My gut reaction is that corporations should strive to be more value neutral. There are causes I believe in which might seem divisive or disagreeable to others. Specifically, I think evolution must be taught in schools and I think educating each other is the highest value. Educating people is a really touchy subject because what is important about education is different to different groups and none of us want to be brainwashed. I don’t want to learn about homeopathy; Liberty University wants people to learn fake science.

Since even education is so mired in controversy, I expect many forms of giving to be even more divisive. If you support women’s health, can you avoid supporting abortion options? If you support marriage, can you avoid supporting domestic partners? I don’t think a corporation can in such a way that they create more sales than they would have generated had they kept their corporate giving to themselves. On the other hand, if a company must give, those donations and any specific details about grants being funded should be disclosed blatantly like a moral Surgeon General’s warning so we can tell what we’re supporting.

Philanthropy is important. I think that should come from individuals only. If 100% of Chick-fil-A’s employees support Focus on the Family but Chick-fil-A as a company gives $0, then I am morally satisfied to purchase their tasty food products. However, if Chick-fil-A donates 10% of their profits to a charity, I must suppose that I am being charged 10% over market value for their food in order to support their ability to give. And in that situation, I must evaluate my support for their charities.

People should give even if it means you are donating to support things I find abhorrent. Corporations should not so that I can buy their products on the basis of their business and product quality without considering whether they are run by people with matching values. I won’t be eating at Chic-fil-A for the time being. And as more companies like Chic-fil-A come to my awareness, I will trim down my purchasing habits accordingly.

Over the next few months:
I will relocate to Tennessee.
I will begin an accelerated masters program designed to earn me a Masters of Engineering and a Masters of Business by the end of May 2013.
I will continue to address the software concerns of a new to me department at work.

And while I’m doing that I’m going to find a way to manage the facts like:
My kids still live in Virginia.
I don’t have a lot of cash on hand.
My girlfriend needs a place in all of this, too.

I guess this blog post is a note to the world that for one period of time, I’m not relaxing while I think about all the ways the world could have been. From now until about June 2013, I’ll be juggling several things at once in the hopes that it launches a lucrative next stage of my career when I convert all that momentum into company focused problem solving.

Wish me success and a large salary. I didn’t win the Mega millions last week so I’m taking the long route.

But you’re the spitting image
you work in the church
You can’t see perspective
when you sit on that perch

So you stagger out friendly like
with a shudder and a lurch
Because your machinism’s rusted
But your Bible’s dusted.

You’re confused and untrusted
Because I have a secular job and no faith
You have a faith based job, that’s why
we can’t see eye to eye.

To learn more about who Jack Palms is or the preceding Seth Harwood stories you could start with this link. Also, he has his own website: sethharwood.com.

This is Life starts with Jack coming home to find his bed burnt with an assailant on the premises. Mills, the old cop who helped Jack navigate through waking up and investigating the death of Ralph, needs Jack’s help to look into the connected return of Jack’s former KGB nemesis who survived the first shit storm climax that left Junius dead and Freeman unemployed. The assassination of a crooked cop via a fifty caliber slug that pokes holes in the cop’s not-a-K-car modern Mustang brings the consequences of Jack’s involvement in the local San Francisco underground home to roost.

Seth Harwood, the author, has a unique marketing strategy and brings his full talents to this, his third book and second of the Jack Palms series. His style is a clean narration of the events with short punchy chapters that drive the action forward. I stumbled across his existence with a fluke of chance when I began googling people named Seth. All of this is posted previously and you can look into some of that by clicking the first link in this post or putting “Seth Harwood” in the search box on this page.

This book is faster than the first two books. With Jack’s background established effectively in the first book, Jack gets thrust into the adventure with so little preparation that he still needs a haircut when the book starts. Sometimes life calls you to act before you can tame the accidental mullet.

I have had a lot of focus issues these days. One symptom of this is the gaps between my blog posts. Another symptom is that even though I have kept up with my book purchasing, the only books I have finished are Young Junius and This is Life. To make my point a little deeper, this is the year I’ve tried catching up on Game of Thrones to see what all the fuss is about. Either my meds are still off or the George Martin fuss might be about nothing I’m into. I’m willing to use my lack of Martin interest to support the idea that there are few books these days that I feel compelled to keep reading. One of the reasons I think Seth is such a page turner is that his style feels a lot like watching a series of something like 24 without ever having to break for the commercials. And in that gimmick free style, I can pay attention to every round loaded into every chamber throughout the story’s progression.

