Sermon - TLIS - 10.5.1 - Privacy: Theological Lessons from Information Security - Privacy

Sermon - TLIS - 10.5.1 - Privacy

Theological Lessons from Information Security - Privacy

This may be a different type of sermon for you.  This is systematic theology.  You are probably more used to Biblical theology, where you take a given passage of scripture, and extract all the life lessons you can from it.  In systematic theology, you take a given topic, from life, and find out what the Bible says about it.  So this is part of a series of Theological Lessons from Information Security, and, in this case, Privacy.

I am a security maven.  Therefore, I understand about, and work with, privacy.  I have to.

Interestingly, for a specialist in this field, I'm not somebody who is too terrifically concerned about my own personal privacy.  Gloria *was* concerned about her privacy (and she wasn't alone in that), and our privacy.  So, I had to pay attention to how I protected our family's privacy.  But, as I say, I was, and am, an expert in the field, and so I knew how to do this.  I think, in a way, that the fact that I *don't* care about my own privacy has been a help in my professional work.  I am not one of those people who is terrifically, and emotionally, concerned about my own privacy.  I can address it objectively, and realistically.

It is highly likely that you are very concerned about your own privacy.  You may think that you are concerned about privacy, in general, but that is *unlikely*.  For one thing, you don't understand what privacy is.  Don't feel embarrassed about this: it's quite common.  Most people don't understand what privacy is.

Of course, it's easy enough for me to say that, and for you to say that you do understand privacy, and which of us is right?  Well, here's a little test.  How would you define privacy?  I mean, in general.  If I ask you to define privacy you might start to talk about not wanting people to know your credit card number, or bank account number, or medical history, or see you while you're in the bathroom, or things like that.  (Or, you might be one of those people who say you have nothing to hide, and therefore don't have to worry about privacy.  I tend not to accept that argument from people who are actually wearing clothes while they say it.)  Certainly these things have to do with privacy, to a certain extent.  But they are not privacy.  They are examples of things that you want to be private, but they aren't privacy, itself.

It's actually very hard to define privacy.  It may interest you to know that experts in the field have tried, and mostly failed.  I know, because I've reviewed most of the literature on the subject.  I think the person who came closest was somebody who said that privacy is the ability to control information about yourself.  That is, as I say, very close to defining what privacy is, and it's useful in terms of trying to figure out whether something has to do with privacy or not.  But it does have a few loose ends to it.

For example, how much control?  Do you have total control over information about yourself?  Well, if you do, you are not part of the human race.  You can only interact with other people if you allow them to know something about you.  And when you do release information about yourself to one person, you have no control about whether that person will relay that information, about you, to somebody else.  And remember, I'm just talking about talking, here: we haven't even gotten into the Internet.  Once we start talking about the internet, well, you might as well assume that anything that you put on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet, regardless of how much you think you've protected it, is about as private as publishing it on the front page of the New York Times.

So, why am I preaching a sermon about privacy?  If I'm talking about privacy, and if privacy is a specialized field, then why am I not just teaching a lesson about privacy, for a workshop, or a seminar to my professional colleagues?  Well, it's because privacy is one of those concepts that has both a technical and professional meaning, and another, which is not necessarily the same, held by the general public.  As I mentioned, most people think they know what privacy is.  And, most people are very concerned about their own personal privacy.  And often they dress up their concern about their own personal privacy, by saying that they are concerned with privacy in general.  So most people have an opinion about privacy, and most people are pretty much wrong about privacy, because they don't actually know what it is.

But let's go back to that definition I gave you a bit earlier, where privacy is your ability to control information about yourself.  We like control.  We like to be in control.  We like to have the ability to control something, particularly if that's something has to do with us.  But, of course, we don't have control.  We do not control what is going to happen tomorrow, or even in the next few minutes.  The Lord may come back before I finish this sentence.  Well, if He does come back in the next few minutes, it'll look pretty silly for me to have written this entire sermon, right?  But, in any case, Jesus pointed this out to us.  We cannot make ourselves any taller, by worrying about it.  We do not control that.  We cannot make ourselves live longer, by worrying about it.  We do not control that.  We are not in control.  At least not of the really important things.

Nor should we be.  We walk by faith.  We have faith in God.  We have faith that God is in control.  We have faith that God controls the entire universe, while exercising that control with the love that God has for us.  Whatever happens, that is out of our control, God intended for it to happen.  Or, because we are supposed to have faith, and trust God, and not try to exercise control over the universe, when we do try to exercise control over the universe, and disregard God's plans and direction, we are in fact sinning.  In that case, what happens is the result of our sin.  God may have never have intended for it to happen.  At least, not if we did what he told us to.  In that case, we still trust, and have faith, that God is not only able, but willing and even eager, to change something that happens that we feel is bad for us, into something good for us.  God loves us.  And God is in control.  This is our faith, and this is our hope.

My wife died.  I don't like that.  It's not fun, being a grieving widower.  It is not good for man to be alone.  God said that.  In addition, after my wife died, I also went into a very strong, and excessively long, depression.  My life is not fun.  Now, I do not blame God for killing my wife.  I presume that he had a reason for it.  For one thing, Gloria always had medical issues, and God, in taking her home to heaven to be with Him, can give her her resurrection body, which she always wanted, "Right now!", and God loves her, and cares for her, better than I ever did, or could.  So I have no problems with Gloria's death, as far as she is concerned.  I remember the passage that says that the righteous are taken away to be spared from times of trouble.  I am sure, I am *absolutely* sure, that that is the case for Gloria.

But, for myself, I'm not happy about it.  I am not having any fun.  Any fun at all.  Any fun that I can dig up is very strongly changed with very deep sadness, because of the depression.  And the depression, by taking away my energy, and my concentration, has taken away, in large measure, my ability to try to have fun.  Which I mostly have by working.  Right now, I feel that nothing that I do has any purpose or meaning.  Therefore, it is extremely hard, quite separate from the lack of energy from the depression anyway, to work up any interest in doing much of anything, since it is all vanity, and chasing after wind, anyway.  I regularly ask God to kill me, because there doesn't seem to be any particular point in my being here.

But that isn't up to me.  God may have a purpose for me.  God probably does have a purpose for me.  If so, he hasn't let me know what the purpose is, yet, but, I hope that he has got a purpose for me, and that my remaining alive on this fallen Earth, is part of a purpose that will eventually become apparent.  Or, even if I die without being used for any particular purpose, possibly the fact that I am suffering, right now, is doing something for me.  For God.  That God is turning me into an instrument, which he may need later, after I die.  I don't know.  I don't *have* to know.  I'm not in control.  God is in control.  I am supposed to trust, and have faith, and hope, in that.

Let me tell you something else about privacy.  It's rather technical.  It's called differential privacy.  It's not actually about privacy, as most people think about it, although it is a very interesting tool that will, in fact, allow us to measure privacy, at least in certain ways.

Differential privacy is about databases, more than actual privacy, in the way most people think about it.  This can be a database about anything: about your shopping and purchases, about your fitness or medical history, even possibly about your money.  It's certainly quite possible that it's about social media.  Social media is, after all, just a number of great big databases, with different means to query the database.  Differential privacy is, as I say, pretty technical.  It's also a bit odd to try and get your head around.  But basically, the differential part means that we should design a database, any database, and the questions you can ask of it, so that there is as little difference as possible between a copy of the database with your information in it, and without your information in it.  The closer we can get to there being no difference between a database with you in it, and one without, the more privacy we can guarantee that you will have.  And there are certain things we can do with the database.  Certain limits and restrictions we can put on the database, and the queries, in order to keep it as close as possible to their being no difference.

For one thing, the more records that there are about you, in the database, the less privacy you have.  Therefore, limiting the database to fewer records about you, enhances your privacy.  The more records that there are about *other* people, other than yourself, in the database, the more privacy you have.  So, in making the database bigger, and in putting more people into it, and in putting more of their records into it, the more we enhance your privacy.

And there's another, very interesting, and rather weird, aspect to differential privacy.  Technically, this is called noise.  What this actually means is that when we ask the database for information about you, or for about any group that includes you, or, indeed, about anybody else, the report that we give back to the person who made the query is a lie.  Well, a little bit of a lie, anyway.  How *much* of a lie depends upon the other factors, like how many records we have allowed people to put in about you, and how many records we have in total about other people, and how small a sample we allow somebody to query, when that sample includes you.  But, when we lie, even a little bit, we can protect your privacy.

