Universal health care is government controlled health care. In the United States, the federal government already control a great deal of the health care sector. While I think that some variant of government managed health care is inevitable it is important to remember that we already have government managed health care. What some of us are clamoring for now is government mandated health care; this under the assumption that any health care is better than no health care at all. For some Americans that might well turn out to be true.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, recently wrote a thoughtful editorial against the “right” to health care. I personally agree with 90 percent of what he has to say in that article.

Many promoters of health care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care-to universal and equal access to doctors, medicines, and hospitals.  While all of us can empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have any more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have an intrinsic right to food, clothing, owning their own homes, a car or a personal computer? Health care is a service which we all need at some point in our lives, but just like food, clothing, and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually-beneficial market exchanges rather than through government mandates.  A careful reading of both The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter, because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Even in countries such as Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care.  Rather, citizens in these countries are told by governmental bureaucrats what health care treatments and medicines they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them.  All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce and expensive treatments.  Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million citizens.  At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund on their behalf.  Our Canadian and British team members express their benefit preferences very clearly-they want supplemental health care more than additional paid time off, larger donations to their retirement plans, or greater food discounts; they want health care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments.  Why would they want such additional health care benefit dollars to spend if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”?  The answer is clear-no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.-or in any other country.

Rather than increase governmental spending and control, what we need to do is address the root causes of disease and poor health.  This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for their own health.  Unfortunately many of our health care problems are self-inflicted with over 2/3 of Americans now overweight and 1/3 obese.  Most of the diseases which are both killing us and making health care so expensive-heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and obesity, which account for about 70% of all health care spending, are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal or no alcohol consumption, and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Mackey is correct in thinking that the root causes of disease are what most need to be addressed. He is correct in claiming that there is no intrinsic right to a service provided by other people. Health care will continue to become more expensive until root causes are addressed. I cannot think of a single government managed project that becomes cheaper or more efficient after it has been taken over by government. Is airport security cheaper and more effective now that the federal government runs it? It is a more pleasant experience for travelers? Why will health care be any different? Someone explain that to me.

The irony of the national “dicussion” we are having on this issue is that is isn’t really a discussion. It’s a room full of morons shouting at one another while all the thoughtful voices are drowned out. Mackey’s reward for his thoughtful opinion is that some people are boycotting his company’s stores – that’s freedom in action. Once we have a national health care plan in place being run at the federal level freedom of choice won’t be an option for Americans who don’t want to participate in that plan. That’s my understanding anyway – there is no opt out for Social Security, why would there be one for AmeriHealth or whatever they decide to call this great project. Government will pick the care options instead of Cigna. Government will tell you when the plan limits are reached. Congress will not apply the standards used on voters to themselves. Business as usual except more government offices will sprout in major cities to administer the fine new system.

Basic human rights are a great conceptual vision. When applied by bureaucrats and politicians their luster tends to wear off pretty quickly. Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free is a pipe dream. At least that has been my experience with such matters.

Disclaimer: I get my health care through the Tricare (military government program) because my civilian employer’s program costs three times as much. However, that doesn’t change my viewpoint that government inevitably makes thing operate less efficiently and cost more. The paperwork reduction act, for instance, caused more paperwork. I don’t know how that is possible but it’s true.

One of my biggest frustrations with military life is that old standby answer I always get when I ask why we are doing something I think is dumb – “We’ve always done it that way. Shut up and do it.” Welcome to new paradigms.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.

Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.

As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.

Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.

“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I have ever heard.’ ”

The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.

“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said.

Technology inevitably changes everything. Hopefully, in the Army, that will mean we think on our feet more effectively and value our soldiers more for their minds than we have in the past. Warfighting has never been more of a mental game than it currently is and that trend will only continue.

The economy is in full recovery. Economic doom is just around the corner. Which of these scenarios is real? That depends who you are listening to.

Kenneth Rogoff thinks doom is inevitable – at least that is how I read it.

Asia may be willing to sponsor the west for now, but not in perpetuity.  Eventually Asia will find alternatives in part by deepening its own debt markets.  Within a few years, western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate, partially default, or some combination of all three.  As painful as it may seem, it would be far better to start bringing fundamentals in line now.  Restoring confidence has been helpful and important. But ultimately we need a system of global financial regulation and governance that merits our faith.

The U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar are faith based. Government bailouts have the long-term effect of causing people to lose faith in their fantasy money system and draw attention to the fed’s completely dishonest bookkeeping practices.

The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year — far more than the official $248 billion deficit — when corporate-style accounting standards are used, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The loss reflects a continued deterioration in the finances of Social Security and government retirement programs for civil servants and military personnel. The loss — equal to $11,434 per household — is more than Americans paid in income taxes in 2006.

“We’re on an unsustainable path and doing a great disservice to future generations,” says Chris Chocola, a former Republican member of Congress from Indiana and corporate chief executive who is pushing for more accurate federal accounting.

Modern accounting requires that corporations, state governments and local governments count expenses immediately when a transaction occurs, even if the payment will be made later.

The federal government does not follow the rule, so promises for Social Security and Medicare don’t show up when the government reports its financial condition.

Bottom line: Taxpayers are now on the hook for a record $59.1 trillion in liabilities, a 2.3% increase from 2006. That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

Half a million dollars in debt per American household sounds like doom to me. Maybe someone can explain to me how the dollar is going to remain viable with this sort of staggering load. Bring me your economists and your money counters and have them explain to me how the American taxpayer is going to survive this. Explain to me why my Starbucks going out of business tomorrow is a good sign that the economy is recovering. Tell me how it is positive that of the 40% of my co-workers laid off over the last six months, most of them are still unemployed, or are working jobs that pay half of what they were earning.

Now explain to me what the government is doing that will fix this situation in the long run.

In the mean time, we hear that economic recovery is imminent.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A gauge of future U.S. economic growth edged higher in the latest week, sending its yearly growth rate to a two-year high that suggests a near-term end to the recession, a research group said on Friday.

The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Leading Index rose to 118.5 for the week ended July 3 from a downwardly revised 117.4 in the prior period, which ECRI initially reported at 117.6.

The index’s annualized growth rate plowed further into positive territory to a two-year high of 5.4 percent from 3.9 percent the week prior, which was revised lower from 4.0 percent.

It was the highest annual growth rate the gauge has seen since the week to July 20, 2007, when it read 5.7 percent.

ECRI Managing Director Lakshman Achuthan holds that recovery is imminent before the year’s end, as long as economic data continues to weaken at a slower pace.

“It is increasingly evident that, despite widespread misgivings based on backward-looking economic data, the end of recession is at hand,” said Achuthan.

I’m left scratching my head and eyeing the pundits with deep suspicion. My pocketbook doesn’t feel safe.

The idea of checks and balances is integral to the existence of the geopolitical entity called the United States. The federal government is supposed to hold itself in check through various mechanisms, most of which are broken. In 2009, the political discussion rarely turns to the tenth amendment to the United States Constitution. The federal government has been ignoring this and other amendments throughout my lifetime. In the United States the majority of political power is reserved to the States and not Washington, D.C. At least, that is how it was supposed to be. Schools don’t teach states’ rights much because the federal government runs schools. That isn’t how it was supposed to be.

Jefferson once wrote, “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” To resist this centralizing trend, the sage of Monticello was convinced, the states needed some kind of corporate defense mechanism.

Our betters have already told us that the only reason anyone might wish to vindicate the cause of states’ rights is for the purpose of defending slavery or upholding some lesser form of local oppression. What follows is the tip of the iceberg of the history that, by what I shall assume is an entirely well-meaning and innocent oversight, these great scholars of American history consistently fail to acknowledge.

As a National Guardsman, I am particularly interested in the ramifications of state sovereignity in relation to my militiaman status.

In 1798, the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky approved resolutions that affirmed the states’ right to resist federal encroachments on their powers. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the resolutions’ authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. The Virginia Resolutions spoke of the states’ right to “interpose” between the federal government and the people of the state; the Kentucky Resolutions (in a 1799 follow-up to the original resolutions) used the term “nullification” – the states, they said, could nullify unconstitutional federal laws.

The U.S. Department of Education just purchased my student loans from J.P. Morgan. In fact, the federal government is integrally involved in decision making about every aspect of Americans’ daily lives. The U.S. federal government keeps growing and growing and growing. President Barack Obama certainly doesn’t represent change when it comes to finding non-governmental solutions to societal problems. This continued growth represents a clear decline in personal freedoms for individual Americans. Every new federal law takes dozens of choices away from the states and their citizens. Every federal bureaucrat represents a threat to the tenth amendment of the U.S. constitution. Who protects the rights of the individual citizen when the federal government will not? History says that job falls to the states.

During the War of 1812, Massachusetts and Connecticut were ordered to call out their respective militias for the purpose of defending the coast. The call derived from the federal government’s authority to call the state militias into service “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel invasions.”

Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong, however, maintained that the states reserved the power to determine whether any of these three conditions held. At Strong’s request, the Massachusetts Supreme Court offered its opinion. That court agreed with the governor: “As this power is not delegated to the United States by the Federal Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, it is reserved to the states, respectively; and from the nature of the power, it must be exercised by those with whom the states have respectively entrusted the chief command of the militia.”

I think it is very likely that in the 21st century we will see armed internal conflicts take place in the United States due to various political realities. Unless our ruling class can continue to maintain the soft easy life for the vast majority of Americans such events are going to inevitably occur. The American role as the world’s sole superpower simply cannot last. Since that cannot last, I do not see how the bubble of comfortable unreality Americans live in can last either. When the bubble pops things will change. History proves that change almost never happens without conflict. I hope that when this conflict almost inevitably comes it will result in a weaker central government and stronger state governments. It is my personal belief that America would be a better place to live if the states were actually sovereign again. Centralization of authority is a cancer growing on our freedom. Strong state governments and weak federal government are appealing ideas from where I stand.

If you are like me, you’ve been using Windows 7 release candidate for months now in your production environment.It was stable, it beat the pants off Windows Vista. The key question for me – how do I upgrade from a release candidate to a release to manufacturer build of the operating system? Microsoft has never officially made such an upgrade possible. However, there is a fairly simple way to step outside the permitted boundaries and upgrade Windows 7 from a beta or RC build to the RTM build of the OS. I got this information from Lockergnome and can report that it has worked like a charm on several different machines.

Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
3. Browse to the sources directory.
4. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
6. Save the file in place with the same name.

Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.

These same steps will be required as we transition from the RC milestone to the RTM milestone.

Again, we know many people (including tens of thousands at Microsoft) are relying on the pre-release builds of Windows 7 for mission critical and daily work, making this step less than convenient. We’re working hard to provide the highest quality release we can and so we’d like to make sure for this final phase of testing we’re supporting the most real world scenarios possible, which incremental build to build upgrades are not. At the same time everyone on the beta has been so great we wanted to make sure we at least offered an opportunity to make your own expert and informed choice about how to handle the upgrade.

We’re always humbled by the excitement around the releases and by the support and enthusiasm from those that choose to run our pre-releases. We’re incredibly appreciative of the time and effort you put into doing so. In return we hope we are providing you with a great release to work with at each stage of the evolution of the product. Our next stop is the RC…see you there!

THANK YOU!

–Windows 7 Team

Bear in mind that this process is not going to be supported if you run into any issues. Microsoft will not help you fix problems that you might encounter. I am not responsible for them either. If you are using a Windows 7 beta or the RC and decide to follow these steps to upgrade your existing environment you should back up any critical data first.

On a good day, I get up at 5:30 AM to go to work. My commute is about an hour and fifteen minutes. On a good day, I get home from work at 6:30 PM. On a good day, I do homework from 6:30 PM until about 11 PM. You see, I’m working on a master’s degree. The cycle starts over Monday through Friday like clockwork. On weekends I do more homework. When I’m not doing homework I have drill with the National Guard. For that, I have to get up around 4:30 AM.

Some days, I’m not sure what keeps me repeating this routine over and over as the years pass. I have done this for about five years now like clockwork. I think it is breaking my body down or aging me a little faster than I would otherwise be aging.

I hope to retire by age 55. I want my time to be mine. I know exactly what I’ll do with it. I have enough personal goals to fill three of the 80-year lifetimes I can statistically expect to live based on my genetics, lifestyle choices and education level. Time is precious. On a good day, I sleep in until 7 AM.

When the Marine Corps doesn’t like something the tendency is to try and kill it. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps fails to understand that information wants to be free.

“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads aMarine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. “The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” a Stratcom source told Danger Room.

This kind of approach just makes the people inside an organization expend inordinate amounts of energy finding new networks that avoid the silly rules and bans. It also discourages the younger crowd from sticking around. Can you say mission failure? Meanwhile, the public gets the idea that the U.S. military has something to hide.

“OPSEC is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that,” Price Floyd, the Pentagon’s newly-appointed social media czar, told Danger Room. “What we can’t do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”

Can anyone tell me of a single battle that has been lost due to social networking? How about a single life lost directly due to “information leakage” related to Facebook, MySpace or Twitter? Certainly

I have no idea what a social media czar is but I’m thinking that the Federal Government needs a new annual convention – it can be called Flock of Czars. It will give all the Web 2.0 pundits something new to make fun of. The sad thing is that people who have decided on a military career are stuck with this sort of foolishness until there is a sea change in the level of blind authoritarianism. These arbitrary social networking bans and information non-distribution policies can cripple information operations related to winning the proverbial hearts and minds. Modern war, we’re told, is based on winning hearts and minds. I guess we’re losing.

It is really no surprise that the “security czar” of the United States has resigned. The job is a joke.

People familiar with the matter said Ms. Hathaway has been “spinning her wheels” in the White House, where the president’s economic advisers sought to marginalize her politically.

Cybersecurity is “a major priority for the president,” White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro said, adding that the administration is “pursuing a new comprehensive approach to securing America’s digital infrastructure.” In the search to fill the top cyber post, “the president is personally committed to finding the right person for this job, and a rigorous selection process is well under way,” he said.

Ms. Hathaway had initially been considered a leading contender to fill the cyber post permanently. She lost favor with the president’s economic team after she said it should consider options for regulating some private-sector entities to ensure they secure their networks, said cybersecurity specialists familiar with the discussions. Being a holdover from the Bush administration didn’t help either, they said.

I’ve expressed my opinions on federal czars. They are not needed in a place billed as the “land of the free.” You can have security but not in conjunction with freedom of choice. Americans are not quite ready to trade all their freedoms away. To have information security they would have to give up ALL privacy and all expectations of data ownership – these would have to be ceded to professional bureaucrats and their minions. Every citizen and resident would have to be subjected to a monotonous litany of banality unsurpassed in human history.

For instance, it is likely that an annual “security training certification” would be needed for a resident or visitor to access any network in the nation if the federal government czars actually had their way. Such programs already exist. To access even the least important information imaginable in the military, one is required to complete a bevy of marginally useful flash presentations that remind that no expectation of privacy exists and that the user is always at fault when something goes wrong. Individuals should never take the initiative. All activity should be reported to the minders. Penalties for deviation apply. Violators will be dealt with in the harshest terms. Keep your head down citizen.

A nation-state that actually values freedom does not need a bureaucrat controlled behemoth agency to enforce policies and procedures from lofty air-conditioned glass towers. If we truly value freedom then we need small strike teams of information warriors ready to respond to threats and direct attacks on critical info infrastructure as needed. That’s it. No czars. No Bureau of Endless Mediocrity in Policy. These things will only what’s left of the nation’s soul.

Wired partly gets it, but only partly.

A “czar” position is the exact opposite of what we need to successfully defeat cyber space adversaries. The botnet that denies service to your governmental web sites might have been assembled by a Brazilian, who borrowed code from an Israeli, who launders his money through a Russian. None of them have met in person, and next month they may all switch roles – and throw in some Americans and Chinese to boot – for a totally different attack. A cyber czar is fighting a network with an org chart.

America doesn’t need the help of the fed to be technologically dominant. We just need government to get the hell out of the way. Sure, leave DARPA in place. Go ahead and create some military hacker programs. Have a secret MOS for that. But stop making up giant agencies with “czars” to head them that accomplish nothing at all, or if they do, are so incompetent at explaining how benefits outweigh burdens and costs that everyone just wants them to piss off.

War, like any part of the human experience, is filled with shades of gray. Conflict comes on many levels. Conflicts between sociopolitical entities have entered a new era. Lawyers have begun debating the ethics of information systems infrastructure attacks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged.

Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman’s terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

“Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The U.N. Charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined.”

As a non-commissioned officer who makes a living centered on the feeding and care of information systems two thoughts spring to mind after reading about our great moral and ethical dilemmas related to fighting cyberwars.

1. Collateral damage to information systems as the result of bungled or poorly planned information ops will have a high probability of creating more long-term problems than are solved – think about what happens when the SWAT drug lords break down the wrong door and shoot grandma or when an air force bomber hits the wrong target. Bad juju. If you’re fighting a war to win hearts and minds you have to operate with precision.
2. Focusing on the ethics of cyberwar while Guantanamo Bay is still a prison camp is a fool’s errand. A man with a small cut on his finger and and an eyeball dangling from the socket should focus on treating the eyeball first and then worry about the finger. Unfortunately, we’re politically bankrupt so we’re focused on the finger instead of the eye.

Unless the apocaplypse comes first it is an inevitability that machine intelligence will outpace the capabilities of the biological computer we call the brain. Probably in my lifetime. At this writing, I am 38-years-old.

The concern wasn’t so much that a super intelligence that exceeded or even matched human ability was coming – at least not right away.  Rather the immediate concern was that machines are right now making significant advances in several small niches of society that will seriously disrupt human labor demand, war tactics, and civilization as a whole.

Most people spend very little time thinking about the future. That is ill advised but it may also be of comfort to those who fear change. Most people will change the topic when I tell them that technology is going to produce longer lifespans and ability enhancements such as better eyesight, spine replacements, hearts that don’t suffer attacks and eventually backup copies of people. Artificially enhanced breasts, replacement hips and facial reconstructive surgery are infantile advancements. It is almost inevitable that humanity will move out of the human body, at least some of us will. What will we be then? Not human but what? Maybe we will be competing with or ruled by our creations and their offspring.

Machines have already made major inroads against a huge array human abilities and tasks.  Machines are largely making humans in the factory obsolete, as evidenced by the flexpicker and the kiva robots.  Robots are rapidly seeping into the worldwide war apparatus from many different angles, whether it be surveillance machines, armed drones, or advanced strategic planning bots.  From soccer, to surgery, to climbing, the list of robotic achievements goes on and on.  So what does the future hold for man and machine then?

Will machines ultimately match and then exceed human level intelligence?  I guarantee it!  Such a point in our future is called the singularity, and the real question is not if, but when and how it will happen.  Kurzweil and other singularity proponents will tell you that machines will match human intelligence in less than 30 years.  I think that is certainly possible, but it could also take much  longer.  At such a point it is impossible to tell what will happen, hence the reason it is called a singularity.

Worrying about what superintelligent machines will decide to do with the time, resources and CPU cycles available to them does not imbue my soul with a sense of forboding. Why? Because I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to move to Washington, D.C. and spend all their time trying to micromanage my life. In fact, I’m hoping they’ll kick those do-gooders and busybodies out of their swamp. Bring on the machine intelligences!

