Last week I re-read a book called “Delusions of Economics … and the Way Forward” by Gerald A. Cory Jr. I am not particularly interested in reading books on the subject of economics, but this one caught my attention. I originally read the book a couple of years ago after meeting the author while enjoying a beer at a tiny bar and grill in Davis, California. I find this particular restaurant to be an interesting place to meet exceptional people because of its close proximity to the highly prestigious University of California, Davis. It is not unusual for out-of-town people to drop in to relax a bit and meet a few of the “locals.” My discussions with Dr. Cory happened on a couple of those occasions.

Dr. Cory caught my attention both because of his rather amazing background and experiences, but mostly because he seemed to have a unique view on science, economics, and human progress. One of his topics that intrigued me was “consilience,” by which he means the effort to unity the sciences, both natural and social. His point being that science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is in a large measure a social phenomena and therefore is incomplete without considering the entirety of the problem, including people.

Cory’s book on economics started with a brief discussion of how we (homo sapiens) evolved from the first life on earth. He pointed out that in the beginning (hundreds of millions of years worth of “beginning”), all life was essentially “ego” driven. By “ego” he means, self-interest. The whole purpose of life was to stay alive and create offspring. Once the offspring were created, it was up them to survive and create offspring. Interest for the well being of others didn’t exist. Over millions of years life evolved and changed, always based upon the driving force of “survive and reproduce.”

At some point a mutation (actually a bunch of mutations) resulted creatures referred to as “amniotes.” Aminiotes are four-legged terrestrial vertebrates that evolved a tough membrane cover of the reproductive DNA carried by eggs (and later in placentas internal to the mother) that facilitated the survival of DNA-bearing eggs on land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

The mutations that allowed this change to occur included the creation of genes for “other-interest”, which Cory calls “empathy.” Humans are on this lineage that includes genes for empathy, or other-interest. However, the earlier genes for self-interest didn’t go away, they continued in the mix resulting in genes for both self-interest and other-interest (or said another way, ego and empathy).

The importance of this for this discussion is that there are built-in, genetically created impulses toward self-interest and other-interest. These two interests are always in opposition to each other, creating a “pull and tug”, each countered by the other. If the “forces” are balanced, then there is homeostasis in a kind of dynamic balance. On the empathic side are drives of self-sacrifice, submission, giving, responsiveness, supportiveness and others over self. The egoistic side includes power-seeking, domination, seizing (taking), assertiveness, competitiveness and self over others. When things are balanced there is compromise, fairness, sharing and justice.

One interesting result of this behavioral “model” is that perhaps the Buddhist’s suggestion of becoming “egoless” is questionable. If Cory is correct, egolessness would result in far too much empathy, and the death of the organism (us). The goal isn’t egolessness, it is a balance. Perhaps instead of attempting to eliminate ego (a clearly impossible, and undesirable condition), the suggestion should be to be aware of its presence, and take steps to moderate its influence to achieve something closer to the desirable dynamic equilibrium necessary for a health life, and healthy society.

The reason that Cory goes into so much detail about these opposing forces, and the desirable state of dynamic equilibrium, in a book on economics is that the currently most influential economic theories being used to understand and manage national and global economics fail to include the opposing forces to the ego driven instincts. They are based upon the idea that ALL economic actions are based upon each party in a transaction attempting to maximize what they can get with absolutely no sharing or empathic aspects to transactions. It is all get as much as you can get away with… period, with no thought to the impacts on others, on the environment, on future generations, global peace, or any other “other-interest” considerations.

I think this does a pretty good job of describing how businesses currently approach economic decisions. This agrees with what I learned in my college economic courses. The instructors and texts hammered home the idea that it is the absolute “duty” for everyone in the economic system to fight as hard as they can to maximize their returns. This is supposedly the source of the “invisible hand” that allows the economy to properly achieve a fair and equitable society. Pretty clearly, this kind of equality has not been achieved, and is getting much worse with time. It is a failed model, and a failed approach to understanding the “value” of things. What is often overlooked is that the “competition” isn’t between the supplier and the customer, it is between suppliers. The supplier relies upon “empathy” to promote the most desirable product, the forces of the ego are between suppliers of similar products.

Cory’s contention is that the problem is that the balancing values of empathy (other-interest) are not included in the calculations, and that is why things are getting so far out of hand with the rich rapidly getting much richer, and the poor approaching catastrophe. It is also why we have concerns of global warming, too much plastic in the oceans, ever growing numbers of homeless encampments and much, much more.

Cory’s final point is that the economic model of “supply and demand” (based on self-interest) only works for situations where the items being traded are not essential. Under that condition, then the “customer” can change behaviors based upon price. They can purchase a less expensive house, a less fancy car, perhaps a different vacation. However, this does not apply and does not work for things that are necessities, such as healthy food, health care, shelter and others. Those things NEED to be available no matter what the “customer” can afford to pay. They do not have the option of not eating because food is too expensive, they NEED to eat.