For example, say that we have a database of all the people in Port Alberni.  We have a database which, for some reason, contains their salary.  Now, we have built protections in saying that you cannot ask for the salary of one individual.  So, for example, you cannot ask what Rob's salary is.  But you can ask what the *average* salary is for the whole town.  That's useful information, and it doesn't really compromise anybody's privacy.  But if you can then ask for what the average salary is for the whole town, *minus* Rob, then, having gotten those two answers, it's fairly simple mathematics to do a calculation and find out exactly what my salary is.

So we add noise.  We lie, even just a little bit.  By giving an average salary that is close to, but not quite, accurate, and giving an average salary minus Rob, that is close to, but not quite accurate, when we perform that calculation, we are going to get an answer that is wildly divergent from the truth.  Therefore, we hide the truth, behind a little bit of noise.

Remember social media?  Well social media is basically noise.  And, in fact, it's being used against us.  It could have been *designed* by our Adversary, the Father of Lies, and remember I did a sermon about lies.  (Sermon 17 - False News Proves God Exists https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/sermon-17-false-news-proves-god-exists.html ).  As well, social media is not intended to tell us the truth.  It is intended to tell us what we would like to hear.  When social media tells us what we want to hear, we tend to spend more time on it.  And when we spend more time on social media, the social media companies make more money.  Remember that if you don't pay for the product, you *are* the product.  Unfortunately, when social media tells us what we want to hear, what we want to hear tends to be what we already believe, whether it's true or not.  If we believe something that's not true, even if it's just a little bit wrong, social media feeds us stories, mostly made up stories, or, to tell the truth, lies, that support the mistake that we believe.  Therefore, social media tends to reinforce the lies that we already believe, and gives us more proof, and more reason, to believe them, on a stronger and stronger basis.  Built on lies.

Our Adversary, of course, is delighted by this.  He even has a special demon, Fomo, who, in ancient times, made people believe lies.  He is still around today, even though you won't find many mentions of him in either ancient, or modern, occult literature.

That's because he's a lie.  I made him up.  Well, not exactly.  But I did lie about him being an ancient demon.  FOMO is, in fact, the acronym for "fear of missing out."  We are afraid that if we don't follow social media, all the time, we will miss it when some important new information comes along.  The fact that the information is, generally speaking, simply another lie, doesn't factor into our fear.  We are just afraid of missing out.  So we spend a lot of time on social media.

Rather than, for example, researching the actual news of the day.  We should be looking for what really happened in any situation, regardless of what our friends say happened.

Or, for example, reading your Bible.  Or praying.  Or otherwise getting good, solid, healthy, worthwhile things.  Whatever is pure, think on these things.  Unless, of course, those things aren't, actually, pure, but horror stories about the heresies committed by other churches, that aren't yours.  I'm pretty sure that I'm on safe ground, when I say that those stories are lies.  How do I know?  Because I've heard the stories.  But I have also actually been to all of those other churches.  And they don't do that.  It's just a lie.  (Sermon 5 - Heretics https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/sermon-5-heretics.html )

There is something else about privacy.  I know this, because I, in the seminars, also have to teach about law.  And, particularly when teaching in the United States, the interesting fact is that while many countries around the world have privacy laws, the United States does not.

Well, yes, okay, that is a bit of an overstatement.  They have a law about how you have to treat health information, and it says that you have to keep patient records confidential.  They also have a lot that states that there are limits on what the government can do about the information that the government collects about you.  There is also a law that says that any website that primarily is aimed at underage children, needs to take special precautions to keep their information private.  But there isn't very much in the way of general privacy laws, although some states are starting, very tentatively, to start putting some privacy laws in place.

What the United States does have, are disclosure laws.  The United States doesn't have any laws that say that you specifically have to protect the privacy of your customers, or clients, or other people that you collect information on.  But it does say that if you collect such information, and then somebody breaks into your database and steals that information, you have to let the people, who you hold information about in your database, that a breach has occurred.  You have to *disclose* the fact that a breach has occurred.  This is a bit different than legislating the fact that you need to protect that information in the first place.

Now, this leads to some interesting theological conjecture.  God does not care if we try and keep our information private.  God knows all about it anyway.  That's what being omniscient is all about.  God knows everything.  God sometimes asks us to disclose information about ourselves, but, even if we lie, God already knows the answer.  So all that lying to God does is to prove that you are a liar.  It doesn't maintain your privacy in any way.

So, why is it that God asks us to disclose these things?  For example, why are you supposed to pray?  Why are we supposed to ask God for things?  God knows what we need, and he also knows what we want.  He knows if we are asking for something that we simply want, or that we really need.  He knows when we are confused about the difference between our needs and wants, and when we ask for something that we want, thinking that we really need it, when we don't.

God asks us to disclose things, to give us a chance to be truthful with him.  To give us a chance to communicate with him.  When God asks us to disclose something, it's not because God needs the information: God already *has* the information.  God already knows.  God asks us to disclose things to him, because it is to our benefit to communicate with God, and to be honest with God.  Tell God about it.  Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry *everything* to God in prayer.

So, isn't it interesting what you can learn about God, by thinking about privacy?  Aren't you glad that I put this sermon together?  Was it worth it?

If you *don't* think it was worth it, you can keep that private  :-)

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Christmas Charcuterie

I see that the merchants are now discounting their unsold Christmas Charcuterie trays.

If I was into charcuterie I would rejoice, since Christmas Charcuterie is the same as ordinary charcuterie, except that someone, at the last minute, threw a couple of candy canes onto the tray ...

Clarion call to end it all ...

I love Bugles.  I know that they are probably one of the most unhealthy snacks on the planet.  They are made of corn, which, in it's natural state, is quite nutritious, but, improperly processed, has a tendency to provide empty calories without providing necessary nutrients.  And they're probably deep fried in corn oil, which makes the situation even worse.  Nevertheless, I love Bugles.

Well, I should say loved.  They seem to have disappeared.

I didn't eat them indiscriminately.  But, for some reason, they were my go-to snack for New Year's Eve.  Maybe they were particularly prevalent during my teen years: I don't know.  But I always tried to have Bugles at New Year's Eve, even if I didn't eat them the rest of the year.

But they're gone.  And so are a lot of other things.  So, I lost my wife, my home, my best friend, my reason for being, my job, and my purpose in life.  And now Bugles.

My New Year's resolution is to be less careful crossing the streets in Port Alberni.

Or, maybe 4k.  I haven't decided yet ...

Computer Club

"It's already helped," he said.

"How did *that* help?" I asked.

Apparently, something that I thought was just a throw away comment, based on experiences from thirty years ago, helped him decide about a software purchase.

It's going to take me a while to get used to the level of need ...

BBC 5 - Port Alberni Time

There is another oddity about Port Alberni.  Port Alberni time.

Now, some people talk about Island time or [insert your choice of ethnic group prejudicially considered lazy] time, as a kind of easy going, not too concerned about deadlines attitude.  Port Alberni time is not quite like that.  It's actually fairly specific.

When I first got here, I was surprised, on many occasions, by the fact that absolutely nobody arrived anywhere, to any event, early.  Given that I am the only pedestrian in town, and was uncertain exactly how long it was going to take me to get serious places, I tended to arrive early.  And then, of course, had to wait outside locked up buildings, until somebody else showed up.

Sometimes they would show up right on time.  (Never, ever, early.)  However, in most cases, they arrived late.  Initially, I saw this as a version of Island time, in that nobody in Port Alberni considered that they were late, if they were only fifteen minutes late.  If you were fifteen minutes late, you were on time.  (This, of course, meant that in addition to however early I was, showing up anywhere, I had to wait an additional fifteen minutes.)  It was somewhat annoying.  But eventually, I learned to allow for it.

But, over time, as I learned more about Port Alberni, I realized that Port Alberni time was not explained simply by Island time.  There was a more particular factor involved.

Nobody who lives in Port Alberni feels that it takes any time at all to travel between any two points in Port Alberni.  This means that if you leave where you are, at the time you are supposed to be someplace else, you are, technically, according to Port Alberni time, on time.

