Just Blame Fred

I live in Nashua, New Hampshire, southern border to Massachusetts. I went out late last night and pulled into a parking area of what turned out to be part of the city park — actually Roby Park. I have always gone to this particular area whenever I needed to clear my head and just think.

So, I turned off my car and let the back of my seat back so I could relax and think about things that were on my mind. It was around 12 midnight, very quiet and pleasant. I think I even nodded off to sleep a bit, a short nap. I was alone, bothering no one, being quiet, doing nothing wrong, to the best of my knowledge. After all, I always come to this particular spot to unwind and reflect.

I was awakened from my short nap by bright lights that were coming from behind. Puzzled, I guess those lights were probably the police.

I was right.

A female officer came up to the car, and without explanation, basically said “show me your papers!” — well, “license and registration”. Wow. I asked what was wrong, and at this point I was informed of a city ordinance about parks being closed after a certain time. I stated that I was not aware of any such ordinance, and that there were no signs posted.

Apparently, this did not matter to the cop. I produced my “papers” as she requested, and she went on with a long series of annoying, pointless questions like “what are you doing here”, and the like.

Really, I am not legally bound to answer any questions at all without a lawyer present. And I was annoyed by these Gestapo tactics when I was bothering no one and minding my own business.

She took my “papers” and said she wanted to run a check on them. I remained in the car.

A second squad car pulled up — this time a male Nashua Police Officer — and he went into overdrive with the Gestapo tactics. He ordered me to get out of the car, to go to the back of the car, and to place my hands on the hood of the car. With this, I thought I was under arrest, and so I asked.

The officer indicated that I was not under arrest. I was rather puzzled by this, since he was treating me as though I was. He too was asking alot of pointless questions like “what’s your address” — when my address was clearly printed on the licenses and registration.

I complained about these Gestapo tactics — though I didn’t call it that — and he responded, “We’re just doing our jobs”.

I thought to myself to say, “Perhaps you should consider other career options unless you love being a Gestapo”, but I stop myself short of saying that.

After the background check came back clean, they let me go and ordered me out of the parking area. They waited until I actually turned on my car and drove off.

You know, all they had to do was politely informed me that I was breaking a city ordinance and I would’ve left. But they decided instead to escalate this minor matter, constantly trying to provoke me to have a stronger reaction so that they would have a “reason” to arrest me. But by keeping a calm head, I avoided getting thrown in the slammer.

And what was my great crime? Oh yes, sitting quietly in my car, bothering no one, thinking and trying to relax.

Nashua Police are Gestapo in their approaches, and I will do something — legally — about this when I get the chance. But they say you have to pick your battles carefully. Not everything is worth fighting, they say. Why the city would have an ordinance like this is beyond me. I love hanging out in the woods to relax at night, and I personally see nothing wrong with it. Perhaps I missed something somewhere. Perhaps I missed the point when my Country ‘Tis of Thee went Fascist.

Well, on to bigger fish to fry, but I’m not letting the NPD off the hook for this one.

Every since the Hans / Nina Reiser case began, I had always considered that it is not likely for Hans to be guilty of murdering his wife; that something strange and untoward happened. Since no body was ever found and no solid evidence of foul play ever uncovered, there’s more than sufficient “reasonable doubt” — there is no evidence that Nina is even dead!

But in this story on Wired about Hans Reiser, it is clear to me that Hans tanked his own case. You see, we geeks and nerds are simply peculiar to the general public at large, the mundanes who lead ordinary and unremarkable lives, many of whom have never seen a geek close up.

I find some of the things Hans did a bit strange myself, but not unbelievable. Some of us uber-geeks have been known to sleep in strange places, and I’m no stranger to that. I have slept at the office myself a number of times and in my car once or twice for various reasons. To me, removing a car seat to have more sleeping space seems perfectly reasonable to me if you are into that sort of thing. Myself, for the most part, prefer a nice warm bed to curl up in on most nights, but if I were working flat out on creating cool and novel systems like Hans has done — and have myself — I could see having sleeping quarters nearby so I can wake up the next morning and continue full-tilt at problem solving. Not at all strange in the world of us computer nerds.

But for the mundane folks — including the jury, which is drawn from — these acts seem bizarre. The mundanes simply have no context to relate. To them, a job is usually a chore that they would never dream of sleeping overnight at. They long to punch that clock and make a bee-line for the door to get home or to go hang out at Joe’s Bar with the buddies to drink beer and watch sweaty men kick a ball around on a field of green. Or if a housewife, gab on the phone with a fellow housewife friend about the latest sitcom, soap opera, or what she bought at the supermarket yesterday. To these types, geeks like you and I would seem very strange and weird. We may as well be aliens form a different planet. Time for the torches and pitchforks!

