to the government – it could take the cell phone into its facilities, apply the patch, and provide the government with the data. Obviously, this is something that it can do currently for anyone, given sufficient inducement. Is the US government really out of line in its demands?

Being that Apple is big and bad enough to stand up to the US government, obviously it believes that it can stand up to the Chinese government. Or could it? Let’s say that China threatened to terminate production of iPhones in China if Apple didn’t break the encryption on a dissident’s cell phone. What would Apple do? Given that the principal driver for Apple’s stance is profit (which is why they outsourced to China in the first place), it might actually be that Apple would simply cave quietly behind the scenes.

Which is another open question: the big data services collect huge amounts of information on their customers. What do they do with it? Frustrating the government’s request to have access to data it owns is an amusing diversionary tactic. While Microsoft has large corporations looking over its shoulder,  nobody monitors Apple’s use of your data, nor Google’s use. Shouldn’t we be demanding some oversight?

I would be less skeptical of Apple’s motives if Cook was willing to recognize that there is a legitimate concern regarding information secrecy. I might argue that attempts to strengthen safeguards in the aftermath of the judge’s order is tantamount to aiding and abetting. If Apple clearly stated an ethical position, with guidelines regarding the conditions under which it will cooperate with governments to recover data, then I think that they would further the debate. As it is, I am afraid that he’s pandering to those that have good reasons for wanting to keep secrets – the criminal set.

The Struggle for Truth

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When I was last asked to speak at my employer’s all-hands meeting, it was in a context of crisis in our relationship with our biggest customer. The tone of internal discussions was denigrating, focusing on their manipulative contract negotiations and technical indecision.

I had been privy to two experiences, however, that gave me a different perspective on the matter. The first occurred during a site visit to the Netherlands. The other three representatives got smashed each night, which is a way of maintaining a coherent gestalt. My approach was rather to walk gently among our hosts. When we went to look at the machine that they were upgrading, I crouched down to look at the cable route, wondering how in the heck they would be moved to replace a critical component. The mechanical designer, who had projected some hostility regarding the project, stepped behind me, and I suddenly understood that a wing nut on a retaining bar, if loosened, would allow me to bend the cables out of the way. I turned around to find him looking approvingly at me.

The second experience occurred during a reciprocal visit to our facility. We produce electronics that can fail catastrophically, and the customer works in the health care industry. The lead engineer asked specifically whether we had tested the logic that prevented this failure mode, emphasizing that “in no circumstances can we have a fire in the operating theater.” He was assured that we had manually tested the fault logic, forcing the failure mode and verifying that power was shut down.

Four months after deploying the solution, our electronics caught fire in the operating room. The assurances offered to our customer were simply a lie.

It was in part to counter-act the mounting hostility that I offered this perspective:

As engineers, we come in every day to wrestle against the laws of nature to help our customers do things that most people think are impossible. In that struggle, fighting against our competition is far less rewarding that fighting against nature for our customers. When we fight for our customers, we enter into their dreams. They offer us their insights and understanding, and help us to make our products better.

Our customer understood that fundamental difference in me. Even though my role was limited to creation of software that integrated with their user interface, I was the first person they contacted whenever a problem came up. They knew that I wouldn’t pull out the contract or demand irrefutable proof that the problem was in our equipment. I would sit down and try to emulate their scenario so that we could evaluate the problem on our end. In turn, they would get a rapid assessment of likelihood that would help them to focus efforts on their end.

This attitude was emphasized by a comment made by the lead engineer in a discussion of welfare policy. He said,

If somebody wants to go fishing every day, I would rather that he just didn’t come in to work. I’d be happy to see him paid to fish, if that meant that I wouldn’t have to fix the problems in his work.

This is the experience of all creative people: in the end, everything that we do is a new form of truth. Creating that truth means living in truth, and the more people that are embraced in that circle, the greater are the challenges we can overcome. That trust can only be sustained when the team members take pride and find satisfaction in the work that they do. Conversely, when falsehood enters that circle, the creative process is corrupted by indecision and mistrust. Everyone runs around checking and double-checking the facts, and defending themselves against blame.

In over thirty years as a professional, the factor that most commonly creates mistrust is when a party representing the market seizes control of creative decision making. Because they do not contribute to the creative process, ultimately they can only justify tyrannical authority by attacking the work of the creative team. Because they don’t understand the creative process, the tyrant’s attacks are arbitrary and often false. As the team fragments, more and more control is asserted, with individuals promoted and demoted largely based upon personal loyalty rather than actual creative capability. Worse, those in the creative team that decry the loss of team cohesion are pushed aside, because to recognize the validity of their perspective is to undermine the power of the tyrant.

The shift that is necessary to resolve this philosophical conundrum was proposed ten years ago out at everdeepening.org. I offered these definitions:

Power is the ability to make reality conform to our intention.

Will is a measure of our ability to sustain an engagement with reality.

Strength is power over the self.

Authority is awarded by constituents when power is validated by expressions of love.

In any situation, a resort to lies degrades power, because lies are against reality. To lie is also to flee from reality, which is a failure of will. To the sophisticated observer, then, it is a sign of personal weakness. As a violation of both self-love and as an attack on the creative team, lies undermine authority. When that trust is lost, the creative team loses its faith that accomplishment will receive satisfactory rewards. Their motivation undermined, the only way that the tyrant can maintain control, then, is to run around telling people what to do.

From these, it follows that in engineering organizations the role of senior management is in securing the cohesion of the creative team. That means giving credit where credit is due. If the team fails, nature will let them know. To the degree that success is achieved, it is the role of marketing and sales to target opportunities that will produce sustaining revenues.