There is an additional outcome of this perspective.  It has to do with Port Alberni drivers.  Everybody, assuming this fact about Port Alberni time, that travel time occupies no time at all, sets out to prove that it is true.  If they leave some place at the time that they are supposed to be someplace else, they drive as fast as humanly possible.  In fact, they drive as close as possible to the speed of light, so that time dilation kicks in, and it does not, in fact, take any time at all to travel between the two points.  Regardless of how far apart the two points are.  Granted, no two points in Port Alberni are terribly far apart.  I consider any place in Port Alberni to be within walking distance.  But it does take *some* time to travel, even in the car, from one place to another in Port Alberni.  But the Alberni-ites refuse to believe it.

BBC

Previously:

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-1.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-2.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/bbc-3-house.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/12/bbc-4-publicity-and-promotion.html

Unexpected triggers

My daily meal, these days, is mostly a can of soup augmented by chopped up carrots (or broccoli).  The cans of soup are on the shelf under the microwave.  The carrots (or broccoli) is in the fridge.

The pantry is mostly long-term storage, for things I've bought on sale, and don't need yet.  I don't open it very often.  Today I was folding up some gift bags, which I store in a section of the top shelf of the pantry.  While the door was open, I noticed a jar of strawberry jam in the pantry.

Gloria liked peanut butter with strawberry jam.  I prefer honey ...

What's So Bad About Feeling Good?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063799/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063799/quotes/?item=qt7183964

Conrad: One thing confuses me ...

Pete (as Hinklemeyer): Yeah?

Conrad: You write about misery but you seem so happy.

Pete: Yeah, I do really.  You must remember three things: Eins.

Conrad: Eins. 

Pete: The only solution to the world's problems is total destruction, yeah?

Conrad: Yeah ...

Pete: Zwei, the world is destroying itself, yeah?

Conrad: Yeah ...

Pete: So, drei, what's to worry about, yeah?

Merry Christmas

The girls organized an absolutely wonderful Christmas for me.

I'm also a little bit proud of myself.

I did manage to get presents arranged for the grandkids and great grandkids (with the girls help).  And the arrangements for Christmas involved parking at Duke Point and walking on the ferry, which I've never done before (depressives are not big on new things).  But I did it, went over Saturday for Number Two Daughter's Christmas Eve Fondue (one day early), held one or other of the newest great-grandson and great-granddaughter pretty much all evening.  Then Number Two Daughter brought me back over to Number One Daughter's Christmas Eve Christmas Dinner, where Number One Great-Grandson is starting to accept me, and also got to hold Number One Great-Granddaughter for quite a while.  Number One Daughter *made* me the greatest and most hilarious T-shirt,

 and Number Two Daughter *made* me a kit to make her famous and delicious coconut curry lentil soup, so I can make it for myself when I want  :-)

... and now, back to the pain of being me ...

Christmas downtime

So, there's yet another reason why Christmas (well, all holidays, really) is hard for the bereaved.  Like Sundays, there's a lot of downtime.

Today, I had nothing to do.  This is not good for grievers or the depressed.  I decided to go for a walk anyway, and made up some errands to kind of make myself do it.  I also ran into a couple of jobs by accident, so that helped.

But holidays, with their extra demands on your time, tend to mean that a lot of normal activities get cancelled.  The bereaved, therefore, tend to have a lot of time to do nothing but mope ...

1 Peter 1:6-7

So be truly glad.  There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while.  These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

I think GriefShare is trying to kill me ...

The daily grief email series from GriefShare is getting to the end.  (Today was Day 359.)

The last several days have been about how great it is going to be when we get to heaven.

Not exactly an argument for staying alive and putting up with all the grief and pain here on earth ...

Ruth 1:16, paraphrased:

Mi Dios, et su Dios.

Depression, working, and energy

One of the symptoms, and effects, of depression is a lack of energy.  This is pretty standard, and probably one of the reasons for the term "depression," since "depression," in medical terms, generally means reduction of a bodily function.  It is one of my indicators that another depression cycle is starting: a realization that I am falling behind on work that is a regular part of "life administration."  But it also means that projects that I would be working on don't get done.

In the past few weeks, I have been starting to get some projects off the ground (*extremely* slowly, but, in depression, you take what you can get), so I thought that was an indication that I was *finally* starting to see some easing in this longest-of-all-depression-cycles that I'm currently in.

Until I realized that the work that I *was* getting done on projects was apparently coming at the cost of *not* getting done even the *minimal* "life admin" that I have been working to maintain ...

Ephesians 3:18

May you understand, 

as all should, how wide, how long, 

how deep God's love is.

BBC 4 - Publicity and Promotion

I have mentioned  that I'm from Vancouver.  And that Vancouver is the ultimate mobile society.  And that almost nobody is actually *from* Vancouver: they all moved to Vancouver from someplace else.  And that Port Alberni is a bit different, in that regard.

You know those small towns where, even if you've been there living there for twenty years, you're still a newcomer?  That's not Port Alberni.  In Port Alberni, you are a newcomer if your *grandparents* weren't born here.  Port Alberni is a pretty stable society.  Yes, a few people are moving here, but they are definitely in the minority.

When you lose someone important, and particularly when you lose a spouse, you lose the life that you had.  I not only lost my wife; and my best friend; and the person that I most want to talk to in any situation; but, since I was her caregiver for about a decade, I also lost my job.  So I pretty much lost my entire life, and ended up, first in Delta and then here, with absolutely no meaning or purpose to my life.  This, of course, does not help with the depression et cetera.

So, as a suicidal and depressed grieving widower, I am trying to rebuild a life.  I am trying to find some purpose.  So I am doing volunteer work, and, with various organizations in town, I am proposing that I can help in certain ways.  However, in a mill town, where not only the high school, but even the college, doesn't have any computer courses, this hasn't been terribly easy.  So I have been proposing various programs, to various organizations, in areas where I think I can contribute.  I have been having enormous difficulties.

Initially, I just put this down to being new in town.  I'm new here, nobody knows me, why should anybody be paying any attention to me, or taking any interest in what I am proposing?  But, as I tried to start various things, and tried to figure out how to publicize them, I became increasingly frustrated.  There didn't seem to be any possible way to publicize any activity in Port Alberni.

Well, it turns out that this was not a problem with me not knowing how to publicize things in Port Alberni.  Nobody publicizes things in Port Alberni.  They don't have to.

Allow me to explain.  Everybody has been here forever.  They all do the same things.  Year after year.  If it hasn't been done, every year, for the last fifty years, it isn't going to happen in Port Alberni.  Everything that happens has happened before, in exactly the same venue, at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same way.  Nobody needs to publicize anything, because nothing new happens.  Everybody already knows what is going to happen, because it has happened, every year, for the last fifty years (and probably longer).  Everybody knows what is coming up, when it is going to happen, where it is going to happen, and so they don't need anyone to tell them, because everybody just knows.  (This is maybe a little bit hard on newcomers, who come into town, and don't get told what events are happening, because nobody needs to publicize everything anything, because everybody already knows what's going to happen, and when, and how, but, I mean, those people are newcomers anyways, so who cares about them, right?)

But this also means that there isn't any way to publicize anything in town, because nobody *needs* to publicize anything in town.  Yes, there is a newspaper.  Nobody reads it, unless they think that there's a good chance that they got a picture in the paper this week.  There is a radio station.  I'm not quite sure if anybody does listen to it, but if they do, it simply is background music.  Shaw Cable has, as it always does, a community cable channel.  Nobody watches that, unless they want to watch Bombers games.  Nobody needs to know what is going to happen, because they already know what is going to happen.  So there is no way to do publicity or promotion in Port Alberni.  Which makes it a bit difficult to start new activities.

Previously:

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-1.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-2.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/bbc-3-house.html

Others:

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/12/bbc-5-port-alberni-time.html

MGG - 1b.2 - Memoirs of a Grieving Gnome - Faith

I grew up in the Baptist denomination.  The Baptists are non-creedal, and believe very strongly in the importance of the independence of the local congregation.  I tend to agree with these matters of Baptist polity, although that may simply be my own antipathy towards giving anyone else permission to tell me what to do.  Evangelical denominations also tend to be anti-intellectual, and the Baptists tend to take this to extremes.  Given my subsequent career as a researcher, author, and semi, or possibly failed, academic, I find the anti-intellectualism a little embarrassing.