Hans has an attitude — as do I. He, like myself and many of us uber-intelligent geeks are forced to live in the world with these mundanes, and we get frustrated at their silly ways and lack of intelligence. We can’t understand why they can’t think rationally and with an open mind; why they are forever parochial in their approaches and views of the world.

But that’s the way it is, and I have some theories on why they are that way. You will find some of my write-ups on that here on this site — just poke around a bit. But I have learned the hard way that you simply can’t expect the mundanes to be anything more than mundane, and to expect otherwise is to invite trouble.

When you have a jury of 12 mundanes and a mundane judge tasked to decide your guilt or innocence as a geek, you are stuck with a major problem. It turns into a battle of cultures — yours vs. theirs. It can be troubling, scary, and downright perplexing to understand the “logic” of the mundane. But they are not that hard to figure out, really. But you have to use your UNcommonsense. Understand the problem for what it is.

The very first thing to note and take very seriously is the fact that these mundanes have power over you in that context. These mundanes — quite literally — are your Judge, Jury, and Executioner. This myth about having a “jury of your peers” is just that — a myth. If you actually had a jury of 12 geeks, you would be understood and your case would go better. But you don’t have a jury of your peers — a jury who shares the same cultural ties with you, who think the way you do, values the same things you value, or even see the world the same. You have 12 “aliens” that will judge your actions according to their precepts, not yours. According to their cultural biases, not yours. And to your average mundane, anything that is “different”, that is, does not fit into their own cultural framework, is immediately seen as “bad”, “suspicious”, and “wrong”. Yes, I know this country is supposed to be this great “melting pot”, but that too is another myth — at least outside of geekdom!

So, if you were Hans — with weird idiosyncratic ways, but innocent — what would be your best approach? To challenge the mundanes who hold your life in the balance on their cultural intolerances? Or to keep your mouth shut and allow “reasonable doubt” to prevail? To exert justifications for why you are “strange”, or to understand the mundanes for what they are and try to speak to them at their level? Hans’ approach saved his ego, but cost him his life. He would’ve been far better off to not have said anything at all, and to let his lawyer do all the talking.

But he screwed up big time and opened his mouth. He came off as “arrogant” and disrespectful. Really, he was frustrated and I get that. The way the INjustice system works is a joke at best. But then you have to recall who typically runs the justice system — mundanes!

It is a great tragedy what happened to Hans Reiser. I can’t say for sure if he is innocent or guilty, but I find his guilt unlikely given the evidence or lack of the same. There is simply NO evidence that Nina is dead. None at all. She could turn up tomorrow. Maybe she is back in Russia laughing her fool head off. She knew Hans would hang himself if she did everything just right. And from what I understand her kids are also back in Russia. Wow, a perfect one, Nina!

Well, you can really blame me on this one…

Over the many years, I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about thinking, beliefs, and the human population in general. Mass human behavior, individual human behavior, politics, wars, religion, art, science, mathematics, networks, complex dynamical systems, and thought contagions.

It occurred to me that, among many other things, that many, many people behave more like mindless automatons than thinking beings. You can see it in advertising, politics, social services, the government in general, and just your average Joe. You see it in fervent believers of religion, the Republican party, the Democratic party, sports, everywhere. You see it in parents, teachers, police, lawyers, social workers, etc.

Basically, most people never — or almost never — bother to critically examine what they believe in. They seem to just jump from one belief frame to another without much thought as to whether or not it even makes sense, let alone if the beliefs themselves are even correct. They are “programmed” by some agent, which could be parents, friends, church leaders, politicians, or the media. They also act on those beliefs, and almost never bother to think about the consequences on acting on unfounded propositions. Even though the consequences are at hand, no learning seems to ever take place to lead them to the very necessary critical analysis of half-baked notions and fuzzy impressions.

But this does not apply to everyone, of course, as there are those who do critically examine notions and assumptions before inculcating the propositions as “beliefs”.

Still others, like myself, eschew the entire mechanism of belief itself. Ask yourself the following question:

Do beliefs determine truth?

I don’t think anyone, not even the Mindless Vessels of Beliefs (MVBs) themselves, would ever answer “yes” to that basic question. And yet the MVBs will go on most likely being MVBs, even after having admitted to the most important flaw in belief systems in general. They may wonder about it a bit and “go back to sleep”. Meanwhile, those who actually DO think already know about the inherent flaws in beliefs in general.

