Huge thanks to Bill for bringing us together, and for providing this new place where we can meet, connect, and start building a future worth having – something I’ve yearned for but never expected to see!
Brief self-introduction in the spirit of getting to know each other: I’ve been an enthusiastic follower, promoter, and grateful supporter of Bill’s work since finding Eject! Eject! Eject! and Silent America back in 2002. Bill, you shone your unique light on things and lifted me up when I needed it most, and for that I will count myself forever in your debt.
I grew up in West L.A. (Pico & Overland) during the 70s and 80s, and spent 30 years total living in urban California, both southern and northern. So Bill’s dispatches from the foot of “Mount Doom” resonate with me in a particularly personal way. I am grateful to have left the state in 2011, and have been much happier as a result. New Jersey is far from a conservative/libertarian stronghold, and took another turn toward Progressivism last election, but the people I meet and interact with daily are generally nice, cars aren’t plastered with angry bumper stickers cursing my kind, and I much more rarely find myself assailed by conversations that turn to “those people” who are the problem with everything. It’s produced a marked and much needed improvement in my outlook and well-being.
I do dream of a place out in the mountains someday – Montana or Wyoming, maybe? I have loved visiting that region and feeling the sense of the old frontier reach out to my soul across time — an experience that, together with Bill’s encouragement to seek other ways to get messaging into the culture, moved me to launch “The No Fear Pioneer”, a podcast that I hope to resume someday soon.
I develop software for fun and profit, which has the benefit that my workspace is portable. I worked briefly in videogame development long ago, and for most of the past 17 years on developer frameworks for a fruit company that makes computers. I’m also the author of a Mac writing app called TypeMetal, that speaks HTML and WordPress.
In school, I studied physics (undergrad, with some lab and computer modeling experience), and I maintain an enthusiastic interest in and fascination with all areas of scientific discovery and engineering. With two bright and self-motivated young sons (10 and 6) and a formative experience of having to get my own education back on track due in good part to failures of public school education that derailed me for several years (story for another time), I have a strong interest in home schooling and other educational alternatives. My own positive experiences with self-teaching (first in programming, then physics) feed into that interest and underpin my hope for better approaches.
Among Bill’s work, two particularly compelling ideas that have especially stuck with me are that of building “parallel institutions”, and the notion that we are a frontier culture in need of new frontiers. I want to contribute in whatever ways I can to developing and implementing the first idea, and to formulating suitably bold plans to address the second. I am eager to connect with others who share these aims.
I’m an optimist at heart, but my curent take on the state of things is going to sound super pessimistic. I don’t think that Progressivism can be stopped. I don’t think the record of the past ~100 years shows that we can do any more than slow the bleeding. Reversals are short-lived. Incrementalism is a powerful phenomenon, that has snuck in political changes our populace would never have accepted all at once. People today are willing and eager to vote themselves into subservicence to a collectivized model of society and a nanny state that guarantees them safety, security, and freedom from life’s challenges. We cannot hope to rebuild a courageous, frontier culture from a population that is tempermentally no longer suited to accepting risk as the price of Freedom. I wish it were otherwise, but that is my sobering take. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong in this conclusion, and I will continue to fight happily alongside all of you to keep this beloved country of ours as free as we possibly can for as long as we can.
The gem of good news I found amid this gloomy conclusion is that incrementalism is only effective against a stationary target. When some subset of the population decides to abandon a purely reactive posture and dedicates its work to the reaching and developing new frontiers, as I believe will happen, all bets are off and the whole game will change. The results are going to be something truly extraordinary to behold.
Now, anyone who thinks I’m crazy enough to put forth the idea of colonizing worlds beyond Earth is going to be exactly correct. It’s not the only option (seasteading, anyone?), but it’s an idea that has energized me for a long time, and I believe the way to win this one is to start thinking with bigger ambitions again — ambitions that are worthy of our indomitable spirit and pioneering heritage. So please bear with me in pondering this lofty goal, and give some thought to what the results of success would mean.
Progressives demand “Change” with great urgency. We will show them Change far bigger than they are prepared for – “radical” change; a hard reset to a free-wheeling, fun-loving, individualistic culture that will thrive just as the USA in its beginnings thrived. We will pioneer a reignition of the American experiment in harsh and hostile but wide-open new worlds, and those who fear uncertainty will be loath to follow.
