Author: blambert

How It Happens

I just finished watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart done by PBS American Experience.  It details the meteoric rise to fame she enjoyed while learning and dedicating herself to flying and expanding women’s horizons on a grand scale.

Unfortunately the last world record flight she attempted ended in tragic loss of her life.  Conjecture about the causes of the loss points to the failures to train, to learn new radio direction finding, egoism, promotional avarice, failure to rest adequately, and a general underestimation of the limits caused by diminished mental acuity.

We find our lives rushing headlong into the future similarly hobbled by our misunderstanding of the hazards that lay before us.  A high mortality virus with the ability to spread long before it can be identified in one’s surround is making its way to every corner of the world.  Leaders are at first dismissing the threat then eventually admitting the dangers long after the pandemic is deeply seated in the population.  The cries for protection equipment, life support equipment, testing kits, and facilities to treat the afflicted are going unanswered as the hundreds of thousands of citizens are sickened and between two and four percent of them die.

The saddest part of this experience is learning that our experts at fighting this kind of fight were dismissed, unfunded, and removed years in advance of this current pandemic.  The executive and legislative leaders are now busy saying they are not responsible and are trying to redirect our attention in order to obscure their failures.

It is common in the collapse of civilizations for all of these things to take place.  If we could learn from our mistakes this would not have to happen.  Our first mistake is to allow others to have such critical control over our life.  The second is to assume anything is someone else’s responsibility.  The third is to enjoy our bread and circuses instead of organizing an effective correction of this self-inflicted demise.

Get to work!

For Trump Supporters….

From Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway:

“For Trump supporters, let me make one thing VERY clear!

For the record NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trump’s fault.
Here’s a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

* Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Co-vid19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test. The question is why? We don’t know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

* In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

* In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

* In 2019 the NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

* Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency. Yes, he did.

* Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that respond to public health threats.

* In 2018, at Trump’s direction, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries including China.

* Trump didn’t appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

* Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

* Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

* Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.

Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nation’s preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life. I hope this clears things up.”

This is why the U.S. has the highest number of cases on the planet!!!

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!

NPD vs Disaster

Narcissistic Personality Disorder versus a world disaster is the subject of this epistle. We have a leader who self-deals so extensively that a pandemic is dismissed as “in control” and represented in direct contradiction to medical experts around the world. As a result of this individual’s efforts to cut CDC funding in previous years we are unprepared as a nation to react to this virus spread in our country. The very part of the CDC that was set up to deal with such things was dismantled by that same individual.
The nature of this pandemic is also been misrepresented. It does spread prior to an individual showing symptoms in up to 66% of the Covid-19 exposed individuals. The most adverse outcomes manifest themselves in older or immunity challenged individuals. The governmental reaction is to order sequester.
The most extreme example of the profound ignorance associated with our NPD damaged leader is the refusal to test for Covid-19 after being exposed to individuals with the virus. One can only hope the virus can correct those undesireable behaviors.

Impeachment

Today the House has conducted the debates among politicians, largely lawyers, that argued rules, policies, constitutional law, moral law, and the basis for impeachment.

When the guy on the top of the executive branch deals for himself, however and in whatever form, he is violating the laws of the people. This is not arguable through manipulations of language. To go further and slander and debase his critics is uncivilized.

The American democracy has very few political parties. The arguments being offered right now by some of the parties speaks to the lack of moral integrity that most of those folks enjoy. It is obvious that politicians will argue. Look at how little they have done in the last several decades.

The fond hope of the powers that are in charge at this moment is that they can wear down the American voters spirit, hide the real dealings going on, and otherwise exhaust us. This tends to keep folks away from the polls.

We need everyone to make it to the polls this next November. We cannot be indifferent, lax, tired, to busy, confused, or in any way diverted from our duty as citizens.

Bernard Lambert – December 18, 2019

What About Us?

What About The Citizens?

In the political frenzy being paraded in front of us let us not forget the purposes for which we elected the representatives and senators. Critical issues close to the safety, comfort, and health of individuals, their communities, their states, and their country are at risk of being ignored or “back paged” during these next months.

Our municipal, county, township, borough, state, region, and nation are not attached to the issues touted in the media or by the politicos. Quietly the money powers are redirecting our attention away from fundamental issues.

Human need starts with safety at the base of everything. If you’re feeling safe right now they have sufficiently redirected your attention.

If you feel like you belong to something, ask whether it is a form of shelter from the outside influences on your life. If you feel you belong to something ask whether it is shelter or enhancement of your life quality. If it is enhancement then the redirection has diverted you once again.

The air you breath, the water you drink, the havoc nature is wrecking on your surround, the nervousness you feel about affording anything, the lack of work and life balance, health, and countless other serious human issues are what our congress men and women are to be working on.

We have received none of these from the current government in Washington. Woe are the people who do not get out and vote in the next election.

  • Bernard Lambert Friday the 13th of December 2019

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.  They also did The Sixties.   It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me.  I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed.  I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation.  Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years.  Many things have made it into the mainstream.  The real loss has been our youthful optimisim. 

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

 

BLL 2019-09-26

A Good Read On Facebook Use

I had this pop up on an index page:

A Two Year Study Of More Than 5000 People Shows This Activity Destroys Your Emotional And Physical Health

It seems UC San Diego and Yale researchers have identified how emotional health deteriorates with Facebook use. The nature of the virtual social environment creates an adverse emotional sense of well being.

It is probably better for you to talk to the person next to you in the coffee shop… BL

Core Competency…REALLY?

I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.

The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools. The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.

The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.

As I began the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.

Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent.

The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years. It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused. It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.

Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.

While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.

One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.

Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.

The corporation was grown by acquisition. It was not grown by innovation. Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves. Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.

When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organizations hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.

Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency? I know! Pass the buck.

Two Civilizations?

History tells us that civilizations rise and fall. Typically the nation state rises as it conquers the surrounding countryside and resources. Peoples are assimilated into this. The cycle is to pioneer the frontier, civilize the outlands, redistribute the resources and wealth, centralize power and distribution of the wealth, and tax production until the resources are overrun and go into decline. Concurrently government and its infrastructure further burdens the populace and the available natural resources.

Fast forward to today. We no longer make anything, as individuals, from the natural resources. Corporations have been formed to do most of that bidding with a scant few “hardy individualists” left to attempt it solo. With this love of the corporeal entity has come a furtherance of the civil and criminal rights of the non-human to the point of creating two civilizations.

If the corporation cannot feel pain and is only obligated to generate wealth at any expense then it is free of the normal human encumbrances like pain, hunger, love, empathy, and many other such feelings. Running roughshod over people and protecting their well being is not in corporate policy for the most part. Policy is sculpted to provide legal protections and not human protections.

The work of the marketeers, spindoctors, and politicos then becomes catering to the deep pockets of the corporations. Altered states of awareness are pushed onto the masses by every means imaginable in order to gain acceptance for the behavior of businesses and their representatives.

The general population is kept distracted by finance, need, manufactured want, and entertainment. As in Roman times; bread and circuses. Today it is popcorn, nuts, beer, hot dogs, halftime shows, and sporting events. And it is all sponsored by the corporeal entities.

Two civilizations exist and the general population is NOT the one benefiting the most from the experience.