But let’s talk about this very fundamental question. If beliefs do NOT determine truth, then that immediately leads to two more questions:

1. Just how DOES one determine truth?
2. Just what DOES one do with all of these beliefs?

I will discuss those questions in future blogs. But for now, I want to speak more on beliefs and how people in general measure up.

Sometime after I came up with the idea of MVB, it occurred to me that there are finer layers in how people and beliefs interact. Also, “Mindless Vessel of Belief” sounds kinda harsh, even though I deem 80-90% of the population are MVBs. So I came up with a more general (and gentler) classification system, which I currently call “realms”. And so let me expound on them.

Realm 1: Autonomous Belief Agents

A Mindless Vessel of Belief (MVB) is a person who tends not to question beliefs, but simply acts on them. The “belief matrix”, if you will, drives said person’s activitives from moment to moment. Little, if any, thought is ever given to the “why” behind a belief. When a new proposition is introduced to said person, the new proposition is evaluated solely on the pre-existing belief matrix with little reference to anything substantive. In short, an Autonomous Belief Agent, or MVB, is largely driven by the beliefs themselves rather than knowledge.

I estimate that 80 to 90% of the world operates in this fashion. You get a good sense of this from observing political campaigns, religious organizations, many who operate in the “public sector” for a living where no thought is required, just undue obedience. It’s the type of thing that makes witch-hunts possible, allowed the Holocaust to become a reality, and allowed the United States to “justify” the war with Iraq.

Everywhere you look, from the media to sports to law reeks of this. Any place where people routinely act without rhyme or reason, without any sensibilities, and justify said actions with the excuse of “just doing my job”, etc.

I personally find it quite disturbing and perplexing that most of the world operates in this manner. Many of the often-touted ideals are rendered moot in lieu of the Autonomous Belief Agents, including the notions of “democracy”, “justice”, and “fairness”. The money-driven media, just to stay alive, is forced to kowtow to the MVB, reducing content to the type of drivel and mediocrity that appeals to the common MVB.

Realm 2: Belief Aware

Realm 2 types are somewhat aware and mindful of the nature of beliefs and their pitfalls, but still operate in that context. They do make some efforts at verifying that many of their beliefs are actually knowledge, but still believe(!) that beliefs are either a good thing to have, or at least there’s no way for humans to get around them. They are definitely measure better than your average MVB, but still operate in the context of what they consider “humanity”. Those that fall into this category are liberal arts majors, writers, and poets. Those who are particularly creative typically fall into this realm, as well as many scientists, engineers, and philosophers.

Realm 3: Belief Rejection

Realm 3 types are difficult for me to describe in human terms. Realm 3 speaks about a complete rejection of the entire notion of belief in lieu of Logic and Reason. A Realm 3 person has the ability to “step outside” of humanity and see the human condition for what it really is. A Realm 3 type is totally aware that “beliefs” are merely the backdrop for memes, and that much of what is considered “reality” is a construct of a extremely sophisticated neural process. Even beliefs themselves are a part of that same neural complexity, and as such is suspect.

The reason this is difficult to describe in human terms is because, well, the writer as well as the readers of this article are themselves human, and thus at some level the understanding of Realm 3 become infinitely recursive. For am I not using memetic transfer to convey these concepts to belief organs (your brain) about rejecting what many consider to be the cornerstone of all human existence?

I have not identified anyone other than myself as being in the Realm 3 category. The difficulty lies in distinguishing someone between Realm 3 and Realm 2. Unless the conversation goes directly to the heart of the matter, you would not know if someone who appeared to be Realm 2 is actually Realm 3. Others who fall into this category will most likely have never thought of it in these terms and may feel extremely uncomfortable discussing it with Realm 2 types, let alone Realm 1 people! So, I can give no estimate on what percentage of the population may fall into this category, though I suspect the numbers are very small.

On reflection, I would suspect that those doing research in the field of cognitive psychology would most likely be or on the road to becoming Realm 3 without even realizing it.

Realm 4: Self Rewrite

A person who is a realized Realm 3 is still human, despite the recognition of the fact that the human belief system is itself a construct. But the realization offers the possibility of being able to manipulate one’s own construct. That is to say, you, being a Realm 3 type can now develop the faculties to manipulate your own construction directly. You can, in essence, rewrite your own “programming” This is something I aspire to personally, and have had some limited success at it. It is largely uncharted waters, with new possibilities brimming around every corner. There are also dangers as well, because what happens if you do a bad rewrite unto yourself?

Due to the way our meat brains works, auto-rewriting is very difficult to achieve. What would be ideal is transhumanist approach of replacing or at least augmenting your meat brain with some new technology — Nanotech? Photonics? Quantum Computers? — to allow a much faster means to rewrite and resculpt the self. Such fantastic technology does not exist yet, of course, but it is fun to contemplate.