VPS.net’s node management window

It’s been quite a while since I last tried to post. This is due to several reasons. A military training deployment took some of my time away. My master’s degree continues to steal chunks of free time from me. My server has been crashing a lot. WordPress runs on PHP and it is notorious for causing strange server behavior. I had been hosting my servers with Midphase.net and was happier with their support than I had been with my previous hosting company, Bluehost. However, I was on a plan that had been phased out and the server my virtual machine was located on had fairly frequent crashes. My load averages were extremely wacky although I was paying for my own private virtual machine with decent RAM and CPU cycles.

I finally bit the bullet and decided to switch to Midphase’s new venture they call VPS.net. VPS.net is an experiment in cloud computing. It lets you scale your resources up and down in about 15 minutes. If your site(s) suddenly start getting a lot of traffic you can scale things around quickly in a dashboard environment. My server loads had been averaging 1 to 2 with Midphase’s non-cloud VPS. Since I’ve switched to the new cloud environment with 3 nodes my load averages are sitting a lot lower as evidenced below.

top – 19:57:17 up  8:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.07

Mem:    786432k total,   739084k used,    47348k free,    54416k buffers

Swap:  1048568k total,    91872k used,   956696k free,   197320k cached

If this keeps up I’ll be pretty happy at VPS.net. One caveat is that VPS.net doesn’t offer phone based tech support – they have an online ticketing system and usually respond within a few minutes to a ticket being initiated. Pricing for a VPS node starts at $20 per month.

Theft is generally considered an immoral act but if I could I would steal time from the universe. The longer I am here the clearer it becomes to me that the amount of time in a typical human lifespan will not be enough to satisfy me. I have not yet had time to learn to fly planes. I haven’t had the gathered the time or money to design and build my underground home. I’m still not a guitar player. I don’t even have my master’s degree yet. Everything feels rushed.

If I knew I’d have 500 years to figure out what I want to be when I grow up how would that change my outlook? How would it rearrange my life plans? What things would I do differently?

The more I think about time, the more I resent those who steal mine. Filling out forms, waiting in lines and being forced into activities that involve wait cycles or completely avoidable repetitive tasks irritate me in the extreme. I want my time for myself. I want to spend it doing the things I dream about. We should live longer than we do and reach higher than we do. Why is it so hard for humans to spend their time well? Perhaps because we do not teach the right things.

I want to become a time thief. I want a longer life.

The House of Representatives is meddling again. Admittedly, this is their appointed job.  This time, Congress is occupying itself making adjustments the types and quantities of energy available to Americans.

The big-money piece of the bill is a proposal to require companies to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to changes in the earth’s climate, causing such phenomena as melting polar ice caps. The bill would put caps on those emissions, with the goal of reducing overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by the year 2020, and 83% by mid-century.

In a series of deals meant to ease the impact on businesses and their customers, Democratic leaders agreed to give away to the business community more than 60% of pollution permits in the early years of the program.

Supporters say the bill will have a modest impact on electricity ratepayers, and in many cases will save them money. That is because the legislation directs state regulators to make sure electricity-producing utilities that receive free pollution permits pass along the savings.

If the legislation passes the Senate intact, it will likely benefit the company I work for greatly because we own a wind energy division are are looking at forming a solar division as well. While I like the idea of encouraging my climate friendly energy generation I don’t like the idea that Congress should be in charge of regulating energy. Government has a way of ensuring a median of mediocrity.

Let’s see what happens to this bill in the Senate. I look forward to my free wind turbine being installed shortly so I can live the green lifestyle.

My dog Bandit died yesterday. He was about 10 or 11 years old. Bandit died of cancer, opened up on an operating table. We didn’t know anything was wrong with him until he stopped eating a few days ago.

My wife and I tried to give him a good life. Bandit was a border collie, a breed called the Blue Merle. He was born deaf and I’m told that made him unpalatable to the kind of people that want Blue Merle border collies. That made him palatable to my wife and I – we collect losers no one else wants.

What made Bandit special? Many things. Among dogs, he was a loner. The other dogs have a pecking order that is constantly being tested. Bandit really wasn’t into the pack mentality. He just wanted to herd the other dogs, especially little Sparky. Hours and hours would pass while Bandit carefully watched Sparky through the gate that kept him on his side and she on hers. She had little interest in him but he was absolutely fascinated by her. That was his nature and his breeding.

Bandit was smart. He knew sign language – two thumbs up meant good boy and would get his tail wagging. Punching a thumb and index finger together meant NO and would result in a downward head motion – Bandit knew he was being chastised. Since he was deaf, I had to stomp on the floor to get his attention sometimes. Outside at night, we had to flick the lights on the back porch to let him know it was time to come inside and go to bed. Bandit loved to lay outside in the rain during thunderstorms. That among everything else made him unique – most of our collection loser pack has an almost neurotic fear of thunderstorms.

Some of our dogs have issues related to their past lives. Abuse can make a dog afraid of strange things. A rough life and starvation can make a dog demanding when it comes to attention from his or her humans. Years on a chain can make a dog “just a little off.” Bandit had none of these traits (or character flaws, depending how you see the world). When he wanted love he would come over and nudge one of us. A few strokes and a pat on the head were often enough to solicit some of his oddly vocalized sounds of content. If you’ve ever heard human born deaf speaking, you know what I mean. Bandit’s dog sounds were goofy. He barked like a deaf person speaks, and made groans and moans when you rubbed his ears that weren’t quite right. His odd sounds amused me to no end and I used to talk to him in a special voice. I don’t know why because he couldn’t hear me at all.

Bandit’s silent world is finished now. He is not only deaf, he is dumb and blind as well. Good-bye my friend. I will miss your strange bark. When feeding time comes, I will remember the strange little piles of food you used to make and then guard from the other dogs. Every time I hear a crash of thunder, I will remember you laying contendedly in the rain. You were a good dog and I’m glad I was able to know you and share in your existence. For almost a decade, you made my life just a little richer.

Hawks are vicious creatures. They are also cannibals. A hawk has been hanging around the four story office building where I work. The building is designed to keep birds from hanging off its ledges. Wires have been strung on every ledge on the theory that birds don’t land on really thin metal wires. The hawk sits on these wires and watches birds.

Our cubicle zombies have speculated that the hawk is a scaredy hawk because they have observed other birds complaining about his presence and doing dive bombing runs. I’ve explained that it is the hawk dominating these conversations and not the legions of caterwauling complainer birds. My explanation proved correct today.

The hawk caught a smaller bird and ripped its head off. It left the pieces of the dead bird on a window ledge for all of us to ponder on.

We all want to believe in something bigger than ourselves. At least I think we do. We need purpose. Our feet get sore as we move forward through life and we need something just around the bend or over the hill to keep us going. There are tens of thousands of causes you can choose to champion in life. They come in all shapes and sizes and cost anywhere from nothing to everything. And then there are the singulatarians, an offshoot of the transhumanists. I am a transhumanist and a singulartarian because both ideas make sense to me.

What is a transhumanist?

Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Dangers, as well as benefits, are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

What is a singulatarian?

Singularitarianism is a moral philosophy based upon the belief that a technological singularity — a theoretical future point that takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence — is possible, and advocating deliberate action to bring such an entity into effect and ensure its safety.

While many futurists and transhumanists speculate on the possibility and nature of this technological development (often referred to as “the Singularity”), Singularitarians believe it is not only possible, but desirable if, and only if, guided safely. Accordingly, they might sometimes “dedicate their lives” to acting in ways they believe will contribute to its safe implementation.

There are many interesting aspects of both transhumanism and singulartarianism worth discussing seriously. Morally, ethically and sociologically these two worldviews represent change. Change is very scary. Change is very upsetting. Change can destabilize systems. Some people fight change as a matter of course because they are comfortable with who they are, with where they live, with how things are. The people are doomed because the only constant in the universe is change.

I fail to understand why someone who thinks of him or herself as a rationalist or an intellectual would start a conversation by labeling a non-religious movement a cult. That’s how John Horgan views us. In two posts, Science Cult and Is the Singularity a Cult, Horgan concludes that “the last thing humanity needs right now is an apocalyptic cult masquerading as science.” Pardon me, sir, but what are you talking about?

Transhumanist and their cousins singularists, as I like to call them, are not a cult. We just want to believe. Please – don’t associate us with religious kooks.

This stuff is true, if you also mention that soon to Kurzweil doesn’t mean soon to all of us and that time is relative and human beings are capable of seeing it on different scales:

Singularitarians such as Kurzweil insist that scientists will soon “reverse-engineer” the brain so that they understand exactly how it works. Many neuroscientists assume that, just as computers operate according to a machine code, so the brain’s performance must depend on a “neural code”; this is the set of rules, syntax or algorithms that transforms electrical impulses emitted by brain cells into perceptions, memories, meanings, intentions. Researchers are trying to decode the brain by probing it with ever-more-powerful technologies, such as magnetic-resonance imaging, positron-emission tomography and microelectrodes.

Cracking the neural code should yield all sorts of benefits. First, the brain’s programming tricks could be transferred to computers to make them smarter. Moreover, given the right interface, our brains and computers could communicate as readily as Macs and PCs. Eventually, our personal software could be extracted from our bodies for uploading into computers.

If a neural code exists, however, neuroscientists still have no idea what it is. Far from converging on a solution, scientists cannot agree whether information is represented primarily by signals from individual neurons, or brain cells, by oscillations of many neurons firing in tandem, by even higher-level waves of chaotic electrical activity sweeping through the brain or all of the above.

But, dear sir, where did the chip on your shoulder come from?

Also it pisses me off when you and your ilk–including Kurzweil–accuse me of “fearing” the Singularity or of merely dismissing it as “weird.” That’s bullshit. Sure, I make fun of you guys, because I’m trying to entertain people. But in my Spectrum article and even that crappy little Newsweek piece I also present specific counterarguments to the wild extrapolation upon which the Singularity is based. My first two books also have a detailed critique of the fields you think will produce the Singularity, including AI, neuroscience, genetics and so on. You Singularitarians, for all your vaunted cleverness,display an extraordinary and I can only assume willful ignorance of the complexities of biology, including how the genetic code produces bodies and how the neural code produces minds. When someone draws your attention to these issues, you respond with what you accuse critics of, ad hominem attacks. There’s the cult-like insularity and arrogance I talked about before. And that’s why you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Galileo Galilei wasn’t taken seriously but it turns out he was right. Ray Kurzweil may or may not be proved correct in time. If he is you lose nothing or everything. In the mean time, all you’ve done is a disservice to people who want to believe in something that might be bigger and better than remaining trapped on a planet full of pretty small amazingly petty minds. There is a universe out there to explore.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many people go mad in our modern society, here’s a clue: overgovernance. Does the Federal Communications Commission really have the right to invade your property whenever it wishes?

“Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

But what about the fourth amendment?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The only way to stop the mentality of the millions of bureaucrats like David Fiske is to stop cooperating with them. Sue them. Obfuscate. Be civilly disobedient. If none of that works, be uncivilly disobedient. The end result of not doing so is a nanny state where government supercedes all other authority and becomes the official religion of the geopolitical sphere it controls. When it comes to the memewar between nannyism and the spirit of independence, nannyism is certainly dominant in the year 2009. The FCC should not be able to fine people for refusing entry in regards to private property.

“It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. “When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna — the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre.”

The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a 2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. “Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection,” the statement says.

The notice spooked those running “Boulder Free Radio,” who thought it was just tough talk intended to scare them into shutting down, according to one of the station’s leaders, who spoke to Wired.com on condition of anonymity. “This is an intimidation thing,” he said. “Most people aren’t that dedicated to the cause. I’m not going to let them into my house.”

But refusing the FCC admittance can carry a harsh financial penalty. In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC’s direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

Would I have paid the FCC a $225 fine? Absolutely not. Take me to court and show me the warrant. That is the attitude we should all have. If government is going to play the role of bully, then we should gang up and defend ourselves with whatever means we have available. We should disobey and be noncooperative whenever the government doesn’t follow its own rules or strays outside boundaries we have placed on it. I don’t want or need to be protected from “pirate radio stations” or other made up “threats.” In the land of the free, the FCC is an unneccessary burden on the belly of society. We should loudly remind each other and it of that fact.

I’ve signed up to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

I wonder where the yellow brick road leads.

One of the things that irritates me most about life in these United States is the tendency our public officials have to respond to any negative situation by peering into your bedroom window, climbing into your pants, or otherwise attempting to restrict your behavior as a consenting adult. In the wake of some nutter wacking women in the New England area (a nutter who happened to prefer finding his victims via Craigslist) South Carolina Attorney General Henry “I’m In Your Pants” McMaster is looking for some attention.

Let’s not pretend that Mr. McMaster wants to make the world a better place. He makes his living profiting from punishing people. If he didn’t have access to what was going on in your pants it would diminish his market share on spanking naughty people.

Which brings us back to the subject of hookers, and South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Earlier this month McMaster, who is of course eyeing a run for governor, threatened criminal prosecution against Craigslist management if pornography and ads for prostitution were not removed from the site. Craigslist took extraordinary measures to comply.

But quiet compliance isn’t what McMaster is looking for. He wants handcuffs and a trial, the kind of stuff that Spitzer got. He issued the following statement on Saturday “As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”

Frankly, I’m not interested in political “servants” who are interested in what goes on between consenting adults. Craigslist is not a criminal organization – it provides a service that connects people. What consenting adults do with their pants (or without them) is only a matter for a prosecutor to get involved in when nonconsensual activity has taken place. The response to the South Carolina AG by Craigslist is noteworthy.

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster today announced that our recent improvements, which go far beyond measures he himself personally endorsed with his own signature six months ago, not only aren’t good enough, but actually require a criminal investigation:

“As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”

He evidently feels justified in singling out craigslist for investigation, and publicly condemning me personally as being worthy of criminal prosecution.

Seriously? The craigslist adult services section for Greenville, SC has a total of 1 ad for the last 3 days, featuring a photograph of a fully clothed person. The “erotic services” section for Greenville, which we recently closed, has 8 ads total which will expire in two days, and even for these ads the images and text are quite tame.

Meanwhile, the “adult entertainment” section of greenville.backpage.com (careful with link, NSFW), owned by Village Voice Media, has over 60 ads for the last 3 days, and about 250 in total. In sharp contrast with craigslist, many of these ads are quite explicit, quoting prices for specific sex acts, featuring close-ups of bare genitalia, etc.

Of course, no one in mainstream legal circles thinks either company should be subject to civil suit, let alone a criminal investigation. But if for whatever reason you were so motivated, would you target a venue with 9 PG-13 rated ads, or one with 250 XXX rated ones?

And FWIW, telephone yellow pages and other local print media have both companies beat hands down as adult service ad venues for South Carolina.

Any interest in targeting them for criminal prosecution? Didn’t think so.

Update – 1st comment on this entry lists 19 adult ads for 1 day from the Charleston Post and Courier.

Update 2 – 5 pages of escort listings on live.com (owned and operated by Microsoft), click on the “images” tab at the top of the listing page if you want to see photographs (careful NSFW), and note the sponsored “hotel” ads being sold against these listings

Update 3 – 26 escort ads for Myrtle Beach on yellowpages.com (owned and operated by AT&T). Anyone care to count the escort ads in the print yellow pages for major cities in South Carolina?

No matter which political whore is busy making hay, adults will find ways to connect, both sexually and otherwise. People will still be murdered. Your pants will still represent a place the attorney general of South Carolina thinks he belongs. Isn’t it time we told self-righteous bastards like Henry McMaster to stay out of our pants? After all, no matter how many attorney generals you have in your pants, your statistical chances of being murdered by a crazed psychopath remain about the same. What do people like Henry McMaster actually bring to the table, other than an unhealthy obsessession with running our lives?

One of the biggest challenges the U.S. military faces in early 21st century is that while it has all the best weapons of mass destruction it has NONE of the best weapons of mass communication. If history remembers either Iraq or Afghanistan, or possibly both, as a defeat, it will be because the Pentagon was not focused on the right things. It will be because the military chain of command failed to recognize, understand and embrace the power of the tweetbomb.

One of the first tweetbombs will likely cause the ‘action’ of sending a vast and sudden surge of 100 million users to a particular website or document somewhere on the internet.  Information distribution paradigms that came before Twitter, such as Slashdot or Digg, are famous for bringing surges of tens of thousands of users to websites within a matter of hours, but this is nothing compared to the power that will be unleashed by Twitter.  A key difference between Twitter and previous paradigms is that Twitter automatically pushes information to  users, whereas previous paradigms relied on users to seek out a specific website to find and act on information.  This makes all the difference.

How can an organization that blocks thumb drives ever hope to win an information war? As a society, we need to encourage our best minds to focus on methods of information warfare. Obama is a cult of personality. Imagine a United States where Obama had a twitter account where his followers waited to receive instructions to mobilize and demand that his political agenda be made reality.

It is conceivable in the next few years that a single individual or institution could have more than 100 million followers dutifully waiting to receive a message and take an associated action.  Imagine an official Twitter account for the United States or Chinese Government, created with the specific purpose of mobilizing its citizens at a moments notice to respond to a natural disaster, military attack, or any number of other emergencies.

The U.S. government has some trust issues to overcome that it will probably have to face before millions of citizens would be willing to respond to a tweet. That’s really neither here nor there. The key point of this blog entry is that information distribution systems continue to grow more robust and ubiquituous. People are growing infinitely more connected than they ever have been in human history. This will shake up paradigms long taken for granted and rearrange them in ways most people are not ready for.

The U.S. military needs to be paying attention to the technology changes taking place in the United States and worldwide because the wars of the 21st century are likely to be won or lost on LED screens or whatever replaces them. Right now that isn’t happening at the level it should be. DARPA might be thinking about how to win an information war, but corporals and captains are not. Ultimately they will need to start, or the U.S. is going to start losing.

A tornado rolled up the hill and between the neighbor’s house and our house on Friday. I was driving home from work so I missed it. My wife called and you could hear the fear in her voice and the roaring outside. There is nothing quite like the sky turning into a giant black fist and smashing your house. Luckily our house wasn’t smashed. A lot of trees on our 11-acre property were knocked over. Two of them were on the driveway from the street down to our house. It took many hours of chainsaw and Bobcat to get them out of the way so our access to the world could be restored. The power came back on eventually and we returned to being connected to the world and as such, members of civilization. How easily all of that can be taken away should be sobering. More sobering than it usually ends up being.

My dreams of living in an earth sheltered home always come to the forefront when natural disasters occur anywhere that they penetrate my consciousness. My wife tends to dismiss these dreams. She would rather expand our existing standard ranch home. I’d prefer to knock it down and start over with something original. The fist from the sky must have other plans for now.

I’m from the government and I am here to help. Many of the world’s most deadly events begin with a promise like this one. Sure, government sometimes manages to do some good. Some people would even tell you government does more good than harm. That may even be true. However, we should ask ourselves a few questions when we hear that the FCC is going to take control of national broadband.

The Federal Communications Commission said today that it has taken the first step toward developing a National Broadband plan to ensure that all Americans have access to high-speed Internet connections.

A CNET report notes, however, that the process could get bogged down by special interest groups who may use the opportunity to push their agendas on topics such as Net Neutrality. The FCC’s announcement today calls for input from “all stakeholders: consumers, industry, large and small businesses, non-profits, the disabilities community, governments at the federal, state, local and tribal levels, and all other interested parties.”