Starting somewhat before Fiona died, I began to try to study my faith more rigorously.  It was at this point that the anti-intellectualism became rather annoying.  I tried to talk to various people in our church, and find out what made Baptists Baptists.  I would ask, for example, who was the first Baptist? The answer that I generally got was "John the Baptist."  Since I already knew that most of the Christian church had been Catholic for most of its history I knew that this was arrant nonsense.  But I couldn't really get a straight answer out of anybody in the church.  I had to do my own research and my own exploration without much assistance from anyone around me.  I do find it somewhat strange that I maintained my belief during this period rather than giving it up as so many people of my age did.  I possibly have the books of C. S. Lewis to thank for that.

There is, or was, a conference on missions, run out of Urbana, Illinois, which many young people attended.  I didn't, but one of my friends did while I was in university.  I vividly recall the poster sized application form for this conference.  One side asked for all kinds of personal information about you.  The other side of the form had one question: denomination (specify).  Then it listed column after column of denominations, and lists of sub-denominations.  My friends and I counted, and the Baptists and Mennonites were tied, with twenty sub-denominations each.  But the Baptist had one that the Mennonites didn't: "Other (specify)."  I think we can take it as a given that the Baptists are the most schismatic denomination of all Christian denominations.

I am a Baptist Metis.  A half breed.  A hybrid.  My father belonged to the Regular Baptists, and my mother to the Convention Baptists.  This is a particularly British Columbian split in the church.  It resulted from the liberalist/fundamentalist split in the North American church more broadly.  But it also resulted from a pioneer in Vancouver, one John Morton, one of the "three green horns" of Vancouver, who, when he died, a fairly wealthy man by that time, in his will left his money to "the regular Baptist Church."  This reference in the will was probably simply meant to refer to the most common Baptist Church at the time, which was the BC area of what eventually became the Baptist Union of Western Canada.  The BC area conducted a convention every year, and were known as convention Baptists.  But there were other Baptist denominations operating in British Columbia.  There is a denomination which, while being known as North American Baptists, actually had Germanic roots.  When I started to do some research on the various denominations operating in BC, during my teens and twenties, the highest number of churches were actually Southern Baptist churches.  They are Southern Baptists, since they originated in the southern states of the United States.  They operate the highest number of churches, since most of their churches are very tiny missions.  But, in any case, a fundamentalist wing of the convention Baptists, during the 1920s when John Morton died, took advantage of the wording of the will to break away from the convention, and style themselves the Regular Baptists.  This, of course, resulted in a lawsuit over the wording of John Morton's will, which resulted in a quarter of the money being given to the Convention Baptists, a quarter of the money being given to the Regular Baptists, and half the money going to lawyers.

There were, of course, still plenty of fundamentalists within the convention Baptists, and it was some of these, in our church, who gave my parents a hard time over Fiona's death.  Sometime later, while still performing my research and explorations of my own faith, I identified at least one of the people who was in this party.  I was interviewing various leaders in our church, and asking them general questions about Christianity and faith.  This one person started to get into this idea that, if anything bad happened to you, it was because you didn't have enough faith.  He even got quite specific about any deaths.  Sickness and death, he maintained, we're simply because you didn't have enough faith.  He then realized who he was talking to.  His face got a funny look, and he started doing all kinds of verbal contortions trying to point out that my sister's death was an exception and this general standard did not apply in my case.  I must admit that, while I didn't react to any of this, I did take quite unholy mental glee in his difficulties at this point.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/mgg-1b1-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-fiona.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1b3-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome.html

John 13:35

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Reporting

At the moment, I find that I am suddenly busy.  But I also find, at one and the same time, that the rewards, or "return on investment," for being busy, have also, suddenly, dried up.

In addition to everything else, my shin splints have returned.  (Or, I should say, shin splint: it always seems to affect my *left* leg.)  So getting out and walking is pretty painful.

Cryptography check sheet

 This isn't exactly a cheat sheet for cryptography, but if you understand all the parts of it, you've got a reasonable background for the exam.  If not, then the parts that give you trouble are the areas that you should go back and study.

See: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/cissp-seminar-free.html

Sunrise

 

The worst thing

The worst thing is being hurt by the person to whom you explained your pain.

Do you *BELIEVE!*

She said, it's obvious that she knew that you cared.

But, I said, I *do* care.

Yes, she said, but she *felt* that you cared.

I found this very strange.  And sad.  Possibly it's because there are so many people who think that they are counsellors and comforters, and even assert that they are good listeners, but it is obvious that they *don't* care, because they don't listen.

Jeremiah 23: 25,26

I know what those prophets have said who speak lies in my name and claim that I have given them my messages in their dreams.  How much longer will those prophets mislead my people with the lies they have invented?

Pedestrian safety

The Alberni Valley News has a story about Port Alberni wanting to improve pedestrian safety.

As the only pedestrian *in* Port Alberni, I thank you for the concern.

However, I don't think that expensive options such as pedestrian-controlled crossing lights are the answer.

You guys are just really, really terrible drivers.

As a suicidal, depressive, grieving widower, I've been crossing that intersection pretty much daily, and you haven't been able to kill me yet ...

Sunrise

 

Review of "King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig

Eig's biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is quite complete, and does not avoid controversial topics, such as King's frequent affairs, his fight against depression, and the lack of strategy in his approach to the civil rights movement.  However, neither does Eig do any significant analysis on these topics.  I'm not quite sure that egg doesn't shy away from the adultery: it is mentioned, and implied, but the word "adultery" is probably never used in the text, nor "affairs," nor "immorality."  It is admitted that King knew many women very closely, and the wording certainly hints at affairs and sexual activity, but that is actually never made explicit.  In terms of mental health, there is pretty much no analysis, except for mentions by friends and associates that king would be depressed, or down.  In terms of the strategy for the civil rights movement, Eig does admit that King came late to the game, and fell into a leadership role more by good luck than good management, but, again, there is no real thorough analysis of King's thinking in this regard, beyond his commitment to non-violence.  The material is certainly interesting, but an awful lot of the most interesting areas are simply left unexamined.

Rather late in the book, at a low point both in King's life, and in the civil rights movement, the biography details a particular sermon, by King, where he attempts to address criticisms levelled at him by asking American Christians to examine where they stood on their country, in relationship and comparison to God.  This point gives the book a major relation to our current times, where the religious right, in America, is supporting a man who doesn't even know whether or not he is a Christian, in opposition to one who demonstrably is, because the one who isn't a Christian is pandering to their fears, and concerns, about the nation, and the prosperity gospel.  The prosperity gospel is not entirely absent from the Bible, but it is far exceeded by the number of references to caring for "widows and orphans," which is biblical shorthand for the disadvantaged.  The Christian is supposed to be for God first, and only second for the country.  The American religious right is primarily for the country, and the politics of America First, and only secondarily for god, if it isn't too inconvenient.

Gluten-free

Today, I had yet another person advise me that going gluten-free would cure my depression.

I've heard that before.

I definitely know that the gastrointestinal system and mental activity is fairly intimately (and weirdly) connected.  And if going gluten-free has cured your, your grandson's, your good friend's, your sister's depression, ADHD, autism, or cancer, I'm very happy for you (or them).  Same goes for oil of oregano, St. John's Wort, and melatonin.

I'm pretty sure I can say, with reasonable confidence, that it isn't going to work for me.

You see, I *have* gone gluten-free at various times.  Recently, with my ridiculous diet, there are many times that I have gone weeks without eating any bread, flour, wheat, or even grains of any kind.  And it hasn't resulted in any improvements.

It's pretty much the same for a number of other recommended diets.  I have gone weeks without any meat.  I have gone weeks without processed foods.  At one point I had so little salt in my diet that I actually had to start consciously thinking about putting it *back*.

And I'm still depressed.

988

Yes, I've heard, thanks.

Jeremiah 23:16,17

The Lord Almighty said to the people of Jerusalem, “Do not listen to what the prophets say; they are filling you with false hopes. They tell you what they have imagined and not what I have said.  To the people who refuse to listen to what I have said, they keep saying that all will go well with them. And they tell everyone who is stubborn that disaster will never touch them.”

I said, "None of these prophets has ever known the Lord's secret thoughts. None of them has ever heard or understood his message, or ever listened or paid attention to what he said."