It was this realization that finally fished me out of my gloom during Obama’s second term — that, since America is an idea, it is within our power to remake it in the time and place of our choosing. Bill’s 2012 “A New Beginning…” and “Where do we go now?” talks helped plant the seeds of these ideas in my mind, and they have made all the difference. I’ve decided that pushing back the tide of incrementalism bit by bit is a game for suckers. We need to have and pursue a bigger, much more ambitious vision than staying put, holding the line, and playing a game of constant attrition. We’re going places, and have things to do there.
America’s founding generations, from the first settlers to those who birthed this free republic, were able to be free precisely because they were willing to go where others feared to tread. This self-selecting filter may be our only hope of jettisoning the accretion of socio-political oxides that has become such a drag on our ability to achieve and enjoy the results. I believe the onus is now on those of us who don’t wish to live in a “progressive” society or a “social democracy” to seek and develop the next places. It’s time to start over, and to do so cheerfully – with our spirits lifted by the knowledge of what we are creating. I’ve grown impatient with “think tanks”. What we need is a “do tank”. Lots of them. Pioneering, exploring, and innovating independently and each with a free hand. Some on Mars or the Moon, perhaps. Some in orbit. Some in remote wilderness, or on the open ocean. These ideas will be derided as particularly crazy by those who choose not to go, and that is fine with me.
I am grateful to be here among you all, by the grace of Bill. I look forward to learning about what drives and interests each of you, your perspectives, and the problems you may be seeking to solve. See you on Stratosphere Lounge chat, and around the site. And feel free to connect elsewhere: I’m @kulak76 on Twitter and Gab (never did join Facebook), I write longer stuff on occasion at Fearless Dream, and I recently launched Able Up to have a separate place to post about personal growth. I have some hope of being able to cross the political divide there, to help foster the growing culture of competence that I know we all seek.
Ad astra!
Troy
17 replies on “Hello, friends!”
We have similar backgrounds, being that I’m a physics person who went into radar and missile systems design (Boeing Defense and Sperry Microwave Systems doing control s/w, target detection and classification s/w, sensor fusion suite s/w) until migrating to commercial Boeing in ’91 where I did ‘advanced research’ in manufacturing methods (machine vision, ultrasound, etc.)
I’m planning to do a long blog post sometime soon about Musk’s dream to get to Mars, and the utter necessity of becoming a multiplanet species — a topic that needs to be carefully explained to people because they just don’t seem to have the imagination to see where we are inevitably headed. I, like you, don’t think progressivism can be stopped short of a global war that reduces civilization back to pre-feudal existence. I also have believed for quite some time that we need new frontiers, and guess what, we have the biggest one there is staring back at us every time we look up at night.
I have been ecstatic about the meteoric rise of the commercial space industry. There is hope, for reals! Thank God.
By the way, SpaceX is a “do tank”. It would never even occur to a think tank to build a spaceship in a field. Every one of the small industries that are springing up all over are “do tanks”, so take heart. We are seeing a rebirth of loner industrialism, such as we had at the end of the 19th century. Of course the leftist hive mentalities hate it (they spit on individualism).
A fantastic time to be alive.
[BTW: About seasteading, I believe there would be more efforts along that direction if one could solve the problem of piracy. True seasteading isn’t done under the protection of some nation or another (because you would be subject to the same socialist government’s whims), but unless you spend a ginormous amount of cash building in defense systems you are sitting ducks. Solutions? Space may be harder to get to, but at least for now we don’t have that problem. (Although I can certainly imagine someplace like China showing up at a base and saying, “this is ours now”.) I can see my expertise in Defense and Space turning into working on Defense IN Space…]
Steve, you’re a man after my own heart. I’ve been enjoying your posts, and I look forward to the one about Musk’s Mars plan! You are absolutely right that we have some highly active and innovative “do tanks” at work in private aerospace right now, and I’ve become a huge fan of SpaceX in particular, due in no small part to Musk’s long-term vision for all of this. I faithfully put SpaceX launches in my calendar and make a point of watching every one live, usually together with my sons. I’ve kept archived video of most of them. I show the Falcon Heavy dual-booster landing to everyone who doesn’t immediatley run away when I pull out my phone. I fuel my creative work with Test Shot Starfish: Music for Space (which would make great Stratosphere Lounge lead-in music by the way, Bill!). I get a massive surge of hope and determination watching this video, which I come back to often to check my bearings. “The Dream,” in my estimation, is now very much alive, and I believe that is going to make all the difference.
