I am an Arizona Walkaway

 I have posted my WalkAway Story on the now-defunct National Walk-Away Facebook Pages.  It is not my interest to post any more historical explanations for why I Walked Away from the Democrat Party.  What I am concerned about is where I'm going rather than where I have been.  With this context, I am sharing my personal manifesto of what it means to me to be a #WalkAwayAZ:

#WalkAwayAZ.  - What it means to me

We are #Walkaway.

We are Patriots who love this country.  We believe in the melting pot that made this country great.  We pledge allegiance to the Flag and our hearts beat strongly for our national Anthem. We are either immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, but we are all Americans.

A) We do not condone racism, but neither do we divide the people of this country by the color or texture of their skin, their ancestry or their religion.  We hold these truths self-evident that all human beings are created equal.  This does not mean that they are equal in every way or even that they must be made to be equal.  This equality is embodied in the core freedoms that our founding fathers prized:

1) Freedom of religion

2) Freedom of peaceful assembly

3) Freedom for the pursuit of happiness

4) Freedom from taxation without representation.

B) Because we love our country, we also love our planet.  We are not ignorant of the threat that global warming represents, but we do not fear global warming.  Rather we have faith in human ingenuity and we believe that through science and diplomacy we can achieve a global solution to this global problem; however, we do not buy into the doom and gloom notions that life on earth will cease to exist in 12 years.  

We are not living in some fictional apocalyptic movie.  We don't live our lives running from our fears and we do not allow fear to influence our decisions. We do what we can to reduce the damage that we do to the earth, and our conservation should be rewarded, not used as a whipping post to further erode our country and our society.

C) We hold dear the notion of the free-market economy.  It's rules are rather simple and everyone has the opportunity to succeed within the free market if they participate.  Those who take life seriously, and who utilize their God-given talents to earn a wage  will benefit form their labors.  We are objective and understand that Capitalism is not perfect, but it is the only system that provides any semblance of giving the workers control over the means of production.  In fact it manages to do this far better than any form of socialism or Communism has ever achieved.  Just ask Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg how Capitalism has worked out for them!

D) Despite it's challenges, The American experiment still stands as a shining gem and an example to the rest of the world of the importance of rugged individualism and free markets as a means of creating a high standard of living for all of our citizens.  So much are we admired, that people from all over the world would gladly risk life and limb to live here!

E) We believe in securing our borders, because we learned on 9/11/2001 that there are those who wish to destroy our way of life. We also understand that it is wrong to syphon the talent from the nations in central and South America.  It is far easier to develop policies that contribute to the economic development of those countries so that they may benefit from their own experience with capitalism.  We also understand that the alternative is to push those countries towards communism which is not in the interest of a strong United States of America.

F) As proud #WalkAway Arizonans, we know that there is indeed a Crisis at the southern border.  It is a humanitarian crisis, a public safety crisis and a public health crisis.  It is a crisis that arises from the instability of the governments south of our border, and from reckless policies of the Biden/Harris administration which led to tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border wearing "Joe Biden" T-Shirts! You simply cannot make this stuff up.

G) We recognize that China is a totalitarian regime and they are willing to attack their own citizens as they have done to the Uighurs, as they have done in Hong Kong, and as they have done in Tianamen square.  We also recognize China as a dangerous regime that released a biological weapon from the Wuhan Institute of Virology killing nearly 3.5 million people throughout the world and more than 1/2 million fatalities in the USA. We also have legitimate concerns that this was done intentionally and we are distraught that the Biden Administration doesn't care to investigate the root cause of the pandemic or the ties that Dr. Anthony Fauci has to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the illegal funding of gain-of-function research, which likely is responsible for the extermination of millions of people throughout the World.  We are baffled why the Woke party, with their abundance of outrage has no outrage over the global human toll of this virus, but is aghast at the mere 600,000 who died within our borders. 

