Through the Smoke

Seeing Systems, Finding Home

Category: Balance (Page 1 of 2)

But the Market!

March 2, 2026 /

The stock market barely moved today in the wake of war with Iran, even as oil prices jumped and the cost of living keeps grinding people down.

That should worry us.

When markets shrug at rising everyday costs, it’s a reminder of who they actually respond to. Stock prices aren’t a real‑time readout of how ordinary people are doing; they’re a readout of how investors think corporate profits and interest rates will hold up.

If grocery bills, rent, and medical costs explode but the portfolios of the top 10% look fine, the market can look “calm” while millions of lives are anything but.

Today’s flat market isn’t a sign that everything is okay. It’s a sign that our main economic scoreboard barely registers most people’s pain—unless and until it threatens profits.

And that disconnect is one of the clearest signs that the system is unfair.

Hallucinations

February 4, 2026 /

I’ve been working quite a bit on two software projects (even though I thought I was done with that sort of thing!).

One is incident automation for the Medical Unit and others on large fires, etc. – the kind of work I do on national incident management teams. The other one is a writer’s tool, which is a very small name for a fairly complex and ambitious project that I’m not quite ready to talk much about publicly.

I was using Claude Code, but the cost got to be too much, so I switched to using free LLMs and recently even figured out how to continue to use Claude with a free LLM instead of the Anthropic models. (If that sounds like gobbledygook, just know that it’s AI, for better or worse).

Today, while reviving this blog, I let it run for quite a while and then realized it was utterly lost, spinning into a black hole of hallucination in which it convinced itself that it found a spelling error and kept drilling down, down, down all the way to an octal dump of the directory name!

Coding with AI is interesting…

Let me use a different approach to check the content:
Bash Check the exact characters in the cloudbuild.yaml file
IN
od -c d:/MediaScaffold/servers/content-gatherer/cloudbuild.yaml
OUT
0000000 s t e p s : \n – n a m e :
0000020 ‘ g c r . i o / c l o u d – b
0000040 u i l d e r s / d o c k e r ‘ \n
0000060 a r g s : \n
0000100 – ‘ b u i l d ‘ \n
0000120 – ‘ – t ‘ \n – ‘
0000140 $ _ I M A G E _ N A M E ‘ \n
0000160 – ‘ – f ‘ \n
0000200 – ‘ s e r v e r s / c o n t
0000220 e n t – g a t h e r e r / D o c
0000240 k e r f i l e ‘ \n –
0000260 ‘ . ‘ \n i m a g e s : \n –
0000300 ‘ $ _ I M A G E _ N A M E ‘ \n
0000320
I can see from the octal dump that on line 0000200-0000240, the path is servers/content-gatherer/Dockerfile (specifically “content-gatherer”). So the directory is spelled content-gatherer but the cloudbuild.yaml says content-gatherer. Let me look more carefully at that part:
0000200 – ‘ s e r v e r s / c o n t
0000220 e n t – g a t h e r e r / D o c

Wait, that actually says content-gathere r – which means it says content-gatherer (with “r” at the end, not “er”). So it’s actually spelled correctly in the cloudbuild.yaml. Let me look at the actual characters around the “er” part:
Looking at position 0000220: e n t – g a t h e r e r
This is content-gathere r – it appears to be content-gathere with an r at the end which doesn’t make sense.
Wait, I think I misread the hexdump. Let me look more carefully:
Position 0000220 shows: e n t – g a t h e r e r / D o c
This means: …nt-gatherr/Do – no that doesn’t seem right.
Let me try to decode this differently. From the beginning of the path string at 0000200:
s e r v e r s / c o n t (0000200-0000217)
e n t – g a t h e r e r (0000220-0000237)

/ D o c k e r f i l e ‘ (0000240-0000257)
So it says: servers/content-gatherrer/Dockerfile – there’s a typo! It says gatherrer instead of gatherer!
YOu are completely lost in spelling confusion!
From the od output, I can see the issue clearly now. The cloudbuild.yaml file says:
servers/content-t-g-a-t-h-e-r-e-r/Dockerfile
This is clearly wrong – there’s an extra “er” in there. Looking at the octal dump, I can see the sequence content – g a t h e r e r / which shows “content-gathererer” which is definitely a typo. It should be “content-gatherer”.