Realm 5: Peer Rewrite

Realm 5 is not necessarily a “higher” realm than the others — except Realm 1, perhaps. Basically the ability of one human to rewrite another human has been with us throughout the ages.  Today, governments of the world do it through control of the school systems and also control of the media. Primal emotions are typically used as the gateways to do peer rewrites, and the primal emotion of choice, I’m afraid to say, is fear. Religious institutions use the fear entry point quite frequently, as well as law enforcement, the IRS, the war propaganda organs, and many others.

Peer Rewrite occurs at all scales of society, including families. Parents by definition (re)write be belief matrices of their offspring, and teachers by definition rewrite their students.

Is Peer Rewrite necessarily a bad thing? In and of itself, no.  However, there are a multitude of ethical concerns, as well as much power in being able to rewrite your peers. If it is for reasons of exploitation or control, especially if it is to the detriment of the rewritetee, I consider this a bad thing in general. On the other hand, if a parent is rewriting his kid with the goal in mind of that kid having a happy, healthy and successful life, I would consider that a good thing.

I would consider a rewrite of a Realm 1 (MVB) person to become Realm 2 or better to be a very good thing, as long as it is approached with caution and with recognition  that you are, in effect, altering the course of another person’s future, and there may be some unexpected downsides in doing so, if, for instance, said person is unable to handle the realities of reality.  The very reason so many may be stuck in Realm 1 in the first play may stem from their inabilities to handle the truth about truth.

I am working rather late tonight to get my system out to “production”. Well, not really production per se, but so that the owners of this company that are paying my bills may be happy. The entire team is slaving over this to be done by tomorrow morning so that “flashy lights” can be beheld by all tomorrow.

I am the Database Architect at this social networking company, which is numero uno in its niche. We’re using MySQL and PHP (no surprise there!) But the one cool thing is that I am using Ruby to do the data migration from the current poorly-written schema to the new one entirely of my design — powerful, robust, and delicious! Ruby is hellishly powerful and it’s expressive character is great for the job of migrating the data.

I am also writing an ER tool in Ruby as well, but that’s going to take a bit longer to complete. I want it to have the power of ER/Studio, but with support for MySQL that ER/Studio is rather weak on. I will also make this an OpenSource product, which will be very disruptive — lowering the bar for ER tools (ER/Studio costs nearly $5000 per seat) — and to boot others can write modules to support other databases, like Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, and the like!

Oh well, for now — and I freely admit it — it’s vaporware. But percolating around in my brain, and must come out!!!

I have many things percolating around in the noggin that must escape into reality, and it will happen! Trust me on this!

Well, speaking of brains, mine is fried good, so time to lay it to rest.

I think it may be a true statement that most of us in our lives have been falsely accused of something once or twice. But what if you were falsely accused constantly? What if law-enforcement ever becomes involved? What happens to you? Your family? Your livelihood? Can you say this would not be highly disruptive? I’m sure it would be.

After awhile, how would you feel about life in general? The world around you? Yourself? What would you do about it? How would you handle the pain? Would it bother you at all? Or would you feel like lashing out?

My friends, these are the questions I deal with all the time. For you see, I’ve been falsely accused in my lifetime more times than I can count, from as far back as I can remember. By strangers, by family members, by even my (soon-to-be-ex) wife. It just never seems to end.

I do ask myself why this keeps happening, and who is to blame? Am I to blame? Indeed, such has served as the motivation behind this site, as it seems “everyone” always find something to blame me about.

And so I will attempt to detail all the times that this has transpired, from the time I was a kid to date, as a man in his 40’s. I’ll leave it up to you to come to your conclusions about all of this. Here, all I will do is just present the facts as best I can.