On a personal note, I have my own COVID-19 experience to share: On March 31, 2021, my youngest sister died - not from COVID, but from Cancer. I still remember when Denise called me to share her diagnosis On April 20th, 2020.  I remember my emotions as I asked her how she would navigate cancer treatment during COVID, she just sighed and vowed to fight with all hear might.  Although  she didn't die from COVID, COVID was certainly culpable for her death.  Denise was hospitalized at least 9 times during her battle with stage 4 cancer.  The COVID restrictions in the hospitals were utterly ridiculous.  Hospitals are thoroughly expert in reducing the transmissions of contagions within their facilities.  They've been doing it for decades with nearly non-existant contagion transmission in hostpitals. But the COVID restrictions barred any visitors from being with my sister when she was recovering from Chemo-therapy or during the various emergency hospitalizations that she endured during the months prior to her passing. 

Every opportunity that I had to speak with her by telephone, I took!  I tried to distract her from her own struggles and steered her away from any topics that would cause her stress or sadness.  My sister passed away at the far too young age of 48, leaving behind her loving siblings, her devoted husband and a 9-year old son, Dwayne.  Through the experience with my sister, my family experienced a very profound relationship with COVID.  There are two situations that highlight this:

1) COVID in my home.  Unbeknownst to me, my wife, or my step-son , we all came down with COVID following a December trip to visit the second of my three younger sisters in Las Vegas.  We each recovered from COVID in early January of 2020, long before anyone had ever heard of COVID we recovered at home without an emergency-room visit and without an urgent care visit.  An antibody test conducted by my family Physician confirmed what I knew was true.  This was a blessing, because we were able to visit my sister at her home when she was between hospitalizations.  We visited nearly every weekend.  We visited her with confidence that we would not place her at risk even with her weakened immune system, because there was no possibility of us exposing her to COVID in the months after we had recovered.

2) Denise's first Chemotherapy treatment.  Denise went to the hospital on May 28th, 2020 for her first Chemotherapy. Denise had been upbeat prior to the treatment knowing that it was her best and perhaps only hope for a recovery. we spoke with her by telephone prior to the treatment and even for the first 12 hours of her treatment.  During the course of her treatment, she became comatose - her body unable to handle the strong does of medicine that she had been prescribed.  Further compounding the issue was the fact that it was the Memorial Day weekend and the hospital was short-staffed. Our calls to Denise and to the hospital went unanswered for 2 days.   On the 3rd day we were informed that she was comatose and that the Doctors had decided to stop her treatment early hoping that she would revive from this inadvertantly medically induced coma.  Fortunately, she did revive and recovered, but the heartache that we all experience not knowing was truly unbearable.  Furthermore, my dear sister's isolation from family and friends made her hospitalizations most painful.  I am angry about COVID, very angry and I want answers.  I think that we are entitled to know:

1) Exactly how it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

2) Why they were conducting gain-of-function research there, and 

3) Why the CDC and NIAID  were routing research funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third-party firm on the authority of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The world deserves answers to these questions.

#WalkAway Arizona!!!

We Simply cannot let the Democratic party sabotage this country.  They are insidious, but they are not invincible.  We need to urge others to walk away as we have, but not only to walk away but to walk beside us towards a better future for our country.

On Complexity

Complexity is the single greatest evil in society.  Although complexity is not often present in physical forms, it is a real issue that confronts us all. rooting out complexity in all of it's forms is at the center of what is needed to wholly advance the human condition.

    Complexity manifests in human life both organically, and  inorganically  It is not so easy to root out organic sources of complexity in human life, but inorganic complexity need not exist in society.  In one sense, complexity is a regressive tax that most adversely impacts the poorest amongst us, but complexity adversely impacts everyone on the planet in one form or another. It is found in the complexities of  commerce, of employment and other barriers to freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

    Complexity can be found within the social contract of every society, but is most tangible in convoluted laws and social mandates that truly have no legitimate purpose.  Complexity is often a side effect of human innovation, but is generally found in systems that are poorly engineered, or are engineered based on flawed assunmptions.

    There is a moral obligation to root out complexity whereever it is found.  One of the most common sources of complexity in the modern era is software complexity.   Software complexity produces a vast number of social problems:

1) Software systems embody certain business logic or rules, which may not align with social norms or standards.  A person may be denied a job, benefits or access to goods or services because the software fails to accept that person's inputs into the system.

2) Software may compute an outcome that is substandard from a human perspective an the user may not be satisfied with that outcome.

3) Software may replace a human in a job such as cashiering cooking, and even computer programming.