It appears that we have a LONG way to go before achieving anything close to the economic, and social justice, conditions that we want and need – but perhaps opening up the “models” to include the other half of our genetic propensities can inform our actions, regulations, and ethics in ways to work toward a more equitable society, rather than our present approach that seems to be driving us all apart rather than together.

I have been doing a little bit of research on the environmental problems associated with the olive oil extraction process. It turns out that eliminating serious environmental impacts from olive oil processing is a pretty difficult problem because the industry is large overall but subdivided into many small companies, and it creates a LOT of potentially harmful waste. Olive oil process wastes can cause severe damage to the environment due to toxic materials, high loads of organic materials, anti-bacterial properties, and others. These same properties can also result in beneficial uses – but the processing required is relatively expensive. Perhaps the byproducts could be turned into valuable products, but the infrastructure required to do so it expensive. The bottom line is that safe/environmentally appropriate treatment of the waste products can be done, but is expensive – it is much more expensive than alternatives such as “dump it into the creek”. This came to my attention because there is at least one local olive oil producer that elected for the more economical approach of dumping it into the creek (and is now facing fines and clean up costs for making that decision).

I seems to me that the decision about whether or not to process olive oil should have include the costs of properly and safely taking care of the hazardous byproducts to the process air, water, soil, noise, smell, etc. If it costs too much to control the bad aspects of the process, then perhaps the process is not economically viable. I do not know of any “constitutionally given right” to do anything you want because it can make a profit. I agree that people should be able to go into whatever business they want – but in my opinion, that only extends to situations where they don’t cause undo harm or costs to others (including the environment and society).

The olive oil business is a case in point. I think Olive Oil is a good thing. I like it on my salads, it makes nice soap, and probably has a lot of other beneficial uses. It is so good in fact that I am happy to buy it from time-to-time. But if it is too expensive, I probably won’t buy it. For most of my life it was outside of my budget, so I treated it as a “luxury.” TI think that if you can’t produce it at a price that will sell, then perhaps you shouldn’t produce it. Just because there are pressures to keep prices low is not a reason to cut corners and create hazards or damage the environment. Your desire to make money does not equate to your right to cause me harm.

I understand that my approach means some (maybe a lot) of people won’t make money from olive oil if olive oil isn’t produced. It isn’t just the oil processors, there are the farmers that grow the trees, the folks that tend the trees and harvest the fruit, the stores that like to sell the oil, soapmakers, etc. However, if the industry can’t do all of that without causes damage and costs to others, or the environment, then perhaps that industry doesn’t have a viable product. It seems pretty simple to me. Living in Northern California where the ’49s chased after gold with no regard to the damage they were doing, it has always been clear that the limits on what you can do to make money has to be bounded by the value of your product. If gold isn’t worth mining in non-polluting, non-environmentally destructive ways, then it isn’t worth enough to go after. The farmers whose orchards got buried by hydraulic mining tailings shouldn’t have had to pay the cost (in ruined farms) for the profits of the miners. The general public shouldn’t have to pay the cost of cleaning up the resultant destruction and mess.

As a safety engineer, I am very familiar with many instances where large and small companies pumped their highly toxic waste chemicals down wells into the ground water because it was cheap to do so. That reduced the cost of their products and increased their profits. However, many (perhaps most) of them went out of business before the problem was identified, or were fined a fractional amount of how much they saved. Now the public is stuck with many extremely expensive “super fund” site attempting to clean up the residuals of the highly profitable businesses. Much of it will can never be “cleaned up” and will therefore end up in terms of health problems for the public that shares the water polluted by those wells. Even when these companies are caught and fined, the fines are vastly less than the cost for remediation. It would have been far less expensive for the companies and the society if they had spent the money ahead of time to prevent the creation of the problem, but instead they elected to push off the problem (and expense) until sometime into the future — after all, the problem is likely to go away by itself because, who knows maybe I’ll die before the catch up to me.

We need to change our thinking from “how do we reduce the impact of dangerous processes” to “how do we eliminate the creation of dangerous processes.” We need to find workable solutions before we launch into projects rather than trying to find fixes after the damage has been done. To be “worth it” means “worth it” in the BIG picture sense. Plastic packaging and bags are a good case in point. They are creating tremendous environmental problems at all stages of their “life”. Are they worth it? Plastic packaging make billions of dollars a year in profits for some, but at a huge cost to the environment. Does that make any kind of sense? Is it even necessary? These products were essentially non-existent for the first twenty years of my life – I didn’t miss them or need them. None of us thought we were missing something important in our lives. We all know full well that we have very negative, undesirable, obnoxious artifacts in the form of things such as plastic bags and blister packs on products that we can’t get away from because a few people want to keep making billions of dollars. This is totally insane, and similar logic shows up with almost everything we do.