While I don’t think the advance of Progressivism can be stopped (rust never sleeps), I do hold out hope that the opening of new frontiers will pave the way to an amicable (or at least indifferent) parting of ways, in a “we shall go from you in peace, and forget you were our countrymen” sense. We will continue to hear complaints and ridicule from those who’d like to control what everyone does, but in the end we’ll be doing them a favor they should thank us for, making the place more “progressive” by our departure. We’ve had a good run here in the USA, and it’s still free enough to make a good staging area for the leap to our next destinations.
The point you raise regarding seasteading has been the main issue on my mind, apart from the threat of hazardous weather and waves. Seems like seasteaders would live by the good graces of the U.S. Navy, benefitting from their patrolling of the seas but having no other significant means of defense if some major power (or just a bunch of pirates) decided to come along and plunder or seize the livelihoods they’d built. Too many unanswered questions there, though I’ve only recently become aware of the movement and started to look into it. An ocean of vacuum between us and potential plunder does seem like a a much greater assurance of being left alone unmenaced.
There is something about the pioneer impulse that deeply stirs my soul, and I’ve begun to see that I do not come to that by mere accident. There are frontiersmen among my family – from Mormon hand-cart pioneers back to British and Norwegian seafarers (Vikings, perhaps!). Moreover, the idea is the foundation of the very country and culture I have loved all my life.
I am glad to know you and look forward to reading your further postings here, Steve! Thank you for replying!
Hey, Troy. It’s very nice to officially meet you. You’ve lived an extremely interesting life. Mine will pale in comparison.
I am originally from Yonkers, NY. It’s a suburb of New York City. I currently reside in North Carolina, and now consider myself a Southern gal, although I’m told my New York accent comes through, at times.
I am a special education teacher by trade and calling. It’s what I was meant to do. I began my career as a progressive, so I fit right in. Actually, I considered myself apolitical, but my tendencies went to the hard left, like my colleagues. I didn’t think about it because it was pervasive throughout the environment I immersed myself in. The people, ideas, and educational philosophies I dealt with daily were left leaning, and I just went with the flow.
It wasn’t until a fellow troll (a college professor, of all things), started talking about the destructive nature of leftist ideals that I began examining politics. I discovered I was becoming a centrist, through his tutelage. The more I read and thought for myself, the further right I became. I liken it to finally emerging from Plato’s Cave. However, I stayed in the closet at work. No one knew I had jumped the political ship.
It wasn’t until I discovered Bill at about 2013 that I began to gain the courage to be myself at work. Slowly I started letting my true nature out, and now everyone knows my politics. I don’t advertise them, but when appropriate, I hold my ground. It has made teaching harder, though. I no longer feel like I fit in. I’m a Stranger in a Strange Land. In some ways, it would have been easier to stay in The Cave. I would still have that feeling of “we’re all in this together” that sustained me through my career. My colleagues and I, so I thought, were fighting for truth, justice, and the multicultural way.
After the Parkland shooting, there was an anti 2A rally at the high school where I teach. There was a lot of NRA bashing. I had enough of that, so I stood up, and proudly announced that generalizing NRA members as brainless hicks was an ignorant stereotype, for I was a member myself. In front of the principal. I attribute that courage to what I learned from Bill. (One of the Assistant Principals, who didn’t give me the time of day before the rally, now is overly nice to me. I think he’s afraid I’m gonna cap his ass if I get mad at him. Haha).
It was at that moment when I truly felt Plato’s Cave was permanently closed to me. There was no going back.
Through Bill, I got to know Scott and Steve, both just as important in my political and spiritual development, but in different ways. Suffice it to say that Bill gave me my political life, and Scott helped me find my eternal Life.
That’s me in a nutshell. A very long nutshell. Sorry about that.
–Cheryl
Well said. Did it ever occur to you that possibly the Assistant Principal secretly agrees with you, and thus his current attitude?
My wife was a Gifted Ed (bastard sibling of Special Ed) teacher, until the insanity of the administrations drove her to drop the career. Unfortunately, she had a stroke two years ago and can no longer talk or write, otherwise I’d get the two of you together to swap stories (such as the time she had to take a loaded and cocked .45 away from a student who was going to shoot herself in class).