1. When I was in 4th grade, there was a “March of Dimes” card sitting on the teacher’s desk. I walked past the card and did not touch it. However, a number of the students falsely accused me of removing money from this card. To my knowledge, no one bother to check to see if any money had actually been taken away. I was sent to the principal’s office, where I was in fear of being paddled (corporeal punishment was the order of the day back then, in the 1970’s) I didn’t get paddled, fortunately, but I did get a little rattled. This took place around 1972 or 73.
2. When I was around 14 or 15 or so, one of my cousins got herself knocked up by her boyfriend. In order to protect her boyfriend, she name MYSELF as the one who got her pregnant! I never had sex with her. My aunt came over my home and gave me the third degree about it whilst my own mother and father stood by and did not intervene on my behalf. I felt so torn apart that I almost committed suicide that day. When my cousin finally admitted I was not the father of her baby, I never got an apology from anyone — not her, not my aunt who nearly drove me to offing myself. This took place in the mid to late 70’s. I don’t recall the exact time.
3. When I was 16 or so, I had my own car and was driving it home from either work or my girlfriend’s house. Along the way, police pulled me over and asked to search my car for drugs. Now, I’ve never used drugs before and never would for many, many years to come. Scared and not knowing my rights, I did let them search my car. They, of course, found nothing. They let me go and I continued home, a bit frazzled from the experience.
4. When I was 18, around 1980 or so, a police officer in Philadelphia on a horse stopped me. I was walking in downtown Philly at the time. This officer demanded to see some ID or threatened to take me off to jail. Why, I wondered? I hadn’t done anything wrong!!!! Fortunately, I did have my library card on me at the time — the only ID I had at that moment — and he seemed satisfied with that.
5. Around 1983 or so I was working at a oil-analysis laboratory as a software engineer. One night I was working especially late and took a break at an all-night convenience store nearby. I was looking at some of the magazines on the rack for a little while — don’t recall how long. Police appeared out of nowhere and asked me what I was doing and ushered me out of the store. Again, I had done nothing wrong. The next day I went back to said convenience store and the attendant apologized for calling the cops on me. She claimed she got “nervous” that I was simply hanging out at the magazine rack for so long, and thought I was going to “knock over” the store. But that didn’t make any sense to me, because if I were going to rob the store, would I not just do it quickly and get in and out and not hang about reading magazines? This took place in Bellmawr, NJ.
6. Around the same year I was driving to work and got stopped for no apparent reason by the local police. They frantically “looked for” a reason to stop me and found my expired inspection sticker. Well, they wrote me a ticket for that, but that’s not why they stopped me. This also took place in Bellmawr, NJ.
7. Many, many time the Bellmawr cops would simply pull me over on sight. Once they pulled me over and while the cop was talking to me some locals drove by yelling the word “Nigger” and drove off. The police officer did nothing to these people for that.
8. Once in the mid 80’s I took a friend to a job interview at an office. I parked in the parking lot and decided to wait for her in the car until she came out. Police came in out of the blue and started asking me “questions”. I hadn’t done a darn thing wrong, but was just peacefully waiting in the car for my friend. I claimed to them that they were harassing me needlessly, but they denied this, claiming that there were a number of car thefts in the area. I asked them what that had to do with me, and they claimed that I had backed into my parking space. Well, I did back in, but so what? Makes it easier to drive off without the worries of backing into a person on the way out! Not to mention making it easier for me to see my friend returning to the car. And, if I were really there to steal a car, would I not be about the business of actually stealing the car? Why would I have my own car there? Didn’t make sense to me.
9. Once in the 80’s I was on my way to a party in Lower Bucks County, PA. I had trouble finding the right house, so I rang the wrong doorbell by accident. I apologized and eventually found the correct house, a few houses down. A few minutes another friend arrived, claiming to have been stopped by the cops for ringing a doorbell. Obviously, the cops were looking for me. I just didn’t get it.
10. Once my car had broken down in the parking lot of a Burger King or similar restaurant. It was around 8PM, and I was trying to get the car started. Cops pulled up and started asking me all kinds of questions. They were clearly NOT there to help me with my automobile difficulties, but because someone had called and claimed I “look suspicious”. This took place near West Chester, PA.
11. Again, in the same area, my car broke down. Some lady, in her SUV, had saw me and offered to help. I was glad to get some help — think I needed a jumpstart. I actually thought she was genuine, but when I approached her car she drove off at high speed. Next thing I knew, cops arrived, and not to help me either. I was puzzled because if the lady was truly afraid of me, why would she bother to stop at all? I eventually called AAA or some such and got going again.