We (individuals) can’t avoid contributing to the problem because we need (or at least want) the products that create the costs and well as environmental and health problems. For example, we want olive oil, but are trapped by the economics of the thing. We want good quality oil at a “low” price. We shop for price, we look at price rather than environmental cost – so pick up the less expensive ones. That means the processors will try to keep the prices low enough to win the most sales, meaning they won’t implement expensive fixes to their environmental problems – if they do, their prices will go up, their sales will go down and they are out of business. We can’t buy the “correct” product because we have no information, and because we also have budgets. There is no “solution” to this in a “free” market. The costs will always be avoided by the consumers and producers, and the costs will always be passed forward to the society (and environment). The “customer” will pay for these costs, but it will be in terms of increased taxes to fix the problems, and a degraded lifestyle somewhere down the road. Unfortunately there is not a clear tie for the individual customer between the cost of their purchase and the eventual fully loaded cost of their decision. The ones that have the savings are seldom the same as those that pay for the external costs.

What is the solution? The first thing that springs to mind is regulation, lots and lots of regulations. Tiny regulations, specific regulations, millions of “can does” and “can’t does”. This approach not only does not work, it cannot work. There are too many things to consider, there are too many powerful lobbyists, things are changing far too fast to ever have nearly enough regulations to cover everything we do. It is practically impossible. What would work? I am not sure, but it seems that the decision of whether or not to produce something, and how to do that, should be tied to “proving” ahead of time that there will be no damages or costs to society or the environment. Should damage occur, then any after-the-facts costs should be paid entirely by those that caused the problems – plus appropriate penalties. Somehow or another we need to shift the responsibility for “doing the right thing” to those that are doing the things. Competition between provides should all have the same constraints – they have to be able to do it properly, not lower their prices by “cheating” or passing the costs on to future generations.

I don’t think we are the last generation of our species. We have endured for something like 8,000 generations and will likely be around for that many more (unless we actually manage to cause so much environmental damage as to cut that short). We will probably stick around for awhile, so why are we doing what we are doing right now?

We act as if there we are the end, once you and I die, that is it so whatever mess we make doesn’t matter. As long as we don’t run out of resources before we die we are good to go. Who cares what future generations have been left to work with? It appears that the furthest anyone can think is perhaps to the children, and maybe their grandchildren – and in most cases they can just “figure it out” just as we did.

We act as if there are unlimited resources of all kinds to support anything we want to do. We slowly pried open Pandora’s box for a few hundred years during the beginnings of the scientific and industrial revolutions only to have the box open completely during the past 100 years where we found that we can do just about anything within the realm of possibility that we set our minds to. Not only CAN we do it, we seem to think that because we can, we should – and have some sort of God given right to whatever it is that we want to get, anything we want to destroy, and anything that creates profit and personal power.

What would it take for us to return to the understanding that we aren’t all going to die in the next 20 years? What does it take to realize that future generations would certainly appreciate it if we left them an environment that supports their lives in relative comfort and health? Why do we have to always grab as much as we can get, even when we have so much we can’t do anything with it other than throw it away?

I guess today just isn’t one of those “positive” days for me. It is so disheartening to live among such insanity. I agree that we don’t have all of the solutions, but we could certainly be making efforts toward them, rather than continually making efforts to destroy as much and as fast as we can. The bombing in Ukraine is a prime example, how can that actually be taking place? What sort of world-view makes any of that alright. It isn’t just Russia that does that kind of thing, many (maybe most) countries have their own histories and their own stories that should make all of humanity cringe in embarrassment. No matter where I turn it is all the same, people getting as much as they can as fast as they can – with little or no regard for themselves or others, either now or in the future. Oh well, I guess that is just the way it is. Luckily I am getting older and that means I only have to tolerate mankind for a few more years. After that I guess I have no more concerns – but it seems to bother me to have to tell my grand-kids “good luck, I am afraid that we let you down.”

I am not easily shocked – but this week’s insanity at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings pushed me completely past that point. I am disgusted, embarrassed, disappointed – and angered by the ugly and hateful performances of Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. It is one thing for these complete, total idiots to put on their act of diversion, deception and deep ingrained hatred for the United States and all that it stands for – I get it, they are destroyers attempting to turn the country into a a fascist, totalitarian dictatorship because they understand that is the only avenue open for people such as themselves to achieve immense power and wealth.

The part that I don’t get is how anyone, anywhere, could watch their show and think that they should be supported in any way. What in the world has happened to the USA? How could it be remotely possible that such clear and obvious stupidity and hate be not only allowed, but supported. How can it be that people like Cruz and Hawley aren’t locked away permanently for their incessant attempts at creating riots, discord and the fall of the country? They are clearly traitors, why are they not treated as such? There are laws against shouting “fire” in a crowded theater because it is well know that such actions can, and do, lead to deaths. It is also clear that they firebrands such as these three jerks do the same, but on a MUCH larger scale.

