Looking But not seeing

This story is several years old and is about a family in Union County IL who try to be self sufficient. The Benson family has a small farm with a woodlot that is growing a reasonable amount of sugar maples.

Early Spring with its increasing hours of daylight brings a sap rise in the trees that can be extracted and boiled down to maple syrup. With just a little effort the family could make a lot of sugar for the year. We have all seen pictures of sugar bushes with buckets hanging from the trees and read annual newspaper articles about syrup production. It's almost iconic.

The Benson's use a traditional syrup collection method and hang buckets on the trees to collect the sap, but one Spring morning in 2012 they found their house surrounded by a police SWAT team who was there because someone had told them the sap buckets were indicative of a meth lab.

Fortunately the police had both common sense and a sweet tooth and the Benson's gave each of the officers a sample of their product. But I wonder what level of paranoia it takes to call a bucket hanging on a tree a meth lab?

Some People .......

As stated previously, I'm a people watcher. I love to observe people doing strange things while believing they are acting in a normal manner. Sometimes my observations are made while surfing the Internet, and on special occasions I even run across of tofer of people being ... "people"

An oxygen thief by the name of Frank Van Den Bleeken is serving a natural life sentence in a Belgian prison for the rape and murder of a young women. In my mind a major part of any prison sentence is the taking away of the felons right to choose much of what happens in his life. Do the crime and you will do the time ... endless, repetitive and boring time for the rest of your life in this case. But this guy decided that endless, boring days until the natural end of his days were causing him emotional distress and under Belgian law an unresolvable emotional state is sufficient grounds for euthanasia. A state review board (in this case an actual death panel) agreed and decided that he could be transferred to a facility in Holland where he could then (and this is my thinking) evade and abrogate the sentence imposed by the court.

Now I grant you willfully dieing is a very strange way to get out of prison, but the people who agreed with his thinking are also demonstrating a equally strange sort of logic. He was sent to prison for a reason and should not be allowed to substitute his own solution for a problem he caused by his own sick behavior.

Fortunately the Ministry of  Justice overruled the decision and Mr Bleeken remains in prison.

Good Deeds and Their Just Reward

The faculty at Harvard University rallied to the support of the Obama administration during the planning and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (now THAT is a wonderful misnomer!) and in fact several of them were central to writing the act and helping conceal  the impact of the legislation on the general public and individuals. But all good deeds are ultimately rewarded and the faculty at the school is now up in arms because the Health Care Insurance they worked so hard to implement is now biting them on the economic ass.

Their present health plans are reported to be one of the most generous plans, far exceeding the scope of plans available to the nearly everyone else... it can well be called a Cadillac to plans. Under the law they worked so hard to create they are now seeing their benefits being eroded and their cost rising exponentially ... and they are "unhappy". 

In their resolution opposing the changes to the University health plan they claim it is causing "distress" and generating anxiety" in addition to imposing a financial burden on their pocketbooks. Welcome to the world the rest of us live in

It brings a smile to my heart to see these emotionally isolated  Ivory Tower Twits coming face to face with reality. Can you say Schadenfreude?

Fresh Times are Coming

New Year always brings a moment of reflection ... what was and what might the future hold. My Lady and I have a tradition of planning where we want to be this time next year. Great plans are afoot even as we speak and only time will tell if we achieve them.

Future plans are always built on past experience, and I've had lots of experience! Some of the memorable have been:

Family - I have a great family that I'm proud of, my wife is a joy, our kids are wonderful and dear to our hearts and the grand kids are magnificent. I'm blessed that they allow me to associate.

I'm self employed and suffer from a boss that is too good to me, but in the past I've had my fair share of bosses that ranged all over the leadership landscape. The best bosses always had a sense of humor.

We need to spend more time at the range this year and hopefully expand our armoury. Not that we anticipate bad things, we just like being able to express our feeling through loud noise.

To all who know, work and associate with me, and for all who have not had the opportunity to do so

Happy New Year

Hubris

Julian Assange is a not so nice product of Australia who has gained notoriety  by hacking into various web sites, downloading the contents and, after cherry picking the product publishing the information for all the world to see. Almost nothing he has raided and published is noteworthy, in fact most of it is inconsequential email and low level reports, but there is usually enough titillating data to thrill the general public and always enough dirty laundry to embarrass the originator. Assange has made a name for himself, by persuading others (such as the hapless US Army private Bradley Manning, who had access only to Confidential files)  to raid those files and accounts and sending them forward to Assange for his profit and emotional thrill.

The narcissistic Assange put himself into self imposed exile and for a while hid out in Sweden. While there he allegedly sexually attacked at least two women before moving on to England and when England decided to honor an arrest warrant he sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy where he has been for several years. I'm sure his self aggrandizing personality must wear greatly on the Ecuadorians but they are stuck with him since they did grant him asylum and he will not leave in the face of certain arrest, transport to Sweden and,if guilty, several years in prison. There is truth for Ecuador is the adage that "no good deed every go unpunished".

