Career Reflections

 

It was 50 years ago today, November 1st, 1971, that IBM began paying me to write programs.  I often call that one of the smartest business decisions I ever made — transferring from accounting to systems.

I only worked for IBM's Field Engineering Information Systems (FEIS) unit for another almost-eight years, before leaving to do contract programming at IT&T and American Can Co., leading to a permanent job with Aramco in Houston, Texas in August of 1981.  By 1984, due to Aramco deciding to Saudi-ize the workforce, I reconnected with IBM and moved to Florida's Suncoast.  Gruesome details on that journey, should you wish to revisit them, can be found on this blog at Life after IBM and Dave Boyd and the STSS.

It has been, all things considered, a very pleasant, productive, and profitable 50 years, and I'm still glad I did it.

 

The Four Laws

 

News media are reporting that actor Alec Baldwin yesterday fired a 'prop gun' on the set of the movie 'Rust' (now filming) killing a crew member and injuring another.  Reporters are calling this 'an accidental shooting'.

Let's be clear about one thing — if we are clear about nothing else:  there is no such thing as 'an accidental shooting'.  There are 'intentional shootings' and there are 'negligent shootings'.  There are no other categories into which to place any shooting.

What makes this ironic is that Alec Baldwin is rabidly anti-gun.  He is said to be deeply distressed over the so-called 'accident'.  Unfortunately, this is a perfect example of the principle that those who are anti-gun rarely-to-never know anything at all about guns.  What a shame, then, that with but a very little serious investigation on Baldwin's part, he might have positioned himself to avoid killing his co-worker, but the anti-gun crowd are ignorant and they like it that way.  They don't want to know anything about guns.  Guns are yukky.  Who needs to know anything beyond that?

BANG!  You're dead.

Alec Baldwin should be deeply distressed that his intentional ignorance has now resulted in a negligent homicide.

Preliminary investigation suggests that something, perhaps a bullet from a prior use, was still lodged in the barrel and when a blank cartridge was fired from the gun, it provided enough pressure to dislodge the (old) bullet.  As with so many other such incidents, it wasn't just a single error that caused tragedy;  it was several points of failure, any one of which, with but a little care, would have prevented a needless death.

There are four 'laws' of gun safety — often attributed to Col. Jeff Cooper — that, if followed religiously, will completely eliminate death-due-to-negligence:

1. Treat every gun as if it is loaded.
2. Never point a gun at anything you aren't ready to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you have decided to shoot.
4. Know what is behind your target, because you will miss.

These all seem, on brief reflection, to be so intuitive that no one should have to be taught them, yet multiple failures yesterday took another innocent life.  Some crew member picked up that gun to give it to Baldwin, but they didn't check to see if the action was clear, as you would for any gun you suspected was loaded.  Alec Baldwin didn't check, either.  Baldwin then pointed the gun in an unsafe direction, put his finger on the trigger, and fired.

This wasn't 'an accident'.  This was a crime.

 

Winter Driving

 

I just spent a pleasant few hours watching YouTube videos of horribly inept drivers (not) coping with winter weather.  It caused me to wax nostalgic.

During my years at IBM, I had the good fortune to be paired with a grizzled old-timer named Dave Boyd.  Dave, by then, had over 30 years as an IBM employee, many of those in 'systems' having written the first AutoCoder syllabus and then taught the first AutoCoder class.  He was a true 'Renaissance Man', and it would not surprise me one bit if he actually fit Robert A. Heinlein's definition:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.

Among many other things, he was a 'German car nut', owning, at one point, a 2L Porsche 914, a 1.8L Porsche 914, a Porsche 356 that he had lovingly restored to showroom condition, a BMW 2002, and a Volkswagen.  He used the 914s to race gymkana on frozen Lake Winnipesaukee NH each winter, and cherished his nickname, 'Iceman'.

He taught me many valuable lessons, not the least of these being 'how to drive in winter'.  One day he asked me "What steers a car?" and I replied "The steering wheel, of course!"  Dave smiled as he shook his head side to side.  "No, the rolling wheels steer the car.  A wheel that isn't rolling is either stopped or sliding."  I was reminded of that as I watched cars from Michigan to Arkansas zipping down icy hills, all four wheels locked-in-place and careening into other cars, some moving, some not.

Mr. Miyagi advised Daniel-San

Best brock is 'no be dere'

and the best way to avoid crashing into another car because of icy conditions is to stay home that day, but if you must be behind the wheel on a snowy or sleety day, remember this:  when you press down on the brake pedal, you stop the wheels from rolling and you stop them from steering, but you don't overrule Newton's First Law: an object in motion tends to remain in motion.