How long, oh Lord?

I was speaking with one of the ministers, today, and he, once again, raised the issue of me sticking with a single church.  This issue has been raised before, by other ministers, of other churches, sometimes even more directly.

Today, we discussed the issue somewhat, and the validity of that position with regard to an ordinary human social situation, noting also the fact that the church is not supposed to be an ordinary human social situation.

Afterward, on some fairly extended walking, I went over our conversation.  Several times.  I grew angrier thinking about it.  Until I realized that, in fact, I *had* tried to pick a church and settle into it.  I had picked one early on, and stayed there for a couple of months, coming very consistently.  With no particular results.  The people were friendly, yes, but I developed no particular support there.  I picked another church, and attended fairly regularly, not only the services, but also Bible studies and prayer meetings.  At the end of three months, the results were pretty much the same.  I chose another.  I attended prayer meetings, Bible studies, men's activities, and helped with the number of special events.  At the end of four months, I was actually being attacked for being depressed.  In fact, at the church whose minister I was talking to today, I had a period of more than three months, where I attended pretty consistently, attended prayer meetings, men's groups, and helped out in other ways, and at the end found that people were *avoiding* me because I was depressed.  (There's no point in my attendance where I'm actually disturbing people.)

So, in fact, I *have* stayed in one place, picked a church, attended regularly, and even more than regularly, and still have found no support in the churches of Port Alberni.  I mean, how long *should* it take?

I guess that's why I became angry, although it took me a while to realize it.

Psalm 109:21-22

But deal well with me, O Sovereign Lord,

    for the sake of your own reputation!

Rescue me

    because you are so faithful and good.

For I am poor and needy,

    and my heart is full of pain.

Merry Generic Mid-Winter (in a northern-hemispheric-centrist kind of way) Solstice Party Period

 

Review of "I Heard the Bells"

"I Heard the Bells" is supposed to be about overcoming grief.  Given the real story upon which the movie is based, it is disappointing.  Apparently, in our grief-illiterate society, one must offer a pallid grief, viewed "through a screen, darkly," kind of like a noir Hallmark movie (if that isn't a complete contradiction in terms).  They don't even use the full poem, or hymn, just the Bing Crosby version, since the full version would somewhat conflict with their version of events and motivations.

We have, instead, a series of vignettes, giving hints of grief, but not dealing with it directly.  There is one short speech, towards the end of the movie, which I found realistic and somewhat compelling, but otherwise the movie simply goes for a happy ending, without any real resolution.

I was most interested in the hypothesis, alluded to but never really developed, that Fanny editted, and even contributed to, Longfellow's poems.

Jesus Film Festival/JFF 2024

20231127 - added film schedule

20231130 - minor additions and edits

20240201 - Thursday showings removed

This is an initial, "heads-up," announcement, and will undoubtedly be subject to change.

The Jesus Film Festival will be sponsored by Holy Family/Notre Dame for 2024.  With grateful acknowledgement of funding made available from the Diocese of Victoria/Bishop’s Appeal, Holy Family/Notre Dame will be covering the cost of licencing, plus film snacks, as well as the lunch for the initial children's matinee.  (Potluck additional contributions gratefully received.)  There is no charge for attendance at any showing.

The current plan is to start with a children's matinee (preceded by lunch) on January 28th from 11:45 am to 3 pm; the film shown will be "The Miracle Maker," an animated, short, and fairly simple portrayal of Jesus' period of ministry.  This film will be followed by eight sessions of movies, on Wednesday afternoon at 1 pm.  (Thursday evening at 6 pm has been cancelled.)

See also https://albernioutreach.com/events and https://hfndpa.com/news/faith-through-film-festival for schedules and details.

(We would appreciate feedback on whether this schedule can be improved.)

Since Easter is early, this means we will have to forgo some of the movies.  The movies to be shown will be "The Miracle Maker" on the 28th, with the regular schedule starting the following Wednesday (January 31) and Thursday (February 1), with parts two, three, and four of "Jesus of Nazareth," "Godspell,"  "The Greatest Story Ever Told" in two parts, and the movie "Jesus" in two parts to finish off.  Each showing will be approximately an hour and a half to two hours, followed by discussion.

(There may be adjustments in the order of presentation, and feedback is solicited.)

(Descriptions of the movies can be found on last years posting of the screenings at https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/jesus-movie-screenings.html )

The churches of the Alberni Valley, as well as the larger community, are invited to attend, but Holy Family/Notre Dame would appreciate some advance warning of how many people may show up.  It is hoped that the churches will, as best they can, help us advertise this festival to the broader community.  (Ideas for promotion and publicity are solicited.)  There is also interest in having participation from other churches in the form of back up and/or additional discussion leaders, small group prayer leaders, etc.

(Additional ideas for the festival can be found at https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/03/jesus-film-festival.html )

For reference, this notice is posted, and will be updated, at https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/jesus-film-festivaljff-2024.html

Jan 28 - The Miracle Maker

Jan 31, Feb 1 - Jesus of Nazareth pt 2

Feb 7 - Jesus of Nazareth pt 3

Feb 14 - Jesus of Nazareth pt 4

Feb 21 - Godspell

Feb 28 - Greatest Story Ever Told pt 1

Mar 6 - Greatest Story Ever Told pt 2

Mar 13 - Jesus pt 1

Mar 20 - Jesus pt 2

Jeremiah 14:13-14

Then I said, O Lord God, their prophets are telling them that all is well—that no war or famine will come. They tell the people you will surely send them peace, that you will bless them.

Then the Lord said: The prophets are telling lies in my name. I didn’t send them or tell them to speak or give them any message. They prophesy of visions and revelations they have never seen nor heard; they speak foolishness concocted out of their own lying hearts.

Smartphones and Dopamine

No, this is not about social media and how it's addicting us to our phones.

You want a tool to let you know how good (or bad) a listener you are?

There are some naturally-occurring chemicals that affect our moods.  You all know about tryptophan, which is supposedly why you all fall asleep after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.  (The only problem being that turkey isn't really that excessively high in tryptophan, and the reason you fall asleep is because you've eaten so much dinner, regardless of what that dinner is.)  There is also the fact that phenyalanine, which we produce when we are in love, is present in chocolate.  Therefore, many theorize that those who are disappointed in love sooth themselves by eating chocolate.  (This is a case of taking perfectly good data, and drawing the wrong conclusions.  The reality is that those who insist on falling in love have insufficient chocolate in their diet.)

Dopamine is a chemical that we produce, ourselves, in many situations.  Dopamine is associated with reward.  When we produce dopamine, we reward ourselves.  It is pleasant.  It makes us happy and rewarded.  So strong is this association that anything which produces dopamine can become addictive.

Talking about ourselves exercises the part of the brain that produces dopamine.

Why should we have a mechanism that rewards us for talking about ourselves?  Probably because letting other people know about ourselves is necessary for communication.  But, of course, when taken to extreme, it can become a problem.  We get rewarded for talking about ourselves.  We like how we feel when talking about ourselves.  Talking about ourselves can become additive.  We can easily get to the point where we only talk to other people because it gives us a chance to talk about ourselves.

(And that thing the police do, using silence to get people to talk?  Well, suspects being interviewed in a police station are probably a bit stressed.  In a bid to reduce their stress, they'll probably want to do something that produces dopamine, so that they can reduce their stress and discomfort.  Talking about themselves will do that.)

You're probably part of the ninety percent who think they are better-than-average listeners.  You may even feel that you are a pretty good counsellor, even if informally, even if you only try to be good at listening to your friends, or people at church.  Trust me, it's likely that you are not.  OK, Rob, I hear you say, you've said we're not good listeners.  *We* say we are.  So far it's "he said/we said."  Prove it.

OK, I have a challenge for you.  Most of you have smartphones.  Most of those smartphones will take video.  Set them up to record a few conversations.  It may be just you having coffee with a friend.  It may be you counselling a friend.  (If so, let them know what you are doing, and get their agreement.)  Then watch the video.  Watch it all the way through.  Listen to it carefully.  Count all the times you talk about yourself.  (You should really *measure* the amount of time you are talking about yourself, but we'll start with just counting.)  Even if the story you are telling is making a point important to your friend, if it's about you, it counts.