I am sorry to hear your wife is ill, Steve. I’m sure swapping stories of life in the school trenches would have been fun for the both of us.
Both you and Troy have had fascinating careers. Really looking forward to reading the blogs those careers will inspire.
Engineering is fun. I’m glad I fell into that kind of career, instead of getting a real job 😉
I struggle with teaching my kids beginning algebra. The math needed for engineering would break my brain, I think. Ha!
Math is not taught well. It’s not that hard if you “get” it. People end up concentrating on the symbols, instead of thinking about the concepts they represent (it all can be said in English, but with 100x more space). It’s just a descriptive language with its own shorthand.
I think math should be taught right next to the things you use it for, so you can get a feel for the underlying principles. Like algebra should be taught at the same time as simple physics.
I hear ya, Steve, but all those strategies wouldn’t make it easier for me. I’m just not wired for numbers. 😀
LOL! That’s why you have problems! Math isn’t about numbers (it’s about relationships)! But some teachers think it is…
Cheryl, do you have access to iPads or the like? My kids learned algebra playing Dragon Box without realizing that’s what they were doing! Brilliantly designed and fun app!
I checked out the app, and it’s amazing! I would have to download it onto our laptops, which has Windows. I need to find out what version of Windows we have. But once I do, I will be downloading it onto all our laptops.
It’s perfect for my guys! We have learned how to balance equations with very basic numbers, and the way it’s presented on Dragon Box will enable them to go even further.
Thank you so much for that piece of info, Troy! I’m always looking for new resources.
Believe it or not, even my lowest students can navigate their way around an iPad. It is astounding what they know.
So glad that helped! I recommend Dragon Box far and wide; it has been so great for our kids. Great that there’s a Windows version you can use in the classroom — I wasn’t even aware of it!
Happy to meet you too, Cheryl! My hat’s off to you for your work with special needs kids. That’s a noble profession and a unique calling that takes a lot of heart. I don’t doubt for a moment that your dedication makes all the difference to the lives you touch.
I also admire your courage in “coming out” to stand ground on your principles in politically left surroundings. I know how hard that can be. Your example will quite possibly show others who may never have questioned their beliefs that another perspective is possible. Good work.
I fear I’ll ramble, but I’ll give the best short version of my own political journey that I can. Growing up in L.A., I think I just wasn’t aware of the severity of political divides among Americans, though the evidence may well have been around me had my eyes and ears been open. Nobody in my extended family wore their politics on their sleeve or brought it up at Thanksgiving dinners; I’m sure that’s a big reason that I remained somewhat happily oblivious to the great chasm of thought. Maybe said chasm also wasn’t as large then as it is now, though I am skeptical of that take, having seen how far back the roots of our present undoings go. I have also seen how skillfully the political left can wear the veneer of American patriotism, while surreptitiously working to undermine our institutions. On the surface at least, it seemed to me back then that whatever our differences, we shared a common devotion to and love of America’s founding principles, and a determination to live in and celebrate freedom. I remember people making jokes about Reagan and what a dummy he supposedly was. I shrugged and figured people made jokes about every president. I grew up under the looming fear of an apocalyptic nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and I figured people’s understandable worry about that danger manifested itself in odd ways sometimes. It never occurred to me that, at the end of the day, others didn’t ultimately share my love and admiration for this man who clearly loved the USA and our way of life as much as I did. I was also aware of the plight of Soviet dissidents (wasn’t everyone?), and I wanted our resolve and example to help light the way for others, who I hoped would one day live in freedom as we do. I had been to Czechoslovakia visiting family in 1986; I had seen the dark backside of the iron curtain with my own eyes. It was real to me.
When I reached voting age, I didn’t start out with a predisposed animosity to either party. I listened to candidates’ ideas, and tried to evaluate them for myself. It would probably be mostly accurate to say I started out as a “default liberal”, as Andrew Breitbart described it in “Righteous Indignation” – pretty much what you’d expect to get from marinating in my cultural surroundings of the time. (Talk about a relatable story for me to read! I was floored by how much I identified with Andrew’s tale, having grown up in the exact same places in L.A. at nearly the same time!) Intuitively, I had some conservative tendencies too (fiscal conservatism and desire for a strong defense, along with opposition to communism that I would never have thought of as “conservative” but simply assumed as what any freedom-loving American would feel), and I ended up a fan of Ross Perot. It kind of kills me that I can’t now remember whether I cast my 1992 vote for Perot or Clinton, but I remember being taken in by Clinton’s charm in TV appearances, and figuring (without having done much informed thinking) he would be an OK alternative.
