PoS

Day after day, week after week, Robert pummeled me with the challenge.

"Daniel," he said, "Let's take these old cane rods off of the wall and go try them on the river."

The river was scant feet away.  We had endless skeins of graphite, fiberglass, and cane between us and it.  Why. That. Fucking. Piece of. Shit. Post-WWII. Japanese. Rod, for gawd's sake, Robert??

It's a learning opportunity, he said without so many words.  

"For Christ's Sake, man, I've had enough of this shit!  How much from graphite to fiberglass to cane do I need to take to understand?"

"But, wait.  Maybe I do understand.  Maybe the student has succeeded the master.  My arm, my subtle twist of wrist, my feeling of the load that this, that, and the other line impart are oh, so, sufficient."

"Aye, I get the feeling.  I got it before.  It's a rhythm, eh?  Yeah, not so hard to imagine and make time with.  Oh, for your acquaintances?  So be it.  I'll move on.  Will you be with me?"

Then, we had a new understanding.  No, the pupil had not exceeded the master, but the pupil was his, his own.  Every pupil before him had thought as much, but not every master had known more.

The time had come for the pupil to seek virtuosity without constraint. Thank you, Robert, I love, I admire the perfection that you demonstrate.  It is beautiful. It is complete.  

It is not me.  THIS is me.  And, in it, I sense the tool, the trailing and the forwarding line that, load upon load, telegraphs what WE do together transmutes from mere waving of a wand into this, wei wu wei.  

FeE: Yarn of The Matrix

 

I learned the term 'matrix' in math and earth science class before seeing the Matrix movies or thinking of the Latin root (mater), so have had to wrap my head around common use today.  My conception is the matrix is the boundary between chaos and order, both being the unfolding of human consciousness.  That unfolding is our journey back to our original estate.  We move between the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine, touching both, but essentially more: The intersection.

Perhaps from my mathematical and, later, semiconductor studies, the word "matrix" evokes an image in my mind of a mesh something like a net or screen, elements being at right angles, more or less, to each other.  Both order and chaos are at right angles to that - the 'Z' axis so to speak.

Irony is a wonderful word.  First and perhaps most commonly, the term is used to describe language expressing an idea diametrically (e.g. 90 degrees, 180 degrees) different from the literal meaning.  The contrast between apparent and intended is deliberate, often humorously.  It may be a skeptically humorous expression.  I think of the profoundly skeptical humor of Zen masters as ironic.  In this and other spiritual senses, it might be considered a method to express ideas for which words are inadequate.  Consider O. Henry's short story of the woman who sacrifices her beloved locks to buy her husband a watch chain as he sells his heirloom watch to buy her a hair comb ("The Gift of the Magi").  It is a story of irony - a touching story at that. It expresses a sense of humanness that is difficult to put into words (the logos, order) and impossible to see as merely the potential of chaos.  It's at the boundary between the two.

My favorite literary use of irony may be Cervantes' Don Quixote.  It is a funny, poetic dialectic between truth and fiction.  How often we joust with windmills, eh?  Central to the story is Dapple, the donkey, carrying Sancho Panza's ironic wit to great adventure and gentle expression of the meaningful tension between what is and what is only apparent.  Dulcinea would be the perfect mother of generations of chivalrous knights errant to come!

Did you know that semiconductors are grown as crystals from a matrix?  And the matrix of electronics zipping around a nucleus, shifting up and down between valence shells (greater and lesser potential), provide us with seemingly solid structures that are mostly space. Ah, the irony of what appears to be and what is!

The boundary between chaos and order is where we are invited to be and from which we grow.  It's only a prison cell for those thinking two-dimensionally.  The plane of the matrix offers no adventure, but jumping - shall we say "bounding" (more irony) - above and below it, we stretch our spiritual legs, learning of the heights and depths beyond the womb (i.e., the matrix).  The matrix is the safety net to keep us from utter chaos and madness.