I probably wouldn’t recommend reading This is Life as your first book especially since I liked the first book so much and that book puts Jack into perspective as a rejuvenated version of a Hollywood has been. I haven’t read the short stories yet but I have them and I will. When I do, I’ll review them and whether or not they are better read in order or if they are fine in an encore capacity.

That’s all a long winded way to say if you haven’t read either Jack Palms books or you simply haven’t read the new one, you’re in for a treat. It’s the best one to date and a good chance to see what Seth Harwood is all about. If you’re motivated by catching a rising author on the way up, you better move fast, he’s gaining momentum. Now to see what he comes up with next and maybe look into his In Broad Daylight, his short stories and what I think is the continuation of This is Life in the Kindle book Czechmate. I’ll keep you posted.

*** Update January 4, 2012 ***
It turns out that Czechmate is included in the physical copy of This is Life. If you finished This is Life via Kindle, then you should finish the job and read Czechmate, too.

I question everything. A lot of people think I settle on the beliefs I have but then don’t think to ask my exwife how different I have been. In some ways, I’m a new person each year because I’ve taken so many mental shifts. I like that except for the frustrating nagging feeling that nobody pays enough attention to me to keep up. They see a contradiction, I see growth and continued effort to grasp enough of complex problems. A lot of people think I’m as atheist as Phelps is a Westoboro Baptist but I’m not. I question whether atheism is a good label even when the idea of gods is very settled for me. I’m not exactly my lack of belief.

I like pornography and I like women’s rights. I believe in voluntary exhibitionism. But I hate marketing. I like when people want to be attractive to me but I want to ensure they don’t have to. I’m pretty sure that no matter how ugly people tried to be, I’d find a way to be turned on somehow. So I think people are prudes. I think dress codes are outdated. Yet at the same time, I see a fun aspect to fashion, dress up, kink exploration and just in your face “ha ha I’m naked bitches!” kinds of pictures. I’m cool with that. Other people are not our toys automatically. But some people are more than happy to let you share in an aspect of voyeurism into their interests. I could talk about pornography all day because I love it so much. But you catch me spending a lot of time pointing out that a message like this

is going to be seen for its information and also it’s going to be seen for the attractive attributes of the speaker. Neither are exactly wrong but I argue that she should be seen for her statements first. And you should act cool and pretend you didn’t know she was pretty because the content of her video isn’t about anything visual. She has to make her breasts relevant. Otherwise, you keep your breast interest or disinterest to yourself. Get it?

Then I get crazy and go further. What about the gays? What about transpeople? Let’s face it, I don’t know that many transfolk. I may have run into two in my life. Why does it matter? I think it matters because the sooner you decide how they make sense the cooler you can treat them in person. I spend a lot of time wondering how I would interact with white trash for the same reason. I don’t mean that term to mean more than illustrative of a type of culture that is very different than mine. It has aesthetics, it has feedback cycles. It has beauty and it has tragedy. I’m not here to do the math. I like it when people want to open up to me and I’m willing to pay the price of thinking too deeply to get that.

Some people go nuts when they think I am deliberately motivated by self interest. How can being an atheist semi-hedonist make sense if all you think about is yourself? Well, how does all the cracked and warped self esteems of the people you know make more sense? Why don’t you try being honest with yourself? Humanity wants its commitments and its fancy. Why can’t we focus on best practices instead of denying that absolute monogamy is a bad precedent in general? That’s just one thing. Also, now that you know I’m loose with my definitions of monogamy, maybe my partner(s) will feel more free to discuss when they have or have just felt like having interactions of an adult kind with other people. It’s not that I don’t understand why you would feel that way. But how am I gonna get to the level where people will talk to me about that instead of telling me everyday how they are Stepford Wives while they are real people with real interests. I want the realness. I’m willing to pay for that with ambiguity.

But maybe mostly people dislike the fact that I’ll say what I’m thinking from the top of my head. Sometimes it’s genius, most of the times it’s disagreeable. I tend to challenge any statement someone else makes as part of my philosophy to think critically. I use it effectively against marketing. I overdo it against friends. But I’m not going to stop. And I’m going to say I get the misogynistic messages in rap even though it’s clear that I have different values. I’m going to say being marginalized is a fairly honest excuse for why you might feel the need to stop worrying about how someone else is marginalized too. It’s not right but the real solution comes from including those people into the conversation and it’s counter productive to attempt to silence them. Keep critiquing them though on their content. Those that do still rap misogynistically still have a wake up to go through. But they aren’t wrong to have said what they think. And they aren’t wrong because they thought it. They are wrong because elevating marginalized groups benefits everybody and so they are in some ways chopping their own feet out from under them.