True to Assange's self indulgence he is now asking for other people (who are probably lessor individuals in his eyes) to donate money for the creation of a life size statue of, who else, Julian Assange. In his proposal Assange says that the statue will be shipped around the word and displayed for all to admire his "bravery" and (my words) "self indulgence".

At the moment the world is awash in narcissistic personalities and we don't need an individual who most likely believes that he is more important than our own resident team of self important administrators. So if you get a request from the fugitive Mr. Assange for money to make himself more visible, please decline!

Toxic People

After gainful employment for almost fifty years I took my last retirement from work and dedicated my life to My Lady and our family. But the world has a way of intruding and my wife was working as an Emergency Manager for the county and was concerned about me being at “loose ends” while she was at work. So in an act of self preservation she suggested that I become a mediator. Why she settled on that occupation I don’t know, but after some initial reluctance I took the training and now, a decade later I’m a contented practicing mediator.

What I do is work with people, businesses and institutions that are caught in a crisis situation and help them resolve the issue to the satisfaction of all parties. The state I live in has recognized my ability and in addition to maintaining a private practice I am certified and approved to practice within the judiciary of the state and help reduce the number of cases that go to trial, it costs both the state and the parties a lot less money to use my services.

I quickly learned that a large part of mediation is knowing that the people at the table are just people. Each person comes to the table with an individual viewpoint and biases and outlook on life that influence how they see events and react to situations. Most of the people I work with sincerely want to resolve the issue and get on with life. But there is a percentage, small but ever present, that have personalities that make my work interesting, challenging and occasionally wondering why I didn’t bring a club to the mediation.

A large percentage of mediators in the U.S. are either attorneys or have trained in the psychological sciences. My background is engineering and management so I bring a somewhat pragmatic skill set to the table. Without stepping on the toes of any of the soft scientists who love to classify and quantify people I see the problem people I work with in four broad categories. Fortunately, for my own sanity, these people are only a small part of the many clients I work with, but each and every one of us can occasionally show parts of our persona that can be said to fit within one (or more) of these categories.

Most common are the self centered personalities, who believe that they are “the only important one”. These are people who can’t understand the other fellows’ viewpoint, since, in their mind, the only opinion that counts are the opinion they have. When challenged they generally go on the offensive and behave in a generally unsocial way.

A second group is those I personally label as “weird”, they are usually emotionally unstable people who are personally affronted by anything that challenges their opinion and almost always react in a somewhat bizarre manner. I have had individuals threaten harm to themselves, pets and inanimate objects if they don’t get their way.

A sub set of the weird ones is the person that sees everything and everyone as the enemy and is always living in a defensive mode. Life, to them is an eternal “me versus them” battle that makes life for those who have to live or deal with them a constant battle. My soft science friends often use the pejorative “paranoid” when discussing them.

Fortunately for my mental health the last group I occasional have to work with are the Predators, people who have absolutely no empathy for anyone else and who take great personal satisfaction in making life difficult for anyone who enters their sphere. They are emotionally destructive to all who come in contact with them and are often physically dangerous people.

Clients I deal with who exhibit these traits (or combinations of them) certainly do make my practice challenging and certainly interesting in the way they perceive events and issues. Solutions to their issues often need to be innovative, and their attorneys, while they may mutter and shake their head will usually compliment me for resolving an issue they could not find a legal solution for.

To my surprise I recently ran across a book by a retired FBI agent who talked about the same personality types, their threat to other individuals and how to deal with them if you are unlucky enough to live or work with them. I recommend that you borrow, or buy this book: 

           Dangerous Personalities by Joe Navarro.

It's a good read and might give you insight into your own safety while dealing with the world and its variegated population. 

Moral Turpitude

The media is atwitter with the release of a 500 page report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that describes actions by the US intelligence community in the period shortly after 9/11. By design the report only talks about events and actions the occurred during the Bush administration and does not address numerous equally reprehensible actions that were taken by subsequent Democratic administrations since that time. Since the report was issued by only the Democratic majority of the committee it's easy to suppose that there is more than just a little politics behind the report.

The 500 page report has in excess of 38,000 footnotes for an average of 76 footnotes for each page. As an author I know that that a good way to confuse the reader is to litter a document with footnotes and get them lost in the minutia of your argument. Authors who are unable to state their case clearly depend on footnotes to confuse the focus of their debate and to overwhelm the reader with (often) extraneous information,

That being said the report reveals, to no one's surprise, that the US did in a number of cases apply physical and emotional torture to individuals in an effort to obtain information. I don't care if they were successful or not ... this country has always portrayed itself as a defender of freedom and a moral bellwether for others to admire and follow. And for a brief period of time we failed and now we have to recognize that fact and return to the founders position that these United States are a "shining city" for others to admire.

I can only hope that a moment of moral failure is just that, a moment in time that we as a country regret and will not allow to occur again.