I am deeply sickened that our great nation not only tolerates, but publicly supports, men such as these. It is an embarrassment to us all. We should all be deeply ashamed that we have allowed the country to fall to this state of affairs.

I have been plugging along on a “spiritual” path since my early days in high school when my brother, who is six years older than me, tried to explain the “beat” philosophy he learned from people such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac from the late 1950’s. My brother lived in Berkeley, hanging out in coffee shops and playing bongo drums, and listening to the great poets of the day while I toiled away in middle and high school. He became a full-fledged beatnik, encouraging me to read books such as “Howl”, “On the Road”, and “The Book of the Dead.” During this time I attended church with a few friends, finding a particularly interesting church with a small “youth group” where we discussed how religion impacts our lives and society, rather than the church dogma. Those discussions, tied together with my beatnik brother’s view of spirituality, helped me to develop an interest in “something” beyond ordinary experience, with rather loose constraints on understanding what that “something” might be.

My brother and I both matriculated (joined) Humboldt State College (HSC) in Arcata California in 1966 during the big buildup to the Vietnam war and the creation of the “flower children” of the 60’s. HSC was on the “speaker circuit” for alternative and “exotic” religions, including several Buddhist and Hindu leaders. It was great fun to go to these events with the exotic smells of incense, sitar music while trying to understand what old white haired Indian men wearing long robes were talking about.

In 1970 and 1971 the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi held extended Transcendental Meditation (TM) seminars at HSC. The students lived in the college dormitories during the summer break, as the town filled with people wearing robes sitting in all sorts of places around town in mediation. It was very obvious that “something” was happening. Out of curiosity, I attended many talks, and eventually paid my $20 (which was a LOT of money to me at that time) to get a personalized, secret, TM mantra. (The “secret” was that the mantra was an ancient one that everyone who knew anything about meditation knew).

I found the practice of meditation to be “life changing” and have continued a daily practice for over fifty years. My meditation has not always followed the TM approach, I explored a range of spiritual systems including Hindu practices, Buddhism and my favorite from Mesoamerica – known as Toltec practices. I finally settled into a daily Buddhist practice, not as “a Buddhist” but as a novice who meditates, contemplates, reads and discusses the topic – without necessarily “buying” all of the stories or practices. I suppose you could say I am dabbling in the topic. I consider myself to be a Toltec practitioner who happens to be performing a lot of Buddhist activities.

One of the main topics of Buddhism seems to be the idea of achieving “Nirvana”. This term is connected to the idea of finally getting beyond suffering, and therefore no longer continuing through endless cycles of rebirth. I find this description to be rather meaningless, more along the lines of a religious belief than a practice that might help in the here and now. The word “nirvana” has been adopted to mean “bliss” or “tranquility,” which sound nice – but also a bit scary. Additional terms used to describe this state of being are terms such as “enlightenment” or “awakenment.” All of this is a bit difficult for me to grasp beyond an intellectual consideration.

I have always wondered what it might feel like to achieve a state of awakenment. Awaking from what? If this term is to be taken literally, it must mean that we are asleep in some sense and therefore dreaming. If that is what is meant, that makes perfectly good sense to me. I have been pondering this issue for over fifty years and have come to the conclusion that we are in fact dreaming, and that ALL that we are aware of is our dream. We have no means of having any solid evidence of there being anything beyond dream, with the possible exception of the René Descarte’s famous statement that; “I think; therefore I am .”

I have always assumed that the state of “Nirvana” (or whatever term fits best) must be one that feels trance-like. I suspect that everyone has experienced instances where it feels like they are experiencing the world as if in a trance. As a simple example, a few weeks ago I was taking the kitchen scraps to the compost pile when I noticed that a bunch of flowers in our garden had bloomed into a riot of extremely vibrant yellow blossoms. It caught my eye, and my attention, in a way that felt a little like “stopping the world.” I paused and soaked in a kind of momentary bliss – not thinking about anything, just feeling joy. That kind of experience happens now and then, and is almost always a surprise and pleasure. Maybe Nirvana is being permanently in that state of a blissful trance. This is scary to me because it sounds too much like where I might be heading with full blown dementia in old age. Dementia seems like being “in the present” but not in a way that is attractive. I actually don’t want to spend my life in a trace – even if those moments in my life have feel extremely peaceful and pleasurable. I want to engage with the world.

A couple of weeks ago I had an experience that was perhaps closer to the meaning of the concept. On that morning, I woke up as usual before the sun at around 5:00 AM. I lay in bed for awhile, feeling my body enjoying the last few minutes in bed before getting up for the day. I got up, started for the bathroom and found myself in bed waking up again! Opps, I had only dreamt that I awoke, the experience of walking toward the bathroom was still a dream. So there I was once more laying in bed wondering if I this time I was actually awake, or had I again woken up in yet another dream?