A Search for God has a wonderful expression of this in the late lesson, "Destiny of the Soul".

"The development of our souls in a material world is as a garment that is made up of the warp and woof of materials that we have gathered through our experiences in every plane of consciousness."

I read that sentence maybe 100 times before I looked up "warp and woof", presuming it had to do with weaving.  It does, as in the lengthwise and crosswise (matrix?) of threads, but the term has a broader meaning as the underlying structure, base, foundation.  Of course, Cayce's "every plane of consciousness" extends across lifetimes, planets, and solar systems!

There must be air entrained in all this FeE, else I would suffocate under the density of life!

Towers of Babel

 

The commonly used definition of insanity is mistaken. Real insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing with no expectation of results.

American public safety agencies have steadfastly neglected the need for communications interoperability since, oh, shortly after the Detroit Police Department heated up the tubes of station KOP in 1922. Failures in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13^th were just another chapter in a long history of that neglect – a neglect born of pitiful arrogance across multiple dimensions.

The angle receiving most attention is that the United States Secret Service (USSS) blew it. Well, from consideration of their clearest mission, that is indisputable. The agency has a well-deserved reputation of arrogance. They may argue that the few presidential assassination attempts in modern history show their effectiveness. We may counter with an alternative and equally difficult to prove theory that there merely have been few. They’re understandably faced both with the traditional policing problem of adequately estimating crimes prevented combined with a unique mission, shall we say “service”, deserving of much secrecy.

Whether born of simple, inbred arrogance or some greater degree of hubris, the Secret Service has earned in our personal experience its reputation for not cooperating with other public safety agencies. Their demonstrated attitude is similar to that in the past of a couple large fire departments: To wit, “We don’t need to communicate with other agencies. We ARE interoperability.” That attitude has invariably, if only eventually, proven expensive to the citizenry covering costs – in taxes, property lost, and even lives sacrificed.

Six shots fired to no observable effect at an assailant within spitting distance, armed with a carbine that even the Viet Cong traded for AK-47s, scoped with the tactical expediency of hose clamps, says a lot.

Back in Butler, reports suggest that the Secret Service once again worked hard to isolate their share of the larger operation. There are many public safety and protective service missions in such an operation, not the least of which benefit hundreds or even thousands of persons at the event. Consider the demands of traffic management, outer perimeter security, and emergency medical care just to name a few. The notion that a true unified command would coalesce all those into a coherent action plan underwritten by an integrated communications plan is considered quaint.

Consequently, shit happens. Not always and rarely at levels this high, but often enough that a pattern has emerged. Thirty years ago. Ignore the principles of incident action planning and comprehensive resource management at your own peril! Or, worse yet, at the protectee and public’s collective peril.

Congressional Task Force on Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump:

Failures in Execution

Why it matters: The fragmented communications structure and lack of timely information sharing resulted in missed opportunities for the Secret Service and its state and local partners to apprehend Crooks and make informed decisions about managing the protectee prior to shots fired.

And the pattern continues with hand wringing and cackling about the sky falling if only the latest-and-greatest round of Next Generation technology cannot be had. Ignore the fact that it is always the next generation that will fix problems of communications interoperability. Or that it will simply add another floor to the Tower of Babel.

The Secret Service is emblematic of a larger, national problem exacerbated by the number agencies at all levels of government tasked with public safety. Would the problem be lessened by involvement of few agencies, if possible? Perhaps, but large agencies demonstrate the same types of insular specialization, smokestacks, and seemingly inevitable hubris. Consider that the USSS is part of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with assuring communications interoperability across all levels of government and types of service – an agency that both struggles internally with the same between subdivisions and studiously ignores reports from its own Inspector General of inadequacies in this regard.

Put down the radio and back away from the technology! Nothing will change without serious accountability for command failures.

April Fools?

