one of many in the wild, wild net.

When I first encountered Michael Moore, it was through his documentary Farenheit 911.  I was disgusted at the whole thing, really… I don’t remember much about it because I saw it years ago (at work during a mid-shift, no less), but it seemed like he focused on the seedy underbelly of government what with the aggressive profiling USMC recriters, or the supposed hypocrisy of the Senate for favoring war while allegedly being very far removed from the fight.  I really don’t like Michael Moore.  When there was a Google-bomb set up to link the word “Failure” to Pres. Bush, I joined the opposition that was linking the word “Failure” to Michael Moore.  I personally think he is irrationally vitriolic and quite divisive.

I have no qualms, however, with his beliefs.  It’s not that I share them, but as my friend Lorenzo told me many years ago, in America, “you have the right to be wrong.”  I love this country primarily for that reason.  As of today, I can walk down the street with a big sign saying “OBAMA SUCKS” or “OBAMA IS AWESOME.”  It would be absurd, but I won’t go to jail for it.  The presidential death squad won’t execute me for being an ideological enemy of the nation.  I won’t get jailed by the local justice system that may disagree with whatever I’m yelling about.  I can be wrong and protest about it, but that’s fine… it’s my right.  This is why I love this country.

And this takes me to why I’m writing this note right now.  I was reading his latest open letter to the President (President Obama, Replace Rahm With Me: An Open Letter From Michael Moore, it happened to pop up in my visit to news.google.com).  It dawned on me that as much as I dislike Michael Moore, I appreciated how he fought for what he believed in… I respect him that much.  That’s a quality that I want more within myself.  But my focus right now is on the 36 pages of comments that are attached to this article.  Alot of them cheer for this guy like he’s their savior…  my question is, what do these people do on their own to fight for what they believe in?  Mr. Moore isn’t just a loud-mouthed asshole, he does research (I know… it’s very little, and the results are questionable)… but what about the thousands of people that share his views?  If you’re going to be a far-left radical, you might need to get some discussion going. You shouldn’t believe in a position, you should know it’s right because  you did the research. Alot of people today say they “believe” in stuff.  They “believe” in the constitution.  They “believe” in global warming.  There’s alot of faith put into Rush Limbaugh, megachurches, government, the effectiveness of universal healthcare, the words from CNN, MSNBC, and FOXNews (or Faux News, as some may call it).  It’s not just the common public, but the 21st century version of the yellow press does it to a lesser extent as well.

My point is this, who’s showing up to the town hall meetings for the community?  Who’s running for office?  Only the most hardcore of devotees to the community who actually give a damn enough to take time out of their lives to work for the public in jobs like town mayor, congress(wo)man, etc.  These people find a platform, be it public office, music, TV, film, or just a literal soapbox on the literal street, literally.  You keep looking to a savior.  I don’t normally finger-wag the general public, but I made the decision a few days ago that I would remove the filters from my brain to my blog, so here goes.  If you’re looking for a savior to rescue you/your community/your state/your nation, you need to look in the mirror, because that’s who’s going to do it.  Assholes like Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are two sides of the same coin, and who’s to say you can’t become that asshole as well??  You literally have the power, even more so than He-man had “the power”.  You can form words using your lungs, vocal box, tongue, and lips, and you can’t get into trouble for it!  If the white supremacists movement can still hold rallies under a Black president, then you can speak on abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, health care, etc. and not worry about repercussions.

But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen.  I have a plan for all of us.  I’m going to figure out how Joe Bag-o-Donuts can self-initiate off the ass he sits on (much like I do now) and become an effective contributor to deciding the direction of this Nation.  Then you don’t need to look to assholes to speak out on your behalf… you can do it for yourself.

You can be your own savior.

-TJ

I’ve always had loosely-held opinions.  I figure, I’m no expert on what I’m talking about (most of the time), I just know what I’ve read and decided to accept as true based on other information I’ve read and decided to be true.  But the other day I was reading Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand.  From what I’ve gathered, Mr. Brand is an old environmentalist and has been for a long time.  Decades.  Long enough to remember what the beginnings of the popular environmentalism movement.  Anyway, apparently alot of environmentalists have knee jerk reactions to things like the trend towards urbanization and nuclear power, to name just two.  He’s been around since the beginning, noted what his hopes for the environment were when he was young, and is old enough to know how those hopes panned out, what was right, and what he could have done better, and over the course of decades he’s seen enough to change his stance on some important positions with regards to the environmentalist movement.  If ever you want to stand on the shoulders of a giant, this is the way to do it… by reading this book.