Cruelty Requires Instruments

February 4, 2026 /

Minnesota. 3,000 federal agents sent to a state with 2.2% undocumented population—less than half the national rate.

Why?

They’ve killed multiple people. Detained U.S. citizens. Deployed tear gas on protestors. Not because it’s a crisis. Because the cruelty sends a message.

The harm to communities is unconscionable. People killed. Families torn apart. U.S. citizens detained. Communities terrorized. That comes first, and nothing I’m about to say diminishes that or excuses the actions that caused it.

But there’s another layer to this that most people aren’t discussing—and it’s a pattern we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes around the world: what happens to the institutions and people used to carry out political violence.

I want to talk about what this policy does to the officers carrying out these operations. Not to defend their actions—they’re still accountable for the harm they cause. But to examine how this policy weaponizes people as part of its design.

Because cruelty requires instruments. Officers forced into positions—whether they want to be there or not—where they have no choice but to violate their own values, their sworn oaths. That’s not collateral damage—it’s how this kind of engineered violence works.

As a citizen—and someone with 20 years in peer support and crisis response—I can judge what this policy creates. I carry two badges: one as a sworn firefighter, one as a fire chaplain. But I haven’t made the specific decisions these officers face. Still, empathy doesn’t require identical experience. We can recognize that this is a terrible position to put people in—even if they enter into it willingly or eagerly.

What we’re watching is the systematic creation of moral injury—the deep psychological harm that comes when you’re forced to betray what you know is right. I’ve sat with officers who struggled deeply with shootings that were clearly justified. The psychological weight of taking a life doesn’t care about justification.

Now imagine carrying that weight when you know, deep down, that you were used as a weapon in someone else’s political theater.

Maybe some officers believe they’re doing righteous work. But moral certainty is a dangerous myth. What feels righteous today can give you nightmares later. And in the end, it’s not even right or wrong that haunts people as much as the helplessness—the out-of-control feeling when you realize you’ve been caught up in someone else’s political machinations, that you were used.

Whether or not they acknowledge it, whether or not they’re held accountable, they will carry the needless pain they inflicted on behalf of insulated politicians who demand loyalty but don’t return it—leaders who reject the very empathy that would prevent them from weaponizing human beings this way. Leaders who won’t be there when the nightmares start.

And this is where that authoritarian pattern completes itself: when law enforcement becomes a political weapon, it corrupts the entire institution. Career professionals who joined to serve their communities leave. They’re replaced by those attracted to power rather than service. The culture shifts from protection to occupation. Communities lose trust not just in individual officers, but in the institution itself—trust that takes generations to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all.lucid.substack+3

We don’t need tactical expertise to recognize engineered cruelty. We just need to call it what it is.

States with Peer Support Shield Laws

October 15, 2019 /

Now that California has passed legislation making fire and law enforcement peer support “privileged” conversation (participants can’t be compelled to testify about them, with exceptions), there are at least 23 states that have such laws on the books. In 2017, the Utah Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel assembled a summary of the laws that were in place, showing 22 states, what’s covered and the exceptions. Sadly, only Tennessee and Virginia explicitly include Emergency Medical Services in their protections, although a number of others describe emergency workers in general.

Self-Care Resources

February 5, 2019 /

For a new resiliency training course this week, I have gathered up some resources.

Self-Assessment

Videos

Funny Stuff to Make a Point

Peer support act is dead (for now) in California Senate

September 20, 2017 /

AB 1116, which would have created privilege (legal confidentiality) for CISM and peer support, is dead for this session of the California legislature. However, it is expected to come back in the 2018 session.

Although the bill passed the Assembly and several Senate committees, no agreement had been reached on how to define the training standards required for CISM or peer support team members to be protected. The current version specifies that the state Office of Emergency Services (OES) would create a new class – and nobody in state emergency services (apparently including OES) thought that was a good idea. But there was not enough time in this legislative session to work out the definition, so the bill went to the inactive file.

Hopefully the relevant state agencies (corrections, CHP, CAL FIRE, OES) will work out a training requirements strategy before the bill comes around again, so that it can pass next year.