The same lesson applies when you're going through a tight turn on dry pavement: if you step on the brake pedal, you have just offered to pay whatever penalty the laws of physics charge.

Only the rolling wheels can steer a car.

 

An Outline of Post-Western Civilization

 

I think this is important enough to reproduce and save:

An Outline of Post-Western Civilization

I also think it is important enough for you to invest your time reading.

With thanks to Paul Rosenberg (Freeman's Perspective) for being the OP, and Thomas Knapp (Rational Review News Digest) for highlighting it.

 

The Governmental Upside to Vaccines (sic)

 

There is a '(sic)' next to the word 'vaccine' because it is a fact that the vaccines we are being cajoled into taking are not actually vaccines in the accepted sense of the word.  For the record:

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease.  A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.  The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
    — Wikipedia, 9-21-21

(Whenever, following, I use the term 'vaccine', I am using it as a convenient shorthand only.)  The Covid-19 vaccine does not fit this description.  It is not synthesized from the C19 virus itself.  It does not provide immunity from C19, neither does it prevent future infection.  It's only claim is that it attenuates the severity of C19 should the vaccinated victim become infected.  Anecdotal evidence, largely from Israel, the most vaccinated country on Earth, suggests that the vaccine may, in fact, be more dangerous than C19 itself.  This is especially true for the so-called Delta variant.  That evidence takes the form that hospitalizations and deaths related to C19 closely parallels vaccination rates.  That is: as vaccinations go up, so do deaths.

Meanwhile, news out of India and Africa is being suppressed because it does not follow 'the narrative'.  That news strongly supports the view that Ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are effective prophylactics when administered early in the disease progression.  In the case of Africa, side-by-side graphs of 'vaccine countries' and 'IVM countries' show that death rates in IVM countries are a puny fraction of that in vaccine countries.  In the case of India, Kerala province went the vaccine-route while much of the rest of the country relied on early widespread HCQ/IVM use and the death rates in Kerala are substantially higher when compared to the rest of the country.

It isn't possible that our government doesn't know this, yet we are urged and coerced into getting vaccinated despite mounting evidence that other options have better outcomes.  Why would our government foist an unproven vaccination regimen on us when there are options that, it now appears likely if not 'certain', are better?

Given that these vaccines are by definition untested — there simply hasn't been enough time to know their long-term effects — could there be an ulterior motive?

Well, there's this:

If a third or more of our population were killed in [a nuclear] attack (a conservative estimate by the standards of the Rand Corporation's "Study of Nonmilitary Defense"), a stronger estate tax would have a tremendous revenue potential.
    — from a 1963 Federal Reserve System planning document

A new mRNA 'vaccine' whose long-term effect was to shorten life spans would likewise provide much-needed relief from Social Security's fast-approaching woes, especially if that vaccine or the disease it purports to treat were highly fatal to an older population.

Alternatively, it has been suggested that our planet is severely over-populated.  A nice little pandemic could fix that — if effective treatments can be suppressed.  It isn't outside the envelope of possibility that the vaccines are simply used as 21st-century snake oil.

In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment.  The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
    — Thomas Sowell

—==+++==—

Update:    As of July 8, 2021, IVM is recommended by CDC/NIH for treating C19.

Update:   April 2026   Huge upswing in stillbirths and miscarriages

 

It was 20 years ago today...

 

The day after 9-11-2001, I wrote Another Day of Infamy as an analysis of what had transpired the day before.  20 years later, I find that I wouldn't change a word.

That's sad when you think about it.  In 20 years we have learned virtually nothing about dealing with other sovereign nations.  Nothing.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

 

Media and banks as censorship tools

 

The government is forbidden, via the First amendment, to censor the speech (written or oral) of citizens.  Recently, there was an incident where some government operative suggested that the federal government ask prominent media companies (Google, Twitter, FaceBook, &c.) to put a stop to (that is: censor) 'misinformation'.  Opinion on this issue fell into two rough categories.  One side opined that this should be illegal since government was effectively doing an end run around the First amendment.  The other side asserts that those media companies are non-government corporations and are not bound by the First amendment, and can thus censor or not, as they see fit.

A similar public-private partnership involving banks and other financial operators was used during the Obama years to put the squeeze on gun manufacturers and sellers.

Which side do you come down on?

Back on February 3rd, I pointed out that corporations are 'creatures of the state' and have no more authority to censor anyone than does their creator.  When FaceBook demonetizes one of their users or when Twitter cancels a user's account for 'violations of the terms of service', they are exercising powers the state could never have granted them — because the state never possessed those powers to begin with.

Somebody with spine and bankroll needs to sue one of these companies and let the Supreme Court rule on whether they can or cannot censor — at the behest of government or without it.