The difficulty of sustaining this organizational cohesion is so daunting that anyone achieving such success will find that people flock to their defense when they are threatened. To people who care only about creating new truth, such a loss would be a tragedy without parallel.

About Superdelegates

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So the news is out that Bernie Sander’s supporters, who won the New Hampshire primaries by 22% but collected only a split on the delegates, want super delegates to conform to the popular vote.

Super delegates are Democratic Party members who have worked over many years to create the infrastructure that the Socialist from Vermont is using to fuel his presidential candidacy. They exist to prevent hot-heads and late-comers from hijacking that infrastructure to undermine the Party’s principles.

So, Sanders supporters, if you want to amend the rules to facilitate an outsider’s candidacy, I suggest that you start your own party. Otherwise, dig in for the long haul and vote Democratic – not just when a fashionable Messiah shows up that you abandon when he can’t deliver against your unreasonable expectations.

As occurred with Obama in 2010, a debacle that we’re going to spend decades digging out from under.

Much Ado About Women

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When I went to my thirty-fifth high-school reunion, I ran into one of my old cronies. After observing me dancing by myself, he remarked that I was “still afraid of women.” Thirty minutes later, I had a lady drag me out on the floor, saying she wanted me to dance with her friends. The eight of them made a circle around me, laughing and shrieking until I reached my hand out and spun around to link their hearts in a circle, rhetorically asking “What’s the energy for, ladies? What’s the energy for?”

So, no, it’s not fear.

But I didn’t know quite how to put it until I recalled a scene in the recent live-action Alice in Wonderland. The caterpillar rejects her identity, and in response to protestations from his friends merely observes to Alice, “You’ve lost your muchness.”

This reflects on a recent conversation with a woman who testified that she spent her youth protecting the weak from bullies, until a man that she recognized as an old teacher (from lives stretching back 4000 years) observed to her that she “didn’t have to be Joan of Arc all the time.” I walked away from the conversation reflecting that she had surrendered her greatness to him so readily.

So, please, don’t do that. Jesus was an exemplar, not a substitute. Make much of yourself, my dears.

American Myopia

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So I’m listening to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow going on and on about the nominating process here in America, analyzing the psychology, political ideology, fund raising and electoral dynamics in New Hampshire. It was all very loud and breathless.

And then comes a notice for the Academy Award nomination for Winter on Fire, documenting the Ukrainian revolution, showing footage of citizens in confrontation with security services, and an under-age youth describing the dead falling around him.

What’s happening in American politics is exciting, but it’s not the only important thing going on in the world. Try not to feed the beast.

Conserving Liberty

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After my post Friday on Speaker Ryan, at Barnes & Noble that night I found myself disrupted in my technology research by a couple railing on about public sector unions. The particular focus of their wrath were police unions that negotiated full-pay retirement packages starting at fifty. As is well known in the West, some officers exercise that option and then take another assignment elsewhere, effectively double-dipping.

Now I agree that this seems unethical, and you’d think that some legislator would find a way to define “retirement” as excluding “leaving to take work elsewhere.” And the six-figure salaries being quoted ($200K) don’t sound like the compensation expected by a beat cop. Again, you’d think that redefinition of terms would be beneficial. There does come a day when a man can’t chase down an eighteen-year-old any longer, but that doesn’t apply to those pushing figures around on spread-sheets.

What was astonishing to me, though, was the framing of the discussion that brought such outrage to the conversation. During the 2008 down-turn, because of the pension obligations, Pheonix couldn’t afford to hire officers to replace those taking early retirement. This was set against the context of civilians that lost their homes in the mortgage melt-down.

For some reason, the couple ranting against the police union seemed to feel that was the union’s fault. Really? Not the financial wizards on Wall Street that stole another $500 billion from the public purse? What gall, to redirect anger against corporate financial fraud against the unions that seek only to secure the survival of the middle class that lost their homes!

This is what drives me crazy about conservative business owners. They rail about regulation as though it’s a confiscatory plot by the poor. Yes, we have the onerous terms of Sorvanes-Oxley that put a CEO at risk of jail if the corporate annual reports contains false information – but that was motivated by Enron’s manipulation or energy markets in California. Yes, we have the Affordable Care Act that requires all employers of more than fifty to provide health-care benefits, but that’s against the context of insurance company manipulations that denied coverage to many with pre-existing or chronic health conditions. And yes, we have rising taxes on fossil fuels, but that reflects a race against time against temperature rises that threaten to wipe out civilization as we know it, a race that has been road-blocked by oil companies (led by the Koch Brothers) propagating fraudulent science in an attempt to prevent governmental action to stimulate replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources.

Let me focus the point: did nobody in the business world know about these transgressions, some simply moral, but in the last case rising to the level of crimes against humanity? Where were your voices speaking in outrage? Or were you all among those business leaders celebrating the “success” of practices that allowed executives to build huge estates and buy private jets with the gains from stock options that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from share-holders funds into personal bank accounts?

Corporate America benefits every day from the investment made by middle-class America in roads, schools, emergency services and governmental process. They provide a steady steam of educated employees. They ensure the free movement of goods and safe working conditions. Access to those benefits is not a right, it is a privilege. Securing great wealth from that system comes therefore with a responsibility: to raise your voice when your peers abuse the public trust. Do so, and you’ll find that a lot of regulation would go away, because the cost of cleaning up from long-running abuse would be modest compared to the benefits that accrue from a freely running economy.