I actually think my views of helping other people helps me. I’m so selfish, I care what you think. How nutty is that?

I believe in the basic principle that a good nation builds good workers that make good products that everybody can be proud of. In return for investing in our young Americans, that nation then taxes you a bit to invest in the next set of young Americans and to care for the well being of those who have invested their twenties through sixties in the American Dream.

I want a country that makes strong athletes, strong visionaries, and big profits. Why don’t we make enough to have signs of luxury in every home and make the rest of the world voluntarily pay for it because our exports are so nice? Why don’t we have the kind of mass transit that you can’t wait to ride? Why don’t we have the kind of medicine that you want to take? Why doesn’t being better feel better?

It doesn’t feel better because the big companies have the big losses, the big salaries, and the big profits all at the same time. It doesn’t feel better because while we voted in conservatives for fiscal responsibility, we got a gridlocked Congress, an “in God We trust” motto guaranteed to divide a nation of people who are suffering together, we lost some women’s coverage of abortion options and somehow that was sold to us as progress. Progress is a new world that feels cleaner. Politicking is solar panels that you can’t afford that won’t run your dishwasher. What we have gotten is politicking.

The government should facilitate commerce by encouraging people who think outside the box to solve problems such as medical ethics, how to get fast healthy food on the market, how to get the right laborers to the right jobs and how to get keep up with the competition that the rest of the world will give us. The government should want to save you time and save you trouble so that you can focus on your job and your family. The government should want to be simple and transparent while finding ways to give you the education you can use to put complex issues into perspective because they actually want your opinion.

Well, I want those things. Do you?

Name me “terrorist” because I spit explosives.
My attitude can’t fly it’s so corrosive.
The patriot act doesn’t cover me
Because I pledge allegience to nothing peaceful.

I wear jeans and I soldiered on.
But I don’t have that job so the smoulders on.
Everywhere I look at Americans it’s face to palm.
It’d be a fine island if you fuckers weren’t on it.

I’m not the Be attitude in your bonnet.
I’m the future caravan. Get your white ass on it.
The bandwagon out the sand when you face the truth.
I’m Keyser Soze then I vanish. Poof!

Rub the bottle and I pop up.
It’s three of your wishes then I’m fed up.
You better sooth the spirit when you’re walking near it.
If you don’t fear it, you’ll get your cranium cleared out.

Explode in your brain like I’m rocket science.
You let me in so go get compliant.
Make a nice tight seal so you can keep this thought.
The future got bought up. I’m getting you caught up.

I’m at the top in my pin stripe get right
Everything I do to you invites your spitefullness.
I smile and clap cause you’re so delightful
when you’re pissed like that it’s like you’re wearing diapers.

The way your wisdom works it’s quite the same.
You claim history but it’s a future’s game.
You didn’t recall the facts of the world at all.
It’s a jab from my left but you see a southpaw.

Pack up last call. Drinking off your glass jaw.
Is that all, packing in the cab yelling “asshole”.
Thinking my freeze will thaw like I’m a TV dinner
Try to feed on me and get apprehended.

1. The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.

2. Do not put things or even ideas above other human beings. (Let’s scream at each other about Kindle versus iPad, solar versus nuclear, Republican versus Libertarian, Garth Brooks versus Sun Ra— but when your house is on fire, I’ll be there to help.)

3. Say what you mean, even when talking to yourself. (What used to be an oath to (G)od is now quite simply respecting yourself.)

4. Put aside some time to rest and think. (If you’re religious, that might be the Sabbath; if you’re a Vegas magician, that’ll be the day with the lowest grosses.)

5. Be there for your family. Love your parents, your partner, and your children. (Love is deeper than honor, and parents matter, but so do spouse and children.)

6. Respect and protect all human life. (Many believe that “Thou shalt not kill” only refers to people in the same tribe. I say it’s all human life.)

7. Keep your promises. (If you can’t be sexually exclusive to your spouse, don’t make that deal.)

8. Don’t steal. (This includes magic tricks and jokes — you know who you are!)

9. Don’t lie. (You know, unless you’re doing magic tricks and it’s part of your job. Does that make it OK for politicians, too?)

10. Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty.

I like the beginning of the first point he makes. Human intelligence and creativity are awesome. Love is suspect. It smacks of woo. Altruism, self sacrifice, loyalty and so forth are things that should be discussed separately. After all, what is love? Baby, don’t hurt me no more.

The second point is crap. “Do not put things or even ideas above other human beings.” That’s unusable. It sounds like it makes sense. But every dollar you don’t spend in starving African nations is a dollar spent that could have saved lives. It reeks of feel good and when you dig you get to economy which is the balance of limited resources against unlimited wants. You can’t always put people first. People are important. Point two is poorly thought out.

I can get behind point 3. Honesty is important. Privacy is also important. Say what you mean. But leave room for jokes and privacy.

Point 4 is okay albeit boring. It’s like rest and have down time.

Point 5 I take some issue with. “Family” is a loaded word. I think we covered people being important on point 2. But if your family is killing you as they do by draining you and being familiar strangers no matter how much you just want to make sense, drop them. Or at least reduce their impact. For the sake of all people you should be willing to tailor your involvement to sustainable levels. Penn doesn’t give you all that leeway and promotes that “love is deeper than honor”. No. Love is a foil. Blood doesn’t make a friendship. If your relatives are friends, more power to you.

Point 6 is point 2 again. But this time it can be an argument for pro-life stances. I disagree with it.

Point 7 is Point 3. Keep your promises is a lot like say what you mean. Furthermore, I think your word is important but is it the seventh most important thing? No. That’s because you need to be willing to grow and change at any time and sometimes that affects your current promise.

Point 8 is simple “don’t steal.” It’s naive. Steal if you must to survive. If you steal from me, we have a conflict. And so it goes. It is unnatural to own property and with desperate times full of people at wide varieties of income, well, I just hope they are doing whatever they can think of to survive. I think that’s the appropriate game theory.

Point 9 is Point 7 and Point 2. Don’t Lie. Say what you mean which involves keeping your promises. Is honesty that important? No. Falsifiability is.

Point 10 is the joke at the end representing the don’t covet clause of the Old Testament. It’s not serious and so I won’t overly debug it. I think ambition is generally an awesome thing. Channel yours.

Soon, I will come up with my rebuttal to the 10 Commandments but I haven’t decided if it’s important to come up with my top ten or just to try and structure my most important concepts that I personally would advocate.

Stay tuned.

Well, can you get there in two years? Why don’t you plot a plan to do that in two years. Break it down into weekly routines. Won’t you be pleased when you get there. Plus, I guarantee you’ll be an inspiration to somebody else along the way.

And by the way, I’m not suggesting you change your look because something’s wrong. I’m simply discussing the idea of tailoring yourself to meet your wishes for what qualities you want that you can plot a course for. It’s still okay to be happy with yourself as you are today even while planning to be something surprisingly refined.

I can also think of the future in a pay it forward kind of way. Did we leave the world better off or worse off? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. But you should think about what you’re doing and pick a view and a series of actions that put your values into actions. It’s so much cooler when you do that.

But I most like to think of social constructs. Do we need churches? Would you like different society approved ways to approach sex, marriage, gods, taxes, and social safety nets? Are kids property? What motivates people to be better, nurture or greed? What sort of education would have set you even further into your dreams and professions?

This category should definitely call to you. You should leave behind a world that would treat people like you better or you should pick those things you shouldn’t be doing and weed them out. Then you should rep who you are.

Society overlooked women for a long time, black people for longer, and it’s like gay folk are coming out of the woodwork only they’ve always been there. The women that break the mold of our expectations have always been there. Minorities share our ambitions or at least goals are only loosely correlated to skin tone. And we should all feel a little ashamed of our gay folk that have been too afraid to be gay and I can think of a few people who didn’t come out until late in life.

That’s not my kind of world. I disavow that portion of the social contract. If you’re a kind of person that has to be you in hiding, I’d definitely like to consider giving you a place in my future world. That’s just how I roll. And I’m gonna figure out a way to act on that.

Thanks for reading.

However god did it, the devil is in the details. And so is the mystery. And that’s where our curiosity leads us if we really want to know what we can know. What we know stands up whether we make a claim about the existence of a god or not (re: Immanuel Kant’s agnosticism). Gravity (the link is a jest), physics and chemical engineering fulfill our expectations that we’ve learned from research. When our expectations are unfulfilled, we get a mystery that leads to a new discovery. The truth is truth for its own sake but it definitely gets more complicated as you dig into it.