Who voted for this program? Who elected the FCC to be in charge of my bandwidth choices? And where is all the funding to “make things better” going to come from?

Now, the FCC has been given $7.2 billion of stimulus money to bring broadband access to every American. I think we should be very afraid. Unless the FCC vastly improves its game, this is going to be a sinkhole for your, and my, dollars.

The FCC is required to submit a plan to Congress by next Feb. 17 that will bring broadband to all Americans at affordable prices. Already, the carriers are lining up to protect the status quo–a situation that already is not working.

There are two things I know from having been in the military for 12 years. The first is that nothing ever goes according to any plan I’ve ever seen hatched up by a government employee – myself included. Second, there is no constitutional mandate for nationally managed broadband.

I am not convinced that we need another federal body to manage yet another aspect of American life. On the other side of the coin, I would like to see widespread penetration of cheap broadband. I’m predicting that whatever they say this is going to cost will be 20 to 30 times underestimated. However long they tell you it is going to take will be off by at least 10 years. You’ll get your cheap fat pipe but it will be closely monitored and you’ll have to pay way more than they told you for the privilege of your “free” Internet.

A student in Oregon has been banned from the state’s system of higher education for having the audacity to exercise his rights.

Maxwell has a concealed handgun permit, and is permitted to carry a handgun according to Oregon Law, and the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution.  Western Oregon University has since withdrawn their charge against Maxwell for carrying a handgun, but came up with a trumped charge about his carrying a knife and having an unloaded hunting rifle in his locked vehicle.  All charges were dropped by the Sheriff’s office as inappropriate, but WOU officials stand by their ruling and punishment of Maxwell.

Jess Barton, the Salem attorney retained by OWVA to represent Maxwell, who is a veteran Marine and member of the association, told OWVA’s executive director, Greg Warnock, that, “Oregon law affords Jeff Maxwell a full and fair opportunity to establish that WOU wrongfully suspended him based on his mere possession of items that ordinary and constitutional law deem lawful….”  Barton, a seasoned appellate attorney is confident in winning the case for Maxwell.

Barton will file a petition for judicial review at the Oregon Court of Appeals this month, to force the university to redress their wrong official action taken, as well as ask for penalties and attorney fees.  Restitution will also be sought now, since Maxwell has lost his GI Educational Benefits, including housing and other expenses when he was suspended.  He also lost the tuition and fees and book charges for last semester, which he prepaid.

The story is one of irony. Jeff Maxwell is a government trained killer. Jeff Maxwell is approved by the state to to carry a firearm in accordance with the law. Jeff Maxwell exhibits rational, logical and life affirming behavior by carrying weapons for DEFENSIVE purposes. Result – a system of “higher learning” punishes Jeff Maxwell.

This sort of memewar is based on irrational fearmongering versus rational life-affirming behavior. Those who wish to be productive and useful members of society are unreasonably restricted based on an agenda that prohibits the individual from defending him or herself appropriately from immediate threats. Anyone who stands up against this petty tyranny is immediately labeled, branded and censured. A glass ceiling is put in place to keep those who assert their individual right to self-defense from rising to positions of influence. If you believe in self-defense as a basic human right you will be marginalized, ostracized and demonized as a gun nut, trigger happy, psychotic, dangerous individual who should not be tolerated by “civilized” people.

This attitude is prevalent because it is taught. In regards to firearms, the U.S. education system is a wellspring of ignorance and misinformation.

I’ve blogged before about not saying anything on the Internet you’d be ashamed to say in front of your mother. In an age when the concept of privacy is dead it’s inadvisable to have mouth diarrhea. Just ask “Cisco Fatty.” He got fired for an inadvisable comment on twitter. Now he lives on as an Internet meme whose half-life will probably follow him to the grave.

Unfortunately, it’s also a lesson even people apparently smart enough to get offered a “fatty paycheck” are incapable of learning. So let’s review: The Internet is not your BFF. Everyone has a “My boss sucks” moment. But the prudent know to express this sentiment away from the keyboard because they also have the “My boss knows how to use the Internet” sense they were born with.

“Cisco Fatty” and all those who came before, and those who will inevitably come after, are breaking the cardinal rule of the Internet: Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other. Alas, if that message hasn’t sunk in by now, it never will. And thanks to Twitter further eroding the wall between your big mouth and a moment required to download some good sense, the Internet is now empowered to get you fired faster than ever.

I have a different take on Cisco Fatty and his fired brothers and sisters of the Church of the Running Mouth. In a century of inevitable social upheaval due to technologically driven changes to social mores we’re probably all going to be fired at one time or another. This should be no big deal. We have to remember that many Americans in the 1950s had the expectation of taking a job and keeping it for three or four decades after which they would receive a gold watch and a pension. If they hadn’t already been sucked into a machine cog or dropped dead of a heart attack they might look forward to as much as two to five years of blissful retirement before dying of high cholesterol or some other medical condition that wasn’t well understood back then. And that was only 60 years ago.

These days, a job is mostly just a job. You’ll work on projects. You’ll even finish some of them. And then you will be downsized and find another job. The important thing is – are you learning to be discreet when the situation calls for discretion? Are you learning to speak at the opportune moment? Are you learning to pontificate in a manner that will market your ideas and yourself effectively? If not, you may find yourself in Cisco Fatty’s shoes; fired before you even show up. At least someone will make a parody video to amuse millions of others at your expense.

Hitler rants about Twitter and Cisco

How’s your progress on that PMP certification you’ve been saying you were going to get for a few years now? Maybe you should be working on that instead of watching the Hitler/Cisco Fatty video. On the other hand civilization might be collapsing. Go ahead and be yourself while you still can. Honesty is the best policy and maybe you’ll learn something about the world by being truthful. The memes they keep a changin’.

I love the games available for my Xbox 360. I have more than 50 titles and I’ve spent countless hours playing titles like Fallout 3, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV and so on.

Unfortunately, Xbox 360 systems won’t function without a hard drive. And hard drives tend to fail. Especially if you have a dusty house. I have 15 dogs and my house collects about 15 times as much dust as normal. My Xbox 360 has failed twice in three years.I’ve had it repaired each time. The most recent failure of my original Xbox 360 happened outside the extended warranty period. Time for a new Xbox.

Order a new Xbox 360 Elite (red edition) with Resident Evil 5 included from Newegg.com. It arrives and I try to swap out my working 120GB hard drive from the old failed Xbox 360. I get a message stating that the system needs to update. The update runs. System reboots and then I get a message saying the update cannot be applied. Damn it. I call tech support. The tech support is probably in the Phillipines. When you call you get one of those infuriating automated recording systems that is supposed to have voice recognition but forces you to listen to Xbox Live advertisments while you’re trying to figure out how to get a human being on the phone.

The first human being to come on the phone after about 10 minutes of robot voice keeps putting me on hold to “check on that for your sir.” Great. After about the fifth hold session without a single helpful suggestion as to how I can resolve my problem, the phone give me a dial tone. I’ve been disconnected. Great. I call back. Another 15 minutes of my life are wasted renavigating through the robot to get to the Filipino. I have nothing against Filipinos. I do have issues with offshoring when they won’t tell you where they are from for “security reasons” – dude, I just gave you my home address and telephone number! Don’t give me bullshit. I’m not coming to the Phillipines to kill you. I just want my damn Xbox 360 to work. WTF!

After an hour of punching buttons and being putting on hold I’m told that a) you cannot swap a hard drive from a broken Xbox 360 to a new Xbox 360 for “licensing reasons” and b) you can order a free transfer kit online to move your content from one hard drive to the other. I’d like to offer a big FUCK YOU to whoever decided to inconvenience me in this way. It makes me much more likely to spend time looking for a company that doesn’t force me to jump through giant flaming hoops to use content I have paid out the ass to use. Redownloading all my content not to mention losing all my saved games every time a hard drive fails is retarded. Why isn’t there a simple, affordable backup mechanism for the Xbox 360? WHY! This is idiotic – someone at the research and design arm of Microsoft Games should have figured this out a long time ago. It will take me hours to re-download all the additional content I’ve purchased through the Xbox Live service. What the hell man? What’s more important – keeping customers loyal or making sure it is nearly impossible to move saved content around?

To compound my irritation with the people at Xbox and their Filipino support division the new hard drive that shipped with my limited edition Xbox was dead in the water. Yeah. It was defective out of the box. The tech told me to just return it to my retailer for a replacement. Why not ship me one overnight and let me return the defective one to you? I’m now disinclined to purchase another console owned by Microsoft. When you make it hard for me to enjoy any continuity in my gaming experience you make it hard for me to remain your customer.

This blog and thus my email address have somehow been added to Vocus PR’s spam program. Perhaps you’ve suffered the same fate. Maybe you’re anxious to get off their list.

Here are the critical pieces of information you need:

US Headquarters
4296 Forbes Boulevard
Lanham, MD 20706
Phone: 301.459.2590
Fax: 301.459.2827
Toll Free: 1.800.345.5572
e-mail: info@vocus.com

Don’t bother with the Vocus e-mail, although it might be helpful if you forward every piece of spam you receive to abuse@vocus.com for a while with VOCUS: REMOVE MY E-MAIL ADDRESS FROM YOUR DATABASE in the subject line.

One would think a “new media” public relations firm would be a bit more savvy than to set up a system where contact data for bloggers is arbitrarily collected and resold to various firms who then spam the bloggers. For instance, the latest press release I received was from a data sensor company:

BOURNE, MA, March 18, 2009 — Onset Computer Corporation (http://www.onsetcomp.com), the world’s leading supplier of data loggers, today announced a line of new Wind Sensor Adapters for connecting the company’s research-grade weather stations to RM Young, Inc.’s wind speed and direction sensors. The new adapters extend the range of wind monitoring applications that are possible with Onset weather stations, while broadening the company’s weather sensor product offerings.

“While we already offer a number of research-grade wind sensors, linking up with RM Young sensors opens up many new harsh-environment applications such as wind site evaluation, wind turbine performance monitoring, coastal weather monitoring, and air quality monitoring,” said Paul Gannett, product marketing manager for Onset. “Customers can now combine best-in-class data logging weather stations with some of the industry’s most robust wind speed and direction sensors.”

Hey guess what Vocus! I don’t blog about Wind Sensor Adapters. Why are you passing my data along to a company that sells a product I don’t cover? I blog about the military. I blog about guns and gun rights. I blog about transhumanism and technology. Come on.

It would be nice if I understood how the Vocus system works in more detail. Is there actually any focused targeting going on, or am I the victim of random PR, as others have suggested?

Sometimes, the only checks and balances keeping American government honest are other government agencies. That’s a sad statement if you really think about it – how honest do you really think the federal government manages to be when it answers only to itself? The new director of the National Cyber Security Center has resigned after a year at the post. He found it hard to do his job because the National Security Agency didn’t want him to do his job.

The intelligence culture embodied by the NSA is “very different than a network operations or security culture,” said Beckstrom in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Computerworld. Allowing a single agency such as the NSA to handle all top-level government network security and monitoring functions poses a significant threat to “our democratic processes,” he said. “Instead, we advocated a model where there is a credible civilian government cybersecurity capability which interfaces with, but is not controlled by, the NSA.”

Much like the CIA, the NSA is a gigantic and shadowy organization. The NSA seems to be better at keeping secrets and has a bigger budget that its more maligned little cousin. Wonder what all they are doing with your money and in your name? Probably worth thinking about. Whether you can do a damn thing about any of it is not clear. If the director of an oversight agency gives up it indicates that change will not come easily to the NSA. Nothing fights harder than a cornered bureaucrat with a license to kill and a nearly unlimited budget.

North America is home to an estimated quarter of a million Amish. I was raised by an Amish man and his Mennonite wife. These two Christian sects are very closely related. Neither one believes in violence as a means of solving problems.

Coca-cola is one of the unhealthiest, most overhyped products on the planet. I get that. But why is author David Berman complaining about the prevalence and location of Coke ads he saw on his overseas trips? Yes, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and Albert Einstein understood the potential of the atomic bomb. Who is the author to posit that they probably both died with heavy hearts as a result? Do Good Design is full of these sort of asides and assumptions that everyone in the world wants to get rid of consumerism and sexually suggestive ads because that is the only correct moral path. Maybe the author is on to something but presentation is everything and I was not impressed.

An example. “Tragically, the Nazi party and its use of the swastika represents perhaps the most effective branding campaign of the 20th century. Hitler’s part re-purposed this famous symbol. The swastika has been used for thousands of years by various cultures. Sadly, none of them chose to trademark it.”

Do what now? Is the author really suggesting that Hindus should somehow have laid claim to the symbol and then risen up against Hitler’s subsequent use of it? How does this apply to morally upright design in the 21st century? To say that I don’t get it would be an understatement.

The only part of the book that actually tells you how to “do good” is the final chapter – the “do good” pledge.

Here are the steps as translated into English by the reviewer:

1) When you spread memes, make sure they are morally upright.
2) Make sure you yourself live in a morally upright way.
3) Tithe. At least ten percent of your lifeblood should be put back into making the world a better place.

Nothing to see here people. Move along. This book might be of interest to moral crusaders who also happen to be graphic artists, marketing mavens or otherwise employed in the advertising industry but probably won’t pique anyone else’s interest.

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I love tales of space exploration. I grew up dreaming about exploring the stars. It was natural to me to pick up Cauldron when I read the back cover. I turned the pages and read the entire novel but I wasn’t really pulled along by author force of will. Jack McDevitt made me work at it, and that isn’t a formula for success. Characters were boring and I never really felt like I got to know anyone much less like them. There were no “heros” in Cauldron. Not the kind I could relate to in any case. Some of the alien societies were initially interesting and then turned out to be really pointless. I thought we were going somewhere that turned out to be a dead end several times during the novel.

The best ideas in the book are only hinted at while the most boring details (a space pilot turned real estate agent, fund raising events) are explored in great detail to the detriment of the reader’s enjoyment. I wanted to like Cauldron but in the end it was a letdown. I wouldn’t recommend purchasing it to anyone but the most dedicated Jack McDevitt fans. One other note: this is the third in a trilogy. Amazon.com reviews indicate the other two novels in the series are much better but I haven’t read them yet (the book doesn’t make very clear that it is the end of a trilogy on the cover).

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The United States is a bad place to be a revenue collector right now. Public “servants” at all levels are scrambling to make up projected and real budget shortfalls. Enter New York Governer David Paterson, who wants to tax everything New Yorkers download to solve the problem.

According to the Pacific Research Institute’s Jason Clemens and Adam Frey, the $787 billion dollar package will actually grow to at least $1.34 trillion over the next 10 years, due to the fact that the government will need to borrow money not only to cover the stimulus, but also the interest on that debt.

That means taxes are going to go up, and New York’s additional proposals to tax the technology sector will be a true anti-stimulus. They will not only create a disincentive to buy, but also push businesses to relocate and thus destroy jobs in New York — for years one of the unfriendliest states to private enterprise, consumer choice and the Internet.

This is a constant problem with government – once you give them authority over something and a budget to fund that authority, it is nearly impossible to get rid of the program and the problem the program was designed to solve never goes away. Do you really think the War on Drugs will ever be over unless Americans riot in the streets? How about the War on Poverty? War on Terror? If New Yorkers allow an internet tax on downloads to be created and foisted on the state it will never go away and will only grow and grow. The end result will be that living in New York will continue to get more expensive – more people will evacuate to other locales. More businesses will leave. Don’t take my word for it.

Perhaps the current anticapitalist zeitgeist is responsible for the apparent disregard for incentives and the universal reality that they matter a great deal. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that incentives to purchase goods directly affect producers’ incentives to hire employees or lay them off.

What Governor Paterson clearly hasn’t considered is that by penalizing sales of digital goods, he will discourage employment — and his state’s tax revenues could actually decrease.

A study I coauthored when California was considering Internet taxes empirically demonstrates a significant trade-off between sales-tax revenue collected and number of jobs in the economy.

For instance, if California had applied sales tax revenue to all Internet purchases in the year 2000, California would have gained $184 million in additional state revenue — but it would have lost 45,207 jobs in 2001. The loss of jobs impacts tax revenue in many forms, mainly in terms of lost income tax and sales tax. This finding is in line with other such studies and was even recognized as a potential result of taxation by John Maynard Keynes in his landmark book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

What’s the end of the road in this battle between “stimulus” and fiscal responsibility? I am not sure, but one likely scenario is civil insurrection. No one wants to talk about tipping points and debt bombs. They’re real though. Government is basically parasitic. It relies on the host organism (taxpayers) for its health, not the other way around. When the parasite feeds too heavily from the host one of two things happen – the host becomes annoyed and kills the parasite or the host succumbs to blood loss, disease or weakness and dies. Then the parasite dies too. Neither scenario is very attractive.

Why can’t we talk about reducing the size of government and getting back to fiscal responsibility? Because we’ve trained the last three generations of Americans to expect government to take care of them no matter what happens. And now we’re paying the price.

Congress feels a need to be in control. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle we are talking about. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Americans will buy almost any lame excuse they are sold for allowing Congress to pry into their private lives at will. Often, such prying is done in the name of “protecting children.” The latest attempt to scrape away what few privacy rights you may have comes in the from of two proposals that would force internet service providers to keep track of you on behalf of the high and mighty Boy and Girls of the Beltway.

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

What does Congress really do to protect children? They have encouraged a culture of irresponsible behavior that makes the problems of children worse for decades now. I fail to understand. Please explain to me how spying on Americans is going to do anything to make the lives of children better. It may make it easier to punish people for various crimes after the fact. That will not help children who may already have had some crime committed against them by an adult. That isn’t really what such bills are about though. They are about control and power over the lives of Americans.

Two bills have been introduced so far–S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Translated, the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.)

“Everyone has to keep such information,” says Albert Gidari, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm in Seattle who specializes in this area of electronic privacy law.

The legal definition of electronic communication service is “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.” The U.S. Justice Department’s position is that any service “that provides others with means of communicating electronically” qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Why would Congress want to invade the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans like this? Because you’ll let them. Conceptually speaking, privacy is the twin sister of autonomy and autonomy is the cousin to a sickly dying idea called independence. These are the “children” I want to protect. These most precious ideas are more important than a nanny state that absolves us of all responsibility for our own actions.

Your expectation of privacy has been dying for decades in America. Technology is one reason but the growth of government is a bigger reason. Link the two together and you get a very dangerous environment where privacy is nearly impossible. Once it is completely dead, many will find they are judged over and over again on their daily activities, choices, relationships and so on. Government cannot protect your children from anything as nebulous as human nature. It will never be able to unless we voluntarily allow ourselves to be chipped, mind controlled and put in work camps. Some days I don’t think we’re that far away from creating such a society.

When children are put in jail for sending a nude cell phone photo of themselves to someone else I think we need to shift direction. When we’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent and therefore a file containing all our data becomes a good idea, I think we need to shift direction. When we strip away civil rights long held dear for the lie that it will protect the children I think we need to shift direction.

If any groups of people should be encouraged to carry weapons on American school campuses, one would think the U.S. Marines might be included in the fully vetted category. Not so. Jeffrey L. Maxwell recently found that out first hand.

When asked why he carried the weapons on campus, Maxwell said he was concerned about his and other students’ safety after the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.

“When Marines hear gunfire, we don’t run from it. We run toward it,” Maxwell told KATU. “I kind of thought of myself as one of the good guys – the one who, if something happened at school, was going to step in and save everybody else.”