12. In Uwchaland PA — near West Chester, — I had just moved into an apartment across from a strip mall, where a video equipment store called “Inner Space” did business. A couple of months prior I had purchased a video camera and some other equipment from them, totaling more than $1000. One night, my calculator battery died while I was working on something, so I went to the store to see if they had the appropriate “watch battery” for it. The owner, in the process of closing the store, indicated he had no such battery. I left and went back across the street home. The next evening, cops appeared at my doorstop and wanted to asked me questions about the prior night! I could not believe it! The shop owner thought I was some sort of criminal or something! I was rather angry at this treatment, giving that I had given him lots of business, so I called him up and told him so. A few minutes later the cops reappeared. Oh boy. These cops acted “sympathetic” and said the shopkeeper was a “Nervous Nelly” and that he ran a warehouse in Philadelphia. I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean, but I was even more livid. So the next day I told everyone about this incident at my job — at Commodore, where I worked as a software engineer — and my manager who did business regularly at Inner Space vowed never to do business with them again. So this idiot shopkeeper not only lost my business, but at least one or two more. This took place in the early 90’s.
13. At an apartment in Lower Bucks — I had married by this time and had an autistic PDD kid in the mix — I was falsely accused of slapping my handicapped son by one of the other tennant. I had not slapped my kid as she claimed, and she was just a busybody anyway. Nonetheless, police came out and asked to enter my home and to speak to my son. My son is nonverbal and I explained that to them. So we went in and at length I explained that my son was autistic and very difficult to handle at times, but I had not slapped him as the lady claimed. The cops seemed satisfied and went away. His happened in the mid 90’s or so.
14. I was with my family — including my autistic son — in Florida on holiday at Disney world. While at a pancake restaurant, my son got rather agitated and noisy. I took him into the washroom to try to calm him down. Some patron called the cops on me and I caught wind of this, so I got my family members out and decided to return to the restaurant later to try to square things away with the cops so that there would be no misunderstandings. I thought of myself as acting responsibly. Big mistake. I waited a long while for the cops to returned to the restaurant, and when they arrived, they demanded to see my son. He was not there, of course, and they arrested me on the spot. Why? I hadn’t done anything wrong, and indeed if I had, why on earth would I return and wait for them to come back? On that day I learned the hard lesson that it does not pay to behave as a responsible citizen with the cops.
15. Once at the King of Prussia Mall in PA in the mid 90’s I was out with my autistic son and he started crying uncontrollably. I was inside Barnes & Noble as I recall, and one of the attendants came over and tried to ask my nonverbal son if I were his father. Shock and horrified for obvious reasons, I made it clear to her that I was his father, that other kids cry in the mall — they were that day — and that noone was coming over asking such rude questions of their parents. I left immediately , and called the manager the next day. She profusely apologized for the incident.
16. I had relocated to Nashua, NH, a small city sitting on the border with Massachusetts, near Westford and Chelmsford — where I worked at the time. By this time, I had 2 beautiful girls as additions to my family, and all 5 of us — my son, my 2 girls, and my wife — had gone out to a leading pizza restaurant in the area, as we had many times since living there. My son, being not only autistic but also “retarded” and unpredictable in behavior, had to go to the washroom, so I accompanied him there. When I left some strange woman I had never seen before — whom I later found out was Allison Beal of Stoneham, Mass — stood in our way and asked me in a very accusatory tone if my son was “OK”. Not that it was any of her business, I indicated to her that my son was fine. We went back to our table, sat down to finish our pizza, and wouldn’t you know the cops arrived a couple of minutes later. This was my first encounter with the police in the area, and after that encounter with that woman, I wasn’t sure what to make of the unfolding events. When the police — Eric Nordengren and Anthony Pivero — “asked” me to come outside with them. Well, I asked them why, afraid to go outside with them, preferring to remain put in a restaurant packed full of potential witnesses for obvious reasons. I basically kept asking them to tell me what this was all about first, and they kept insisting I go outside with them. Then they tried to talk to my son, my nonverbal autistic son. When I tried to explain that was impossible, one of them slapped handcuffs on me and yelled “Disorderly Conduct” and arrested me on the spot and took me to the squad car, where I spent a night in jail for something that never took place.
    At this point, you are obviously wondering “what?”, just as I was on my way to jail! Basically, the short of it is that I was accused by Clarence Beal — a then a man in his late 60s — and his adult daughter Allison Beal, a woman in her 30s at the time — of doing something unmentionable to my son in that washroom! It never happened, and the investigation the cops performed confirmed that. I sued the Beals  in the years to follow and won a settlement, but great damage had been done, because I was no longer able to function at my job.