The dominant cultural messaging did have the effect of nudging me leftward, even as I was a fish unaware of the water I swam in. I remember being warned by the general zeitgeist that America was endangered by a bunch of uptight, moralizing scolds with a bunch of hangups, who wanted to ban expression of unapproved ideas, pry into people’s private decisions, and tell us how to run our lives. I can see now that these people were warning me about themselves. Interesting, that.
College was what really opened my eyes in a startling way to the lunacy that lurks among us. Classmates with Che Guevara likenesses on their walls. People who admired socialism and denigrated our own country and way of life. Though stunned and mortified, I decided it was simply the kind of nonsense that can grow like weeds inside a bubble of freedom and plenty. I figured the appearance of a real threat would someday awaken us out of such idle nonsense. A few years after I had that thought, 9/11 happened. And I found that I’d been more wrong than I’d ever been about anything. I lived through the days and weeks that followed in the company of more hard-left academic lunacy, in whose eyes the USA was the one to blame and the villain to be feared. The despicable conduct of the left in the years that followed, including the press and the mainstream Democratic party, in dragging the doom-and-gloom narrative of inevitable defeat and emboldening our enemies with such public shows of weakness, cemented my resolve to never vote for a Democrat again. I could not cast my vote with people who held such animosity and derisive contempt for our country as I had witnessed.
In the end, I don’t think I so much changed as realized that the Democratic party did not stand for what I thought it did, what I had been fooled into believing it did. In the years since then, I’ve gained exposure to many great conservative thinkers, and have thought through and introspected about my philosophy more methodically, but my instinct from the beginning has always been to love this country with all my heart and a profound sense of gratitude. I just hadn’t found my political home yet.
Adjusting to this revelation has been a whole other story. Given that I lived and worked in predominantly left-leaning surroundings, and married into a politically left family, it has not been easy. But after many years of struggle, I think I have finally found my way. A big part of it has been understanding myself and having thought through the ideas enough to have reasons for my leanings, rather than just strong feelings about them. I don’t bring politics into things, but when others do, I try to patiently ask good questions that tug at their premises while lighting the way to mine. I try to understand the psychology and past experience behind people’s beliefs (fear explains a lot), rather than setting out to stridently convert them (which is rarely successful). I finally feel the comfort in my own skin that I longed to achieve for years. (I will never possess his brilliance, but I have long admired and aspired to Victor Davis Hanson’s calm demeanor. I might be partway there.) And the funny thing is that sometimes I have comfortably stated my position or raised an objection to some assertion in politically different company, and to my astonishment people have simply ignored it, glossed over it, and carried right along as if they hadn’t heard a thing. People can be so immersed in and accustomed to their assumed point of view that sometimes it seems they can’t even process the premises or possibility of another. Strange and fascinating.
Now I’m the one who’s gone on even longer… Suffice it to say I am glad to meet you and I appreciate your sharing your story! I hope we’ll all get to meet in person at a “WhittleCon” someday! Take care, be well, and see you around!
Regards,
Troy
Thank you so much for sharing your political journey with me, Troy. It certainly has been a long road riddled with twists and turns. It seems that a lot of us started out on the left, and shifted to the right as the years went by. As Bill likes to say, age beats the stupid out of you.
I think this Member Blog is in the top 5 business decisions Bill has ever made. I am really enjoying getting to know everyone, and discovering the deep, rich life experiences everyone has had.
I hope to meet up at a WhittleCon as well. Meanwhile, as long as you and Steve continue sharing your stories here, I will continue to read them.
Take care, as well.
–Cheryl
The quote is so embedded throughout all of history, there is no consensus as to its origin (which probably means it arises spontaneously from anybody who is watching the world go by), but just remember:
A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
The feeling’s mutual! I’m greatly enjoying this chance to get to know the amazing folks Bill’s work has drawn together. It’s a dream come true, and I hope it will improve our ability to connect and work together toward a better future!