They’ve spoken for us again, they’ve turned us against each other again; it never stops. I am a believer and you are gay. They say I hate you, they say you fear my values.  The media is wrong and they are stoking a false narrative about both of us.

I have a few stories to relate. In 1986, in the Northern Virginia region called Tysons Corner, Manpower sent me off to a new job every two weeks for one entire year. These were low-level computer jobs helping me establish my career. I met many gay men, some older and most about my age of 26. We took lunch and snack breaks together and complained about boredom together but, one day a gay man asked me to pray for him without my disclosure of being a believer. He said I was praying at my computer when actually I was only rubbing my tired eyes. What was I to say, “no”? During that lunch break we prayed for his personal needs in my old VW and then went back inside. On to the next job. Another encounter with a gay man, this time after a supervisor had yelled at him. The man chose me to vent his anger toward but not personally. The next day he said I seemed like a dad – which I wasn’t. He later shared his personal struggles with me and yes, we prayed.  Such encounters went on all year sharing work life with several gay men going site to site for Manpower. After I moved to Nashville in 1991, I was approached by a 70 year old man named Houston on the Vanderbilt campus where my fiancé was attending. He asked for sex but remembering back to Virginia I just asked him outside to talk – and we talked and talked. He took me through 70 years of life. Then, to my surprise, he asked me to pray for him. What was I going to say, “no?”

None of these men hated me and I hated none. We talked and interacted about life. So what: I go to church and you don’t, I love clouds, you love rainbows, I have kids and you don’t. We both experience discrimination. I lost my job at age 49 and according to businesses I am too old to be productive and intelligent. I’ve been labeled and discriminated against. Even more, I worked in a mall and met many, many gays and lesbians and one transgender who worked in my store. I sat in the food court chatting with gays frequently and we didn’t hate. What’s killing us is the media that plays LGBT’s out to be victims of believers and believers as aggressive haters – and yet, in my 31 years in the church I find these false narratives. Spirituality is God’s gift to everyone and the Father knows we need His connection. No hate there. 

Christians don’t hate the LGBT population but either your victimization by the media as suffering mercilessly at my hands and the same media defining my faith akin to old fashioned bigotry – will soon destroy us. Or we can demand Big media to treat us both with respect and dignity. As long as Bruce Springsteen is allowed to portray our American culture as hateful based upon one law about where we take a crap, we can at least stand together against the media rage, rub our tired eyes and take a walk across the campus of humanity together away from these false narratives. I’d be lying if I said you aren’t loved.

The internet functions by way of multiple layers. The top layer, the applications layer, is where we search for and input information. Telecommunications firms’ hardware and wires moves data on the lower physical layer. What is happening in between the top and bottom layers involves engineering data for proper packaging and routing of bits and bytes.


Marketing and Human Resources operate on separate layers in organizations but  one function has blended. They share the goal in identifying users’ personal preferences concerning group affiliations, countries visited, debt, property ownership - cars and houses  - and so much more.  Also, both want relational data as the who, what and where of your entire strata of human engagement - but - only for the past 10 years! And they both go about assessing people according to behaviors; meaning, labeling people as data, with enterprise software  applications.  Hidden beneath that top application layer there is software discovering personal data. Marketing aggregators and uncountable digital business operators such as Facebook and Google invisibly record our web life as the internet’s profile interrogation systems. Business is doing exactly the same thing with employees. How has the HR process blended into this system? The answer: HR software apps increasingly profile job candidates like Marketing. They are mutually expressing human values categorically psychological, neurological and sociological.  Businesses are relying on HR to find predictable employees taking unstructured data and structuring it.
  