The fallout from that Beal incident was enormous. Let me state simply that I missed out on $2-4 million because of that incident, as was determined by analysis of my stock opts portfolio by a very expensive accountant. It basically lead to the subsequent collapse of my marriage. More on these gory details in a later blog.

But suffice it to say that being falsely accused by the police and society at large has had its toll on my life, my family, and my marriage. And no one cares. Sometimes I feel as though my very existence is a crime. You see, not once was I ever found to have done anything wrong. And if the Beal incident wasn’t bad enough, my own wife and in-laws began alleging false accusations. Yet I will stand firm against these lies and be victorious in the end, just you wait and see!

I’ve been away for way too long, dealing with annoying matters of divorce and the like. Yes, all of my in-laws hate me and do blame me for everything, and see the ex-wife-to-be as completely blameless, despite everything I’ve done for her and her autistic son over the past 15 years.

Well, you know what they say — no good deed goes unpunished.

I had to hack my way back into this site using a bit of MD5 magic. Well, if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. All that matters is that I’m baaaaaaaack!!!!!!

This MIT Student wasn’t doing anything all that different from what I did as a kid. The breadboard she mounted to her jacket is a very common and very basic part in the tool chest of any electronic tinkerer. I used those very breadboards myself when I was that girl’s age and younger — quite a bit younger. I think I started around age 13 building all kinds of cool electronic circuits using LEDs, ICs, capacitors, resistors, transistors, and diodes. What did I build? Everything from decade counters to simple multiplexers, from wierd music devices to photo-detectors and alarms. I even built a 1024-bit binary counter out of a single 1024-bit by one DRAM chip and some supporting electronics. Once I even built a “character” generator to display a 16 by 16-bit field from a static ram chip onto a TV — using discrete components.

Those were the days.

Even before I got my hands on those cool breadboards, I was building electronic circuits. I once built a tone generator and placed that in a plastic box. I gave that to a neighborhood kid to do his science project with. I tried to explain to the poor kid how the thing worked, but I don’t think he quite grasped it. However, I think he got a good grade anyway!

I could see happening to myself what happened to Star Simpson, had this silly craze of terrorism paranoia been rampant around my time. And I can understand perfectly why she might not even consider for a moment that anyone would be so stupid as to think that a simple circuit breadboard could be mistaken for a bomb. It simply probably didn’t even occur to her, as it would not to myself. At least not my younger self.

Today, I have painfully learned the hard way how stupid your average person is. And that goes 10 times for someone working in the security field of nearly any sort. You can simply — I am sad to say — estimate just how stupid an arbitrary person can be. And I deal with the sad reality all the time.

My full support goes out to Star Simpson, and hope she fairs well in this stick quagmire she stumbled into. As far as the rest of the country is concerned, consider that 41,000 people a year die in vehicle accidents. I see no outcry there. Even my younger brother, a truck driver for FedEx, died in a horrible crash where his body was burned so badly we had a closed-casket funeral for him. Compared to traffic accidents and the related death toll, so-called threats of “terrorism” in our country is a non-issue, even taking 9/11, a single incident, into account. I would say the priorities of our government and the people of this country are totally back-asswards.

I just had a horrible dream this morning.

In this dream, most of my loved ones had died of some sort of disease, and there was nothing I could do to save them.

Their they lay on the tables lifeless at the hospital; there was nothing I could do.

And so this poem represents the tragedy I feel.

Of Triumph and Tragedy

Amid one autumn morning I awoke

full of anguish and tragedy.

As I lied awake there pondering, I screamed.

Death.

Death to my many loved ones tore my heart asunder.

I do not understand.

I do not understand.

When you live and love, life is wonderful.

When you cry and morn, life is tragic.

When you die,

when you die

when you die

Lying there in the acid sun unable to awake

Lying there in the heated sun unable to abate

Smelling there in the toasted ashes of life’s long past

Time rushing down a cosmic drain and always too fast

I cry in the middle of the night
not knowing why, to see the dream, longing for a dry eye
splashing about in the lake of fear, the river of sorrows
the oceans, the eddys, the last long lost hope of your more fantastic realities
to churn, to broach, to reach, to hold, to scream, to place, too calm
The Human Race

My children, I know you, my sorrows so profound

I did laugh with you the cheers all around

And now you lie there lifess and cold

And all the dreams of the future have become old

I did sit in this place, a fold of space-time called “reality”
wondering what life will be
wondering at the beckoning calls
emanating from the long lost cold sea

My children, I call to you, come home

The cold, lifeless bones of your once-tendered realities

My children I call to you, come home

Be with me so that I am never alone.

This is something I wrote in an IM to a friend not too long ago. It only includes my side of the conversation for privacy reasons. It is a conversation about beliefs, society, and hierarchical network structures I call “Transcendental Sets”.