Perhaps we can assure ourselves that these outcomes are certainly for the greater good.  Who needs to do menial jobs?  Who cares if outcomes aren't perfect, because life isn't perfect. If a computer's logic doesn't align with social norms, what's the problem?  Well, tell that to someone who places much importance on pronouns when the software uses only "he and "she".

Agile is unforgiving - The evils of software complexity.

"People won't self-organise around systems they don't understand.  People won't make experiments if they are afraid of breaking invisible things." - Kenny Baas-Schwegler (Agile 2019)

ABSTRACT

The Agile Alliance never specified a one-size-fits-all methodology for "doing Agile".  Isn't this just a technology story that mirrors the old fable, "The Emporer's New Clothes"? What is the purpose of the Agile Alliance and it's principles and values if there is no underlying methodology?  It was not the intent of the Agile Alliance to dictate a specific methodology.  Every methodology is unto itself an exercise in planned obsolescence. Waterfall methods supplanted more earlier structured methods and Agile has mostly supplanted Waterfall methods throughout organizations across the globe.  It is clear that the agile alliance's goal was to create something that would transcend methodologies and never yield to the next thing, and perhaps even avoid the pitfalls of someone coming along to broadcast to the world, "I have something better:  Agile 2.0!"  After all, a philosophical school of thought doesn't get replaced or updated any more than a library is updated.  The library houses a set of books -- Some good, some not so good -- regardless, a compendium of knowledge is found in the library.  Similarly, Agile is rather like a library. It contains ideas, principles, values and some facts, but no specific methods.  The methods may come and go, ebb and flow, but the philosophy and mindset of agile is intended to remain constant.

Since Agile is not a methodology, one may want to know what is the value of agile? Can an organization truly change it's value proposition and improve productivity and results by adopting agile methods, by adopting Scrum, Kanban, XP or Lean?  Let's decompose and examine the introductory quote of this paper:  

1) "People won't self-organize around systems that they don't understand."

2) "People won't make experiments if they're afraid of breaking invisible things."

This is a sage wisdom that many fail to understand. Why is this important?  Clearly the statement is intended to emphasize the importance of understanding the subject product or system.   There are a few corollaries here:

1) A team is unlikely to succeed with agile methods if they were failing with a prior methodology.  

Allowing expert software engineers to self-organize and thereby succeed in their endeavors requires that there is a foundational understanding of the product(s) or system(s) that they build, support and maintain. To succeed with agile, the team must grapple with the underlying and structural challenges that they experienced before transitioning to an agile practice.  Failing that the team is rather destined to fail with agile.

2) Simplifying relentlessly is crucial for success in any software engineering endeavor. 

Overly-Complex systems are difficult to understand, difficult to build, difficult to maintain and difficult to support in a production sense, thus relentlessly Simplification is crucial for success in any software engineering endeavor.  The same is true for agile efforts.  There are far too many software organizations that have built needlessly complex software products, simply because the customers have driven the product's complexity over time, and the engineering team has failed to pay attention to the increasing complexity.  

As this complexity increases, the product becomes progressively less supportable and ultimately trends toward an inevitable obsolescence.

The above is crucial knowledge for those who would like to adopt Agile methods. Keep in mind that Agile is a philosophy, the characteristics of the Agile philosophy are flexibility, adaptability, and yes, agility.  The questions that must be answered are:

1)  How can we achieve agility within our team and our project?

2) Are we succeeding with our current approach?

3) If not, what can we do differently?

4) Have we simplified relentlessly?

5) If not, what can be simplified?

In conclusion, it is clear from studying many organizations efforts in adopting agile practices that one of the most significant challenges that organizations face in agile adoption is application complexity.  In fact, application complexity is a crucial problem if it appears within any software engineering team. Software Complexity kills team performance, team morale and invariably leads to a myriad of software quality challenges.

If the complexity of applications is a problem within an organization, the enterprise will likely fail with agile adoption.

Entertainment

Led Zeppellin - the Greatest Rock and Roll band in history.

Prince - Guitar Virtuoso

Christopher Cross - Ride Like the Wind (Live) - Listen at the end for an amazing guitar solo.

Joe Bonamassa - Brilliant Medley (Live) - Some of his best guitar work IMHO.

