Far Left Inconsistency

How come the people on the far left spend so much effort promoting “Constitutional Separation of Church and State” which does not, in fact, exist in the Constitution of the United States; and yet they also spend great effort to deny “the Right to Bear Arms” of an individual, which IS in the Constitution?

There’s an agenda, there. They negate the Constitution on at least two counts.

I’ll tell you what. This isn’t original with me, but – “I’ll use my Second Amendment rights to defend your First Amendment Rights – if you’ll use your First Amendment rights to defend my Second Amendment rights.”

The Constitution is of a piece – you either accept the whole thing, or you don’t. If you don’t, feel free to leave.

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New CHL Laws in Texas

I have a Texas CHL (Concealed Handgun License). Therefore, I try to keep up with the latest and greatest laws that pertain thereto. The following is in the current book (ls-16.pdf) published by the government for the purpose:

PC 9.34 PROTECTION OF LIFE OR HEALTH.
(a) …
(b) A person is justified in using both force and deadly force against another when and to the degree he reasonably believes the force or deadly force is immediately necessary to preserve the other’s life in an emergency.

OK, so… I can kill somebody dead in order to save their life?

Okee – Dokee, now.

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Engineering Companies

I am in the position of quoting projects to customers of all sorts. Most of the time, this is a fairly benign process – the customer tells you what he wants, you do design work if necessary, and figure out the cost and how long it will take to provide the product. In our case, the product is pumps, or pump systems mounted on a base. We take our cost, apply a percentage to it, and tell the customer how much and when. They buy the pumps, we fill the order, and everybody is happy (usually).

When dealing with an engineering company, you run up against a paper mill that is nothing short of incredible. We just got an order for three vertical turbine pumps. That’s it – just three pumps. These are by no means huge pumps, but the order is for about a quarter of a million dollars. Our supplier can build these pumps easily in about 18 weeks. The order’s ship date is some 11 months in the future, so delivery is no problem. Easy.

Except – the request for quotation came with specifications 1 1/2″ thick – I just measured it. For three pumps. Now that we have the order, the specifications that came with the order measures about 1″ thick – so the bidding process thinned it down a bit. There is a list of documentation required with 85 line items on it, 3 1/2 pages long. For three pumps!

That list has items like “Barge Load Plan”, and “Past Experience”, and “Preliminary Training Plans”, and “Final Training Plans”. For three pumps!

I have around 20 subdirectories on my hard drive with documents that went back and forth in the six months it’s taken just to quote this job. 44 MB of data – before we even got the job!

The end user is paying an awful lot of money for a crew of engineers and MBA’s and lawyers and clerks to generate all that paperwork, and then to require us to provide even more paperwork, for three pumps. The overhead cost to the customer on this must exceed the price of the pumps by a fair amount, in terms of salaries, organization, office space, etc. But it will be very, very well documented.

They could save an incredible amount of money if the facility engineer just called us up, gave us his design characteristics, let us select a pump, provide our warranty, fill the order, and be done with it. But instead, I’m going to have to hassle with these three pumps until this time next year! The pumps will outweigh the paperwork – but maybe not by much. And all of it will have to pass through my hands.

Oh well, it’s a living.

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Pacifism – Wrong!

Violence is something that exists in life, and sooner or later all of us will be confronted with it on some level. Many people are taught to submit when confronted with violence. These people tend to believe that in order to be ‘peaceful’ they must never be aggressive themselves. After all, Jesus said ‘turn the other cheek’. These people are taught, falsely, that if they submit, the bad guys will not hurt them. But that puts the decision about your welfare in someone else’s hands – and at best, that someone has already demonstrated zero respect of you and your rights.

In some cases, this may work as a survival strategy, but by definition it puts you at the mercy of the aggressor. Pacifism is not a survival strategy in the real world – it only works when EVERYBODY is a pacifist. One aggressive individual in a room full of pacifists is THE BOSS, and the pacifists have no rights.

It is appropriate and moral to be aggressive in response to an attack. The basis of this morality is in not being the initiator of the conflict.

A careful reading of the Bible shows that ‘turning the other cheek’ means to not respond to insults or other similar provocation with force. But when the provocation escalates to bodily harm to you or other innocents, or even hurting you in a financial way by stealing what is yours, then you have the moral right and obligation to defend yourself. A truly excellent treatment of this subject can be found at The Cornered Cat. Highly, highly recommended.

It is possible and right to be a non-pacifist, deal from a position of strength, and still be a moral person who loves God.

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Church Management – an Unflattering Look

I’ve been going to the same church since 1975. I’ve been there through half a dozen preachers. So I get a pretty good feel for what goes on.

Recently, two or three (very new) members of the church have aggressively promoted themselves to the (fairly new) preacher. You might say they’ve ‘gotten in good’ with him. For brevity, I will refer to this group as the ‘cabal’. The cabal is pushing for a multi-media program for the church, in which (of course) they play a central part. The preacher has committed himself to this program in a big way.

