Before I jump into the meat of what I want to say, I want to step back and look at why I’ve really slowed down my blogging. A few things have been going on. First, I’ve been really struggling with my mental health. It’s been with me my entire life. I’ve had some sort of depression or another. In the lead up to the 2016 election I was obsessed with politics and it was not healthy.

I was frustrated with our political candidates in 2016 as well. I didn’t like Clinton’s policies and I thought we needed a significant shift in our foreign policy and domestic policy. That we should use the next presidency to reduce military spending and strive to make significant changes in our healthcare policies and expand our basic rights. I believed we needed to codify this into law. I didn’t see Clinton doing that. So, I submitted a protest vote in 2016. I voted for Bernie. Now, I rationalized this a few ways. I gave money to the DNC, I voted for all the national Democrats aside from her. I also knew that my protest vote wouldn’t have a significant impact in Oregon. I was right. Clinton handily won Oregon, won the national popular vote, and I got to protest that we should have had a better candidate than Clinton.

However, with Trump’s election, things rapidly spiraled. I needed to step back from all of the chaos he was causing. I couldn’t handle the news. Instead, I ramped up my donations. I give to more established causes across more diverse set of political interested than I did before.

Then my health started to fall apart. In 2019 I learned that I’ve been struggling with significant allergies for years. The care I was receiving seemed to ramp up my health issues and just before everyone else was stuck in their houses for Covid I was stuck in the house because I would have anaphylaxis reactions. So, instead of protesting, I read and wrote book reviews on here and donated more.

I read White Rage and I believe that book does the best job at explaining the history of why we’re seeing these erosions of rights than ever before. So, given the dire circumstances, I did the only rational thing, voted for Biden, donated more money to more causes and focused on getting healthy.

My health is moving in a better direction, though I’m still deep in the forest and a long way from getting out of the woods.

I sent that protest vote in 2016, because I wanted a leader that could start structural change. Someone that was willing to buck convention to risk reelction by codifying more rights. We need more rights enshrined in federal law. We need democratic leaders that recognize the Republicans goal is power. Continual power for a white ethno-theocratic state. One that doesn’t allow for BIPOC or their allies. One that only allows Evangelical Christians.

Roe is most recent right to fall. it will not be the last. It didn’t start here. Our rights have been on a long decline since 2001 when the Supreme Court decided the election, even though recounts indicated Gore was likely going to win Florida. It continued with the Patriot Act and the continual erosion of the 4th amendment. Then we saw the continual erosion of voting rights, first with the Citizen’s united ruling and culminating with the elimination of the VRA. This caused the huge lines we’ve seen at all the most recent election. It’s why we see so much dark money sloshing around.

I know I have a lot of privilege in our democratic system. My goal during the next few years is to ramp up my donation and leverage my privilege to push the Democrats farther to the left to counter the extreme rightward pull of the Republicans. I will mostly do this during primaries when I vote, but then vote for the Dem candidate when it makes sense.

Our rights are going to continue to erode. Gay rights and contraceptive are next, then interracial marriage, then we’ll be an apartheid state again. That’s the goal. In the mean time, I hope to do more blogging, I will donate. I will do what I can.

The End of Food Allergy: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse a 21st Century Epidemic by Kari Nadeau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I bought this book, because I’m going through a LOT of food allergies right now. Even though we’re in COVID, I’m stuck in the house more than just about anyone else. I have allergic reactions to the pollen outside to the point that my throat feels like it’s closing up. On top of that, I keep rolling back my food uncovering new things that I’m struggling with. Testing can be a challenge and it’s kind of impossible to test for everything. Just the other day, I figured out that I couldn’t have pasta sauce, either because of basil or because of tomatoes. Regardless, things are hard and really stressful for me.

So, I bought this book looking for some other sorts of ideas that could help with my ongoing treatment. I’m currently undergoing Immunotherapy, which this book is basically all about. Well that and preventing food allergies in kids. So, if YOU are expecting and really worried about your kids having allergies, this book is for you! There’s seriously a full chapter on the different types of research conducted to uncover the root cause of allergies.