The Agile Dichotomy

WARNING: There is an immense dichotomy in agile, and it is infiltrating companies throughout the world! C-Suite executives perceive agile adoption as a means of delivering quality software solutions faster for customers and business partners. Whereas, engineering teams point to the cornerstone principles of the agile manifesto, especially, the emphasis on delivering working software.  The obvious problem here is that delivering working software in no way means that software solutions will be produced faster.  Hence, the dichotomy is between corporate executives who interpret the Agile Manifesto as promising something for nothing, whereas the engineering organization is focused on strategies that mitigate risk, reduce project failures and ultimately benefit the engineers.  The fundamental problem is that C-Suite executives need to justify the cost of their agile initiatives to their investors.  There is a significant bottom-line cost to transition to agile and stakeholders are interested in the return on investment for the "Agile Adoption" thingy that the company is spending so massively to adopt.  

In concept, Agile adoption may lead to greater velocity; however, it is noteworthy that the word "velocity" appears nowhere in the agile manifesto.  There are also 12 principles that the Agile Alliance adopted and  "velocity" is not found amongst those principles.  The principle that most closely suggests anything that may be interpreted as "velocity" is the following principle:

Simplicity--the art maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

This notion of simplicity is anything but simple.  There is tremendous art in simplicity. By analogy, simplicity cannot be achieved by simply speeding up a conveyor belt.  Each of the tooling stations in the assembly line must be capable of adapting to the underlying velocity.  Perhaps we can eliminate or combine assembly operations to improve the efficiency of the product assembly?  In some cases this is feasible, but in software engineering, removing steps from the process can be catastrophic.

There is an underlying premise that much of the assembly-line process can be automated to ensure that the software is produced more efficiently and that less work is done to achieve quality software.  But will this result in greater velocity, and is that velocity improvement quantifiable?  This is an important question!  

Thus the dichotomy between Executives or managers and software engineers may persist for a very long time, thus undermining the agile adoption.  This dichotomy is insidious and even dangerous to the adoption of agile. In fact, all of the questions that surround agile adoption must be vetted within the teams within an organization that have decided to adopt agile.  We must ask the following questions as well:

1) What operational processes within our organization tend to derail agile adoption?

2) What organizations have successfully adopted agile and what choices helped  in their adoption?

Finally, we need to consider this question: 

Does agile actually produce velocity, or higher quality software or both or neither? 

If it doesn't produce velocity, is there still a value proposition for agile adoption? If it doesn't produce higher quality software is there still a value proposition for agile adoption? If this analysis appears as syllogism, it is not trivial or wasteful.  Agile adoption must be done with stated objectives and the adoption must adhere to the identified set of objectives.  Otherwise, what priorities shall we use to guide us in determining how exactly to maximize the work not done? A bottom-line question is: How can we measure if agile adoption is successful? Only if we have a specific criteria for success can we tune agile adoption to meet the success criteria.

Attention Teachers: Do not teach socialism or hate for the USA

In my first career, some 33 years ago, I was a school teacher in south -central Los Angeles, CA. Having had a progressive indoctrination in college, I was ripe for the increased indoctrination that the Teachers at my school tried to feed me, but somehow, the radical politics that I was asked to digest just didn't go down very well.  I realized that communism wasn't going to make the lives of these inner-city children (mostly Latinos and African Americans, in my city) any better.  I also learned that I had the wherewithal to inspire children to learn and to make learning personal for each student, in Spanish or in English. 

One of my communist fellow-teachers mentioned to me that, among other things, he would make visits to his students homes to strengthen his bonds with students who were struggling.  Although the lesson came from a self-avowed communist, it was not a concept that required me to adopt a revolutionary mindset - only a pragmatic mindset - so I added the practice to my toolbox and began meeting my students at the homes of their parents, in the heart of gangland. I became one of a very small number of white men who could travel freely in that part of L.A. after dark without becoming a victim of the gang wars.
I also developed other ways of connecting with my students and their grades ascended through the combined techniques that I developed. 

Regrettably, the jealousy that I provoked due to my extraordinary success with my students made me quite the target for many of  my less successful colleagues.

Over time I began to feel ostracized and started to lose enthusiasm for teaching. I ultimately made the choice to pursue another career and left my cherished students a good deal better off than when I first met them.