First, the cabal promoted implementation of a projection system in the church sanctuary, to the tune of around $16,000. It was voted on and passed, and that was OK and reasonable. Many of us didn’t see why we needed it, but there wasn’t a really good reason not to do this, so it was voted on and passed. It’s working now, too, but suffering a number of growing pains that are sometimes comical, such as lack of coordination with the music director. Final cost around $20,000 after associated expenses.

This system was purchased based on one quotation. This is absolutely awful business practice, not to imply anything else.

Funny how it worked out that, a month or so later, we suddenly had to have a new sound system to go with the projection system – around another $20,000. This wasn’t mentioned or promoted until after the projection system was in place.

Another purchase based on one quotation – to the same company as before.

This next part involves some conjecture. I would lay very heavy odds that the cabal planned both of these at the same time, but broke it up into two portions in order to get them passed in the church business meetings – it’s unlikely that the church would have gone for the combined price in one pass. If this is true (about which, to be fair, I have no proof), then I think it was dishonest of them to conceal the full cost of the program from the church at the very beginning. Because of the timing, I do think it was planned in advance. So, in my view, the cabal is manipulating the church to bring about changes that, taken together, probably would not have been approved by the church body.

If I am correct, the cabal is manipulating the church body, to achieve their own goals. If I am not correct, the sudden additional need for a sound system represents mismanagement, poor business practice (1 bid?), and poor planning at best. And it’s really peculiar that we’ve now spent around $36,000 to $40,000 on a project introduced by people who haven’t been members of our church but a few months. The total of these expenditures is about 1/3 of the church’s total cash reserves, as listed in the last business report.

The next thing to happen is the cabal’s expressed desire to take control of the church website, which was created at the request of the church a little over a year ago. The access codes were turned over to the cabal by the author without delay. Although a complete website was already in place, I was surprised to see that the very next day, the entire website is gone, replaced with a single placeholder page promising a whole new site in three months. Now, the site could have been left in place until they were ready to implement the new one, but instead they chose to destroy it.

The cabal may be able to do a better website than existed before. If so, good. But there wasn’t anything wrong with the old one, and it represented many hours and days of work. Furthermore, they blew it away three months before they plan to have anything to replace it with. They were in a hurry to get rid of it. An old site is better than no site, in my mind.

There are at least a couple of other issues of which I am aware, but in one case I do not have permission of the involved persons to discuss it, and in another I do not have enough confirmed and verifiable information. My intent here is to convey only incidents for which I have both solid knowledge and when appropriate, permission of the sources.

So, in summary – a very small group of very new people, along with a fairly new preacher, are now in direct control of every form of communication and publishing our church has. There is some possibility of deliberate manipulation of the church body. And there is some question as to the wisdom of certain business practices.

Bending over backwards to be fair, I suppose that some of this could be subject to a different interpretation. But this account shows how it looks from where I’m sitting. This whole situation is, at best, a stewardship problem – and at worst, something much worse.

Not a very flattering view of the management at my church. This is a true account of recent events at our church, but I have named no names – not even the name of the church. This is to protect the innocent, as well as myself.

I haven’t posted this out of spite, or anger; but if there’s one place that you should be able to find openness and truth, it is your own church; and just at the moment, I feel a little sick about it, instead.

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Violence!

I just read an article describing how many Utah schools are either not commemorating 9/11 or are downplaying it. The text of the article stated, regarding the children, “we don’t want them to dwell on violence”.

It occurs to me that, though we all want to protect our children from violence, hiding it from them may be a mistake of major proportions. After all, it is a violent world!

Now, I’m not saying we should support violence, or put a positive spin on it. But I am saying that our children will have to learn how to deal with it at some point in their lives. The ability to deal with violence, both emotionally and physically, needs to be part of the training and education of every person, so that when confronted with it, a reasoned response can be generated.

This might be anything from calming down someone who is about to go ballistic, all the way to taking the initiative to defend yourself when physically attacked instead of just giving up. Right now, so many people are being taught that, when attacked, give the aggressor what he wants and he will go away. Sometimes it does happen like that. But many times, it does not. As witness the Virginia Tech massacre. Some of the students and teachers were mentally prepared to defend themselves – and some were not. Particularly in an execution scenario, doing nothing is not a survival strategy that works.

I believe that educating people about violence would improve the ratio of those able to defend themselves, if done correctly. And I think we would become a healthier society because of this. Denying that violence exists will not make it go away – therefore it is absolutely necessary to learn how to deal with it.

God help us if we ever get a U.S. President that believes in going belly-up at the first sign of aggression.

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Jump!

Howdy, Everybody;

Well, our customer said Frog again, and we Jumped again!