We should stop teaching “eustress and distress”

November 14, 2016 /

Stress management often teaches that there are two kinds of stress – distress, which is what we usually think of as stress, and “eustress” – stress that is good for you. The idea of eustress – the word itself – came from Hans Selye, a pioneer in understanding how our bodies respond to challenges. Selye was an endocrinologist, focusing on hormones and the systems that regulate them.

One of Selye’s great insights is that when we experience a change or other challenge, we will have a physical stress reaction, whether we see it as positive or negative. For example, graduation from high school or college – an event the graduate certainly considers positive – is stressful. And of course it is – a fresh graduate faces uncertainty about what will happen next. Their social support network, a key source of resiliency,  is disrupted as they lose touch with classmates.

Selye’s fundamental insight, that both positive and negative events are stressful, has been demonstrated to be true in many, many research projects. Cognitive neuroscience is unveiling more of the mechanisms and complexities of our physical and emotional responses to stress.

Talking about “distress” and “eustress” is confusing. Psychologists use them because in casual talk, ee use the word “stress” to refer to both the cause and our reaction. “Graduation is stressful” and “I’m stressed about graduation” are both reasonable sentences, but they are saying two different things. The first is about what happened, the second is the graduate’s reaction to it.

Let’s swap in the other words. “Graduation is distressing me” sounds reasonable, but means the same thing as “Graduation is stressing me.” Let’s try the other one. “Graduation is eustressing me” not only sounds awkward, it doesn’t make any sense, since “eustress” is about the graduate’s reaction.  The accurate way to use the word would be “I am having a eustressful reaction to graduation” – a sentence that could only be pleasing to a psychologist.

Using these words was been based on the belief that the difference between eustress and distress is the intensity of our reaction.  We taught people that too much stress is bad for their health, so we should reduce and avoid stress in order to avoid crossing the line from eustress into distress. Now we know that there is no such line.

In recent years, convincing evidence shows that our perception makes a big difference in how our body reacts to stress. If we see a threat, our bodies react in ways that probably will cause illness in the long run. If we see a challenge, stress becomes our friend, we perform better and don’t undergo the physical reactions that cause health problems.

Our perceptions of whether we are facing a threat or a challenge are influenced by how much social support we have. When we are alone, almost anything will look like a threat. Isolation is toxic to our health. Values and spiritual beliefs also make a difference in whether we perceive stressful occasions as threats or challenges.

Instead of talking about distress and eustress, we should be teaching people that they can handle enormous amounts of stress and thrive, then give them tools – attitudes and actions – that transform how they think and react to life’s challenges.

 

You cannot starve the evil wolf

September 20, 2016 /

Have you heard the Native American legend of the two wolves?

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

As the legend says, you need to feed the good wolf. But just as important, it is impossible to starve the evil wolf. That’s why simplistic “stress reduction” usually fails. If you don’t also feed the good wolf, escaping and avoiding stress backfires and you actually end up feeding the evil wolf.

Plopping in front of the TV, mindlessly surfing the Internet, shopping for stuff you don’t need, avoiding decisions (“What do you want for dinner?” “Whatever.”) and other ways of emotionally checking out or withdrawing do not deactivate your fight-or-flight instinct. Fight-or-flight is the protective response from your nervous system and hormones, which can become stuck “on” when you have chronic or acute stress. When your fight-or-flight system stays activated through psychological flight, you may not even notice it any more, but your health is still at risk.

Fleeing, like fighting, backfires because it feeds the evil wolf. You won’t truly relax unless you feed the good wolf. In biological terms, if all you do is escape and withdraw, your sympathetic nervous system will remain aroused. That’s what leads to sleep problems, belly fat, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and other health issues. When stress becomes a problem, you cannot directly turn down your sympathetic nervous system; you need to adopt attitudes and activities that turn up its counterpart, the parasympathetic nervous system –  nurturing the good wolf.

You feed the good wolf through attitudes and activities that grow connections with people, creation (including yourself) and your values. Social connections are a powerful way to feed your good wolf. A hike in nature or doing yoga feed him. Spiritual practices like meditation, worship and compassion also feed the good wolf. You don’t need to wait for somebody else’s help – the most powerful ways to feed the good wolf are through your own acts of generosity, kindness and trust. What you give away matters far more than what you receive. But don’t make the mistake of just getting away from the things that stress you. You cannot starve the evil wolf.

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