This time when I got up it was an entirely different experience from any that I have had in the past. I was awake, and things were all as the normally are, but I felt crystal clear – my perceptions were clear and crisp, colors were more vibrant than usual, sounds were more crisp, I didn’t find it necessary or even appropriate to “think” about anything – I just was and that was enough. I realized that my “normal” way of experiencing things feels like it is in a subtly “fuzzy” trance. There is a delay, and a filter, of some kind that takes the sharpness away – and my “normal” experience is the trance, not this new one of being “awake”. The feeling of being “clearly” present persisted for a couple of hours until such time that the events of the day overcame me and I dissolved back to “normal.” I felt like I had somehow woken up – is that what “awakenment” feels like? If so, I like it.

Maybe this is closer to what the Buddhist means by awakening – it isn’t going into a separate “dream state” of a trance, but instead it is just doing what we are always doing, but with a crispness and clarity that we normally miss. Maybe it isn’t really anything at all, maybe it is just waking up. Maybe it is just a more normal experience of normal than we normally experience.

I wonder if those folks that think global warming is a hoax are noticing the negative impacts of remaining dependent upon fossil fuels. Even if global warming doesn’t exist, even if pollution from burning fossil fuels is somehow good for us, even if the increased CO2 levels in the oceans isn’t killing the bottom of the global food chain, even if the rising ocean levels just means a booming economy as we move from the current shores and rebuild on the “new” beaches (my home might become beach front property at an elevation of 52 feet) – even if all of that means we should just keep on keeping on with regard to our use (and misuse) of fossil fuels, there are still the problems that are being highlighted by the war in Ukraine.

Just the problems of nations being held hostage by other nations because of their dependence on fossil fuels seems enough to warrant changing how we use energy – not just how we make energy. So far just about the only thing that is promoted by governments, industry and “the news” is how we can switch from using fossil fuels to using “sustainable” sources of energy. Of course, none of those alternates are truly “sustainable” or environmentally friendly. The only obvious solution out of this bind that I can see is to change how we use energy with the result that we reduce our consumption to the point where we can actually power our civilization on sustainable, environmentally friendly, sources of power.

The discussions should be all about using less energy, not on using the same (or more) energy from other sources. We need to be focused making major changes to what we use energy for, and how much we waste. We have many, many solutions available that use much less energy for the same utility. Examples of possible energy saving solutions including making homes more energy efficient, MUCH more energy efficient is easy and inexpensive. It is almost always possible to bring homes to the point where they consume zero external energy at an upfront cost that is less than not making changes. It it possible to cut transportation energy use by vast amounts using currently available, affordable technology.

Instead of finding ways to “mine” energy from difference sources, we need to actually do the things that will reduce our needs. As we have been shown many times during the last few decades, using less energy does NOT mean less utility or a decrease in lifestyle – in fact it almost always means better utility and a better lifestyle. It is not “taking a hit for the team” – it means improving our lives while damaging the environment less. It doesn’t even mean having less jobs, or making smaller profits, or anything like that. I almost always means more jobs, better pay, safer and more enjoyable work, more security.

What does it take to get people, as a total society, to wake up to the fact that our current approach is damaging, expensive, and as the war in Ukraine is demonstrating, very dangerous. Can’t we just drop all of the ballyhoo and make the necessary changes? Do we really need to make something that everyone can see is an obvious good thing, an obvious need, and an obvious good solution into a civil war? Do we really need to make whether or not to do a good thing into a giant argument? Our current approach of yelling and screaming is just total insanity – and everyone on both sides of the issue knows it.

A friend of mine told me a story today that really makes me wonder how we (humanity) can find a good path forward.

His friend, a 50ish woman from Russia, told him about phone call she had with her mother, who still lives in Russia. This discussion happened on March 6, just two days ago. As you might imagine, the conversation quickly turned to the current situation in Ukraine.

Apparently the conversation didn’t go well. Her mother lambasted this woman for blaming the Russians on the war in Ukraine. She said she didn’t understand why everyone was getting upset with Russia because all of the righting and bombing are being done by Ukrainians against Ukrainians – the Russians are there with the sole purpose of stopping the bloodshed. They are there for humanitarian reasons to help the Ukraine government and people – they are being heroes, facing great danger at great expense to protect the people of Ukraine.

My friend’s friend could find no way to enter into a dialogue or have a civil discussion on the topic – from her mother’s point of view it is obvious that we are being lied to, that the Russians are totally in go the side of good and helpful, while the NATO world (and the USA) are only attempting to destroy Ukraine, and Russia along with it. She believes that we are attacking Russia for our purposes, and that our media is in a large concerted propaganda campaign of disinformation.

Obviously, that isn’t what my friend’s friend believes. She believes the information we get is mostly accurate, or at least truthful. Her mother believes the same about the information she gets – and there is no obvious way to get around this impasse.