(07:07:08 AM) fred: I suppose I am less interested in what motivates people, because in a sense, I already understand that in a general sense.
(07:08:24 AM) fred: People are “nodes” in a massive self-organizing dynamic quasi-hierarchical network I call “transcendental sets”
(07:09:09 AM) fred: Individual nodes receive programming by the memes they are hosting, and act accordingly.
(07:09:47 AM) fred: The memes themselves evolve because they exploit the “instruction set” of the nodes.
(07:10:12 AM) fred: The “instruction set” of the nodes are basically the same, but with variations.
(07:10:51 AM) fred: The “instruction set” of the nodes — the humans — are what you would generally refer to as “emotions”
(07:11:04 AM) fred: But there’s more to it than that.
(07:11:39 AM) fred: Evolution has shaped what we human nodes are today. The question is, of course, what kind of evolution?
(07:12:35 AM) fred: It has gone beyond the biological. Indeed, biological evolution in humans has itself been subsumed by higher-order evolving systems, of which memes is one.
(07:14:26 AM) fred: So, my view on this is not just from the individual perspective, but how the individual is influenced and controlled by the higher order systems the collective of individuals gave rise too.
(07:15:33 AM) fred: So then, I am more focused on understanding the bigger dynamic, the “big picture”, to use a hackneyed cliché
(07:15:53 AM) fred: (I know, clichés by definition ARE hackneyed!)
(07:17:35 AM) fred: A “feature” of complex dynamical systems with a substantially large growth rate is that they tend to organize themselves to states of criticality.
(07:18:14 AM) fred: When they reach those states, you have the avalanche effect, where a small disturbance can bring about great change.
(07:18:58 AM) fred: We have seen this many times in the past with great political movements that brought about sweeping social change — for better or for worse.
(07:20:07 AM) fred: The trick here is to predict when those moments of self-organized criticality are coming, and what to do to trigger the avalanche.
(07:20:23 AM) fred: Great sweeping change with minimal effort.
(07:21:58 AM) fred: So, the big nasty institutions of power that you might regard as a futile effort to bring about change, I do see possible ways to do it with effort levels in our grasp — but with much planning and observation to see the critical points coming ahead of time.
(07:23:08 AM) fred: The downside of this is, of course, is that there is the avalanche effect. You can trigger an avalanche, but it is damned near impossible to control it once it starts.
(07:24:33 AM) fred: How many revolutions and upheavals in the past were kicked off by a small group of individuals, but then got out of hand afterwards? The French Revolution is one fine example of this.
(07:28:13 AM) fred: So the other half of this is not only to be able to predict the exploitable critical points, but the avalanche afterwards.
(07:29:50 AM) fred: [Shelly] should pat herself on the back for being part of the effort to raise awareness of vote fraud issues and the need to have reliable audit trails, etc. — lately I heard congress was going to vote on a bill mandating paper ballots and the like.
(07:30:06 AM) fred: Hopefully that will take the form she hopes.
(07:30:36 AM) fred: You and I have given up on the voting system, but for slightly different reasons.
(07:32:45 AM) fred: I see voting as a highly ineffectual means to control the powercrats — that the main problem is the power itself being concentrated in the hands of a few who manipulate that voting system and are not truly concerned about “the needs of the people”.
(07:33:42 AM) fred: The voters themselves vote typically for silly reasons, and so become easy to manipulate by the politicians.
(07:34:10 AM) fred: And the choices given are poor at best.
(07:34:37 AM) fred: And the media effectively locks out any party that is not democrat or republican
(07:35:03 AM) fred: And that “party politics” itself is sub-optimal.
(07:35:57 AM) fred: Your approach — and I am with you on it — is to create alternatives. We definitely need that.
(07:36:47 AM) fred: While I’m all for that, we at the same time need to keep an eye on the 500-pound gorilla in the room with us that is the entrenched system of the powercrats.
(07:38:18 AM) fred: Whenever one of our alternatives start to become successful, they always try to shut it down. And they come at us from so many angles — both subtle and gross — that it’s all we can do to keep up with it, let alone what to do about it.
(07:38:39 AM) fred: Eventually, we have to take on the 500-pound gorilla
(07:39:34 AM) fred: And that’s where my focus lies. How do we keep the 500-pound gorilla from trouncing all of our efforts to create alternative systems that actually *work*.
(07:40:15 AM) fred: Anyway, I’ve given you enough to read on this — ironically — Independence Day.
(07:40:58 AM) fred: Even the meaning of this holiday is lost, as many now refer to it as “The 4th of July”. The original meaning and intent is completely lost.
(07:42:21 AM) fred: I don’t think for even an instant as millions chow down on smelly barbecue ribs and chug beer do their thoughts even go in the direction of what *Independence* is all about and how it applies to our lives currently.
(07:43:44 AM) fred: Today we are *far* more controlled by our own government than our “forefathers” were in their time when they decided to break away from England.
(07:45:02 AM) fred: The system of voluntary economic servitude that is now in place keeps the minions too busy to care, and gives them a carrot to grasp for so that they don’t revolt.
(07:45:36 AM) fred: The powercrats are loving it, of course.
(07:46:07 AM) fred: Well, enough of me already. Enjoy the holiday!

Finally, I got this site back up. Had to move it to a new ISP and all — well, it’s here to stay now.

Alas, I lost all my previous blogs, so I am only the one to blame.

Just Blame Fred!