There are few groups of people trained more highly with firearms safety and handling than those who have served in the United States Marines.

To further add to the blind anti-gun stupidity that has been engendered in our civil society, Maxwell was told he would have to write a 10-page essay on the importance of following the law as well as be examined by a mental health professional to be re-admitted to the University. Frankly, one of the reasons I have pursued my bachelor’s and master’s degrees on-line is because I don’t have to sit in a gun free self-defense prohibited zone to learn. I’m not interested in being disarmed by bureaucrats. There was no law prohibiting Maxwell from having a gun for self-defense. There was only an administrative school rule.

The net effect of such rules is that mentally ill people or others who represent a threat to society are drawn to schools – they know that schools are one of the softest targets available for a killing spree. Societies spread memes like viruses, from one mind to another. Every kid who has ever thought of going on a killing spree has probably thought of doing it at school first. Malls are another place that make rules banning firearms – rules that only law abiding mentally sound people follow. This further exacerbates the situation when a lawbreaker or mentally unstable person decides to act out with firearms.

Police should have firearms. More importantly though,  we should encourage an environment where any responsible adult is taught a mentality of self-defense and community involvement. If we teach people that only specialists can intervene when violence breaks out we are basically saying that we don’t want our citizens to act like citizens anymore. If our citizens are not citizens then they are subjects. Subjects are easy to manipulate, control and rule.

Concerned individuals may e-mail university President John Minahan or call (503)838-8888 and/or contact Polk County District Attorney Stan Butterfield. The Oregon Firearms Federation is accepting tax-deductible donations to the Jeffrey Maxwell Legal Defense Fund. Contributors should select “Oregon Firearms Educational Fund” and indicate specifically that the funds are intended for Jeffrey Maxwell’s case.

If you are in the minority of Americans who still believe that the citizen is the basic building block of society – the mold that everything else is made from – then please consider making a donation to a Marine who served his nation and wants to continue to be the kind of strong individual we need in this country. Without some herd dogs, the flock is easy prey. Groupthink is dangerous stuff when the memes are not logically sound. Citizens with gun permits should be allowed to carry guns everywhere.

There are a lot of “what-ifs” in this New York Times story about Obama’s candidate for U.S. drug czar. Nevertheless, any shift away from guns and cages is a hopeful sign that Americans and more particularly American government is waking up to the fact that the drug war is not being won. People are going to do what people are going to do. Guns, fear, authoritarianism and cages can only have so much of an impact on human nature. Unfortunately that impact usually adds to the problem rather than mitigating it.

The anticipated selection of Chief Kerlikowske has given hope to those who want national drug policy to shift from an emphasis on arrest and prosecution to methods more like those employed in Seattle: intervention, treatment and a reduction of problems drug use can cause, a tactic known as harm reduction.Chief Kerlikowske is not necessarily regarded as having forcefully led those efforts, but he has not gotten in the way of them.

“What gives me optimism,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, “is not so much him per se as the fact that he’s been the police chief of Seattle. And Seattle, King County and Washington State have really been at the forefront of harm reduction and other drug policy reform.”

The White House has yet to announce the nomination of Chief Kerlikowske, and a spokesman for the Seattle police said the chief would not discuss the matter. His appointment would require Senate confirmation.

Here’s hoping the nomination is made and that the Senate can collectively pull its head out of its butt long enough to confirm the guy. While I disagree on principle with the post of “drug czar” to begin with I’m not idealistic enough to expect the position to be eliminated overnight. That would take a violent revolution.

Of course, the potential nominee has detractors:

Norm Stamper, whom Chief Kerlikowske succeeded in Seattle, said he was a “blank slate” on drug policy. Mr. Stamper, who left office not long after the riots that broke out during a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, supports legalizing marijuana and spoke at Hempfest after leaving the chief’s job. He said Chief Kerlikowske had not been a vocal supporter of some of the city’s drug policies focused on treatment, like a needle exchange program or a 2003 city ballot initiative, overwhelmingly approved by voters, that said enforcing the law against marijuana possession by adults should be the department’s lowest priority.

“The question is, if he were in a much more conservative community, would he attempt to turn that around?” Mr. Stamper said.

Others said that Mr. Kerlikowske’s role as a police chief put him in a delicate political position because he would not want to be accused of being soft on crime. They note that he did not actively oppose the 2003 initiative and that he instructed his staff to comply with it once it passed. They say that Seattle police officers in recent years have kept their distance from the sites of needle exchanges.

Drug arrests are down in the city and overall crime is at a 40-year low, though concerns have increased recently over gang violence.

Chief Kerlikowske has faced plenty of criticism during his time in Seattle. In 2001, a study found that more than half of adults arrested for drug crimes in the city were black, though less than 10 percent of the population was black. The chief vowed to address the disparity, and it has decreased.

In 2002, he received a vote of no confidence from the local police union. The year before, officers had been frustrated by his handling of a Mardi Gras riot in which one person died and dozens were injured. Some officers said they were prevented from intervening soon enough.

In 2007, a special commission found that the department had been too lenient in disciplining officers in certain situations.

In 2004, the chief’s personal weapon, a 9mm Glock pistol, was stolen from his unmarked police car while he and his wife shopped downtown on the day after Christmas. A police spokesman said later that the chief had accidentally left his car unlocked but that he had not violated department policy by leaving his gun in his car.

Anyone with as much responsibility as the police chief of a major city is going to make enemies. We’re humans and we love to snipe at one another. I think the potential nomination of a person who may see treatment and leniency, particularly when it comes to marijauna use, is much better than the potential nomination of a drug czar who talks a lot of jazz about stiffer sentences, more prisons and more drug “warriors” – the growth of the police state has been primarily fueled by the “drug war.” Many civil liberties have been lost or eroded. America is less free and a less palatable place to live because of the so called war on drugs. It’s about time we used a little common sense and treated non-violent drug offenders as if they were a minor nuisance rather than a national security threat.

The War on Drugs has not done a damn thing to make America a better place to live. It is what the Army would call a “force multiplier” for tragedy. Just ask death row inmate Cory Maye. Maye is on death row.

When you mix a culture of authoritarianism so strong that it is willing to destroy human lives over marijuana use with a culture where the last vestiges of entrenched American racism still hide and thrive you get bad juju. Why do I care about Cory Maye? Because other than the fact that I’m white I can see myself involved in a similar situation. My next door neighbor is a meth addict. My house is full of guns and I believe in using them for self-defense. If I’m woken in the middle of the night because the police break into the wrong house I don’t know how the situation will turn out. Would I end up on death row? I would probably have a better chance than Cory Maye because of my race, my education and my connections. Nevertheless, prosecuting an endless war against certain substances by advocating violence as the solution is a fool’s game.

Cory Maye shot a cop to death in the middle of the night just after being woken by the sounds of men trying to break his door down. Should he be put to death for defending his humble castle? I would have done the same. It is a tragedy that a cop died. But he didn’t have to. If the police stopped breaking into houses in the middle of the night and using terror like tactics in their civil invasions the incidence of unnecessary deaths would go down sharply.

Watch the documentary and decide for yourself. When are we finally going to learn that treatment is a better option than men with guns when it comes to solving substance abuse problems? Will it be in time to save Cory Maye’s life? I hope so.

The idea of collaboration is not new. The saying information wants to be free has its roots in the year 1984, which is also a fairly well known book. What’s the point? The point is that information technology people are either building open information models or closed information models. Don Tapscott advocates the power of open collaboration when it comes to information models.

The best ideas for your business might come from someone who doesn’t even work for you. That’s the contention made by author and consultant Don Tapscott in his newest book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Tapscott, along with coauthor Anthony D. Williams (who teaches at the London School of Economics), believes that the pervasiveness of the Internet will usher in an era where companies will lower their proprietary barriers and collaborate to foster greater innovation. As people employ instant messaging, blogs, wikis and other Web-based applications to communicate and develop ideas, Tapscott believes the Internet will become a platform on which companies will be forced to seek external talent in order to solve their greatest challenges.

In the spirit of this idea, and because of economic necessity (think survival mode), I am testing out Spiceworks on behalf of my employer. As budgets tighten and my employer looks for ways to cut the fat, open information models and collaboration become more and more attractive. Why pay a consultant tens of thousands of dollars to answer a question that I can get answered for free?

If the choice is protecting IP versus innovation, you’ve got to default to innovation. You can’t win by living off your morals in this new global economy. Rob McEwen went with innovation. You’ve got to innovate or die. And that means you need to think differently about intellectual property. I’m not suggesting you open up the kimono on everything. But increasingly, if you’re going to peer produce things and mass collaborate, if you’re going to get more deeply involved in collaborating on precompetitive research, then you need a portfolio of IP-some that you own and some that you share.

Innovate or die. Adapt or become extinct. There is a reason that old, unyielding executive in companies are called dinosaurs. Without real innovation, it is possible that the United States of America itself will become a dinosaur and go extinct. In fact, I think it is likely without real change. We’re not talking about a campaign slogan. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in attitudes towards innovation that starts with rethinking the openness of our information models. I’m adding Don Tapscott’s book, Wikinomics: How Collaboration Changes Everything to my reading list. I hope it will reinforce my own internalization of the moniker “information wants to be free” and give me ammunition to help convince others around me that open information models are always better than closed information models.

I blogged earlier this week about the launch announcement for Singularity University (and their web site promptly failed due to intense interest – it has since been fixed). Jamais Cascio (a futurist) posits that the curriculum of Singularity University isn’t much to his liking.

I find the name and slogan annoying, but let’s set those aside. I’m mostly astounded — and not in a good way — by the academic tracks. For those of you who haven’t yet ventured into SU’s ivy-covered marble halls, they are:

1. Future Studies & Forecasting
2. Networks & Computing Systems
3. Biotechnology & Bioinformatics
4. Nanotechnology
5. Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement
6. AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing
7. Energy & Ecological Systems
8. Space & Physical Sciences
9. Policy, Law & Ethics
10. Finance & Entrepreneurship

The message here? People don’t matter.

The first track is just Singularitarianism 101. The next seven cover technology-based industries — the mix of “here’s what you can invest in now!” with “here’s something that we can imagine” still to be determined. The last one, on “Finance & Entrepreneurship,” gives away the game with its introduction: “…how can we monetize this new knowledge of future technologies?”

Mr. Cascio goes on to suggest an alternative curriculum after noting that Singularity U is still a work in progress.

[Intro:] Future Studies & Forecasting:
With Ray K as the chancellor, you’re not going to get away without a Singularity 101 session — but this doesn’t need to be a full track.
1. Remaking Our Bodies:
   Understanding biotech, radical longevity, and enhancement.
2. Remaking Our World:
   Understanding energy, ecological systems, and nanotechnologies.
3. Remaking Our Minds:
   Understanding neurotech, cognitive systems, and AI.
4. Power and Conflict:
   Emphasizing the role that political choices have in shaping technology.
5. Scarcity, Trade, and Economics:
   How does scarcity manifest in an accelerating tech world? How do you deal with mass unemployment, technology diffusion, leapfrogging?
6. Demography, Aging, and Human Mobility:
   Shifts in population and cultural identity; understanding impact of extending life.
7. Human Identity and Communication:
   Understanding the changing nature of identity in a densely-linked world, looking at how different forms of identity clash.
8. Governance and Law:
   How does governance emerge? How are laws about technology shaped?
9. Ethics, Morality, and Unintended Consequences:
   How ethics emerges in a swiftly-changing environment; morality and technology; precautionary/proactionary principles.
10. Openness, Resilience, and Models for Dealing with Rapid Transformation:
    Open source, open access, open governance; understanding resilience.

I have to be honest – I like the suggested curriculum better than the stated curriculum. Transhumanism is not a mainstream idea. It isn’t a part of most people’s lexicon. The global socioeconomic ramifications of the inevitably of the singularity are massive and could kill billions of human beings. We are talking about socioeconomic shifts that will rock the foundations of our world. Think for a moment of a cyborg Osama bin Laden who can make backup copies of himself. Or imagine how career government positions will change when a career spans 950 years instead of 30. What could a bureaucrat do with all that time? How do we avoid creating societies that restrict longevity technology availability to the elite? Is high penetration and widespread availability of such technology even desirable? How do we ensure that no one clones Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton?

I hope that Singularity University is a massive success and I think the curriculum will have plenty of time to evolve and mature. I’m more excited by the possibilities and the interest than I am disappointed by the initial offering.

The military uses the herd mentality to achieve goals that would otherwise probably not be achievable. As a veteran, it’s no shock to me that synchronized activities among humans cause the development of a sense of loyalty.

HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. “It makes us feel as though we’re part of a larger entity, so we see the group’s welfare as being as important as our own,” he says.

We may all feel comfortable with the idea that herds engender loyalty among the members of the pack but why? The answer shouldn’t be much of a shock if you’ve got even the most basic understanding of the chemical concoctions that make our brains tick.

Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an “error signal”. This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it’s how we learn to follow the crowd.

What would be much more interesting to me than an explanation of why humans tend to follow along with the crowd is why I tend to go against the crowd. What makes me lean towards contrarianism 90% of the time? If you can tell me that I’ll buy you a beer sometime.

Eric Holder is the new attorney general of the United States by a vote of 75-21 (which means four senators couldn’t even be bothered to vote). What does this mean for Americans?

I can only speculate but it is likely that efforts to keep guns out of the hands of “average” Americans will intensify. Eric Holder is the kind of elitist who thinks most people are too irresponsible to own guns and that government needs to make lots of rules about who, what, when, why and how firearms are distributed throughout a society. Let’s be honest; Eric Holder is a proponent of the nanny state.

As deputy attorney general in the Bill Clinton administration from 1997 to 2001, Holder “was a strong supporter of restrictive gun control,” according to The Volokh Conspiracy, a Web site that focuses on the legal system and the courts.

He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners, a three-day waiting period on handgun sales, rationing handgun sales to no more than one per month, banning possession of handguns and so-called “assault weapons” by anyone under age 21, a gun show restriction bill that would have given the federal government the power to shut down all gun shows, and national gun registration.

“He also promoted the factoid that ‘Every day that goes by, about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence’ — a statistic that is true only if one counts 18-year-old gangsters who shoot each other as ‘children,’” noted the Web site, founded by law professor Alexander Volokh.

After the 9/11 attacks, Holder wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post arguing that a new law should give “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms a record of every firearm sale.” He also said prospective gun buyers should be checked against the secret “watch lists” compiled by various government entities.

I am completely pro-training when it comes to firearms. As a libertarian I hesitate to put the state in charge of the training, or of any other claptrappy rules system set up to protect us from us in regards to firearms. The whole mentality surrounding firearms needs to change from the ground up. A tool is something to be treasured and valued because it extends and reflects the beauty of being human in one fell swoop. Instead of fearing the tools we create it would be prudent to develop systems that train our citizens in their proper use. In the case of firearms we should be teaching memes that involve sober, defensive ownership. A shotgun should be no different from a hammer.

Why can’t we be reverently respectful of what the firearm represents? Why can’t we teach our kids to love and respect the equalizing power of weapons used for defensive purposes? Why do we have to put up with authoritarian elitists who try to restrict weapons. Restricting weapons changes the tone of national dialogue completely. Two men, both armed, always speak politely to one another. This is not the case when only one of the men is armed. When only the authorities have the power to defend themselves against agression the logical outcome is that the authorities will always set the tone of the conversation.

Holder also played a key role in the snatching of 6-year-old Cuban Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives’ home in April 2000, according to the Web site. Gonzalez was to be sent to Cuba where his father lived.

Although a photo clearly showed a federal agent pointing a gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that the federal agents sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.”

I look forward to the new sensitivity we can expect to find rushing out of the Justice Department like manna from heaven.

Eric Holder will have to work very hard to earn my trust and respect. I’ll be watching him very carefully and complaining loudly if he tries to further demonize the way of the gun, my right to personal self-defense or to collectively nanny citizens in any way. I expect to be busy.

Deputy U.S Attorney General Eric Holder talks to journalists about the Justice Department’s investigation of Internet hackers during the weekly briefing in Washington Thursday, Feb. 10, 2000. High-profile internet sites, under assault since Monday, have been blitzed by large amounts of junk traffic. (AP Photo/Leslie Kossoff) (Speaking, Alone, Internet, Computer) ORG XMIT: WX105

This is a school I’d like to attend.

Singularity University, which will be housed on the NASA Ames base near Mountain View and begin classes in June, is the brainchild of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. The two world-renowned scientists were expected to unveil their plans at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference beginning in Long Beach today.

The school hopes to attract students from a cross section of emerging disciplines – including nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology – to tackle huge issues facing humanity. Pandemics and global health care concerns would be typical in scope and import.

“We are reaching out across the globe to gather the smartest and most passionate future leaders and arm them with the tools and network they need to wrestle with the grand challenges of our day,” said Diamandis, who is perhaps best known for his current work as chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a group that gives $10 million awards to teams working on breakthroughs in fields such as space travel and genomics. “There is no existing program that will offer the breadth and intensity that SU will offer.”

What’s not to like? I believe the in the concept of a singularity. Here is an explanation of what some people call the Singularity.

At the core of the university’s mission is Kurzweil’s theory of “Technological Singularity,” which theorizes that a number of exponentially growing technologies – such as nanotechnology and biotechnology – will massively increase human intelligence over the next two decades and fundamentally reshape the future of humanity. In his 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” Kurzweil famously predicted that artificial intelligence would soon allow machines to improve themselves with unforeseeable consequences.

From my perspective the more energy humanity can devote to this optimist’s outlook on the future, the better of most of us become just around the corner. The catch – you’ll have to be chosen and tuition is steep.

Unlike a traditional university, Singularity will consist of a single, nine-week course of study every summer, during which 120 students from a cross-section of disciplines will mix together to tackle weighty issues. Tuition will be $25,000. Candidates will be chosen mostly from graduate and post-graduate programs around the world.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this program as I’ve spent years daydreaming about what paths I should be following. I want to be involved in efforts like this one. Hell, if all I could qualify for was a janitor job with this outfit I’d be happy. These are my people – the dreamers, the visionaries, the futurists, the explorers, the technologists and the calculated risk takers. Those who embrace change and then work to shape it make me happy.

This survey just proves that survey results cannot be trusted. First the IRS tells you that income tax is “voluntary” and then they commission a survey which they purport proves that 90% of Americans feel cheating on your taxes is wrong. Utter bullshit.

An IRS survey finds that nearly nine in 10 Americans think it is “not at all” acceptable to cheat on your taxes.

The annual survey released Monday by the Internal Revenue Service Oversight Board found that only 9 percent of respondents thought it was ever OK to cheat on their taxes. Eighty-nine percent said it was never OK.

Although the survey was conducted in late August, its release comes as Tom Daschle, President Barack Obama‘s nominee to be Health and Human Services secretary, has acknowledged failing to pay more than $120,000 in taxes. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had similar problems on a smaller scale.

The truth of the matter is that many of these people lied when responding to the survey. People naturally protect themselves when it comes to being locked up in a cage. What person is going to openly admit on a phone survey that it is morally acceptable to them to be dishonest or misleading when it comes to taxes? Very few. I absolutely do not believe the results of this survey to be accurate. If I had to guess, I would think the results are closer to 50/50 in favor of keeping as much money as possible out of the hands of government. I for one don’t support the use of taxpayer dollars to commission surveys about taxpayer attitudes towards paying taxes. That’s a matter for the voting booth.