It seems like the new easy connectivity created by the Internet has created (or exacerbated) the problem of sorting out fake news from real news. Now that everyone can have a say we no longer have a trusted source of information – and anything goes. The problem with figuring out whether Russia is invading or assisting is a prime example – it is obvious to me, but if the story is a true one (which I believe it is), it is not obvious to everyone. This means that there is a different “truth” depending upon the source of information, and there is no clear external demarcation for “true” or “false”. In the case of the Ukrainian issue, I suppose one could travel there and see first hand what was happening, but even then all you can see is what is nearby – and that might be a tiny bubble in the midst of a totally different situation. We can’t be everywhere at all times, and even if we were we would still be stuck with not knowing how to know the entire situation. We HAVE to take the shortcut of believing (or trusting), but have no method for determining how to do that.

What a complicated, and frustrating, world we have come to live in. I suppose it has always been a little like that, but we didn’t know that we didn’t know. Now we do, and we can’t do anything about it.

I had a successful weekend that I want to share.

When I met my wife at college she was an art student specializing in high-fire, non-functional (artistic) ceramics. I loved her work, and really enjoyed visiting with her as she worked – kind of mesmerized by the motion of the potter’s wheel and enjoying our discussions. (I suppose that is a large measure of while I married her.) We both graduated in our chosen fields, got jobs, had a family and left things like art behind. When her 50th birthday came we were finally getting some our “life” back so I bought her a potter wheel and converted our garage to a “studio” space in the hopes of her returning to her art. While it was a nice gesture, things kept coming up and the wheel sat unused. Without a kiln it is pretty difficult to transport “greenware” to a kiln because clay is extremely fragile in that state. It was just too much trouble to make things at one place and then fire them someplace else.

About ten years after getting the wheel she found a big, old, very used electric kiln for sale at a yard sale. The price was right even if it didn’t work and needed some repair. A new kiln like it costs about $6,000. She paid $300 for this one. It came home and sat for several more years – taking up space but without power or a place to be used.

When we became stuck at home because of covid I ran out of excuses for postponing the project of setting her up with a usable studio space. We have a small barn that I claimed as my shop space. Since we no longer had horses, the unused stalls were just full of the overflow storage from my shop. That meant that there was the possibility of creating a small studio in one of the unused stalls. Creating that studio space turned into quite a project, requiring insulation in the walls and ceiling, a new wall to separate it from my woodworking shop, windows, doors, sheetrock, and tiny HVAC system, lighting and more. I finally got all of that completed – but still had an old, untested, kiln waiting.

The first problem was that the device for lifting and holding the lid was absent. The lid opens like the top of a chest freezer, but it is too heavy to lift without assistance, and there was nothing to hold it up once it is open. The first task was to create some sort of lifting device. I started by trying to rig up cables and things to lift it, but that wasn’t working very well. A good friend came by one day and mentioned that I needed ballast. That idea resulted in a very simple device shown in the photo. It was just a couple of sections of angle iron hinged on the same hinge pin as the lid. My son’s old body-building weights counterbalance and offset the weight of the lid. It works perfectly! Lifting the lid is accomplished by pushing down on the bar holding the weights, which becomes slightly “over centered” when the lid is fully open – holding the lid up without any other devices being required.

Having a working method of accessing the kiln meant it was time to invest in bringing it electricity. Other than the high cost of copper wire these days, it was a small job of our local electrician. It was now time to do a test run to see if it actually works, if the controls were still functional and the heating coils still working. A few small items in the controls are no longer functional, such as the knob on the heat controller and the device that turns off the power once the desired temperature is reached. I tried to order replacement parts for these items, but the kiln is so old (circa 1965) that the parts are no longer available! However, after studying the manuals I figured out how to make it work without the controls (more manual, less automatic).

My first day of trying to make it work wasn’t very successful. No matter what I tried, the thing just wouldn’t turn on. How frustrating! I read the manuals, searched ytube for assistance and all of that – to no avail. I even contacted the controller company who were very helpful, sending me the controller electrical schematics – but most of the components are no longer available. It was looking dire. I devised some ways to bypass the controller completely and run the kiln manually. As I was pondering how best to do that I did a lot of electrical testing to make sure power was acting as I thought it should – and it seemed to be correct, but still nothing was happening. I decided to just turn it on for awhile and see what, if anything, might happen. A couple of hours I went to check it and “IT WAS WORKING!” I had misunderstood how the control system worked. It has a clock that ramps up power by cycling the power on-and off. It starts with each “on” time period being a very short part of time cycle. As the firing progresses the portion of the cycle that is “on” increases until eventually it is on all of the time. When I was first trying to make it work the “on” cycle was mostly “off” – so when I measured voltages and things there was nothing to measure. However, when I just left it alone the length of the cycle increased until it was obviously running. Eight hours later and the kiln was up temperature, glowing almost yellow through the view port. As night came, all of the little seams were glowing bright yellow with heat waves enveloping the kiln. It works!