I’ve got a friend. He votes Republican. He doesn’t understand how you can spend your way out of a recession since that would violate what a person should do if they were in debt. That’s a good argument. Saving money is simple. And saving money works on a small scale. But Democrats ask a greater good question. “Is it possible to redistribute the wealth so that the system bounces back to economic growth faster?” I don’t believe rich people aren’t entitled to their money. I believe many earned it and that’s worth seeing as the rule rather than the exception. But what if not redistributing the wealth costs them more than they imagine? Who should make that decision for the greatest good of the nation? Well I think that’s the job of the government. And yes, I have the same fears that the government will fuck things up as the rest of you. I think politics should be about arguing the best reasoned arguments and incidentally educating the voters who listen to the debates. Instead we get barbarian tactics of “my way or the highway”. That’s scary and it needs to be fixed. The welfare of the nation is still the government’s responsibility. And it starts out simply about life, liberty, and the misery of taxes and ends up really complicated.

Homeopathy is about the essence of a thing. I don’t want a duck, I want a drop of duck. I don’t want cancer, I want to recognize cancer and defeat it. Jesus was a homeopath with loaves and fish dividing and dividing until everyone was fed. It was a miracle or what I like to call “a fairy tale”. It’s a spectacularly simple system based on dilution and the law of similars and doesn’t even bother with complicated math. It’s not hard to get to Avagadro’s number with homeopathy and once you do, whatever you thought was in your concoction probably isn’t there at all.

Laissez-faire capitalism makes sense in its simplicity. Don’t interfere in the greed of an entrepreneur. If they weren’t greedy, they wouldn’t create jobs and without jobs well, there is no economy to speak of. But the past has shown that business interests will override the safety of the workers to the point that some workers have been killed in order to save a buck. Each entrepreneur has their own values and they need to be regulated against exploiting workers and then workers can find labor in the regular way. That sounds simple but it is not. It involves anti-monopoly watchdogs and labor unions to protect against profit gouging consumers and wage gouging workers.

Traditionalism gives you the old way of doing things which many of us learn on accident and benefits all the people who were benefited before while giving old folks a way to look at young folks and remember that time when they were contributing citizens, forgetting how they marginalized all sorts of people and isolated themselves from the world only to get woken up by the Japanese bombing us (much to American business profits that we waited so long to realize there was a war going on). The modern way is more complicated but it involves paying attention to the people who are the most vulnerable in our society and trying to spot ways in which the system makes being vulnerable all too easy. Also, it involves allowing reason and facts to update what we think is right and wrong. Morality is affected by how much complexity you can consider for good reason. It also should be affected by how effective our justice system is at accomplishing its goals of crime prevention, rehabilitation, and satisfying the parties that have been wronged.

Green energy is a hoax because solar and wind power are unsustainable and it often comes hand in hand with a fear of nuclear power. Right now, nuclear is the most efficient and most clean fuel we have that meets our current needs and we are simply marketed lies by petroleum, coal, and green peace people another side effect of laissez-faire business in a sense since the lies are allowed to continue despite facts. Green energy was a great idea and I think it was worth it to investigate but at some point investments should demand a return.

Gold based economies relate a unit of currency to an amount of gold thereby acting as if your dollar was so much gold. The problem is gold values change. Literally, some days you would rather have the gold than the dollar and vice versa based on supply and demand as well as portability. In other words, that relationship changes. It’s a lot more complicated and worth paying attention to.

But you don’t. Or at least many of us don’t. You buy your alternative medicine. You pray to your gods. You vote Republican. You honor tradition and you hope everything will be okay based on the fact that the world has survived this long on what our ancestors have always done. And you act like Christian ministries are charitable without wondering why some charities aren’t ministries. You pray because it doesn’t hurt anything instead of thinking about solutions because the odds are long that you can contribute even if they are priceless for those that succeed. You want fewer taxes and you don’t want to support the poor out of fear that the people spending your tax dollars aren’t working as hard as you are and thus don’t deserve it. And yet you haven’t convinced our politicians to run on the platform of saving money by reducing the amount of wars we are fighting since I imagine that is where most of our money is being spent.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. You don’t even need to believe me. But I’m gonna ask you to treat this world as being a little more complicated and I’m gonna ask you to put a little more effort into why you have your position. Push me back and we’ll rise above our economic and political problems.