The general findings are that you need to expose kids early, with a bunch of stuff together, rather than waiting a long time. (There are things that make that easier). That and if your kid has dry skin, you better doing everything you can to heal it, cause that’s a major vector for food allergies.

The Authors spend a bit of time scaring the crap out of readers with short cases of allergy sufferers dying. Which kind of sucks to read. Cause they are young kids that unknowingly eat something that kills them. It’s a stupid tragic death. It’s terrifying, cause I feel like that could happen to me. I’m pretty sure that could happen to me if I eat ginger, so it’s looking at death in the face, if you have allergies.

However, there’s good news, because they go from talking about kids dying to talking about how they saved a bunch of other kids using Oral Immunotherapy. They also talk about a couple drugs that speed up the immunotherapy from a year or more to less than a few months. However, I’m actually ALLERGIC to that drug, so I hope, in your case, you have much better luck.

In terms of peanut allergy sufferers there’s even better luck, because there’s something of a “vaccine” that switches your immune system from attacking peanut protein to actually treating it as food. There are a number of studies in progress.

Overall, this book was really well written, there are fantastic layperson explanations of very technical immune system deep dives. There’s clear explanations of risks for any and every treatment options. There’s a lot of hope in this book. The other thing that’s really nice. They talk about the emotional and psychological toll these allergies take on a person. They strongly recommend finding a therapist to talk through the anxiety and stress of the disease.

My biggest complaint is the last of end notes to indicate what study they are referencing at any given time. They often have summaries that are cited at the very end, but it’s not like the Body Keeps the Score, which has notes to the actual papers as they are reference.

Highly recommended if someone you know is suffering from food allergies.



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Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader by John Rossman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I believe this book was intended to be written in the style of Amazon narratives. Some of them were well written others were uninteresting or felt like the author was pandering. I read this book over the span of a few weeks, I would say it was generally unmemorable. I really don’t remember many of the ideas listed in the book.

The reason I don’t remember them? Well, the chapter heading at three items on it. The title of the idea, a subtitle, and a pithy quote. The idea was written out in a little box which may or may not have been on the first page of each idea. Further clouding this, is that for each idea, and there were 50 1/2 ideas, there was one or two pages of introduction before getting to the meat of the idea itself. Often the ideas which acted as chapters, were only two to four pages long.

Some of the ramblings were speculation of what amazon could do if they got into health care, some was complaining about some business the author had to use, but did a bad job with their processes. In many cases, it showed a sad lack of empathy for the people the author was interacting with in these businesses.

Finally, the author hasn’t worked at Amazon in 15 years. He was in one major role, while it played a large part in Amazon’s overall growth, he doesn’t have any deeper understanding of AWS than anyone else looking from the outside in. Maybe a bit more because he might have some high up friends working there.

Ultimately, this book has a piece or two of interesting ideas, but is very short on execution. Don’t recommend anyone read this book.

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Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found out about this book through a series of events. A woman I follow on Twitter tweeted about a talk one of her peers gave and in that talk she referenced this book. I plan to share this book any time that I see someone saying that coding is “color blind” and that it past experience and history doesn’t matter.

One of the things that I’ve learned from doing Agile software development, is that outcomes are more important than the specifics of the coding. This book focuses on the outcomes of search engine algorithms and explains how search engine algorithms drive racist results.

The author Safiya Umoja Noble, does a fantastic job explaining the basis of her research, querying Google for “black girls” and getting a huge list of porn. She verifies monthly for almost 6 years. She meticulously explains that these results are racist, sexist and the responsibility of Google.

Noble explains why Google believes that these results are not biased, because they are objectively using an algorithm to determine what links appear where on their search results. These results, they argue, are based on what is popular and therefore that makes the content “true.” The basis for Google search is Library Sciences, which uses citations to determine relatedness between content and how important (regardless of context or if the import is a negative or positive attribution) specific pieces of work are. This is called Bibliometrics (I did some of this work while I was earning my Masters).