I can finally hand over the studio and kiln for my artist friend (my wife). I hope I haven’t taken so long that old age is going to interfere with its use. One of the neighbor ladies from down the street has expressed interest in sharing the kiln, which would be great fun. I am looking forward to many enjoyable days with friends sitting with the kiln as it slowly cooks the locally made art pieces. There is something really special to sit with a kiln as it fires, you have to be present for safety reasons, and to make adjustments as the firing progresses – but it is also a great time to chat with friends, watch the day go by and just sort of relax with something to do, but not too much. I have started fantasying about creating a pretty little sitting space for the pottery kibitzers and kiln sitters.

It was a great day to finally bring all of the threads of the protect together into a usable whole.

This discussion might be a bit on the “geek” side of things for some of you. Sorry about that, now and then I run into things in my profession as a System Safety Engineer that get me fired up enough to write about. Perhaps you will find it interesting, even though a bit geeky.

For a little background, for the past few years I have been working with Arizona State University (ASU), the System Safety Society (SSS), NIOSH and a group of very large construction/engineering contractors to try to find ways to implement System Safety (SS) practices into general engineering practices. System safety is a process of identifying potential hazards (and their risks) associated with proposed new systems (cars, buildings, rockets, table saws – whatever) so that measures can be taken to eliminate them (or at least reduce the risks to acceptable levels). It is based upon engineering expertise with the intention of makings inherently safe as an integral aspect of the design.

OSHA has leveraged this concept by proposing a process called “Prevention Through Design (PtD)” (which sounds a lot like System Safety). Because it is being promoted by the construction division of OSHA, the scope of the activity tends to be limited to worker safety during construction – rather than user safety which is a big part of the scope of SS. They propose using a similar process as SS uses for doing the evaluations, just with a much reduced scope.

There are quit a few people around the world trying to figure out how to actually do PtD. I have joined a small group of interested organizations in the hope of showing them that they don’t have to make up new processes. The SS profession has been doing this work for decades, has tons of materials (books, standards, courses, etc) to help learn the process, and is willing and able to assist. So far there is a strong sense of “not invented here” bias preventing the “worker safety” profession from accepting what we have learned over the years. It is a shame that they feel the need to redesign the process because it will inevitably follow a similar path as the SS profession has with successes, failures, and expensive trials after millions of hours of effort, and trillions of dollars of development projects. We could help, but so far they continue to believe they are developing something brand new. I guess that feeling of “ownership” lends “energy” to the process, but it certainly frustrates me. I would rather that they work with us to figure out how to implement our known processes into their specific needs instead of watch them as they start from scratch yet again.

Yesterday I attended a meeting with the group as they planned out a workshop to be presented on-line in May. Several of the papers that they selected for the workshop focus on new protective equipment such as active body armor and exoskeleton force multiplier devices (wearable powered frames that do they work instead of the person’s muscles doing the work – another one of those sci-fi fantasies that have come true). The group was very excited by these opportunities to limit injuries to workers. Luckily one of the members voiced a concern that I was worrying about – “Is this new equipment really PtD, or is it just fancy PPE”. (PPE means Personal Protective Equipment such as hearing protection, eye protection, respirators, etc). (I didn’t bring up the question because I have been attempting to avoid pushing my point of view too hard, hoping to gently guiding their discussions rather than being too pushy.)

That opened a conversation whereby I pointed out that the idea of PtD (and SS) is to design the system to be safe, not to just add things to protect people from the dangers of the system. I told them that from my point of view the goal is to reduce the need for people to do the right thing to stay safe. Requiring the use of PPE is certainly a long way from that goal – and is only needed when the SS effort has failed.

I was heartened to notice that a couple of attendees seemed to get something of an “ah ha” moment, that the point isn’t just to protect the workers, but it is to make the system safe for workers, users, the environment – for everyone. I was surprised to see the changes in their expressions – somehow I assumed that when they were talking about PtD and SS they actually understood what they were talking about. Apparently not. The problem is a long standing one in the safety profession having to do with our respective paradigms concerning the nature of the business. We (SS folks) think in terms of minimizing all risks throughout the system lifecycle by designing out hazards. They (worker safety folks) think in terms of reducing lost time accidents on the job site (OSHA – Occupational Safety and Health Administration). An example of how this results in different answers is working at height. SS tries to design so that there is no need to work at height. OSHA focuses on providing fall protection devices when working at height.

The really interesting part of the “ah ha” moment that I noticed is that there appeared to be a shift from thinking that the design of PPE is and example of Prevention through the design of the PPE, versus the idea of enhancing safety by changing the design of the project. They were convinced that the design that they were focusing on was the design of the protective devices and procedures, rather than the design of the system under consideration. This is a HUGE difference of point of view, one that I have been trying to point out to my Worker Safety colleagues for the past forty or so years – usually with little or no success. The trouble with these kinds of paradigm mismatches such as this is that we both use the same words, use the same descriptions, have similar ultimate concerns – but don’t actually communicate when we speak.