(And remember, if this is a counselling situation, simply letting the counsellee talk about themselves means that *they* get the dopamine reward.  They get to feel good.  Isn't that the point of the exercise?)

If you're being honest, you'll probably be surprised by the result.  You may even be shocked.  I'm not going for shock, here, but you can't start to fix a problem until you realize it exists.  Once you realize that you *do* need to improve, you can start to use this tool (and move on to the measuring part) to practice and improve your listening skills.

Job 16:20

My friends scorn me,

    but I pour out my tears to God.

National Grief and Bereavement Day

Today is National Grief and Bereavement Day.

You didn't know that, did you?

Sermon slides

It's a bit weird, running the slides for the church service.  Even though I'm running the song slides, I can't really get into singing, because, if I do, I may forget to change them at the right time.

The sermon is really strange.  I'm definitely not going to daydream, because I have to change the slides at the right time.  And I have to pay attention to what the minister is saying, even if I have the typed sermon in front of me, because there's usually a last minute or on the fly modification that he or she makes, and I have to try and figure out when we are back on track and ready for the next slide.  So, on the one hand, I am listening to the sermon more closely than anyone else in the church.

But, on the other hand, I'm focussed on not missing the cue for the next slide.  So I may not be engaging with the ideas of the sermon particularly well ...

MGG - 1b.1 - Memoirs of a Grieving Gnome - Fiona

As noted, my mother was much fonder of drama than of reality.  Many people have stated that my sister Fiona's death was a defining moment for our family.  This may or may not be true, for various values of "defining," but it was definitely true that it has a massive, and often very weird, effect on our family, generally through my mother.

Mom was fond of saying that when Fiona was born, the doctors did not expect her to live to be six months old.  When she was 6 months old, the doctors did not expect her to live to be two.  When she was two, the doctors did not expect her to live to be three, etc, etc.

I don't remember all the specifics of Fiona's hospitalizations and illnesses.  I do remember that she had some strange, and regularly occurring, problem with her eyes.  She would wake up with her eyelids swollen, and some exudate encrusting her eyelashes, gluing her eyes shut.  I remember that she found some of these earlier episodes quite frightening.  Eventually it became simply a regular occurrence, and hot washcloth compresses were used to soften the encrustations on her eyes so that she could see open her eyes and see again.  I don't remember there being any particular treatment for it, and I don't remember it ever being diagnosed as anything specific.  That's what I remember about her medical condition up until she was about nine years old.

In those days we made regular trips, around Thanksgiving (which we, in Canada, celebrate at the *right* time, around the harvest period), to visit our paternal grandparents in the interior of BC.  Shortly after Fiona's ninth birthday, on one of these trips, as we were preparing to depart for Vancouver anyways, our return trip was interrupted by a visit to a hospital for Fiona.  This was the beginning of what was, eventually, a diagnosis of liver cancer.  About a half, or two thirds, of her liver was removed at that time.  I was twelve at the time of that initial hospital visit, and about thirteen when she had her operation.  In my mind that was that: she had been treated for cancer and the episode was over.  However, two years later, she had a recurrence of cancer.  Mother reported to us, in later years, that this cancer was angiosarcoma, and there had only been seven cases in the world up until that time.  Angiosarcoma is, supposedly, a cancer that spreads through the blood to metastasize to different parts of the body.  Given Mother's predilection for drama, I don't know how much of this is true.  But it was true that Fiona got very sick.  She was treated with chemo, and lost her hair, and, as was the case with girls at that time, was issued with a wig.  She didn't seem to care very much and treated the wig very cavalierly.

At one time Mother told me that all of us children in the family had higher than normal IQs.  Once again, I don't know how much of this is true because, apparently, she reported different levels of IQs to my other siblings.  In any case, whether Fiona really did have an outstanding IQ, or simply because my father worked in the educational system and knew how to apply for it, at the time of her death Fiona was enrolled in what was referred to as the Major Work Class.  This would now be considered a program for the talented and gifted.  It did mean that Fiona was not going to our local school, and was taking the bus most of the time to go to a school, rather more distant, where are the Major Work Class was held.  I mentioned this Major Work Class because it explains why my memories of Fiona, just before her death, are of her coming home from school, walking down the street from the bus stop, twirling her wig on her finger.

While the chemo held the cancer at bay for a while, eventually the cancer won.  Fiona died in November of 1969.  She was twelve at the time.  I was fifteen.  As noted previously, I didn't really know how I was supposed to feel.  I was quite confused by the whole situation, not least because Fiona had been in and out of hospital, and, in my mind, this was simply another visit, and I had absolutely no expectation that she would, actually, die.  Also as noted, absolutely nobody would talk, at least to me, about Fiona's death.  And I remember, very strongly, wanting to talk to somebody about it.

Mom and Dad decided that, with the death being so close to Christmas, the best thing to do was to avoid Christmas altogether.  Any Christmas celebration, so soon after Fiona's death, would be a major problem.  So, instead of staying home and doing the regular Christmas routine (whatever that was) Mom and Dad decided that we would take a car trip to California for two or three weeks.  So that's what we did.

Dad was a teacher, and subsequently administrator, and Mom had been a teacher briefly before they got married.  Mom had also inherited a recreational property on an island in Howe Sound near Vancouver.  Therefore vacations were not generally trips, but were spent on this island.  Any trips that we did take, did tend to be car trips, like the trips to the interior to visit our grandparents.  So car trips were not a rarity.  Indeed, during 1967, we spent the summer traveling across Canada.  All the way to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, and back.

So, the trip to California would simply one more car trip.  I remember that we visited a number of the theme parks for which California is famous.  I don't remember all of those that we visited.  I do have a vague recollection that one of them was SeaWorld.  I do specifically remember the visit to Disneyland.  However, I remember the visit to Disneyland more because I had a boil on my leg, and was carrying my then baby sister on my shoulders for most of that day.  A day or two later that boil burst, and I still have a scar on the back of my left calf, that looks something like I've been shot with a .22.

Mother has reported, at least to me, that Fiona's death nearly broke up their marriage.  I don't know about that.  What I do know is that the outcome of the decision to take an unusual trip during Christmas meant that the family seemed to encounter the trauma of Christmas without Fiona all over again the year after.

I do know that a number of people in the church gave my parents a really hard time about Fiona's death.  A number of people said, and apparently quite openly to my parents, that Fiona would not have died had my parents had sufficient faith.

When I pass various milestones in my own life, I tend to think about Fiona and wonder how she would have turned out, had she lived.  I wonder what career she would have chosen, had she chosen a career.  I wonder if she would have been a wife and mother, and what kind.  I wonder whether we would have been close friends, or whether our lives would have taken different directions.  I consider the women I know who are slightly younger than myself and therefore the same age that Fiona would have been and consider what she might have been like at this age.

Possibly Mom wondered the same questions.  At one point Mom commissioned a portrait of Fiona by one of those painters who promised to give you a picture of your loved one as they might have become.  All of us in the family find the portrait more than a little creepy.  It looks similar to how Fiona looked when she died at 12 years of age.  It's based on a picture that Mom gave to the portrait painter.  But it also has odd characteristics that are more mature than a girl of 12 years of age.  As I say, we all find the picture creepy.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/mgg-1a-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-grief.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/12/mgg-1b2-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-faith.html

Isaiah 40:31

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

I like it that the passage is in this order.  We all want to fly: it's a dream, and it requires enormous energy.  Likewise, to run; run fast and far; and exult in your strength, and speed, and not get tired, is a dream.

But I know what it is like to work to summon up the strength to take one more step, and then another, and simply to get the strength to take one more step ...

The AI Pin

The name is obviously intended to capitalize on the recent interest in generative/large language model artificial intelligence.  Equally obviously, some AI is involved, as long as you allow your definition of AI to extend to mere speech-to-text capability.

Humane's AI Pin is a smartphone.  With no screen.  Attaching to your clothing with a magnet, it can make calls, take pictures, access the Internet, and even at need, project text (presumably later it will do images) onto surfaces using lasers.

In one sense, this is what I always figured that smartphones would become.  It is styled as a "smart assistant."  If you have a human assistant, you give them orders verbally, you don't type out commands.  (Unless you're sending them texts ...)

