Current employment:

2021 - Present:  Sr. Project Consultant & Sales Manager at Wicks Roofing and Solar; Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, CA

2007 - Present: Owner at Good Times Surf Shop; San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

Past employment:

2020 - 2022:  Sales Executive at POSM Software; California/South Florida/Latin America

2019 - 2020:  Residential Solar Sales at Auric Energy; Denver, CO

2016 - 2019:  Real Estate Agent at Aurora Beachfront Realty; San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

2005 - 2007:  Account Executive at UPS; San Bruno and Sunnnyvale, CA

Education:

MBA; Quantic School of Business and Technology; 2024

BA, Geography, Communication; Indiana University, Bloomington; 2003

Last night I was reaching a chapter in JFK's book, Profiles in Courage, about US senators who defied their state constituencies to seek compromises to preserve the Union.  Knowing that Britain abolished slavery decades before the US, I was curious this morning about when exactly slavery was abolished by the British empire, and so I looked it up.  I found it interesting how the British crown actually led the world the campaign to abolish slavery and essentially forced an end to the transatlantic slave trade by the European powers and the US.  The first step was the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by both the US and Britain in 1807.  Slavery was completely abolished by Britain in 1838, the US in 1865, and Brazil in 1888.

The thought that popped into my head is that there is a parallel between the campaign to abolish slavery and the campaign to end the carbon economy.  This parallel extends to the decision by Britain to gradually phase it out rather than end it all at once, and the resistance to ending slavery by slave owners and by others for other reasons.

The injustices of slavery may seem obvious to us in retrospect, but in the same way that the truth about climate change had to be brought to the public attention and to the attention of the US Congress and the UN first by activists such as Carl Sagan in the 1980s and then everyone who has followed, the true horrors of slavery and the moral imperative to end it were not readily apparent to British parliament  and crown either.   It took the efforts of Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and others (including no doubt countless un-named women), to bring it to the forefront.  

Likewise the resistance to ending the hydrocarbon economy shares a parallel with the resistance to ending an economy based on forced labor and human bondage.  The same attitudes that prevailed in the Southern states of the US in the 1800s in regards to the issue of slavery can be found today regarding the issue of decarbonization and climate change: skepticism, denial, rationalization, cognitive dissonance, and hatred towards those who insist on disrupting a rich and easy-going lifestyle.  

We can only hope that 100 years from now we will hear the same revision of history that we hear from Southern apologists today - that carbon was on its way out anyway.

I’d like to share my point of view on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.  

First of all, I can’t believe this is reality.  Maybe it’s because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen so many things develop and I don’t just take for granted that they exist.  For people of my parents’ generation and earlier, it was an incredible new reality that we had a new world order that didn’t exist before, and there are things that don’t really change your daily life but when you think about them it kind of just blows your mind.  For example putting a man on the moon, or the idea that there are 20,000 - and at one point there were 63,000 - nuclear warheads in the world, and that we are all just going about our daily lives as before except constantly just minutes away from total annihilation at the press of a button.  Or the Kennedy and MLK assassinations.  For me the fact that Donald Trump was the president was kind of like that.  Not in a tragic way but it just hit me one day in 2017 or 2018, like “This is weird, and I can’t believe it’s reality.”  Now that he’s going to be president a second time it’s not that big of a shock.  

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy forming a special government task force with a crypto dog meme name is just about as weird.  

I work with Tesla the company on a daily basis and my first hand experience is that they make incredible products, but the company is highly dysfunctional.  It’s almost the opposite of how I would like to see the government operate.  It’s a complete tyranny, where entire divisions of people have been laid off because of the whims and moods of the CEO, and customers are consistently treated like garbage.  Hasty decisions, poor planning, and high turnover ensure that there are plenty of problems and never enough competent people to solve them.  I don’t think that most Americans want our government to work like that, and whether they want it to work that way or not I don’t believe it’s correct or effective, or the foundation of a strong state or citizenry.  It’s a great model for badly needed public infrastructure development, but I don’t think the "Tesla way" would be effective anywhere else in the government, outside of wartime production.

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short  and Moneyball recently gave a great interview exposing the ridiculousness of Elon and D.O.G.E. :

“It’s kind of insane to put Musk in charge of an organization right now.  There may have been a time in his life where he was suited to managing other people, but I don’t… - he couldn’t manage anything now.  He’s got a group of people underneath him at Tesla who do things for him, I assume and at SpaceX, and they probably - there's probably a story there that someone's going to dig out about how one day they did it, how they did it in spite of him rather than because of him kind of thing.  He's completely self-absorbed.  He seems to spend all his life on Twitter.  It's destructive rather than constructive.  It's dishonest over and over.  It's just lie after lie after a lie.  He's preening.   He’s all the things that a bad manager is.  The idea that person is going to go into this largely selfless enterprise called government and manage it - that's nuts!  It's the kind of person who could - and it isn't and it isn't that government wouldn't benefit from some some input from the private sector - it's that running government is different from running business. It’s dumb to say we're going to turn this into a business, but you can't do it because you don't have the same incentives.  