We are almost never as dumb as our overlords think we on an individual basis. Collective intelligence is another matter entirely.

My company laid off 15% or so of the workforce on Friday. Welcome to 2009.

I wonder where we will be at the end of the year when 10-12 million people are unemployed. What if my guess is off and we are talking about 20 million unemployed Americans? I can imagine how it felt to be told your position has been eliminated. I’ve been in the same shoes in the past. Retail construction is not a growing enterprise at the moment. Either my employer will reinvent itself in rapid fashion (which it is attempting) or the company will continue to suffer.

In uncertain times, I feel certain of several things. This depression will last from several years to more than a decade. The country will be reshaped at the end of the economic realities currently being wrestled with. “Stimulus” will not solve anything in the long run. From my own pocketbook to the way the federal government handles money, a fundamental shift must take place in the way we think about money, credit and savings. I don’t see how we can ever go back to “easy credit for everyone.” I’m not particularly interested in what Obama has to say about the matter because he is no more an economist than I am. I’m sure he has some economists advising him but it isn’t clear to me why I should listen to them either. Where did we get this idea that government is supposed to create jobs? Most people seem to accept as a given that the federal government should make up jobs to shore up a failing economy. Now we’re arguing over who has a better plan to create jobs out of thin air.

CEA Director Romer’s view is that the House analysis is absolutely incorrect. The CEA estimates that the Republican plan would create only 1.7 million jobs, compared to 4.2 million for the Democratic plan.

Question: The House claims that based on the research of CEA Chair Christy Romer, their plan would create 6.2 million jobs. Isn’t that a more effective way of jumpstarting the economy?

Answer: The Republican House analysis is flat wrong in its claim that the House Republican stimulus is more effective. No matter what your analytical assumptions, as long as they are consistent the plan the President supports would result in substantially greater job creation than the House Republican plan.

Independent groups that have analyzed the President’s plan — from Macroeconomic Advisors to former McCain advisor Mark Zandi — have confirmed that the President’s plan will create between 3 – 4 million jobs–twice the number of the House plan. The President supports takes a broad, comprehensive approach. It includes substantial tax cuts – many of which mirror the provisions in the House Republican plan. But it also includes new spending programs that many economists across the spectrum believe will help create jobs and give our economy a kickstart right now.

Question: But doesn’t Dr. Romer’s research show that the economic impact of tax cuts is higher than even the Administration is assuming?

Answer: Dr. Romer’s research suggests that all types of fiscal stimulus, both spending and tax cuts, might well have a larger impact than is typically assumed and is assumed in the CEA’s analysis. It would be great if that were so. It would mean more job creation and more economic activity — which is exactly what we need right now. The Administration has based its analyses on more modest assumptions that are in line with those several independent forecasters – Republican and Democrat alike.

We should have an open discussion about these analytical issues.

We cannot afford to play political games with apples-to-oranges comparisons. Such political games distract our attention from the magnitude of the substantive task at hand.

What are all these jobs that will be created? How long will they last? What sort of long-term impact will they have on the nation’s economy moving forward? Who is going to pay the salaries of the people who take these jobs? There really are no authoritative answers to these questions.

The White House view that government spending is a potent way to get out of a recession is, in essence, a bet on a theory. The theory might be right, but it is certainly one about which many economists have doubts.

Economists may argue and debate all they want. None of them are likely to be laid off in 2009. That pleasure is reserved for the rest of us. For a few dozen of my former co-workers I wish you only the best and hope you find new opportunities soon.

I recently gave in and bought an iPhone, primarily because I can consolidate my four primary email accounts and check them easily. My work provided Blackberry does not make this task simple or pleasant. I’ve read many rave reviews over the months since this chic product has become available on the market so I was expecting a pretty happy relationship with my new phone.

I must admit, it’s a sleek and thoughtfully engineered product. It can do almost everything you’d ever want a pocket device to do. Check e-mail? No problem. Surf the web? Yep. Locate yourself on GPS and then go someplace else? Easy. Watch a movie? In theory. You see, the iPhone has a major flaw – the battery life. If you use it to do everything it can do all the time, you will have about 30-60 minutes before you need to plug it in and get charging.

Luckily, Apple offers a few simple tips for extending your iPhone’s battery life:

• Minimize use of location services: Applications that actively use location services such as Maps may reduce battery life. To disable location services, go to Settings > General > Location Services or use location services only when needed.
• Fetch new data less frequently: Applications such as Mail can be set to fetch data wirelessly at specific intervals. The more frequently email or other data is fetched, the quicker your battery may drain. To fetch new data manually, from the Home screen choose Settings > Fetch New Data and tap Manually. To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings > Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. Note that this is a global setting and applies to all applications that do not support push services.
• Turn off push mail: If you have a push mail account such as Yahoo!, MobileMe or Microsoft Exchange, turn off push mail when you don’t need it. Go to Settings > Fetch New Data and set Push to Off. Messages sent to your push email accounts will now be received on your phone based on the global Fetch setting rather than as they arrive.
• Auto-check fewer email accounts: You can save power by checking fewer email accounts. This can be accomplished by turning off an email account or by deleting it. To turn off an account, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose an email account, and set Account to Off. To remove an account, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose an email account, and tap Delete Account.
• Minimize use of third-party applications: Excessive use of applications such as games that prevent the screen from dimming or shutting off or applications that use location services can reduce battery life.
• Turn off Wi-Fi: If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.
• Turn off Bluetooth: If you rarely use a Bluetooth headset or car kit, you can turn off Bluetooth to save power. Go to Settings > General > Bluetooth and set Bluetooth to Off.
• Use Airplane Mode in low- or no-coverage areas: Because your iPhone always tries to maintain a connection with the cellular network, it may use more power in low- or no-coverage areas. Turning on Airplane Mode can increase battery life in these situations; however, you will be unable to make or receive calls. To turn on Airplane Mode, go to Settings and set Airplane Mode to On.
• Adjust brightness: Dimming the screen is another way to extend battery life. Go to Settings > Brightness and drag the slider to the left to lower the default screen brightness. In addition, turning on Auto-Brightness allows the screen to adjust its brightness based on current lighting conditions. Go to Settings > Brightness and set Auto-Brightness to On.
• Turn off EQ: Applying an equalizer setting to song playback on your iPhone can decrease battery life. To turn EQ off, go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Off. Note that if you’ve added EQ to songs directly in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ on iPhone to Flat in order to have the same effect as Off because iPhone keeps your iTunes settings intact. Go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Flat.
• Turn off 3G: Using 3G cellular networks loads data faster, but may also decrease battery life, especially in areas with limited 3G coverage. To disable 3G, from the Home screen choose Settings > General > Network and set Enable 3G to Off. You will still be able to make and receive calls and access cellular data networks via EDGE or GPRS where available.

If you follow every tip, your iPhone is immediately only half as useful. That means that most iPhone users, myself included, will spend a lot of time turning features on and off.

It may be that Apple will develop a better battery for the first generation iPhone. In the meantime, the included battery leaves something to be desired. In particular, DO NOT leave any e-mail account set to push. My work account (Exchange server) was set to push e-mail and kept failing so it would try over and over. This drained the battery repeatedly and caused me a great deal of heartburn.

If you really have to use every feature of the iPhone all the time, you might need to buy Mophie’s iPhone battery extender, which purports to add an additional 8 hours of talk time to your iPhone. My best guess is that eight hours of talk time equals about 2 hours of movie watching, 100 e-mail account push attempts or a few hours of internet browsing.

As I contemplate my economic stability and my need to have a backup plan, I am reading over the schedule of requirements for the accelerated officer candidate school. My feet are going to hurt if I decide to follow this path.

Course Overview

Phase 0

Phase 0 (IDT). Phase 0 is not a formal OCS POI Phase and no programmed instruction is taught in this phase. State OCS companies typically conduct a three IDT Phase 0 program. This phase consists of instruction to basic soldier skills, drill and ceremony, physical training, land navigation, administrative preparation, and is to be conducted in a non-stressful environment. The goal of this phase is to prepare prospective candidates to succeed in OCS. It is highly encouraged that the state requires Phase 0 because it increases the officer candidate’s success rate in the program

(1) APFT # 1 – Must pass standard APFT IAW FM 21-20 within 60 days of (and prior to day one of) Phase I training.

(2) Course prerequisites – Must provide all required documentation to confirm candidate meets course prerequisites prior to the start of Phase I. Documents must be organized in the candidate record IAW Chapter 4 of this CMP prior to arrival at Phase I training.

Phase I

Phase I (ADT). The OCS TASS battalion conducts 16 consecutive days of OCS training at a consolidated site. Day 1 will be devoted to reporting and inprocessing. Day 16 of the 16 day training course may be devoted to out processing, turn-in of supplies and equipment, travel from training site, maintenance, and recovery. The following events during this period will be conducted:

The following events must be successfully completed prior to the end of Phase I.

(1) Five-mile foot march – Must complete five-mile foot march without assistance IAW Chapter 10 of this CMP. This is the only phase requirement that can be retested in Phase II.

(2) Peer evaluation # 1 – Must complete peer evaluation # 1. See Chapter 10 for details concerning peer evaluations.

(3) POI Training – Must attend or makeup all Phase I POI training as outlined in Annex D of this CMP.

(4) Examinations – Must pass all four Phase I exams or retests as outlined in Annex D of this CMP. Candidate must score 70% or greater on each exam. Phase I exams include: Training Management, Land Navigation Written, Land Navigation Day Practical, and Land Navigation Night Practical. All exams and retest must be completed prior to the end of Phase I.

(5) Leadership Position Evaluations – Must receive and complete a minimum of one leadership position evaluation during Phase I. See Chapter 11 of this CMP for details concerning the Leadership Assessment Program.

(6) WTBD – Candidates must instruct at least one of the WTBDs and demonstrate task mastery through skill application of all WTBDs. Candidates must receive a “Go” on all WTBDs and have documented evidence of task mastery on each task. See WTBD verification sheet in Annex F.

(7) Must be recommended by the OCS company commander (by signature on End of Course Summary Sheet Phase I) as possessing the ability to acquire the leadership skills, attitudes and knowledge required of a second lieutenant prior to graduating Phase I training and beginning Phase II training.

Phase II

Phase II (IDT). Field Leadership Exercise I (FLX I)/ Warrior Tasks Battle Drills II (WTBD-II). The State OCS company conducts 48 separate Unit Training Assemblies (UTAs) over a training year

The following events must be successfully completed prior to the end of Phase II.

(1) Peer evaluation # 2 – Must complete peer evaluation # 2. See Chapter 10 for details concerning peer evaluations.

(2) POI (Program of Instruction) Training – Must attend or makeup all Phase II POI training.

(3) Examinations – Must pass all eight Phase II exams or retests as outlined in Annex D of this CMP. Candidate must score 70% or greater on each exam. Phase II exams include: Operations, Tactics, Call for Fire, Leadership, Military Justice, Heritage and History, Supply Activities and Elements of Military Intelligence. All exams and retest must be completed prior to the end of Phase II.

(4) Peer evaluation # 3 – Must complete peer evaluation # 3. See Chapter 10 for details concerning peer evaluations.

(5) Seven-mile foot march – Must complete the seven mile foot march without assistance within 2 hours and 30 minutes. Uniform must be IAW instructions concerning the seven-mile foot march contained in Chapter 10 of this CMP.

(6) Ten-mile foot march – Must complete the ten-mile foot march without assistance within 3 hours and 30 minutes. Uniform must be IAW instructions concerning the ten-mile foot march contained in Chapter 10 of this CMP.

(7) APFT # 2 – Must pass standard APFT IAW FM 21-20 within 60 days of Phase III start date. For Accelerated OCS Phase II APFT # 2 must be prior to and within 20 days of Phase III start date.

(8) Three Mile Formation Run – Must complete a three mile run in formation without assistance. The run will be an 8-10 minute mile pace. Candidates are not authorized to walk at anytime during the run; if this occurs, the individual will be considered a failure in this event. Uniform will be the IPFU.

(9) Leadership Position Evaluations – Must receive and complete a minimum of one leadership position evaluation during Phase II.

(10) Must be recommended by the OCS company commander (by signature on End of Course Summary Sheet Phase II) as possessing the ability to acquire the leadership skills, attitudes and knowledge required of a second lieutenant prior to graduating Phase II training and beginning Phase III training.

Phase III

Phase III – Field Leadership Exercise II (FLX-II). FLX-II is conducted during Phase III ADT concurrent with the Tactical Leadership Course (TLC). FLX-II is a tactical exercise designed to provide the candidates with an opportunity to apply skills learned in Phase II, Basic Infantry Tactics, while employing leadership at squad and platoon level. Although tactical proficiency is not the focus, the ability to successfully employ these skills becomes part of the candidate’s demonstrated leadership performance evaluation

The following events must be successfully completed prior to the end of Phase III.

(1) Combat Water Survival Test – Must attempt the combat water swim test IAW Chapter 10 of this CMP.

(2) Obstacle or Confidence Course. Must conduct obstacle or confidence course training and make a valid attempt at each obstacle on the course. See Chapter 10 for details concerning obstacle or confidence courses.

(3) POI (Program of Instruction) Training – Must attend all Phase III POI training.

(4) Leadership Reaction Course (LRC) – Must participate as a squad member and as a squad leader at LRC training.

(5) Leadership Position Evaluations – Must receive and complete a minimum of one leadership position evaluation during Phase III.

(6) Must be recommended by the OCS company commander (by signature on End of Course Summary Sheet Phase III) as possessing the leadership skills, attitudes and knowledge required of a second lieutenant prior to graduating Phase III and OCS

I’ll be 38-years-old when and if I begin this course of instruction. I can easily handle a three-mile run or a 10-mile road march. However, when you put me in a 60-day training environment with 16-hour days including transportation methods that include 100% my feet I can feel the throb already. I suppose it’s part of the drill to become a second lieutenant at the same age most officers are thinking about whether or not they want to retire in a few years.

People are worried about their jobs these days. Incoming President Barack Obama may or may not be able to do much to alleviate the climate created by the last few decades of unrestrained financial irresponsibility. (Thank you to all the American politicians who helped foster this environment). The company I work for builds retail stores. Guess what? Retail chains are not building new space at the moment. Rather, the opposite is true – more and more space is ending up vacant as company after company folds.

It’s time for me to work on my fallback plan – I’m considering fast tracking officer candidate school before I’m too old to do so. I cannot afford a long-term state of unemployment or even underemployment.

As a commissioned officer, I would have more opportunities to add what I hope would be a positive contribution to the U.S. military. As an enlisted troop, I’ve spent years railing against what I consider to be systemic, ingrained inefficiency and stupidity. I’m under no illusions that I will change anything big or anything long-term but I have to continue to pay the bills and my taxes if I hope to continue to enjoy the semi-freedom of modern American life and a retirement free of financial hardship.

My fallback plan may never be needed. Watching Circuit City crumble is not a good portent.

In the mean time, I will spend a little bit of energy adjusting and shuffling my vanity sites around.

trevorsnyder.com will turn into my writing web site.

fstopdreams.com will become my photography site.

willtoexist.com will remain my personal (non-official) blog.

I make a little more money from my on-line activities with each passing month. Unfortunately I’m not quite paying my current hosting fees. Hopefully, no matter what the economy and our overmanagement of it bring, I’ll be able to continue to post my existence on-line. It’s become an important part of my daily routine.

We are entering a great depression and all I hear is economic voodoo.

In a TV interview last month, Vice President Joe Biden said the following:

Every economist, as I’ve said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.

That statement is clearly false. As I have documented on this blog in recent weeks, skeptics about a spending stimulus include quite a few well-known economists, such as (in alphabetical order) Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales–and I am sure there many others as well.

I am not a fan of big government, as anyone who has visited this blog more than once probably knows. Yet I try to digest and process all of the various solutions to economic failure that are being thrust into my brain like a nail driven by a hammer. Will government investment in infrastructure fix the problem? I don’t think so. The problem is a spending driven economy of instant gratification. Or am I wrong?

If we just keep throwing made up money at the problem how will that fix it? Won’t that just make it worse for future generations? Someone please explain how a spending problem will be fixed by spending more. It is quite possible I will be jobless in the near future. I don’t see how going further into debt would alleviate my situation and I don’t see how the U.S. government thinks that it can just continue spending its way out of basic irresponsibility.

The Economist tries to make a case for exploring space with automatons.

Michael Griffin, the boss of American’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a physicist and aerospace engineer who supported Mr Bush’s plan to return to the moon and then push on to Mars, has gone. Mr Obama’s transition team had already been asking difficult questions of NASA, in particular about the cost of scrapping parts of the successor to the ageing and obsolete space shuttles that now form America’s manned space programme. That successor system is also designed to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping stone to visiting Mars. Meanwhile, Mr Obama’s administration is wondering about spending more money on lots of new satellites designed to look down at the Earth, rather than outward into space.

These are sensible priorities. In space travel, as in politics, domestic policy should usually trump grandiose foreign adventures. Moreover, cash is short and space travel costly. Yet it would be a shame if man were to give up exploring celestial bodies, especially if there is a possibility of meeting life forms—even ones as lowly as microbes—as a result.

Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.

I find that last sentence to be completely silly. If there are compelling reasons to use robots to explore the universe around us, risk mitigation isn’t one of them. Taking calculated risks makes life worth living. However we get it done, space exploration is going to become an increasingly urgent matter unless some great event makes the planet’s primary species infertile. I look forward to seeing what’s out there – hopefully through my own eyes and not those of a remote observer.

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I suspect that the average person I see on the street is not aware that there are active cryonics companies in the United States which will preserve your corpse upon expiration in the hopes that future technology will allow you to be revived so that you can continue existing. Assuming you know about cryonics and have an interest in the idea, you may want to spend some time thinking about the particulars and processes involved.  Cyronics is a scientific discipline – an unproven and often maligned and belittled field. Let’s be honest though – if you aren’t putting your hope in a perfect afterlife why not take a shot that you might be able to live again here in this world?

Aschwin de Wolf explores “5 dangerous ideas about cryonics.”

5. I will sign up for cryonics when I need it.

It should be obvious without much reflection why this is a dangerous idea. At the time a person really need cryonics, he may no longer be able to communicate those desires, lack funding to make arrangements, or encounter hostile relatives. A more subtle variant concerns the person who expects that aging will be solved before cryonics will be necessary. This person may or may not be right, but such optimism may not make him more immune to accidents than other people. This mindset is often observed among young “transhumanists” and practicing life extensionists. A related, but rarer, variant is to postpone making cryonics arrangements until the cryonics organization makes a number of changes including, but not limited to, hiring medical professionals, stop wasting money, becoming more transparent, giving members the right to vote, etc. Such issues are important, and need to be addressed, but a safer response would be to join the organization and influence its policies, or, if this will be necessary, combine with others to start a competing cryonics organization without such flaws.

There are not many people who think that it is sensible to make cryonics arrangements, but there are even fewer people who have actually made such arrangements.

As we have seen, some of these dangerous ideas share the same or related assumptions and produce identical effects (a decreased chance of personal survival). An important common theme is that cryonics cannot be treated as one single monolithic technology and that the fate of our survival depends as much on the state of the art in human cryopreservation technologies as on the competence of cryonics providers. Caveat emptor!