On the other hand, as we have seen in various events to do with Siri and Alexa, this is "always on" surveillance.  The AI Pin will always be listening for commands.  (And, in common with Siri, Alexa, Gboard, and all the others, those verbal commands will be sent back to HQ for processing into text and parsing.)  By accident (and possibly by design?) it will be listening to everything that goes on around you.  (And, with the camera, possibly looking, too.)

And, if it gets popular enough, who knows what you can find out with all that aggregated data ...

Jeremiah 45:3

You have said, Woe is me! Don’t I have troubles enough already? And now the Lord has added more! I am weary of my own sighing and I find no rest.

BBC 3 - House

Okay, so, I'm new here.  How did I get to Port Alberni?  Well, my wife died.  That's what started it all.  It's kind of too bad that it worked out that way, because I think she would have liked it here.  She always loved a view of the mountains.  This goes back when she first moved to Vancouver, and, as the story goes, her father drove the family over the Lions Gate Bridge, talking about the North Shore mountains.  Well, it was raining, and he said that that was why they couldn't see the mountains.  Gloria didn't believe that a little thing like rain could prevent you from seeing something as big as a mountain.  Over the course of a few decades in Vancouver, she learned otherwise.

Her mother's favorite scripture was Psalm 121, which starts out "Unto the hills around."  So, having hills all around (and where better situated to have hills all around then in Port Alberni?) would have been a big thing for Gloria.  When we got married, she lived on the slopes of Grouse Mountain, which she always referred to as "my mountain."  (The grandchildren frequently disputed this claim.)  I have still have a piece of Gloria's mountain, because we once went to a presentation on the water tunnels being dug between the Capilano and Lynn Valley reservoirs, and the person giving the presentation had gone, that day, to the tunnel construction, and had picked up a bucket of the very large rock chips that the boring machines carved out as they were digging the tunnels.  It's from a point about six hundred feet below one of the intersections quite near to our old house in North Vancouver.

But I digress, as I am prone to do.  Once Gloria died, her pension died with her.  I, with a career history that is not so much chequered as plaid, never stayed with one company long enough to qualify for a pension.  So I was left with simply my savings and CPP.  My baby brother got very concerned about my finances, and said that I should buy a house.  Of course, in Vancouver, that's impossible.  However, Number One Daughter, while not a realtor, had worked extensively in the marketing and promotion of pre-sales.  Everyone in Vancouver knows what pre-sales are, but nobody in Port Alberni knew what they were.  So, when she found one, she figured it would be undervalued, and therefore within my price range.  So she told me to put a deposit on that.

However, that is not the house that I eventually moved into.  A little while later, I was at a trade show.  I wasn't feeling particularly well, and so I went to sit in the bathroom, to see if that would ease the situation somewhat.  I hacked the hotel's wifi.  (I'm not a security maven for nothing.)  The girls are always on WhatsApp, and so, shortly, I was explaining to them what I was doing (although not in as much detail as I'm telling you).  Number One Daughter asked if I wanted to move sooner.  I said that that was an attractive proposition, but could we talk about it on the weekend.  That particular weekend was Number One Great-grandson's first birthday, and so I was going to be traveling over to Port Alberni for it.  Did we have to decide this right now?  Number One Daughter said we had to decide this right now.  So, I bought the house, where I'm currently living, while I was sitting on the toilet.

Previously:

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-1.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/06/bbc-2.html

Others: 

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/12/bbc-4-publicity-and-promotion.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/12/bbc-5-port-alberni-time.html

Sunset

Vegan Versus First Nations

It is always a treat to go to the Reconciliaction meetings.  As usual, we generally have lunch.  Today's lunch, for various reasons, was vegan.  It was all very lovely, but there was no meat.

The First Nations participants were enjoying the meal, but did comment on the fact that there was no meat involved in it.  Some of us were trying to explain the idea of vegan food, and the various types.  I was asked to explain to some of them the various motivations behind veganism, mentioning animal cruelty is one factor.  One of the First Nations participants opined that this concern for animal cruelty was probably because we, eating store bought food, had to produce animals in small cages and pens, which was cruel.  They would simply go out and kill something.

Okay, I suppose that's one way to look at it.

But it did remind me of a story from one of the Greenpeace trips.  Of the collective of individuals, with various positions on the world, and how it should be, the vegans were used to holding the high moral ground.  As was usual with this type of crew, the vegans took over meal preparation, since it would be unfair for anybody to be making cheeseburgers with vegans on board.

As I say, the vegans are generally used to holding the high moral ground, among this particular facet of the sociopolitical spectrum.  But, on the left, there is one higher rung on the moral step-ladder: oppressed indigenous peoples.  There were First Nations participants among the crew of this particular trip.  And they were having none of this vegan crap.  They wanted *MEAT*.

So, the vegans had to back down.

Jeremiah 15:18

Why do I keep on suffering? Why are my wounds incurable? Why won't they heal? Do you intend to disappoint me like a stream that goes dry in the summer?

Death by PA drivers

Hey, how hard can it be?

You guys killed Albert five months ago, at the intersection where Wood crosses Redford and becomes 16th.  Cars in the left lane stopped, but someone swerved out into the right lane and blasted through the intersection.

Same thing happened last night, except that the driver who swerved out didn't get up to speed fast enough, and so couldn't hit me.

It's like you guys aren't even trying ...

Psalm 42

Why am I downcast?

Why is my heart discouraged?

My heart is breaking.

Not quite a review of "A Pocket Full of Happiness" by Richard E. Grant

"A Pocket Full of Happiness," by the actor Richard E. Grant, is, sporadically, a memoir, of Grant's life and work, but also his marriage to Joan Washington.  Interspersed with the memoir, about half of the content deals with Washington's cancer, and eventual death.

(Initially, I felt rather weird similarities and differences between Grant's story and my own.  Grant is a famous actor.  I am not.  Grand had eight months with his wife, while she was dying.  Gloria died in two and a half weeks, and most of that time was comatose, sleeping, or otherwise unable to speak.  But Grant and his wife were married eight months before Gloria and I were.  When Grant met his wife, she was more established in her career than he was.  Grant's wife was older than he was, and had a child when they were married.  Grant's wife died four months before Gloria died.)

While there is nothing particularly novel in this book, it makes important points about cancer, caregiving, end of life, and anticipatory grief.  It is also possibly easier to read than many of the works on those topics, as it is leavened with humour and celebrity gossip.

Ecclesiastes 12:1

Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days come, when you shall say, “I have no pleasure in them”

Depression and taxes

I have, elsewhere, noted that just keeping on going, persistence, tenacity, or just putting one foot in front of the other, is one way to deal with depression.  Myself, I developed this method of addressing depression based on Martin Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness" as a possible origin for depression.  Learned helplessness noted that forcing depressed subjects to succeed, or even appear to succeed, was a way to address and possibly alieviate depression.  (This is, problematically, somewhat at odds with one of my primary ideas about depression.  A lot of people keep asking what I am depressed about, to which I tend to reply that if you are depressed *about* something, you are not depressed, you are reacting rationally to external circumstances.)  (But I digress.)

So, I have kept doing it.  For various, and generally small, values of "it."  One of the things that I haven't been able to face, for eight months, is income taxes, the season for which started about the time my depression hit.  Last year's taxes were emotionally fraught, as an extension of the accounting which I found surprisingly emotionally fraught.

To give you the full flavour of how minor a victory this is, I have to note that I have done my own taxes for fifty years.  I did Gloria's taxes, the whole time that we were married.  Last year's emotional freighting of income tax was partly because I was doing Gloria's final income tax.  And I did it.  I did my first income tax when I was seventeen. And, on that occasion, I had to fill out the taxes as if I owned my own business, since the company that employed me, at the time, had seriously messed me about, by putting on to my T4 slip the sum total of every penny of every cheque that they had paid me, including those when they were repaying me, for purchases that I had made, at their request, on their behalf.  When you fill out the tax forms for your own business, when you have never had a business, normal taxes don't frighten you very much.  For most of the last thirty years I have also had to fill out my taxes as a small business, or for professional services.  The Canadian government has made strenuous efforts to ensure that filling out your own taxes got progressively more complicated.  On a couple of occasions I went quite a while without contracts.  I tell people that I've retired twice, and neither time did it take.  But, yes, on at least two occasions I filled out the tax forms, listing only pension income, and interest income from the bank accounts.  On both of those occasions it took longer to fill out the tax forms then it did when I was seventeen, and filling out forms as if I owned my own business.