But you can learn from the management techniques in private business.  The kind of person who's going to do that is like the quiet excellent manager of some company who doesn't pay himself too much and who is extremely aware of the value of the person six levels down from himself.  That's the kind of person who's going to go in and be useful.  When Donald Trump says ‘I’m going to make Elon Musk the head of government efficiency,’ who does that play to?  It plays to all the people who know absolutely nothing about anything - about Elon Musk - about the government.  It’s people who are kind of moving through life with a very very superficial understanding of the world around them ... and that's the Republican party right now.”

Elon Musk is a genius and he’s not a fraud.   And I don’t think he’s evil or self-serving either.  But I do believe he has become so rich and successful and popular within his own tribe that he’s essentially lost the need to be humble enough to question his own ideas.  He literally owns his own opinion factory, and he is beholden to no one.  In an extreme sense this is basically like where Hitler’s character arc was after conquering Poland and France, and thus right before leading his nation to total disaster, destruction and complete military and moral humiliation, with half or more of the women being raped and the country split in two for the next 45 years.  (And that’s what people should be really scared of when they say “Trump is like Hitler.”  - not that he’s going to commit crimes against humanity, but that he’s going to lead our country off a cliff).  

I’m actually pleased that Elon is involved in the administration, because I do believe he’s generally a force for good in this world and that his mischievous side is mostly confined to trolling.  But I want people to realize that this is the same guy who insisted to the world that a diver involved in rescuing a soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand was a “child rapist” just because that man made fun of Elon's mini submarine.

I used to have an online dating profile where I stated my religious views as Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Hindu, Spiritual, Other..  I often get asked how I can be a member of all these faiths traditions at the same time.  

I don't see Buddhism as a faith.  It's a non-theistic maintenance manual for the human condition.  I discovered Buddhism for myself through a book called Refuge Recovery, a Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction.  And so I am a Buddhist because I follow a Buddhist path.  What does it mean to follow a Buddhist path?  #6 in the Buddhist Eightfold Path is "Right Effort."  This is the most important for me, .  What Right Effort means to me is that nobody is going to solve our problems for us, and that includes solving our inner mood.  Activities like exercise, yoga, meditation, organizing and maintaining our spaces, grooming, paying our bills, etc. all require effort, and performing that effort, combined with a life consistent with the other seven spokes of the wheel, will lead to a release from suffering.   We must accept that as long as we are alive we must be constantly swimming upstream, fighting entropy and decay, and that it's not automatic.  Because we have free will, we have to choose to make the effort to live well.

I am a Catholic because I was born into a Catholic family.  My grandmother was born and baptized in Wadowice, Poland, the same birthplace of Pope John Paul II.  My parents graduated from St. Mary's College and the University of Notre Dame, and were married in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.  I went to a Catholic grade school and then a Jesuit high school.  I loved it and I felt at home.  The saints were my heroes.  The Kennedys were my heroes.  The crusaders were my heroes.  The conquistadors were my heroes.  I still appreciate it and I feel a little defensive whenever the Faith and Church are criticized.   The uplifting art and architecture and sense of community were just as important to me as the religious teachings.  But even as a child I mumbled through the Nicene Creed and eventually just kept silent because I was never sure I believed in it.  And eventually I found that my confusion and lack of conviction in believing that Jesus Christ is the same as God, combined with a limited cosmovision in a world full of more diverse experiences and traditions drove me out of the Church.

I still believe in good and evil and that we are all born with original sin - that we are all sinners, and we can achieve redemption and salvation through faith and good works.   And I'm not sure how healthy or correct those beliefs are.  They have caused me a lot of torment.

But the most fundamental element of Catholicism is the Gospel, which contains the teachings of Jesus.  And I am a Christian because I believe in the teachings of Jesus, and in Christian values.  I believe in radical love, generosity, and forgiveness,  I believe in the power of faith. I believe that the true meaning of Justice is treating your neighbor as you would yourself.  

I believe that God is everywhere and in all things.  I believe in reincarnation and I practice yoga.  

I believe that there is a spirit world, and that this world is a shadow of that world.

I believe in the beauty of nature, and the sacredness of natural spaces.  I believe the presence of our benevolent creator can be found in those spaces and that when we abuse nature we are not only committing a moral crime, but we are also causing injury to ourselves, because we are part of nature.