Some people are content with the idea that a few decades is enough. I am not. Ad vitam aeternum. Transcend humanity.

Some people love winging everything that life throws their way. I prefer being somewhat prepared. Whenever someone gets upset that I carry a gun everywhere I go I point out that I also carry a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher and a basic survival kit in my vehicle. The mentality is less John Wayne and more “I like being alive” than anything.

This guy seems to be similarly mentally aligned when it comes to the medical aspects of the meme.

If you’re camping or hiking in a group, you can’t go wrong with the previously-reviewed Adventure Medical Kit. But if you’re a citygoing 9-5’er (read: not a search-and-rescuer), the Red Cross’ personal safety kit packs many of the basics — whistle, blanket, face mask, glow stick, poncho, germ wipes and first-aid kit — for a price that’s more or less unbeatable.

We’ve got a home medical kit. We regularly update the earthquake/disaster kit in our car (a plastic tub complete with basic med supplies, canned goods, MRE‘s, water, spare clothes, etc.). But like a lot of folks, I spend a chunk of my time working in an office building where I’ve always presumed/hoped supplies are both plentiful and current. That’s why I very recently stashed one of these kits at the desk I keep away from my home office.

Could the pack be more complete? Of course. My first gesture was to rubberband a small handcrank flashlight to the diminutive bundle. Even still, the embellished package remains small, light and manageable.

Even if you are completely anti-gun (or anti-self defense as I like to think of it) you should have sustenance, survival and shelter emergency plans wherever you go. This is a mindset. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a habit. As much as I knock the federal government it’s worth a moment or two of your time to check out their emergency preparadeness kit planning page. The principles for surviving an emergency involving having fresh water, food, clean air and warmth. This is simple stuff that most people never think about until these basics become unavailable. We’re trained by the excesses of our society to rely on others for everything we need to live from one day to the next. Bad idea.

From where I’m sitting, Joe the Plumber looks a look like an idiot. I’m not particularly interested in what his opinion is. Granted, he doesn’t know I exist so we’re pretty even at the moment. Here’s the thing – sending Joe the Plumber to war was a stupid idea. There are so many much better informed candidates who could do a much better job that I’m irritated enough to change the channel when I accidentally flip over to FOX. What about JD Johannes? That guy knows what he is talking about.

In modern warfare, winning or losing has as much to do with polling results, election returns and roll-call votes as what happens on the battlefield.  Modern 4th Generation warfare is about turning the voting public against military effort or foreign policy.  The public is influenced by what they see in the media.

Clamping down on media access always fails because someone else then provides the content and seizes the battle space.

Which is why back in 2005 I bought a camera and a plane ticket and went to Iraq.  There was a part of the story that was not being told and I quit my job and rolled the dice to tell it.  In a perfect world, the media would already be telling that story, but we do not live in a perfect world, so I did what I felt needed to be done.

The war in Iraq isn’t a conventional war. It is a social war – a generational conflict that must change the culture and the prevalent memes before anymore “mission accomplished” signs will be hung. George W. Bush will be in the grave before history really decides whether Iraq was a success or failure from the Western viewpoint. The same is true of Afghanistan and to some extent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis and Palestinians who survive the actual fighting will win or lose the bigger battle in the media. In the short term these all these conflicts appear to be about land or oil or terrorism, and they are. But the big picture and the long term outcome is about dominant culture. Will liberal societies prevail or will fundamentalism triumph? Will secular values take hold in Arab countries? Will Israel finally cede to the Palestinians an acceptable homeland of their own?

Sending Joe the Plumber to intrepret either the short or long term aspects of events in the Middle East has zero appeal. FOX has lost me. To get me back they would need to replace Joe the Plumber with a genuine war correspondent, not a manufactured shill. Michael Yon, JD Johannes or Pat Dollard would get my listenership. Joe the Plumber? Hell no.

Humanity + is the most organized transhumanist group that I am aware of at this time, with a worldwide membership of 5,000+.

The group is currently nominating people to join its board of directors. I was reading Humanity + board of directors candidate statements when I came across an interesting summary that sums up my own thoughts fairly succinctly.

We live in interesting times – facing an upcoming century of radical uncertainty, where any number of new technologies may dramatically alter the world.  Probably for the better, but possibly for the worst.

It will be exciting time for humanity, and one in which we will see transhumanism make the same transition as personal computers and networks have in the past few decades.  Transhumanism will go from a fringe area appealing to a small group of open-minded geeks to an integral part of our society, discussed daily in newspapers and television.

Here’s why the 21st century will be the most interesting one so far:

• People will live longer than ever – but only some people in some societies.
• Social disparity will continue to grow causing tension, conflict and strife around the world.
• Nanotechnology and biotechnology will change aging paradigms forever.
• The number of “limited” conflicts being fought simultaneously around the world will reach the highest levels in history.
• Expectations about privacy will continue to erode in the more technology oriented cultures and societies. People in these areas who value privacy will turn to disinformation seeding campaigns (I’ll be writing a lot more about this idea.)
• The UN will be replaced/morph into world government.
• Non-human sentience will occur.
• A human mind will be replicated in the lab.

I’ll share more predictions as they occur to me.

In the mean time, expect part of the social disparity of the current century to involve conflicts between emerging memes and groups like Humanity + versus well established but inevitably dying memes like Christianity and Islam. Also expect many mutations when people find ways to make mashups between transhumanism and religion as will inevitably happen. I’m interested in the mutations and permutations we can expect to see in world religions when the average human lifespan jumps drastically higher, let alone the changes and conflicts that will result from the transition to post humanity. Will we survive?

It is hard to know whether the almost inevitable new New Deal, which I will call The American Rapture for lack of a better term, will succeed. The old New Deal is lauded by some as having saved America from the Great Depression. Others claim that Franklin Delano Roosevelt only extended Great Depression I with his government subsidies and programs. I am not an expert but I tend to believe in the second theory based on my experiences in government.

The same arguments applied to Great Depression I are being applied to Great Depression II, an event which is still breaking news at the time I am writing this blog entry. Great Depression II is underway, and FDR reincarnated is weighing his options. Our incoming Lord and Savior Barack Obama will have his miracle making work cut out for him. Americans are demanding more than water into wine. They are demanding jobs, health care, a continuance of their high standard of living and probably some other funky stuff I am not paying enough attention to know about.

The pundits argue.

Tyler Cowen, in his ongoing effort to ensure that the government spends as little as possible in its attempt to stimulate the economy, cites approvingly a post by Arnold Kling arguing against a big fiscal-stimulus package, because the risks vastly outweigh the potential rewards (actually, Kling doesn’t really think there are any potential rewards from a stimulus plan). Kling enumerates those “risks” in a list. This is not a very useful list, because it contains absolutely no evidence for any of his assertions—he simply assumes the existence of his risks to be a fact—and no assertion about how likely any of these “risks” are, which makes it a little hard to do a cost-benefit analysis. Kling says that “on close examination,” the case for stimulus is weak, but, in this post, at least, he offers no such “close examination,” merely a laundry list of familiar (and unproven) criticisms of government spending. . .

The point is that it isn’t just some group of pointy-headed Keynesians saying that a big stimulus package will be good for the economy: the collective wisdom of the market is saying the same thing. And it seems peculiar for a supposed believer in the efficiency and intelligence of markets—which, as a libertarian economist, I assume Kling is—to simply disregard what the market is saying in this case. In effect, libertarian economists are saying that they have a better sense of what’s good for the economy than the aggregated wisdom of investors does. And that makes them sound peculiarly like the Platonic economic planners that they typically decry.

I’m not an economic planner. I don’t have the predictive skills of Nostradamus. All I know is that a lot of people are concerned about their jobs, including me. I know what my fallback plan is. Do you? The irony of my fallback plan is that it relies on the one function of federal government I find to be most legitimate (if also most abused) – defense. Since I am in the National Guard, there are ample opportunities to keep myself gainfully employed no matter how bad this economy gets. Idealistically I work to encourage people to think in more freedom and choice oriented ways. Practically speaking, I sometimes have to do that from within organizations that are somewhat flawed in these areas. Ah well, it isn’t a perfect world. Surviving Great Depression II will be an adventure.

I spend quite a bit of time hanging out in forums on the Internet. I gravitate to places where ideas and events are exchanged, dicussed, argued over, rebutted, disclaimed, proved or otherwise dissected, chewed up, spit out and rehashed endlessly with minute variations. I tend to hang out at reddit.com, dancarlin.com and armedpolitesociety.com the most.

So what have I learned? A lot, actually.

I have a big mouth for a little guy. Always have and probably always will. I have an opinion about everything and I’m not shy. When I first got on the Internet I, probably like many of you, had a lot of virtual arguments. They used to be called flame wars. Maybe they still are. The point of my telling you that I had a lot of virtual arguments is this – I wasn’t convincing anyone of anything. I’ve been learning though. Tip: calling someone a fag NEVER convinces them you have a valid point. Study fallacies. I probably engaged in every single one of these at some point. How stupid of me.

The single most important lesson I have learned from the Internet is that it is a pointless waste of time to take any attack personally. Who cares? There are six billion people in the world. Some of them will not like you. Some of them will disagree with you. It is much more productive to spend your time finding people you are compatible with than arguing with those people you are not compatible with. If you are going to argue, do it because you enjoy it.

Second and almost as important is the lesson that you can control your own emotions when someone is making a personal attack. You don’t have to react. If you do react, it should be rationally, without emotion and well thought out. When being attacked on the Internet, the first thought that flashes through your head is usually the last thing you should put in the comment box. One of the best responses I’ve found to an attack is to ask a question that rephrases the attacker’s sentiment. This usually gives me time to think over what the original intent was and to rebut it logically instead of just blurting out things like “you stupid horsefaced fatass” or “your mom and your dads all smell” etc. Of course it is still fun to descend into verbal jousting sometimes and usually it is safe enough. If you do it often though (and I speak from experience) it tends to have a negative effect on your overall mindset. Days past when I have spent several hours in a flamewar I had a worse day overall. I don’t know if I am growing out of the need to win an argument or have simply realized the complete pointlessness of negative conversations. If I am not getting through then why did I bother?

I learn a lot more from other people when I filter out the negative ones and focus in on those individuals who are willing to discuss and consider. I learn a lot more when I ask questions about why someone has an opposing viewpoint instead of merely arguing against that viewpoint.

After all we’re about to implement some form of socialist health care. If I am expected to pay for your medical needs then I demand a stake in your lifestyle.

Starting the moment Obamacare passes I demand the following if you expect me to continue paying taxes:

• Health and nutrition classes will be 25% of the public school curriculum
• Public facilities will serve only health foods approved by government nutritionists and only in appropriate quantities
• Immediate ban on “all you can eat” schemes
• Smoking ban
• Government provided nutritionists who will monitor the diet of every American
• Obese people will go to jail until they have met weight standards
• Anorexics and bulimics will face similar corrective measures
• Mandatory federal oversight of restaurant menus
• Food inspectors will visit every household in the nation on a quarterly basis to ensure compliance with government dietary guidelines
• Unhealthy foods such as candy and cookies will be strictly rationed
• Repeat offenders of height/weight ratios established under these mandates are subject to stomach bands and other risky control mechanisms
• A new federal agency be formed – Department of Personal Education – DoPE would teach Americans to exercise, eat right and naturally keep the correct balance of hormones flowing
• Restrict, by law, the number of hours Americans may watch TV, play video games or sit on a couch in any given week.
• Mandatory genetic screening prior to copulation
• Before having unprotected sex, Americans will get a permit
• Permit will ensure that any offspring produced by the coitus are genetically non-problematic and therefore not a significant burden on the taxpayers
• Violators will be housed in cells with non-violent drug offenders

OK, now that I’ve given my demands I’m ready to proceed with Obamacare on a ten-year trial. I look forward to a weekly mandatory television address by that great American doctor-journalist Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Hopefully when Gupta becomes surgeon general the feds will use their common sense and change the position’s title to Lifestyle Czar. Gupta can head his own arm of the Department of Homeland Security and reign over our lifestyle choices and collective health care system from his DoPE palace in the magical land of Washington, D.C.

I’ve only seen the teasers for “Homeland Security USA.” That’s probably as much of the show as I will ever watch. I have no interest in glorifying a department of government that I consider an abomination. DHS is a training ground for the downfall of American freedom.

The DHS is a bureaucracy’s bureaucracy: unwieldy, inflexible, absurd, gargantuan. It makes work for roughly 210,000 leeches and will cost us $50.5 billion in 2009 – over $375 per taxpayer (based on 134,362,678 income-tax returns filed in 2005). The monstrous George Bush established this behemoth in 2002 as “the most significant transformation of the U.S. government in over [a] half-century…” Finally: a bit of truth from this utterly mendacious White House.

Strangely, there was more truth when it came to naming the mess: “Homeland” conjures the Nazis and all their brutality. Almost as stunning as Bush’s transparency here is the easy acceptance Americans grant this despicable term. Companies sell gadgets for “homeland security,” colleges offer majors in it, headlines casually twist it into an adjective, television programs swipe it for their title. Perhaps the phrase caught on because it captures the nuances of a ludicrously inept police-state that nevertheless takes itself very seriously. Our Masters may aspire to the Nazis’ ruthless efficiency and omniscient surveillance, but they’re essentially Barney Fife playing Gestapo.

If the end goal is the end of freedom in America, the Department of Homeland Security is an almost perfect tool, or as close to a perfect tool as a national government could ever hope to generate.

However infuriating, “Homeland Security USA” it isn’t breaking new ground. Americans will recognize its format from such kindred obscenity as “COPS”: armed bruisers in cruisers whaling on smaller men, women, and kids; ordering supposedly free people about as if they are slaves; laughing at the suffering of their victims. Why Our Rulers’ documented abuse hasn’t provoked a mass uprising remains among the most baffling and mortifying mysteries of our day. Instead, “COPS” is “long-running” and “critically acclaimed.” “Acclaim” is about what I’d expect from the general run of idiots masquerading as critics; what’s sobering is that over 6 million “viewers” watch Our Masters hammer their fellow serfs into submission. And apparently relish the hammering since they’ve tuned in for “20 seasons and over 700 episodes.” It seems that when the government claims a man has bought or sold an illegal drug, Americans not only devoutly believe that allegation, they also agree that he thereby deserves all the indignities and beatings Leviathan’s legionnaires care to dish out. This is barbarous taste in entertainment, one shared with the ancient Romans. They, too, enjoyed watching the State’s beasts tear “illegal and dangerous” Christians to shreds.

Are you not entertained? Don’t tase me bro! It was one of the most popular memes of 2008. The very fact that we all take for granted that Americans who step out of line, no matter how minor the infraction may be, will be violently silenced, is scary to me. Being tased is not a fun experience. Being abused by the Department of Homeland Security should not be one of the things Americans fear most, but it is.

No one dares to step out of the security line at an airport and complain about how ridiculous the rules are. We take for granted that our shoes all contain bombs and that to even question the efficiency of a government employee should be an offense. We may well be doomed. At least we have a show about our “heroes” to help pass the time from now until the end of America. If you weren’t bothered by the police state in action at our two joke political conventions last year, then Homeland Security USA is a good show for you. If you laughed at the “don’t tase me bro” guy then Homeland Security USA is your thing. If you enjoy being herded and micromanaged and condescended to this show will make you happy.

Mike Yon on American airport bullies.

What could I say to alleviate any of this?  Could I say, “This is the U.S., nothing to be afraid of.”?  The world already sees us as senseless bullies.  Aew might have been detained indefinitely; even I was concerned that the Department of Homeland Security might detain Aew for no reason.  Essentially, she had no rights.  They had already coerced her e-mail password out of her head through intimidation.

This does not make me feel safe: Our Homeland Security was focusing on a 40-year-old Thai bank officer while there are real bad guys out there. Thailand and the United States have had good relations for 175 years, and Thailand is one of the few countries in the world that is proud to say they are friends of the United States.  There are no threats to Americans from Thai people — who, among other relevant things, are mostly not Muslims.  The King of Thailand was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard.  I have never seen the King with a gun; only a camera.  His 2009 New Year’s speech was also a call for peace.  The King and his family helped bring widespread education to Thailand, which created a special problem.  Today there are large numbers of highly educated, successful women looking for highly educated men.  I remember General (ret.) McCaffrey, our former drug Czar, telling me a couple of years ago that the King of Thailand was incredibly important in wiping out opium poppies in Thailand.  The King of Thailand is highly respected by the government of the United States.  He is a very good man.

In the long run, in our foolishly named War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, which is also poorly named, is doing a lot of damage. I’d venture to say that DHS breaks a whole lot more than it fixes. The world we live in runs on goodwill. DHS has no idea how to create goodwill. It creates the opposite. This is a branch of the federal government that harasses, inconveniences, condescends, spies on and generally bullies everyone it comes into contact with. Why the hell do we think that is going to reduce terrorism in the long run?

One of my Christmas presents this year was Guitar Hero, Aerosmith Edition (with wireless guitar). Really fun game. I finished it in one sitting on easy level. Medium and hard may take longer. A couple notes for other 37-year-old rock god wannabes. Your fingers will hurt if you have OCD and play for six or eight hours like I did. The Aerosmith edition was OK, but the Legends of Rock edition is better. I’m playing on the Xbox 360 platform with a 46-inch LCD TV. Battling the devil on Charlie Daniels Band’s The Devil Went Down to Georgia was just frigging awesome. I felt like I was actually playing a real guitar against an opponent. Beating the devil sure felt good. Plus my wife gets a kick out of watching my developing “style.”

I’m going to practice a little more and then see what multiplayer is all about. Guitar Hero is just plain fun at any age. Even more so than Dance Dance Revolution. I find myself absolutely unable to complete Slayer’s Raining Blood, at least after a few beers. I’ll try again with none in me. I think I’ll go pick up Guitar Hero World Tour for tonight’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

Playing Guitar Hero made me wonder – does a real guitar player get screwed up trying to play the game. What about vice versa? I’d be curious to know if there is any mental barrier that you have to cross to be good at both real guitar and fake guitar on a video gaming console. I have a real guitar but I am left handed and only know a few chords since I insist on learning to play the guitar right handed (like I shoot). I’d love to hear from someone who can play real guitar and is also good at Guitar Hero.

As dwellers of a rural ZIP code, my wife and I face challenges that wouldn’t normally cross the mind of an urban American. For instance, our well is going dry.

Most of us count on water coming out of the tap when the faucet is turned on. When you can choose an unending stream of hot or cold water day after day, month after month and year after year you take it for granted. We do not. That is because at my house the water is only on when the electricity is on. Furthermore, the water is only on if you don’t use too much of it. At my house, we can take two showers, run a load of laundry and run the dishwasher. After that, there is no more water.

This is often a good thing – it forces me into a state of conservation mentality. Shaving, brushing my teeth and running the water in the sink have all become activities in which I do not take anything for granted. The water is on long enough to warm up and then goes off while I lather my face and shave. I use the same technique for brushing my teeth – get the brush wet and then get my teeth clean with a few more short bursts to rinse my mouth and the toothbrush at the end of the process.

We are going to have a second well dug to supplement the first but I will never again take the water flowing out of my taps for granted. From my way of thinking this is a healthy approach to anything in life. Taking things for granted is a good recipe for losing them. Whether your spouse or your new car is the thing you take for granted doesn’t matter. If you do not respect and care for the things that make your life bearable they will abandon you when you need them most.