Anyway, one thing he said about his opinions was that they were loosely-held.  I used to hold true the aphorism: “If you don’t stand for anything, you’ll fall for anything.”  It was the only piece of knowledge I’ve encountered that seemed to speak to me… and how I needed to just pick a position and stick with it.  But Mr. Brand, I think, has a very valid counter-opinion in that loosely held opinions means you are open to discussion and learning…

Excerpt from Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand:

… my opinions are strongly stated and loosely held–strongly stated so that clients can get at them to conjure with, loosely held so that facts and the persuasive arguments of others can get at them to change them.  My opinion is not important; it’s just a tool.

When I read this, I had to stop and think (really, to thank God).  I am open to discussion.  I am open to learning.  I consider discussion and learning the most important methods in which mankind will grow and progress.  When we close ourselves off from discourse, we stop learning, and we stop growing.  For myself, I am painfully aware about how little I know about our world and our Universe.  I could hold 10 PhDs and I’ll still feel this way.  There is always something new to discover, and until I am divinely blessed with the boon of knowing everything there is to know about everything–ever–I will keep myself open to opinions, counter-opinions, and–most importantly–facts.

-TJ

I’ll go out on a limb and say that one things my friends know about me is that I’m self-conscious (among other things)–about certain things.  I highlight that last bit because I’ve been known to give impromptu rallying speeches and random public performances (prom query, high school senior production, OTS) given the right conditions, so I figure folks know I’m not 100% self-conscious all the time.

That said, I mention it because I don’t put up alot of the things I want to say on my  own blog, for fear of future reprisal or disappointing people who I consider near and dear (think: family, mentors, friends that for one reason or another put me on a pedestal).  I’m considering changing this policy on my blog.  One of the reasons I went from olaes.net to ockets.net was because I initially wanted to restart my blog and remove my name, but one thing I am not is an anonymous coward.  Not to brand all anonymous posters on the internet, mind you.  It’s just that, when I expend words–verbally or in writing–it’s after they pass internal decency and sanity filters.  The result is… I don’t speak a whole lot because I’m usually watching, considering, forming opinions and counter opinions.  But most of the time the process happens in my head, and some of my curiosities don’t see the light of day.

I guess for the past few years, I’ve been trying to write to this and other journals as a method to find out who I am–to see my soul.  But seeing as how I only write stuff here that pass my filters, and how the majority of product resulting from the firing of neurons in my brain never see the light of day, I think that I am not taking this space to its full potential.  I am trying to decide whether or not I should publish my unfiltered thoughts.

I am afraid of many things if I do this.  A few things come to mind: people (and I) will see my demons, and will subsequently think less of me.  I am afraid that uncensoring myself on my own blog will jeopardize my career and future careers, not because I would reveal some sort of illicit activity, but for subtler repercussions that I can’t begin to fathom.  I am afraid–quite irrationally–that my parents, siblings, and close friends will “kick me out of the house”, so to speak, when they find out that they have only known a subset of the true me.

But as people change, opportunities present themselves.  Within the last few months I’ve been getting bolder in my own life, and with that I’ve been slowly learning how to give less of a crap about what people may think about me, and learning how to care less if people don’t agree with me or don’t like some aspect of my personality.  And despite all these fears, I’m still drawn to the idea of going forward with this plan because I think that once I confront my demons in a public place and air my supposed “dirty laundry”, I can allay my fears of what might happen if I speak my mind.  The true state that I want–to be known for who I am, and neither who I want people think me to be (my perception) nor what people independently regard me (your perception)–can finally be achieved.  I think in doing this I can move forward with… well, moving forward in life.  For one thing, I can stop beating myself up for aspects of who I am that I often consider the “failure parts”.  I can stop wondering if people will accept me and put me in greater positions of responsibility.

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I think I’ll do it.  You may not like me hereafter, but if it’s because you learn something about me that you don’t like after I reveal it, I think I can live with that.  I’d rather you abhor me for who I am than venerate me for what I am not.

