Saw a law school friend’s post on why trans soldiers should be serving, and some idiot friend of his was complaining about it.

I was tempted:

Okay, as likely one of the few straight male [disclosure of potential bias] former Army officers [appeal to authority and experience] commenting on this, let me mansplain to the folks who don’t understand: everyone who thinks that less freedom and fewer rights is the right path gives the impression of having not read and understood the Declaration and the Constitution. Would gay soldiers have seemed out of place in the early 90s of DADT? Yes. Did that make it right? No. Will we eventually get over these worries of trans solders? Yes. But not soon enough. Continue your petty squabbling, especially those of you who want to reduce the rights of others who are, irony of ironies, willing to fight and die to protect your rights. [Evidently, I’m having a bad day. Prejudice does that to me.] /rant

But then I deleted it. What’s the point?:
(1) Is that guy ever going to change his mind?
(2) Do I need my former classmates to know how I feel and pat me on the back?
The second is a “no,” and I’m afraid the first is too.

One of my best friends recently attended an academic conference and shared a thought from a colleague, to the effect that “Has anyone ever been convinced by someone else’s regression?” The idea is that maybe we’re all just stuck with our beliefs and even those who claim to be empirical or data-driven really just rationalize our way to maintaining our beliefs – no cognitive dissonance allowed. I realized this morning that that comment may have just broken my life.

The only reason I went back on FB was to sign in to dating apps. That part has gone well. The rest? “Same as it ever was.”

What, then, do we do to change the world? Is leading by example – the Army way, one by one the way that works?

Does this mean I have to change what I do and how I do it and everything else?

The first rule of leadership is lead by example. I heard it in so many forms during my 5 year in the Army, I can’t possibly footnote it.

Recently, Kellyanne Conway said she was suprised at the disrespect for the president and the office.

And yet here’s this example of how then-candidate Trump showing respect for a certain reporter.

I learned, when the Army gave me a little gold bar to wear on my uniform, that you may be entitled to the trappings of respect- a salute, “Sir,” and all that – but you have to earn respect no matter what your rank.

Yep, this is an old post. The world has moved on.

Supreme Court nominee

President Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court.

I’d like to read some of his opinions before I decide. Does he write his own opinions?

Frankly, I’m comforted by the fact that he’s not a crazy Trump pick. Low standards these days!

and yet:
http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004905557/trump-selects-gorsuch-for-supreme-court.html

Based on the picture in that article, nope. He looks too happy about hanging there with Trump. I think everyone should look like Chris Christie when they meet President Drumpf McTinyFingers.

A happy moment

My happy place looks like Waimea Bay, on the north shore of Oahu, running around the bay in the middle of the evening, with a full moon over the water and just the sound of the waves crashing in the otherwise silent evening.

For me, it was in the middle of one of my legs of the Perimeter Relay, a 7-person relay race around the island, about 133 miles. It was my first year at my unit in Hawaii, the 4/27th Infantry Battalion in the 25th ID(L). It’s a feeling, a sound, a sight I will never forget.

For those of you who didn’t know:

My older son has what I describe as mild to moderate autism. He’s happy; he smiles; he talks; he reads; he does math – add, subtract, multiply, and learning to divide. He’s very affectionate: I know he loves his brother and me, and he knows that we love him.

He attends a private nonprofit school for kids with autism. Learning things is both easy for him – deep down I believe his skills are there – and hard: learning is sometimes really slow. It takes a lot of work for him to focus: far more than those random adult who describe themselves as “a little ADD.” His memory plays tricks on him: he was able to teach himself the sign language alphabet from a placard at the playground and the capitals of all 50 states, but at the same time he can’t reliably remember what he ate that day for lunch or dinner. In some very fundamental sense, he knows what matters to him and pretty much ignores the rest.

I work regularly at trying to give him more and more responsibility for his own life. After all, as I’ve written before, self-determination is the touchstone of freedom.

I’m not sure what his future will be, in much the same way that I don’t know whether my other son will go to Caltech or Stanford or Allegheny or MCC. But I know that my son’s life will get better; every day his future improves, and that might be all that really matters. After all, isn’t that what matters for all of our children? I’d rather they be happy freelance poets than miserable, insufferable, self-medicating, suicidal neurosurgeons (or lawyers).

Feel free to ask me questions. This isn’t any big secret in our lives.

How much should you save?

That’s a very good question, to which the easy answer is simply “as much as you can and then a little bit more.”

As I’ve written over on the page for this new tool, the savings rate calculator is designed to help you break a big savings and investing goal, years away, into small chunks. Why small chunks? Because that’s how you live your life. You can look at marginal purchases when you’re thinking about how to allocate your money and decide what makes more sense: another four movie channels or $23.75 a month to add to your savings.

As you’ll see if you read right-minded people, these spending choices pay a double dividend: first, each time you save money it adds to your nest egg and speeds up your time to being financially independent; second, each time you restructure your life to avoid some expense that you realize is not necessary for you to be happy, you permanently remove that expense from your future spending, so you don’t need to save more money to underwrite that future expense.

So if you ditch a third car, you can pocket that money today. More money saved = retire sooner. Then, post-retirement, you won’t need to spend that. Lower expenses = retire sooner.

Note: this isn’t about having the lowest possible expenses of anyone. This isn’t a competition. It’s about your life. If you like something, do it. Enjoy it – really enjoy it. But add a bit of mindfulness and see whether there are things you should be eliminating from your life because they don’t bring you as much joy as they cost.

I hope the tool helps you plan. Please let me know what you’ve found worth keeping in your life, and what you’ve let go. Again, it’s not a competition against anyone but yourself. These shared stories are here to help us realize what we might not have thought about – either as something important or something not.