We often read articles about how worried CEO’s and CIO’s are over finding skilled workers.  The trouble is job candidates' lives are interrogated from past to present and then predicted using metrics based on behavioral sciences. Culture.me is more important every day for the use of biometrics and benchmarks, assessments, tests, analytics and algorithms lead to a software-selected workforce.  The trend may support Marketing goals but is counter to forming a workplace with diversity. The HR layer is eliminating quality candidates by practicing profile discrimination; layers of profiling software functioning as science. The US can’t compete globally with these functions compromised  by theoretical social sciences.
RPW2016

From: The Only Fields That Matter

Like millions of parents with little boys we signed-up our son to play on his first baseball team at age seven. We liked his coaches and enjoyed watching boys develop the skills of catching a ball, swinging a bat and running the bases. We also entered into the team's family social life supported by the steady flow of correction emails. In Joseph’s first year he was demonstrating good skills and had an inch or two on his teammates; the coach would tell us he’d hit one over the fence some day. His two coaches even allowed me to share in the minor role of third base coaching during the games and helping out in practices which I loved doing. Baseball was a healthy activity for our entire family but in the 2010 season my wife was divorcing me, lawyers were being lawyers and our son couldn’t bring himself to the season for his sport. There would be no baseball in 2010. The following spring we pushed him to get back in baseball and thankfully he complied. He performed well with the machine-pitch method for delivering a baseball to batter. It was such a good season in 2011 that Joseph was selected for the 9 year old's all-star team. The championship game was to occur - of all dates – on his ninth birthday played on Field 9. Let me get to the point, after all, it’s only one game of kid baseball. On his third up-to-bat, taking two strikes, the umpire pulled and released the machine lever and off the ball flew toward home plate. His swing sent the ball sailing over the centerfield fence to the immediate uproar of parents and coaches. The Greyhounds emptied the dugout to join him at home plate with his own look of wonder covering his face. So what’s the big deal for me? Mr. Underemployed, Mr. Divorce, Mr. No-Money, Mr. No-Career, a three year job search failure, humiliated and ashamed, lost for answers and direction in the recession. Simply, his long hit over the fence presented in one instant, a new career metaphor. I can't revive my old job, my old life: it's time to jump the fence: go! Field 9 really mattered to him and me. I had been crushed by job loss, unchartered family issues, financial chaos, yet, a baseball driven off a blue metal bat challenged me to consider looking beyond my own career fences. After re-living my son’s home run repetitiously it dawned on me that nothing good had happened in a long time. Picture it one more time, recall your emotional outburst, this is good this is really good because everything has been so bad, so traumatic. He played throughout the summer of 2011 for the Greyhounds uplifting my spiritual and mental states substantially by hitting ten more home runs.
RPWaters

 A junkyard. Not on your mind is it? ​

Let’s say it’s year 2029 and the first generation of used autonomous cars are hitting the heap. You’re there because your autonomous car needs a LiDAR interface part. Another fellow is there for a 3D visualizer panel v1.b, another guy is hunting down a stability control part v.1.2.1 and another customer is searching for an Intel chip for his advanced driver assistance system with GPS v2.2.1, the part made in Mexico, not in China.

There are no smells of gasoline or cigarettes in the service areas; that is, where three rows of 10 computer tablets sit atop metal posts, secured. People come in and go directly to a tablet for part-searching. A team of men and women check-in cars also being discarded, each car’s computer port allows a 30 second transfer of software specs and part specs to be uploaded to a cloud database patented by Waymo. The database was innovative, of course; it tracked an internet-of-things sensor installed at check-in. The goal is to keep junkyard lot managers from searching aimlessly through the yard by sending them directly to a car in 4 minutes. Not only that, the 30-second upload captures the full driving behavior history (DbH) of the car’s owner – per month.  Sounds like too much data but in reality cars were built with stress-grouping sensors on axel components which informed the software of driving behaviors predicted per stress metric. In other words, high-stress numbers indicated unpredictable, neural-sensitivity factors associated with driving behaviors. Machine numbers were then translated into human psychological behaviors via artificial intelligence in the cloud.

Another thing; there are behavioral psychologists on-site to counsel people when discarding a car. Their job is to converse openly with owners about their passive driving behaviors (PdB); the activities they did in their car while it drove them around. It’s really more like a neuromarketing interview because answers are directed to marketing organizations. The first question the psychologists will ask a car owner: Do you understand your DbH and PdB data will now be shared, that there is no opt-out and that legal and insurance entities can use it for the betterment of society?

Robert P. Waters Nashville, TN