 National Security Needs Both Futurists and Traditionalists

Technological change is not new. Nor does a focus on technology at this particular moment make one a blinkered “futurist.” Technology is an instrument of national power that feeds and in turn is fed by other elements of national power. With so many technologies with potentially transformative applications emerging at once, focusing on understanding, developing, and leveraging these technologies is well justified, even if it seems myopic at times.

Survivalism - The Emerging Movement (1981)

This monograph was prepared as an independent research project for undergraduate credit. It was subsequently presented to a couple audiences at the behest of my professors.

Some forty years later, the material is curiously topical again.  The sociological focus was sound, as attested to by professors who used the material, recommended it to others, and suggested I use it as the basis for a graduate thesis.  Even in distant retrospect, the amount of work involved was considerable, especially considering that it was produced in an age without benefit of the Internet and word processors.

Survivalism - The Emerging Movement (~28 MB)

A New Leaf

After many years of serving mostly as a means of bookmarking items of interest for myself, this blog is turning over a new leaf.  In the future it will be mostly my original work - some historical, some current.  It will serve as the point of initial publishing of copyrighted works.

    dh

More Calls for FirstNet Interoperability

Public TV Stations Push FCC to Mandate FirstNet Datacasting Interoperability - Broadcasting & Cable:

Datacasting is a novel and potentially valuable adjunct to other forms of public safety communications.

Interoperability 20/20

For over twenty years, the subject of interoperability in emergency communications has consumed much in the way of public discourse and other resources.  To what end, may we ask here at the dawn of a new decade?

Fundamentally a problem of culture rather than technology, emergency communications capabilities are again and again bludgeoned by emerging “solutions” to ill-defined problems of interoperability - the “I-word”, itself, having become vulgar.  “Solutions”, by definition, have price tags and marketers and booths at conferences and lifespans measured in a few multiples of that of mayflies.  Gadflies tasked with solving the intractable problems of communications interoperability speed to the latest bright, shiny object purported to solve all problems: Truly mesmerized. 

“This is a time of unprecedented change in emergency communications!”

How profound!  Yesterday was such a time, as well, before you arrived and tomorrow will be even more so after you’re long gone!  How are we better prepared for that change than we were yesterday?  Or is breathlessness an adequate measure of success?

What hasn’t changed?  The complex, federated world of emergency response and, thusly, communications of, for, and between its components.  What else?  Our lack of understanding or, better yet, lack of ability to analyze the crucial elements of information interchange between otherwise autonomous public entities tasked by their taxpayers with precise missions far removed from the rarefied air of capitols.  What else?  Our ability to develop and evolve systems to meet those information sharing needs over time without becoming mere technological cheerleaders simply starry-eyed and convinced of our own prepubescent prescience.  What else?  Convolution of operability with interoperability to the effect that an agency’s own emergency communications needs (read: funding) become a demand on denizens of every other jurisdiction despite, oddly enough, those jurisdictions’ own funding challenges. 

No more mature since the turn of the century is the public sector’s ability to manage life cycle costs of technology, training, and sustainment of interagency communications capabilities.  The search for Silver Bullets continues.  Interoperability remains moot if only we would all use the same system – ignore those ugly dimensions of governance, policy/procedures, training, exercise, and familiarity through usage that nag regardless of the technological means by which we communicate.

The way forward from here is made more difficult by decades spent neglecting the fundamentals that would prepare the public sector:  Systems designed, deployed, and measured by contextual yardsticks for which they were intended.  Today, we’re left with immensely more complex challenges with no better understanding of underlying interagency business requirements in a world more and more awash in data.

The way forward remains illumined by an understanding of business (emergency response) requirements and the rigorous application of systems design principles to meet requirements, mold technological opportunities, and measure success in preparing for subsequent generations.  As long as interagency communications requirements are articulated in technological terms, rather than those of the business of emergency response, the specter of colossal interoperability failures grows directly in proportion to society’s dependence upon information and expectations that public safety services follow accordingly.