I could share hundreds of touching stories about these delightful 7th and 8th graders, and also a few heart-breaking stories, but the most important lesson that I can share is that socialism and teaching hate for the USA does not help our inner city youth. It simply pushes them fully towards the gang life which is already present in epidemic proportions. I guess that my years of teaching were really the start of my #walkaway experience, and prepared me to leave the Democratic Party.

In short, there is no need to train our youth to be socialists or communists and there is no need to teach our children to hate our country.  The USA is a great country, and patriotism is important to maintaining our Democratic Republic.

Conservativism and Patriotism - Awake, not Woke

MY #WALKAWAY

It's a personal tragedy for me to know how completely the Democrats had co-opted me in College, beginning in 1984, I was invited to organize for the Students Against Reaganism (STAR), and the nation-wide Anti-Apartied Network. There was every reason to protest Apartied and press for the freeing of Nelson Mandela. But there really wasn't anything especially wrong with Ronald Reagan's vision for this country. STAR was just the next thing, and therefore, a way for progressives to keep us involved. I know now that I was wholly deceived by the progressives for many years. I am awake, not WOKE. Liberals are all about controlling your personal liberty, because absolute compliance is pre-requisite under a Socialist regime.

SOCIALISM

Everyone is Not equal in a socialist nation. The leaders of the party are treated like royalty and the inner circle of the party leadership is next most affluent. Opposition is repressed, because a socialist country's biggest threat is an organized opposition party. The proletariat are relegated to poverty and stand isolated with no power. Moreover, a dark and dangerous underground grows within socialist countries to fill the void of opportunity that invariably prevails within socialist nations. The ruling class invariably installs a Chairman or President with a life-long term of office; hence, socialism begins to morph into a dictatorship rather quickly as history has demonstrated in China, the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela.

THE PLAYBOOK

I know that the Democrats have a well-honed partisan playbook. Heck, I was instructed to work from it and to improve it during my activist years.

TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESSIVE ACTION

The Anti-Apartied Network was a nation-wide, social network of colleges and universities. Colleges were among the first places on earth to have reliable access to the DarpaNet which later became the internet. With e-mail and instant messaging applications such as they existed, we coordinated with Universities across the country in opposition to Apartied and to press for change - the ultimate goal was to free Nelson Mandela, which occurred very quickly in response to our efforts.

Democrats have practiced and refined their playbook for years since before Reagan and Nixon.

Many forget that the same playbook was in place with George W. Bush (Impeachment before taking office)! Democrats challenged the 2000 election results going so far as to contend that Jeb Bush being governor of Florida gave GWB the critical advantage he needed in order to win that state.

History

Democrats, with the assistance of Bob Woodward and his pall Carl Bernstein. were able to impeach Nixon - Don't be mistaken, I agree that Richard Millhouse Nixon deserved to be impeached for his role in the Watergate scandal.

IRONY

Isn't it funny? The First duly elected Republican Party Commander in chief after Nixon (who resigned under the eminent threat of being impeached for his part in the Watergate scandal - the alleged and provable rigging of an election) was besieged by the media and treated with utmost disrespect.

Conservatives are not so easily dissuaded.

Democrats believe that if they control the house of representatives they run the country. It is foundational socialist theory on which the Democrats have tended over the years. Socialists, in turn, understand that controlling the Democratic party is the only path to gaining control of our country.

As such, the Socialists have operated from the same playbook that the earliest Marxists operated from. Nevertheless - being weak-kneed Liberals with tears for the dead as their strongest Weapon. Do not be fooled. The COVID Death toll is a massive misrepresentation. And of course, this is precisely what the socialists need in order to launch their revolution: Millions locked down in their homes for months while their family members perish. This is utter nonsense and misappropriation of government and an injustice upon the citizens of our proud nation.

My liberal friends and family who have cancelled me due to my support for conservative issues are blinded by the rage that they have been indoctrinated to hold more dear than their own family members. After all, it is the nuclear family that is the singly largest threat to Socialism. I am irate that my former party creates soap-opera dramas whenever THEIR power is challenged. It's no surprise that Hollywood celebrities tend to support the Democratic Party. Actors have been reading and performing such soap operas for decades as they endeavor to make their path into far bigger productions.