Life in the country tends to reinforce this lesson.

The McAfee software company makes products that are supposed to simplify and enrich my computer life by protecting me from unwanted intrusions such as spam, malware and viruses. However, they fall pretty short when it comes to convenience. I’ve been testing the product for some months now as part of the Amazon Vine program. I’m going to have to do reduce the number of stars I’ve given McAfee for their 2008 security suite. Here are the reasons.

1) Failure to fix product flaws, however minor. It shouldn’t take McAfee more than two years to address a minor problem. A toolbar that won’t remember where you dock it can drive you nuts. Imagine if you parked your car in the garage and the next time you went to get in it it had moved itself to the driveway. Irritating, to say the least. My advice to McAfee – don’t allow your staff to make promises that they have no intention of following through with.

09-19-2006, 06:38 PM

RichyH Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 4

SpamKiller toolbar does not stay in position (Outlook 2003) Just a small problem compared to the emproxy problem, but yet it’s pretty annoying. In the new version of SpamKiller it doesn’t show an icon with options in Outlook 2003, but a toolbar. And when I change the location of the toolbar it resets itself to the original position everytime I restart Outlook. I know it’s not a big problem, but it’s also not a improvement compared to the previous version, but rather a setback. Maybe something small like this can be fixed. I sure hope so.

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#2 09-20-2006, 05:11 PM

Steerpike_ca McAfee T3 Technical Support Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Waterloo, ON Canada Posts: 140

HI RichyH, This version of SK does not allow you to permanently change the position of the toolbar in Outlook. There are plans in future releases/updates to provide this functionality. HTH __________________ Steerpike_ca Chaos reigns within Reflect, repent, reboot Order shall return

2) Failure to make a useful anti-spam feature. McAfee’s anti-spam feature appears useless to me. Customers are supposed to be able to “train” their in-box by identifying certain email as spam. For instance, I once subscribed to the Huffington Post daily email. It’s garbage and I don’t want it anymore. No matter how many times I tell McAfee that email from Ariana Huffington is junk, the mail still shows up in my in-box. What is the point of an anti-spam trainer that isn’t trainable?

The worst part of the deal is that McAfee wants $60 a year to keep my software current. Guess what? No. You’re not getting $60. Software companies need to be taught to fix the broken features in their products.

One of the new paradigms Americans face in 2008 is the increased likelihood of being videotaped while dealing with any type of authority. It is likely that you are being recorded every time you travel an interstate, when you are pulled over for minor traffic violations, as you enter or leave government buildings and in a host of other situations where government is involved. This reality proves to be a double edged sword from my perspective. Now everybody gets to be on the jury. The police are not exempt from this new reality, nor should they be.

It is my opinion that civil servants should be recorded in the performance of their duties as a matter of course. I’m sure many would disagree. However, there are enough citizens with cameras that police abuse of power will be harder and harder to hide when it happens in public venues.

“If you’re getting in the way, or obstructing what I’m doing, that’s a different story,” said the officer in Downtown Brooklyn. “But if you’re not obstructing what I’m doing, you can put 10 videotapes on me.”

An officer in the Union Square subway station on Tuesday said that once when he intervened in a fight, he found he was being filmed by several people. “I asked people to help, but no one did,” said the officer. “I didn’t expect anyone to help, but at the time I really needed it. It was two against one.”

If you’re videotaping the police stay out of their way. If they try to take your camera, resist and flee. The police have no legal authority to stop you from recording them in the performance of their duties. This is an issue near and dear to my heart because I am a photographer. Since 2001, it has become increasingly risky to take photos of happenings in certain venues, particularly in large cities. Police have a greater tendency to interfere and officiously tell me that “photography isn’t allowed” in a given area. Bullshit.

In a free nation, photography is allowed wherever you happen to be. In a free nation, if the authorities are recording you, then you should also be recording them. There is nothing wrong with keeping each other honest.

Our dual wars are easy to forget, even for a veteran like me. It is important that we remember them. Daily events in Afghanistan and Iraq are going to have ramifications in the United States for decades to come. Robert D. Kaplan speculates on Obama’s inherited conflicts:

He’s already made a good start in Iraq. By appointing centrist pragmatists like Marine Gen. (Ret.) James Jones and Sen. Hillary Clinton to top national security positions, and reappointing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he has sent a message in the face of an uptick in violence in Iraq that his administration will not be rushing for the exits there, so as not to risk a disintegration of the country. Indeed, Obama’s strategy in Iraq will likely be defined by “no risks,” so that if Iraq founders, the blame will be laid on the previous administration.

The situation in Afghanistan is different. There, Obama will need to take some immediate decisions his first weeks or even days in office. We are involved in a counterinsurgency that it appears we are losing. The Taliban has a credible presence in most parts of the country and the additional troops we deploy there may have to go to Kabul to defend the capital itself from enemy attack. That’s how bad the situation is.

First of all, anyone who calls Hillary Clinton a centrist is not to be trusted. If Hillary Clinton is a centrist then I am the Pope. I know nothing about retired general James Jones.

I don’t know much about the ground climate in Baghdad these days, although I would guess that mortars are probably still a daily occurence in the green zone. Whatever Obama is planning for Iraq and Afghanistan, he needs to cut the fat and focus on something that is easier said than done – changing the culture – on both sides of the table. That is a multi-generational challenge. All Obama can do is set a new tone.

Appointing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State may well be the equivalent of setting a new tone, I’m just not sure what that tone is.

Obama is going to have a hard time ignoring all the promises he made during his campaign. In the digital age, we may have short attention spans, but everything is also recorded. If the right people focus the public on the right broken promises at the right time, we can ensure that Obama fails just as mightily as his predecessor. After all, modern America is like a bipolar manic depressive coming down off a meth binge. We want everything all the time and we want it free. It’s no win for everyone in the long run.

Foreign outsourcing is not a government controllable phenomenon. Sure, we can make stupid rules to try and regulate how, when and where jobs go. We can also stand on the beach and try to direct the tide – both activities are an idiotic exercise in time wasting.

Foreign outsourcing is a hot-button issue for many U.S. workers. Mr. Obama said during the campaign that “unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to companies who shift jobs overseas and will start giving it to companies who create good jobs in America.” Under the current rules, U.S. firms don’t have to pay high U.S. taxes on overseas earnings until they “repatriate,” or bring home, the money.

A transition aide said Mr. Obama’s position on gradually ending the deferral of taxes hasn’t changed. The aide said the economic advisory board represents diverse opinions.

But some Obama supporters are concerned. “We’re less than thrilled,” with some of the advisory board members, says Priyanka Joshi, a spokeswoman for WashTech, a Communication Workers of America local in Seattle that has helped mobilize technology workers against outsourcing.

Almost every member of the economic advisory board who has worked in business has been involved in significant outsourcing actions. Companies where the executives work said they aren’t commenting on issues related to their advisory role.

My understanding of why outsourcing happens may be too simple. If Shrivash in Banglalore can do the same job I do for one fourth the price then he deserves my job. I’ll find something else to do. I realize that this is not as easy to swallow on the back end of a layoff. That’s how the world works though. If you insist on earning $80 an hour for a job someone else will do for $40 it should come as no surprise to you that you have no job.

The arrogance of demanding a job as an entitlement will ultimately be one of the major contributors to the end of American dominanace in the world. How Obama influences this conversation will be recorded even if it is not remembered by the masses.

I’m thinking of suing Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is a public nuisance who is personally responsible for making it harder and more expensive for law abiding citizens to purchase guns in the United States.

Bloomberg is proud that he is attacking my local gun store, Adventure Outdoors, and making my prices go up. From a press release put out by the smarmwhores of New York City:

The Adventure Outdoors case has received prominent media attention, since it was the first of the two lawsuits to go to trial. Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Jack Weinstein had been expected to preside over this civil case, with an “advisory jury.” The City claimed that Adventure Outdoors had created a “public nuisance” in New York by selling weapons that later ended up being used in crimes here.

In other words, the City alleged that Adventure Outdoors sold guns to persons not entitled to buy them, and those guns found their way to NYC, where they created a public nuisance. The City hired an investigative agency, the James Mintz Group, to make simulated “straw purchases” (i.e. those in which one person submits to a background check for a gun actually to be used by someone else, usually someone who couldn’t get a gun legally on his or her own). The Mintz Group sent undercover buyers to five states, including Georgia where Adventure Outdoors is located, where they bought weapons in these simulated straw purchases.

Judge Weinstein recently ruled that, in his view, there is no constitutional right to a jury in this case, since it is a nuisance case in which the City is seeking only injunctive relief. However, he also agreed to seat an “advisory jury” – i.e. one that would hear the evidence and decide who should win – so that if it turned out he was wrong, and an appellate court found there was a right to a constitutional jury, the case would not have to be retried. (In other words, a jury verdict would have already been entered.)

The real nuisance here is the city of New York and King Bloomberg. I have been line several times at Adventure Outdoors and observed employees following the law and denying gun purchases to those who didn’t qualify, whether on a technicality or because of a criminal record. For the city of New York to send dishonest purchasers in to gun stores and then claim that the store is selling guns knowing they will be used is crimes is dishonest. In fact, it is the criminals who commit the crimes that are responsible for their crimes, not a gun store. But this is what happens when you put an egotistical crusading do-gooder in power.

Adventure Outdoors is countersuing Bloomberg in Cobb County, where they can at least get representation and perhaps a fair trial. Obviously, any trial taking place in the city of New York will be biased in favor of the muncipality.

“Mr. Bloomberg feels he is above the law,” Marger said. “In fact, he believes he is the law. He believes that his billions and connections gained through the use of those billions make him immune to that which we commoners endure.”

Bloomberg claims Adventure Outdoors had sold 21 guns, later used in various crimes in New York between 1994 and 2001, and called the business a “rogue gun dealer.” Those comments, which were picked up in national and local media, have affected sales, Barr and Marger claim.

I am going to be purchasing a rifle from Adventure Outdoors tomorrow, excercising my rights. These rights are fading away. The culture that says you are responsible enough to be trusted with a firearm is under attack from every side. Americans are being systemically taught that they are too stupid and too irrational to be trusted with guns, and that defense of human life is someone else’s job. I disagree. I support honest gun dealers. If you do as well, please visit Adventure Outdoors. Support Jay Wallace. Buy a gun from his store.

This article is well worth reading. Many more such technologies are coming soon to a medical facility near you.

A MICROSCOPIC swimming machine that works like a paddle steamer could help deliver drugs inside the body and move chemicals around inside miniaturised labs. The device is the first artificial microswimmer to move without using chemical propulsion or bending itself into different shapes.

For microscale swimmers, the viscosity of water presents a much bigger barrier to motion than we are used to on everyday scales. It is like swimming through honey for a human: any forward movement during one half of a swimming stroke would be negated by an opposite backwards motion in the second half, with the result that the swimmer goes nowhere. “In a stiff fluid, what you achieve in half of your swimming cycle you undo in the next half-cycle,” says Ramin Golestanian, a physicist at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Nanotech, biotech and gentech. We’re about to change every aging paradigm in existence.

Spark explains the burgeoning research into how exercise is one of the key ingredients missing in the modern Western lifestyle. The author uses numerous anecdotal, statistical and research based examples to make a compelling case for improving quality of life during any phase by simply moving.

Depressed? Exercise! Injured? Exercise! Obese? Exercise.

Spark is an important book because the idea that you might just be able to replace your Lexapro prescription with an hour of Dance Dance Revolution per day is hugely important. The idea that your brain chemistry and your ability to feel good is largely based on how much you move is hugely important.

I happened to find Spark about a year into a rejuvenation of my own health through exercise so let me add my own anecdotal evidence – exercise can and did allow me to get through depression, panic attacks and has helped me with what is probably a mild case of ADD or ADHD – conditions I once scoffed at as made up.

Spark is a convincing tome. If it cannot get you to stop popping pills and start exercising ever day, nothing will. Spark can be a little complex – some of the explanations of how brain chemistry works are a little too in depth for the general reading public.

The United States has a two party system that shuts out and systematically beats down all contenders for political power. This is not a good thing. I’m torn when I read stories about how voters have acted to preserve this tarnished, corrupt system.

On Nov. 4, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) narrowly outpolled challenger Jim Martin (D), 49% to 46%, triggering a runoff election held yesterday. This time around, Chambliss crushed Martin by a margin of 57% to 43%. Why the difference? The New York Times reports:

Many voters interviewed Tuesday said the balance of power in the Senate had been an important factor in their choice of a candidate. “If you can’t have a little back-and-forth arguing between the parties, then the party in power will make mistakes,” said Ron Zukowski, a computer expert in Atlanta who voted for Mr. Chambliss. “This was my chance to say no, and I said no.”

Clearly the American people want change built on common ground between liberals and conservatives, not a one-sided remaking of the United States. In the spirit of identifying that common ground, The Heritage Foundation begins a series of policy memos this week called Change We Believe In: Memos to President-elect Obama. The goal is to reach out to Obama on subjects where his words line up with our vision of how to solve critical issues facing America.

I don’t really claim to know what the American people want, other than an endless supply of affordable gas and large screen televisions, not to mention an overabundance of feeding troughs where they can gorge on a regular basis.

This two party system, however, is doomed. While I like the relative stability that comes with a government closely balanced between two parties who spend their time squabbling over statist issues that always end with the same result – growth of government and additional legislation that doesn’t actually fix anything but drives up the cost of being American – I am ready for real change. Not the kind of change Obama offers. I’m talking about a basic reshaping of the political landscape.

The two party system must die. For the United States to be politically healthy there must be more than two choices available when we ask important questions. Saxby Chambliss may keep an “assault weapons ban” from passing. He may ensure that other Democratic agenda items fail to pass. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

Obama made many promises during his campaign. He has already started backpedaling. Now that control of Congress is less decisive for the Democrats, Obama has an excuse for many of the promises he’ll fail to keep. Same old game we’ve been playing as long as I’ve been alive.

Meanwhile, thieves on both sides of the aisle continue making up money out of thin air and giving it away to stave off the inevitable downward spiral we have created for ourselves. Something has to break. Some catalyst has to shake up the system enough that it is reborn in a better form. This will happen, and I think it will be in the next 10 years. We’ll see.

I got pretty sick for the Thanksgiving holiday. In addition to some sort of virulent bug that caused me to hack, sneeze and lose my vocal abilities for two days, I injured my back carrying an air conditioner. I was nevertheless able to test out Dance Dance Revolution on my Xbox 360.

To say that watching my parents try it was surreal would be an understatement. They are the poster children for the stereotype that white people have no rhythm. My wife and I played it twice over the weekend, and it’s mildly aerobic in nature. I suppose if I did the advanced dances (higher BPM) I might even get a good workout.

In any case, I’m glad to get my wife interested in exercising and I started having fun about halfway through a Moby song whose name I cannot currently remember. My parents had fun too, even though they sucked worse than anything I have ever dreamed.

If you are looking for a cheap low impact exercise system (and already own a console) you might want to check out Dance Dance Revolution.

The state of intellectual and academic freedom in Iraq can be used to measure forward progress. That’s assuming any forward progress is happening. EDIT: Arif has weighed in down in the comments section and he seems to think there is positive progress happening in Mosul, at least. I spent a week in Mosul in mid-2006 and the city felt dangerous as hell from where I stood (I was in uniform and an occupier). It would be nice to be invited to go back and see how things have changed for the better. I would welcome an opportunity to see higher education as it exists in 2010 and to participate in any civic activities going on.

Scholars in Iraq are still relatively isolated from the outside world, Kadhim said, citing the pertinent example of the difficulty of securing a visa for foreign research. Domestically, he added, most have severely limited and unreliable Internet access, if they have access at all.

Though not to the extent that it was during the Saddam regime, Kadhim said, academic freedom is still constrained in Iraq. Inside the classroom, he said, the free flow of ideas between student and professor is limited by former customs. For example, he noted that many Iraqis consider the questioning or challenging of a professor publicly an “act of hostility.” Even the wider academic curriculum cannot offer a diversity of interests or values to students, he said, noting that degrees are “cookie cutter” by design and leave no room for electives.

Scholars are similarly constrained by administrators and government officials, Kadhim said, calling the university just another “mini dictatorship.” Though Saddam has been deposed, he said many “Saddamists” still exercise their control over academe. He noted that many unfairly awarded degrees were given to some academic administrators now in control in Iraq. Some, for example, wrote their dissertations on topics such as the “economic genius” and the “eloquence of the speeches” of Saddam Hussein.

The United States’ failure to grant academics visas is tragic and short sighted. Discourse, visitations and relationships between academics and intellectuals should be encouraged, not discouraged.

Encouraging to some is the increase in educational opportunities for Iraqis. Amal Shlash, director of the Bayt al-Hikma Research Centre in Baghdad, described higher education as the “only achieving activity in the country.” In 2002-3, the academic year of the United States invasion of Iraq, there were 19 public universities and three private universities in major towns throughout the country — four of which were in Baghdad. Now, the country hosts 23 public universities and 23 private universities. The country went from educating 322,000 students in 2002-03 to educating around 370,000 students this year.

Shlash said that, during the Saddam era, universities were only allowed to be built in cities with populations greater than one million. Now, she said, universities can be built anywhere in the country. This has resulted in a higher number of female enrollees than ever before because many young women now no longer have to leave home to attend a university. At Baghdad University, the enrollment is 57 percent female. Even more striking, in the southern city of Nasiriyah, the university’s enrollment is 71 percent female.

Long term, Iraq may see more intellectual freedom, but only if the more radical Islamic fundamentalists are restrained. Iraq is a long way from being a good place to raise a family, and a long way from most other desirable measures of quality of life. Educational choices are one key measure of quality of life. The fact that Iraq has more universities is hopeful.

I will say that Iraq has become free when I can book a ticket to Baghdad on the Internet to attend a fine arts photography class at one of the city’s universities. Hopefully by the end of the century.

Some entities are so strong that they can only be defeated by themselves. The United States of America seems to me to be one of those. Idealistically and technologically, the United States has dominated for as long as I’ve been alive. Those days are drawing to an end though, through the magic of bureaucratic stupidity.

Rule of law is an important concept in any society that bills itself as free. Unfortunately rule of law, the idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the judicial system, becomes a joke when the law itself is so farcical as to become disrespected by a large majority of the citizenry.

We have a prime example of such a law in my state of residence, Georgia.

Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia’s sex offender list for more than 12 years.  Her crime?  She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17.  The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday.  Both were sophomores.  Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.

Laws related to sex offenders fail at both the state and federal level in this country. Too many people are arbitrarily given a virtual scarlet letter that severely distorts and detracts from their quality of life forever after. Wendy Whitaker is a felon because as a teenager, she decided to give another teenager a blowjob. This happens thousands of times a day in my state. If the law was being enforced across the board in the same way that it is with Wendy Whitaker, a significant percentage of the population of Georgia would be felons.

When you tell a 29-year-old woman that she cannot live in her home because of a consensual sexual act that occurred when she was 17 – an act that should never have become the business of the state in the first place – you chip away at the rule of law. For each Wendy Whitaker a society creates, there is a ripple effect that weakens the authority of the state. Create enough non-violent felons who have hurt no one and then harass them for the rest of their lives. Rule of law erodes. Authority is undermined by unjust decision making. The fabric of society becomes stressed.