To my surprise, Noble explained to me that the Dewey Decimal System was racist, sexist, and Eurocentric. I was taught, this was just the way libraries were organized. That this was the best way to organize books. Noble explains, briefly, that this system still used Racist categories like “Black Question” and similar type of classification. Similarly, the US Library of Congress uses similar classification headings. This is problematic, because other major library systems follow a similar system and take their lead from the US.

Google claims that they cannot control their outcomes, however, Noble points out, repeatedly, that they will modify their searches based on criticism or serious problems. Furthermore, Noble explains that after she wrote an article in Bitch Magazine, within 5 months the search results significantly shifted when she queried “black girls.”

I believe that outcomes are the responsibility of engineers, testers, and product owners. Algorithms are not neutral technologies. Hell, even Bridges can be non-neutral technologies, as they can be shaped to prevent buses from using them (which happened in NYC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_…). So, engineers and leaders that believe that software projects are always neutral is flawed.

The best solution is to hire Black Women, Black people, Latinas, and other minorities. Furthermore, it’s important to allow those developers to significantly impact the outcomes of the product. Otherwise, having them as employees will not be effective.

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White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you, like me, recently read “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, you’ll have found that book to be incredibly moving. I felt it really helped explain the environment that many Black men now in their 30’s and 40’s grew up in and that young Black men are growing up in now. However, the book only glimpses at touches of context. Obviously there are references, plenty of them, to great Black thinkers and political activists. That book is primarily an emotional book. To help a reader, targeted towards Black men but very much helps white people, empathize with a young Black man. It humanizes.

This book, this book, though, is a clinical look at our history. It starts out with context around the history of the Civil War, that it WAS a war fought over slavery and not state rights. Anderson highlights the failings of President Lincoln and eviscerates President Johnson (which if you read An Indigenous History of the United States you’ll be unsurprised he’s as horrific towards former enslaved people as Indigenous people).

This book outline the systematic tools white leaders have used to continually keep Black Americans down. How tactics shifted from outright racism to much more subtle approaches of racism. How immediately after freeing enslaved people, they were basically forced into labor and where their labor could be sold if they were caught being “vagrant”, the so-called Black-Code. I’d never heard of these.

The Black-Code morphed into Jim Crow, which stuck around for an absurdly long time. In fact, the book essentially argues we only had a few years without Jim Crow dominating and we’re back into a quasi-Jim Crow state with all the current “Voter Fraud” initiatives – which are really just carefully worded Racists preventing non-whites from voting.

The book is a history book, so it’s dry. That doesn’t mean it’s not an emotional book. There are points where your blood will boil. Where you will be infuriated that we, Americans, have treated through law a group of Americans this way.

I learned how much effort the NAACP put into getting education into southern states. They were the catalyst for Brown. I have to admit, I didn’t know a lot about what they did. I vaguely had a negative impression of them when I was younger, because my parents would both get angry any time they were brought up. Like they were a bad group that were only trying to help bad people. Other than that I was pretty ignorant of what they did. Now, I can only look at how my parents reacted to the NAACP as two white people experiencing White Rage at what the NAACP was doing. That my parents and many other people in my home town, practice the subtler form of racism that is dangerous. It can turn into a darker type of racism, like Dylan Roof (which Anderson specifically mentions in her book).

This book is incredibly well researched. The paperback version, with an afterward reflecting on Trump’s election, is only 180 pages long with 83 pages of end notes. For some chapters there are well over a hundred end notes. I learned a lot from this book and honestly, it was an overwhelming amount of facts that spanned from the 1850s-2016. Overall, the book is one of amazing perseverance by the Black community. I’m in awe of what they’ve been able to do despite intentional roadblocks along the way. These roadblocks, it’s important to note, didn’t just hurt Black Americans, they hurt all Americans and are STILL hurting America today.

We could have many more Black scientists than we do, but because of policies enacted in the 50’s to STOP Brown v. Education, we destroyed educational opportunities for multiple generations of Black Americans and poor white people. White Americans should be embarrassed, but instead, many are pushing laws to continue disenfranchising and holding back Black America.

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