-TJ

I woke up today at 6AM, went to work at 9:30AM, and found out at about 10:10 that they closed the base.  In the timeless words of Homer, “Woohoo!”  Homer Simpson, not Homer of Greek literary renown.

I drove around today, and via a circuitous route I wound up at Barnes & Noble next to the mall next to my apartment.  I browsed around for a book that I eventually found out was just released today (The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr by Ken Gormley).  I instead bought two books that I thought might be interesting to read based on the reviews on the back of the books… I know, not very good indicators, but indicators that served the purpose well enough of enticing me to spend money to read what they have to say.  They are Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff, and Have You Seen My Country Lately? by Jerry Doyle.  The former written by a UC Berkeley Cognitive Linguistics professor, and the latter by a conservative radio talk show host… trust me when I say that I try, in my own quite possibly misguided ways, to look at truly fair resources for reading material, and when I can’t find it I try to balance out what I hear so that I get more than one side of a story.

Anyway, I got into Moral Politics, and after getting through the first chapter I put the book down and started thinking about my own political aspirations.  I’ve toyed with the thought of running for office some day–most likely when I retire from my current office in 15-20 years.  It’s been in my head for a few years now, and I’ve told it to Law and my Dad.  Since I commissioned, I’ve gotten to be involved in stuff that has required interaction with Congress–I’ve never done anything that I could consider “interacting with C0ngress”.  I’ve never even thought that in my lifetime I’d be doing something that could be considered “interacting with Congress”, let alone doing something now.  Suffice it to say, I’ve realized in this last year that I’m alot closer to Washington than I previously thought.  I also realized this last year that the real power apparently is in the Legislative branch of our Government.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but Laws are made in Congress, both at the Federal and State levels.  Anyway, I’ve narrowed down that if I run for office, nationally I want to be a Congressional representative in either the House or Senate.  Local government, I wouldn’t mind running for State congress or even mayor of a town.  As I understand it, these are full-time obligations but not full-time jobs… so definitely I would have to have a source of income other than being in the government.

Blah blah.  Anyway, I was thinking I should, at some point, start keeping a page of what my platform stances are on today’s issues.  I feel I need to declare as soon as possible what my stances are, as that’s something I want to get on record as early as possible so that if I run for office in the future, I’ll have something to point to.  As my views change, so will the page, with narrative explaining why that view changed.

If my speech betrays a politically naive person, consider this–by education, I’m an engineer, and as a private person I tend not to research things I don’t have much interest in.  My knowledge of things not related to engineering is severely lacking but ask me about possibilities and I’ll talk all day about them.  I’m ultimately not interested in what we can’t do, but what we could do–we as a city, a state, a country, and a human community.  As each day comes and goes and I learn a little bit more about my world and my society, and at some point I realized that to effect the greatest good I’ll have to do something that will test the limits of my capacity to make things happen.  I think that working in the Legislative branch will test these limits, while at the same time I can provide the input that I want to give to the leaders of our Nation (or perhaps become one?).  There’s alot I want to say, and I don’t type or speak fast enough to communicate everything that’s whizzing around in my head.

Anyway, more on this later.  I’m at a B&N, it’s 8:30PM (close to my bed time), snow is still coming down, and I have to eat something still.

-TJ

How Christian Were the Founders? – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been hearing about this for a while, the article is mostly about the Texas public education school board setting the curriculum for the rest of the country’s public education system.

Whatever school my future kids go to, I’ll be sure to supplement their historical information so they get true history, and not the parts that the public school system allows them to see.

I gotta say this before I lose the thought.  I’ve been playing with Google Sidewiki and an idea just burst into my brain.

First, read this: Google’s Sidewiki page

Then, search google for “sidewiki controversy” and note the opposition to the new communications platform.  Take your time, I’ll still be here.

Now, if you are so politically inclined, you could install google sidewiki, and join or start a conversation on bills that are passing through Washington by going to thomas.loc.gov, searching for–oh, I don’t know–the healthcare bill, and get smart on what it actually says.  Using Google Sidewiki, you can finally leave comments on those pages, so now our elected officials who are cutting-edge enough to have google sidewiki installed can go to thomas.loc.gov and see what the public (or those who have sidewiki installed, anyway) are saying about sections of bills being passed through congress!

I’m gonna try it.