Got a call yesterday just before lunch that they wanted us on site to startup the pumps, again. So we called everybody to meet us there, same as last time, and left the office just before lunch. Three hours later, back on job site. At first glance, things looked pretty good. But it turned out that most of the emergency shutdown sensors weren’t installed.

When the controls man showed up, about 3:30 pm, and then the pump manufacturer’s crew showed up around 4:00 pm, things began to move. It turns out that, because of the shutdown sensors not being wired in, the only way to run the pumps for startup was manually via the variable frequency drive controls. So after checking rotation on the motor (which was marked backwards – whee!) the pump guy bolted up the shaft coupling, and we started running the pump manually. They had enough water in the tank for around an hour of run time.

The pump worked as advertised. But we were unable to get the PID control loop setup to control the pump motor RPM according to the flowmeter reading compared to a set point. While we were struggling with that, the pump guys found a problem with the second pump, that they started working on.

That’s about where we were when we lost the light and had to quit. So we headed home, arriving around 11 pm.

When we were up there Saturday, it was clear and hot. On this trip, it drizzled all day long. Today it is even worse, and G is going back to the job site to complete the setup. I wasn’t needed for this trip. I hope he has better luck than we’ve been having.

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Confusion on the Job

Howdy, Everybody;

It was supposed to be a three-day weekend (Labor Day), but one of our major customers wanted to do a start-up on a pump system located a couple hundred miles from here, on Saturday. It worked out that I needed to take my Jeep, so I got up at 5 AM, left as soon as I could get ready, taking my one cup of coffee with me.

Let me tell you about coffee – if I don’t get that first cup of coffee, it is not safe for me to be on the road. Besides that, I get the standard caffeine headache if I don’t get enough in the mornings. Usually I drink 3-4 cups, but on this day I only got one. Amazingly enough, I didn’t get a headache that day.

In any case, my GPS took me directly to the job site about three hours later, arriving around 8:30 AM. My boss, G, was there about an hour ahead of me. He’s way more energetic than I am. Also younger. When I caught up with him, he told me they weren’t ready for us, by a long shot. See, to dial in the controls on these pumps, certain things have to be done. There was steady work being done by a herd of electricians, but they were still wiring in the controls, and the two 600 HP motors. The flow meters and level detectors weren’t wired up. For that matter, the level detectors hadn’t even been installed. And finally, the tanks need to have a lot of water in them so we’d have something to pump. There was maybe 2 – 3 feet of water in the tanks – nowhere near enough. At least a couple of days worth of work.

We had a controls programming guy flying in from somewhere – he was at the local airport. We also had two people there from the pump manufacturer, who drove about 500 miles to get there. There was me and G who each drove 200 miles one way to get there. And there was a level detector rep also supposed to be on his way, also from our area.

So, we all sat around for a couple of hours waiting for the customer’s manager to show up. I took a whole lot of digital pictures, as we find them immensely useful at times, and then cooled my heels waiting. Had to move down the concrete curb we were sitting on every so often as the shadows moved. Watched this ant crawl around wondering how the heck he wound up in this rocky desert (they spread crushed rock all over the job site for a driving surface).

Eventually, the manager (J) showed up. I understand he’s over several sites like this in the area. Anyhow, he and G walked around looking at stuff and in a few minutes he had agreed we weren’t doing anything useful by being there today, and it would probably be Tuesday at the soonest and maybe later. So we were dismissed.

So we scattered, all going our separate directions. G went to meet his family in the Houston area for the holiday – I went back home, arriving around 3 PM. Had to stop and walk around several times on the way back when I was trying to nod off. Driving always puts me to sleep, especially in the afternoons and evenings.

All of this business is, of course, finance driven. Ultimately the customer knows that every day he is not pumping, he’s losing money. So that justifies it, in their minds. And from my company’s standpoint, willingness to jump when the customer says frog is part of our customer service. We get business that others don’t get, because of it. Again, finance driven.

I don’t mind doing what I need to do – as long as the effort isn’t wasted. I am more than a little perturbed because our customer apparently thinks so little of our efforts that they don’t care if they waste them.
Why did this false alarm happen? It is simply not possible that the people on site didn’t realize they weren’t ready. I’m not going to speculate on the actual reasons, but it surely demonstrates two things – amazing lack of coordination on our customer’s part; and a likewise amazing indifference to the disruption of personal plans of the several people (and their families!) who’s time was wasted and who’s holiday weekends were wrecked, completely without reason.

As for me personally, I’m not really mad about it in this case. As it happened, the only plans of mine that were disrupted (this time) was a work day around the house. I’m certain that no malice was involved, and G was operating on the information given to him. It just frustrates me how wasteful the whole thing was. I place high value on my time off work – I work to live, I don’t live to work. But if G requires me to be somewhere on a Saturday, that’s where I’ll be if I can. Besides being my boss, he is my friend – a unique relationship, in my experience.

But the next time this customer shouts ‘frog’, I may not be quite so quick to jump. What goes around comes around.

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