I have read that when someone shifts their paradigm they can understand the differences – but those using the original paradigm can’t. This results in a situation where I can understand their point of view because that it how I thought about safety when I was a general building contractor. However, when I shifted to viewing the problems from the SS perspective I entered into a paradigm that I understand, but they don’t. I can see both my point of view and theirs (because I have experienced theirs), but they can’t so easily see mine until (or unless) they experience the kind of “ah ha” that I hope I saw at the meeting. It will be interesting to see if I am correct, or if they really just saw a slightly different approach within their paradigm.

Well, the debacle in Ukraine has managed to stop my blogs in their tracks. I have been avoiding chiming in on Ukraine, and nothing else seems particularly relevant – so I have gone silent. However, that can’t go on forever – I once more feel compelled to throw some of my thoughts into the ring.

One of the questions leading to my hesitancy to speak out has been along the lines “why isn’t Ukraine part of NATO?” There are lots of discussions flying around about this question, not the least of which is that Putin doesn’t cotton to the idea. But, so what if he doesn’t want them to join? A rumor is passing around that we made a “deal” with the Russians when the fall of the Berlin Wall and he is holding us to that deal. Apparently this is a rumor only, that was not part of the negotiations concerning the Berlin Wall. (I may be wrong about this – but so far that is what I have turned up). The only really solid reason that I have found for Ukraine not being accepted into NATO has to do with the Ukraine military being under military control rather than civilian control. (The “code” words on this topic are needing a “civil government”). My understanding that membership requires that the military be governed by the parliament instead of the President. Apparently Ukraine has been unwilling to implement that change in their constitution. I suppose their hesitancy harks back to their recent membership in the USSR where a military under exclusive control of the leader is the norm. Of course, that is exactly the reason that the war in Ukraine is so very, very dangerous.

So now there is a problem that doesn’t seem to have a good solution. Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, therefore there are no legally binding agreements to defend them. For this reason Russia (Putin – the sole leader of the military) has taken the position that NATO is only allowed to protect NATO countries, and any actions beyond that are an act of offensive war (rather than defensive war if they were protecting a NATO member country). Gads, we are now in a very dangerous game of “chicken” – and Putin has a long history of not being the one to swerve.

Clearly, NATO countries providing arms, aid and training are dancing on the edges of the problem of supporting Putin’s enemies. Perhaps without direct boots-on-the-ground support, or aircraft, but very close in any case. It reminds me of the experiment known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” This link provides a good description of the “experiment” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/tickling-the-dragons-tail-plutonium-time-bomb/557006/ Basically, the point was to see just how close to total disaster you can get without setting off the nuclear bomb “gadget”. We seem to be playing the same game today, but with thousands of nuclear bombs rather than just a bit of radiation that kills the experimenter. Mankind is amazingly willing to get risk annihilation in the name of pride. Our big brains come with extreme risks.

Assuming we manage to avoid an all-out war, what should we (the global community) be doing? Clearly the safest approach for Ukrainians would be for Ukraine to give in, join their neighbor, and hope for an opportunity to increase their freedoms at a later time. However, NATO (and others) are fearful that if that happens then Putin will know that he can win any game of chicken that he might want to play – not a good thing in the future.

At the moment, my thought is that perhaps we can find a way to enforce a safe evacuation, letting those in Ukraine that want to leave a way out. Putin claims that most Ukrainians want to join back up with Russia – so maybe that is what happens. Those that don’t want to join Russia, leave. Those that do, stay. We help those that leave get resettled, and Russia helps those that stay rebuild their country again. It would be interesting to see how many leave and how many stay. However, I can’t imagine such a scenario playing out.

Unfortunately, it appears that no good solution is to be found. Russia will continue bombing, Ukraine will continue to be demolished and their citizens killed, and eventually Russia will control the region. Hopefully we will manage to avoid an all-out war (with, or without, nuclear weapons) because the costs of the escalation to a full blown war will far outweigh the loses in Ukraine. Maybe Ukraine can hold out long enough that the Russian’s realize that they can’t afford to continue. That happened in Afghanistan. I believe that one of the main reasons that Russia wanted to take over Afghanistan was to obtain a secure route to the oceans for their oil pipelines. They didn’t manage to accomplish that because of local push-back, and they finally gave it up. Too bad we decided to jump in an join the fun. Now it appears that Russia is looking for a secure route to the Black Sea through Ukraine (it is an economic decision). If the Ukrainians can hold out long enough perhaps Putin will realize that the price is higher than the value of the access to the sea.

One of Russia’s big problems is that it has become essentially landlocked with no good sea ports. This is a huge problem for the country, and for their ability to maintain global power and a flourishing economy. It is also a huge problem for us because Putin is attempting to find a solution and any cost. Putin is doing whatever he can to solve this problem, as we are seeing played out in the current war and the history of Russia attempting to break through to the oceans.