So, I am not afraid of taxes as such.  I believe in funding the government, and government programs that benefit me.  And I know that it would be ridiculous to try and account for who uses a lot of the government benefits, because doing the accounting to track that would cost more than providing the actual services.  So I don't mind paying my income tax.  The income tax that I am due to pay.

The thing about depression is, you are depressed.  When medical people use the term depressed, they are generally talking about bodily functions that aren't working as they are supposed to.  Such and such a function is depressed means that it isn't producing what it is supposed to produce on a regular basis.  So, just at the time when all the tax forms were supposed to arrive is not the time to get depressed.  Generally depressed, meaning that every function is depressed.  Your energy is depressed.  Your motivation is depressed.  Your concentration is depressed.  Your rationality is depressed.  Just at the time when you need all systems firing at full capacity to chase down all the various forms, and the forms from the government, which they no longer send you automatically, plus the forms that your bank claims that they have sent you, but haven't sent you, because they mailed them, and they have never corrected your postal code, so the post office never delivered them.

I have been worried about not filling out my income tax.  You're supposed to fill out the income tax, even if you weren't supposed to pay very much, if anything.  Which is my usual state.  I don't usually have an awful lot of income tax to pay, because I'm not very rich, and I don't make very much money.  (I am rather bitterly amused by the continual stories of how companies are unable to hire security personnel, because they cannot find any qualified security personnel. Having worked in the field for almost forty years, and having, for more than twenty years, taught my younger colleagues how to increase their skills, and broaden their breadth of scope in the field, I have kept track of pieces of information that would justify these assertions of a lack of security personnel.  My students have not had an increasingly easier time finding high paying jobs.  The jobs that I, myself, apply for aren't having salaries firing through the roof.  No, Virginia, there is no shortage of security personnel.  There are just companies who want to winge and complain, and pay minimum salary level wages for professional services.)

At any rate, thanks to help from the girls, I was able to find an accountancy firm that was willing to do my taxes, for a not-sky-high fee.  This, the hiring of a firm to do my taxes, was something new in my experience.  I have never had to hire anyone to fill out my taxes.  I have always done it myself.  I have never used software, to fill out my taxes.  (Or, rather, I have tried several times, with various pieces of software, none of which filled the bill.  Some couldn't handle professional income.  Some couldn't handle medical expenses.  Some couldn't handle charitable donations.  Some couldn't handle RRSP contributions, for crying out loud!)  At any rate, the girls found me a firm, and the firm has, in very short order, done my taxes.  As far as I can tell they have done them correctly.  I don't really have the energy, or the concentration, to go through and double check absolutely every line of multiple pages of forms.  But I have spot checked, and it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Of course, even getting someone else to do your taxes, means getting various forms, from various places.  The accountancy is familiar with basic taxes and had me fill out a representation agreement with CRA which got them access to the forms regarding my pension.  And, presumably, the basic forms regarding my investments.  But I still had to get them copies of other forms from SW, which SW had never delivered, and has not been terribly efficient about delivering.  The manager of the local bank branch has been much more helpful, even though SW is supposed to be the office that I deal with.

However, SW has not been terribly useful over the years.  SW got me to switch over to them, at a very vulnerable time in my life, immediately after Gloria had died.  They fed me a sales pitch, two parts of which were particularly appealing at that point in time, just after I had filled out Gloria's final income tax: that of a promise of assistance with income taxes, and the promise that I could write off their fees banking fees brokerage fees and other investment fees, which I couldn't do with the investments that I had with the bank itself.  This turns out to be a crock.

My first Portfolio Manager was a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA).  In the first six months I was with SW, my investments lost a quarter of their value.  Just at the time I need to cash out in order to complete the house purchase.  Which they knew about.

For another thing, it turns out that SW provides you with absolutely no assistance in dealing with taxes, other than charging you fees, which you can write off against your income tax, if you know has to do that.  Which, of course, I didn't.  And, it turns out that you cannot write off all of the fees: only those fees for non-registered accounts.  Just about all of my savings is in registered accounts.  So, rather than being able to write off $10,000, I was able to write off only a bit more than a mingy $600.  And how do you do that?  Well, I don't know.  SW promised that they were going to send me instructions on how to do that, but they never did.

Don't want to be here

One of the grief accounts had a long list of "life advice," starting with being kind to people (which I can go along with), but including this bit about checking for lumps and slathering on suncream to keep from getting killed by silly things, so I started to cry, because I'm willing to be killed by any silly or stupid thing, because I don't want to be here right now ...

MGG - 1a - Memoirs of a Grieving Gnome - Grief

Gloria's death was not my first grief rodeo.  I lost my favorite cousin when I was seven.  This may be unfair to my other cousins, but she was eight, and therefore close in age, and we saw them quite regularly: possibly as early as every couple of weeks.  I can remember the drive to see them.  In my memory, it is a long dark mysterious route.  Looking back on it, it was only about a little over half a mile into deepest darkest South Burnaby, from our home in Southlands, traveling along Marine Drive, which probably now has even less traffic than it did then, since most of the traffic has been removed to the new Marine Way.

I lost my favorite sister when I was fifteen.  That is definitely unfair to my other sisters, since, until shortly before she died, at the age of twelve, she was my only sister.  She had been sick with various ailments since she was a baby, and had been in and out of hospital.  So, when she went into hospital this time, I didn't think it was any big deal.  Even though she had had cancer previously.  She had had liver cancer, and they had removed two thirds of her liver.  One would have thought that that would have fixed it.  But two years later it came back and it fixed her.

I do, very vividly, recall my grief at that time.  It was of course, strange, and I didn't feel what I thought I was supposed to feel.  But what I do recall is that absolutely nobody, but nobody, was willing to talk to me about Fiona.  And I was desperate to talk about her.

So, when my favorite grandmother died, about three years later, I was a bit more prepared.  I knew that nobody would talk about it.  My grandmother died while I was at the Older Boys Parliament of BC.  I was not told, and did not know of her initial stroke, nor of her few days in hospital.  I was only informed, and a family friend sent to fetch me and put me on the ferry, when my grandmother had actually died.

By the time my paternal grandfather, and then paternal grandmother, died, I was getting used to this.  Not only the fact that no one would speak of it, beyond the hushed "My condolences," which I would later learn to translate as "I don't want to talk about it!" but also the fact that my parents were the only ones who are allowed to be in attendance at a death.  My parents would then fill us in on the story of that particular death.  A story, which we were later to learn, was largely fictitious.

When my father died, my mother was, briefly, away from the hospital.  My little brother and I were, therefore, allowed to be with my father when he died.  I was actually able to see my father in the moment of his death.  That was a grace that is hard to explain, but, after all of the fictional stories that we have been told about the other deaths, it was a blessing.  (Of course, my mother never forgave me for the fact that I was there, and she wasn't.)

My father's death was not a big surprise.  He had had failed brain surgery, ironically to prevent the occurrence of a major stroke, which left him with effects very similar to an absolutely massive stroke.  He had major problems with communication, and, as far as we could tell, with cognition as well.  With the impairments in communication, it was difficult to assess his level of cognitive skill.  Essentially he was lost to us after the surgery.  When he finally stopped breathing, almost exactly seven years later, it was only closure on an already existing fact.  I had, in fact (and I mean this quite literally), written his eulogy seven years earlier after the surgery.

And, I should mention, that a few months before Gloria died, my mother died as well.  She had had a stroke shortly before the CoVID pandemic hit.  It was rather ironic: some months previously mother had had a fall and, because of poor hygiene with an eye procedure, which resulted in the loss of most vision in that eye, mother squinted that eye, rather like a pirate.  Therefore, when she had a fall, the staff at her residence, and at the hospital, assumed that she had had a stroke, and that the facial contortion was due to the stroke, rather than her screwing up her eye.  When she *did* have a major stroke, just before the pandemic hit, it affected the side of her face with the problematic eye.  Therefore, mother no longer had the muscular control to screw that eye shut.  Therefore, the hospital staff didn't actually think that she had had a stroke, because she didn't look like she had had a stroke: she looked normal.

She had had a stroke of course. And she went pretty steadily downhill over the course of the pandemic.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-1-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-early.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/mgg-1b1-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-fiona.html