-TJ

Yeah, so I apparently don’t think things all the way through.  I was talking with Alvin last night over my new netbook (HP mini 311, upgraded to hell), and up to now I’ve been slave to my impulses.  I quit Facebook on a whim back in January, without thinking there were people I actually communicate with via that website.  I deleted my website last night on a whim thinking I was going to retool it from the ground up.  And today, I fumigated my bathroom without really considering how far the poison gas would spread in my apartment… I sat two rooms away for about 3 hours.  Granted, I shut off the vent, closed the door, and thought that it wouldn’t travel through my heater system, but now I’m feeling just a little bit off.  I’ve been out of my apartment for about an hour now, having gone to eat and sit here at Panera Bread surfing the web.  I feel kind of yuck, though, I don’t know if it’s because of the pesticide or for want of sleep… I went to sleep last night at 4AM.  Woke up this morning at about 8AM, so it’s not like I lost that much sleep… 2 more hours and it would be my norm.

Anyway, when I get back home I’ll be disposing of that can and airing out the apartment again.  Actually, I wonder if I can just get away with turning on the bathroom vent for half an hour.

Ugh.  I can’t wait to move into a house.

-TJ

Just finished The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs.  Pretty good book.  I recommend it to anyone open to new perspectives on religion and faith.  Website is here:  http://www.ajjacobs.com/books/yolb.asp.

-TJ

Today I said goodbye to a friend.

I worked with Bill at Wright Patterson for about 9 months.  In those months, I met a guy who had truly lived a life less ordinary.  He was a man who spoke the truth, especially when it needed to be spoken.  He was an awesome friend that I wish I met when I was younger.  And now, he is with God.

I didn’t know Bill all that long.  But I learned two things from him.  The first, I need to be honest with people when it comes to negative feedback.  Especially when it comes to negative feedback.  Problems can be avoided in a professional setting if differences are resolved quickly and early on, instead of letting lots of petty minutiae pile up until it becomes a mountain of festering resentment.  That wasn’t Bill’s problem, but he told me a story where someone had these problems with him and affected that person accordingly.

The second, I need to see as much of this world as I can, while I’m still here.  Bill took trips down to NYC when he lived in Rhode Island a long time ago.  He knew NYC so well, it seemed to me that he had lived there, but he never did.  The short of it is that I will be taking 8 trips to NYC this year, and I will learn it well while I’m still young.

All I can say now is I wish I knew him better.  I kept putting it off, and now I’ll have to wait until later.

Ah well.  We will all see each other in the end.  In the meantime, goodbye Bill.

-TJ

(Read his obituary here: http://www.legacy.com/Dayton/Obituaries.asp?page=lifestory&personid=138944416)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve went from one weekend to the next feeling like alot has happened. I went to Melbourne FL for business this week, and when I wasn’t predisposed to meetings I took the time to get out of my hotel room and shoot pictures. I shot about 120 pictures, but I only have about 8 worthy of sharing. Alot of the pictures I took were of birds and trying to capture them doing something cool, but apparently I need a bigger zoom lens to shoot good wildlife pictures.

Yesterday, though, was pretty cool. I had a flight out of Orlando at 9:54 AM, but due to weather and mechanical troubles I ended up getting rebooked for another flight. My options were either to make a 5PM connection (instead of 1PM) in Atlanta, which would have left me sitting around in the Atlanta airport for 4 hours, or take a nonstop to Dayton at 7:17PM. I ended up going with the nonstop, because I thought that was the only way I’d get a free roundtrip ticket that they were actually offering all of us Dayton travelers.

So I started thinking about what I’d do in Orlando for the next couple of hours… I effectively had about 7 hours to kill at that point. I contemplated getting a cab to go down to International Drive, but I was holding a laptop bag that was particularly heavy and a backpack with some real estate books and my camera, and I honestly didn’t want to walk around town carrying all that crap… it would have been a screaming “MUG ME!” sign.

I had lunch at the Airport, and while I was figuring out what I could be doing, I saw red cross workers leaving the restaurant area and remembered that there was a relief effort at the Airport. So, I figured… what the hell.

I ended up helping the team at Orlando with making sure refugees got tickets and made flights to their relatives for 7 hours. It wasn’t all that stressful, but now I think I will sign up to be official on the Disaster Relief Team. I think at the very least it will help me learn to deal with managing an emergency response, and I think as an Officer that would be a good experience to gain.

-TJ