Applied law is force. Force is a blunt instrument that should only be used as a last resort. If we continue to make thousands of bad laws every year and if we continue to ostracize and fetter segments of our population for made up crimes that haven’t actually caused anyone any injury then don’t be surprised when Atlanta burns. Don’t be shocked when the bombs start going off in D.C.

You can only repress so many people for so long before something goes boom. Trust me. We’re working hard to defeat ourselves.

Conn Carroll writes a thought provoking essay on the inevitably upcoming “universal health care” that is going to be rammed down our throats. Most of us are like little birds with our mouths wide open, excited about the free grubs. Me, not so much.

When selling his vision for health care reform to the American people, President-elect Barack Obama promised: “I will establish a new national health plan, similar to the plan available to federal employees and members of Congress, that gives every American the opportunity to buy affordable health coverage.” The Heritage Foundation has long been an advocate for organizing a national health exchange based on the same model that delivers care to members of Congress; the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).  The problem is that both Obama’s plan, and the plan recently released by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), contain key differences from the FEHBP that will completely undermine its success.

Under the FEHBP, national and local private health plans compete on a level playing field for the business of members of Congress and thousands of federal government employees. The FEHBP has relatively few mandated benefits which allows for both more choice in the types of plans available and keeps a lid on costs. The Obama plan in particular moves away from this model by significantly increasing the number of mandated specific benefits all plan most cover. This will send already rising insurance premiums through the roof. Worse, the Obama plan clearly intends to bring price controls into the health care sector. Obama promises Americans will be charged “fair” premiums and “minimal co-pays.” Presumably, Congress would define these terms. This would put the federal government in the business of deciding what constitutes a fair price and a proper co-payment for benefits and ser­vices, leading to some type of centralized rate set­ting or standardization of payments for providers. In the FEHBP, prices are market-based. No price regulation is imposed on plans or services.

The truth of the matter is that Hillary Clinton will always received better health care than her subjects.  Barack Obama has a better chance of surviving cancer or a heart attack than you do. Clinton and Obama have lives that are worth much more than yours. That is how government works. Government, a monopoly on force, naturally protects its own members first.

That is why I have low expectations and a dubious outlook when it comes to “universal” health care. There is no such thing. Different standards will be applied to the elite ruling class. They’ll have better care, more options and fewer treatment limitations.

The government-sponsored health exchange would naturally write the rules of competition to benefit the government plan. Imagine if baseball umpires and the New York Yankees both worked for George Steinbrenner. The Red Sox or Rays wouldn’t stand a chance. If you think a government entrant in the marketplace will not inevitably turn into a monopolistic financial disaster, then we’ve got two failed mortgage financing giants we’d like to sell you.

Responding to a campaign supporter in New Mexico this summer, Obama said, “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.” The Obama plan does not scrap our entire health care system in favor of a brand new government-run system, but it is definitely a deliberate first step down that path.

Mentally prepare yourself young people. You are going to grow up in a place where government, not you, will decide what is best for your continued longevity. Your diet, lifestyle choices and possibly any facet of your life that could affect your health are slowly going to be taken away from you and controlled by people who think they know better than you what is good for you. Here comes change whether you want it or not.

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse is a series of dark future tales written between the 1970’s and 2008 by some of the most talented writers in science fiction, fantasy and horror. The book is full of haunting visions of survival at the end of humanity, survival after a great change in humanity and survival after a great reshaping of humanity.

Of particular note, from my perspective was the extremely haunting The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi.  Without giving away the entire plot, humanity is certainly going to change – that is the only inevitable thing we can count on with the passage of time. Mr. Bacigalupi’s vision of those changes haunts me. I am a dog owner and lover. If you are as well, it is likely you will be haunted by vision of what mankind becomes portrayed in this story.

Of the 22 stories in this anthology about 18 of them were worthy of inclusion. Of particular note, in my mind, are the stories When Sysadmins Ruled the World, by Cory Doctorow and Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler. The bottom line in regards to Wastelands is that you’ll love most of the stories and probably feel a few of them were a waste of your time.

The book is a great way to pass a few hours being exposed to a really wide range of what-if scenarios with the common theme being that the world inevitable changes drastically. For us, living in the moment, it is good to step outside our tiny bubble of comfortable time/space continuum and examine other possibilities, even if it is only so we can contribute to a society in which none of them ever come to pass.

I really don’t understand the point of ordering a homeless guy to pay $101 million in restitution. Might as well just make him an indentured servant. Maybe this is the modern day equivalent. I’m not sure.

Fifty-year-old Steven Emory Butcher was convicted in February of starting blazes in the Los Padres National Forest in 2002 and 2006.

The 2006 fire raged for more than a month and cost more than $78 million to suppress. It injured 18 people, destroyed 11 structures and was the fifth-largest fire in California history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Maybe Mr. Butcher can get a bailout since he obviously can’t manage his own affairs. Seriously though, someone explain the legal ramifications of rendering a judgement against this guy that will never be collected? Is it done on principle? What are the ramifications to Mr. Butcher?

For the first 200 or so years it existed, the United States was a place where individual responsibility was a valued concept – at least that is how it was taught to me. Not anymore. The United States is now a place that encourages infantile behavior and abandonment of commitment. As evidenced by Kathleen Pender’s editorial which asks the question, what’s my motive to keep paying?

Last week, the government announced a program that will substantially lower payments for many homeowners who have little or no equity, but only if they are at least 90 days delinquent.

Critics say the plan, which applies to loans owned or guaranteed by government wards Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac among others, could encourage people to suspend payments.

But what about the moral obligation to pay off a debt?

Elected officials have been chipping away at that by blaming the foreclosure crisis largely on predatory lenders. In a campaign fact sheet, President-elect Barack Obama says he “recognizes that the real victims in the subprime mortgage crisis are not the lenders, but the millions of borrowers who followed the rules and whose only crime was taking out mortgages that lenders told them they could afford.”

By all means, take advantage at the expense of the few remaining responsible people around you!

To qualify, you must be at least 90 days delinquent and live in the home as your primary residence. You must owe at least 90 percent of the home’s value. It’s fine if you owe more than it’s worth.

Your mortgage must be owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or held by one of the participating loan companies.

If you meet these requirements and can document your income, your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment – including property taxes, insurance and association dues – to 38 percent of your gross income.

The reduction can be accomplished in one or more ways:

— Reducing the interest rate, but not below 3 percent. (The new rate, if below market, goes back to a market rate after five years.)

— Extending the term of the loan up to 40 years.

— Reducing the principal on which monthly payments are calculated. Unpaid principal is added to the loan balance and due when the homeowner sells or refinances. The reduced interest payments never have to be repaid.

If you owe more than the home is worth, the plan will only reduce principal down to 100 percent of market value, according to an official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If all three of these maneuvers can’t reduce your payments to 38 percent of income, you won’t get a fast-track modification but could still request a customized deal, says the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The streamlined process looks only at income, not assets. If you refinanced your home to buy a Mercedes or own another home, you won’t be expected to sell them to pay your mortgage.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to feel like complete morons if they don’t participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn’t afford.”

I wonder where this road will take us. I don’t want people out in the street but I don’t want to reward irresponsible behavior either. This problem has been in the making for as long as I’ve been alive. The bastard child of the entitlement mentality is rearing its ugly head and it is hungry.

Whether you are being attacked by a horde of zombies or a horde of Obama’s Civil Defense Corps personnel, the Benelli M2 Tactical is one of the best urban defense weapons you can currently buy in the United States.

Remember, a 12-gauge shotgun is a crowd control weapon for close range operations. Urban clearing, mowing down undead shamblers and close quarters defense against advancing hordes of hostile fleshy creatures are the correct uses for a weapon like the Benelli M2.

The key factor that makes the Benelli a reliable and lifelong keepsake to hide from the gun grabbers – it’s not gas operated. Instead, it is recoil operated. That means you won’t have to do a critical functions check or clearing operation right as that zombie who used to be a postal worker is about to bite into your forearm. Simple engineering and reliable operation are what make the AK47 and its many variants the most popular assault rifle ever. The Benelli is designed on the same principles. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking is the most appropriate anachronism that springs to mind.

The tactical model is much better for stopping the advancing minions of the forces of entropy than the field model because you can fight your hopeless battle against overwhelming odds with style. A flashlight on your Benelli will allow you to see the cold whites of those dead eyes just before that rotting, stinking corpse explodes and is flung backwards across the room, knocking over at least a half dozen fellow brain eaters and allowing you to cycle the chamber and load another delicious helping of buckshot into the barrels full of second death. Yes, zombies have to die twice. I don’t think Tritium sights are really necessary, but you could mount those on this fabulous and stylish instrument of destruction as well.

At only $1,200 (soon to rise to about $12,000 on the black market), the Benelli M2 is an excellent value. After all, your intact body and beating heart are certainly worth more than $1,200 aren’t they? Buy a Benelli M2 while you still can. The zombie hordes are on the march. A plague of giant locusts is imminent. All hell is breaking loose. The end is nigh. Get a decent combat shotgun.

Source: Guns and Ammo magazine. For some reason, they didn’t publish the review on their web site.

Inertia operated zombie killing at its best.

Confusion over the continuing impact of the federal government’s “bailouts for everyone but taxpayers” program continues. Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution pontificates:

In my view the real bailout is the existence of the FDIC which, like it or not, is not a commitment we cannot walk away from.  Had nothing been done, the required FDIC bailout of bank depositors would have been enormous, given frozen interbank credit markets plus a certain level of panic.  So in reality I favored a smaller bailout than did most of the “purer” libertarians, although MR commentators rarely frame it as such.

A combination of bank recapitalization (which I was first skeptical about and thus have changed my mind on) and a greater emphasis on an “identify and isolate the bad banks” approach was the right bailout to do, not to allocate $700 billion for TARP.  I agree with everything Arnold writes in this post, but still in my view “doing nothing” wasn’t really an option, again if only because of the preexisting FDIC commitment, not to mention the disaster associated with a plummeting money supply.

Now that financial confidence is partially restored, we can hope that the Obama administration redoes the deal.  But the money is being committed rapidly and the demands of the interest groups are piling up, so I hardly expect much ex post improvement.

Here is what I think about the bailout. The people responsible are criminals and they should be locked up. They should be stripped of all offices and titles and possibly tarred and feathered. We are talking about thieves.

The money is all made up anyhow, but these people are cheapening our lives and the lives of future generations by spewing out devaluments that will cause massive inflation in coming months and years. A business that cannot make a profit should be allowed to fail – this is the natural course of things. When you don’t allow that business to fail and go even one step further by rewarding the people who are responsible you are setting up a wider failure.

That’s what is most likely to happen in the next decade – a national and possible global economic crisis unlike anything that has happened in my lifetime. Sure, you could label me as a paranoid doom and gloom type, and I expect that some of you will. No matter how you label me, your government is still robbing you and refusing to act in a responsible manner. You should be worried. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

A tsunami doesn’t do any damage until it hits the shore. You might want to get to higher ground if you can.

Gun control advocates should take a long hard look at Great Britian, which by all accounts is not so great anymore. Unless you place high value on living in a crime ridden surveillance society. I realize that saying so will like offend many readers from Great Britain and would remind you that you are free to criticize the United States – I live here and I think we have a lot of our own issues to solve. Nevertheless, Great Britain is becoming a cesspool of bad social policies and resultant social tensions and afflictions.

On a June evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, “theirs is worse than ours.” The response was swift and sharp. “Have a Nice Daydream,” The Mirror, a London daily, shot back, reporting: “Britain reacted with fury and disbelief last night to claims by American newsmen that crime and violence are worse here than in the US.” But sandwiched between the article’s battery of official denials — “totally misleading,” “a huge over-simplification,” “astounding and outrageous” — and a compilation of lurid crimes from “the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic where every other car is carrying a gun,” The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, “Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes.”

In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year’s Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.

Guns are tools designed for a specific purpose – to expel a projectile with explosive force. Anything in the path of the projectile is in jeopardy of being damaged or destroyed. When a society becomes obsessively focused on the wrong things it loses. Instead of worrying about the projectile we should be worrying about the mind that pulls the trigger that activates the mechanism that launches the projectile.

A human mind, when aimed in the wrong direction, is much more dangerous than any gun. It’s the culture stupid. This is a reminder to our new director of fixing everything, Lord Barack Obama. Fix the cultural problems and you’ll be able to stop worrying about how many guns are out there.

Please remember this as well. There are at least a few million Americans who believe that the right to bear arms is more important than anything. Be very careful how you use your unconstitutional agencies – the ATF and the DEA – because a few million new political prisoners would not help you implement positive cultural changes. Don’t make rules that men of conscience will not follow. Don’t create new classes of criminals out of people who would otherwise contribute more to your society than they would take out over a lifetime.

On my way to work this morning, I listened to Dan Carlin’s hardcore history episode Punic Nightmares III, in which the Carthaginians are tricked into giving up their means of self-defense by the Romans. Their city is sacked and they are wiped out. Mr. Obama soon to be President Obama, I would remind you that it is immoral to take away a human being’s means of self-defense. Do not focus on furthering the immorality of the government you lead or you will merely be creating a further divided nation. Instead, I would ask you to focus on fixing what is broken in the culture. Teach self-reliance, individual responsibility, civics, sound economics and minimal government interfence in a private citizen’s daily life. Emphasize community and local autonomy. Don’t get stuck on stupid. Don’t focus on trying to control us by taking away our guns.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been digesting the audio version of Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. My commute is 130 miles round trip so I get a lot of audio books.

Friedman’s postulate that we need to focus on more green energy is dead on track. I completely disagree with his methodology. I don’t want or need a bigger federal government or one world government – we have enough bureaucrats controlling enough areas of our lives.

Is green energy critical to ensuring a sustainable future for coming generations? Yes. That alone makes Hot, Flat and Crowded worth reading or listening to. However, I would suggest to Mr. Friedman that we have to change the memes from the bottom up and not the top down as he suggests. Voluntarism is the right way to get people to change bad habits.

Freidman disparages magazine articles that give householders 10 easy ways to go green but those articles are changing memes without anyone needing to use a gun to force change. I would like to see more voluntary community programs and more cooperation between states to create environmental energy incentives. It is demand from the public that will force companies to change.

Let’s focus on incentives and not penalties, on cooperation and not regulation. This is the area where I find Friedman to be least helpful. In providing statistics and a clear and compelling case for us to change our habits and consumption levels though, he is spot on. On the whole the book is well worth your time.

We should always look for alternatives to the bailout mentality, where made up money is thrown all around at random in hopes of “stimulating” the economy. Citigroup appears to be taking a measured approach to the current mortgage crisis.

Citigroup says it is imposing a moratorium on most foreclosures as part of a series of initiatives aimed at helping at-risk borrowers remain in their homes — making Citi the latest big bank to announce sweeping efforts to try to curtail losses from souring mortgages.

Citi said late Monday it won’t initiate a foreclosure or complete a foreclosure sale on any eligible borrower who seeks to stay in a home if it is the borrower’s principal residence, the homeowner is working in good faith with Citi and has sufficient income to make affordable mortgage payments.

Citi said it is also working to expand the program to include mortgages the bank services but does not own.

Additionally, over the next six months, Citi plans to reach out to 500,000 homeowners who are not currently behind on their mortgage payments, but who are deemed as potentially needing assistance to keep current with their payments. This represents about one-third of all the mortgages that Citigroup owns, the bank said.

Citi plans to devote a team of 600 salespeople to assist the targeted borrowers by adjusting their rates, reducing principal, or increasing the term of the loan, steps known in the mortgage industry as a workout.

Irresponsibility should not be rewarded. The other side of the coin is that our society does a terrible job of teaching individual responsibility. We teach the exact opposite from the top down. Congress steals from the people and redistributes the wealth however they see fit. They claim this is their mandate. Maybe it is their mandate. Nevertheless, when the power structure is designed to foster irresponsible fiscal behavior, it is nice to see some signs that common sense is being used, at least on a limited scale.

If people can be kept in their homes their lives are somewhat more stable than they would likely otherwise be. Citigroup benefits from less foreclosure losses. I don’t see any losers when it comes to taking reasonable steps to keep people in their homes.

The supply of “help” from Washington D.C. is apparently endless. Since American car manufacturers aren’t able to be globally competitive and are therefore losing money, let’s just make more up and hand it to them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There were fresh calls on Sunday for the Bush administration to help stalled U.S. automakers, but Democratic and Republican officials said taxpayers cannot repeatedly support business rescues.

Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida delivered important backing for those urging the Bush administration to use a recently launched $700 billion corporate bailout program to rescue General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC with desperately needed cash.

“Within the authority of that package, I think it’s possible for the secretary of the treasury to direct a loan to that — to those entities,” Martinez said.

Martinez is a member of the Banking Committee, which oversees administration of the financing program.

The Bush administration, which recently rebuffed a request for capital from GM to help facilitate a possible merger with Chrysler, has not decided whether it will — or can, by law — expand the bailout initiative beyond banks and other financial services firms.

GM, Ford and Chrysler are burning through cash at a rapid rate and are seeking at least $25 billion in immediate federal loans to help them survive.

Someone explain to me where all this money comes from. It has to come from somewhere. Someone explain to me why we reward irresponsible behavior with more irresponsibility. Top down irresponsibility is not a method building a successful organization.

The Big Three are beaten but they won’t admit to defeat, much like the Japanese in World War II. Instead of manna from heaven maybe we should drop a Fat Boy on Detroit. Companies that cannot turn a profit should be allowed to fail. Instead we are creating a world where we are eventually ALL going to fail.

Barack Obama’s “Plan for America” includes  the following broad categories:

• Economy
• Ethics
• Health Care
• Seniors
• Education
• Energy
• Fiscal Discipline
• Rural
• Women
• Immigration
• Poverty
• Service
• Civil Rights
• National Security
• Veterans

I would have switched Ethics and Fiscal Discipline to the beginning of the list since all the other categories are predicated on having the appropriate levels of these two key ingredients that seem to be completely missing from the conversation in Washington D.C.

On ethics, Mr. Obama says he is going to “close the revolving door between K-street and the executive branch.” He’s also going to increase transparency so “ordinary Americans can understand their government” and “make government more effective.” These promises have not gone unnoticed and I will be holding the new administration accountable.

Federal Ethics Reform
Obama took on both parties and proposed ethics legislation that was described as the “gold standard” for reform. It was because of their leadership that ending subsidized corporate jet travel, mandating disclosure of lobbyists’ bundling of contributions, and enacting strong new restrictions of lobbyist-sponsored trips became part of the final ethics bill that was signed into law. The Washington Post wrote in an editorial, “The final package is the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.”

Google for Government
Americans have the right to know how their tax dollars are spent, but that information has been hidden from public view for too long. That’s why Barack Obama and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) passed a law to create a Google-like search engine to allow regular people to track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans online. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “It would enable the public to see where federal money goes and how it is spent. It’s a brilliant idea.”
Illinois Reform

In 1998, Obama joined forces with former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-IL) to pass the toughest campaign finance law in Illinois history. The legislation banned the personal use of campaign money by Illinois legislators and banned most gifts from lobbyists. Before the law was passed, one organization ranked Illinois worst among 50 states for its campaign finance regulations.

A High Standard
Unlike John McCain, Obama’s campaign refuses to accept contributions from Washington lobbyists and political action committees.

I flat out don’t believe that the Obama campaign didn’t take contributions from special interests. A “google-like” search engine that lets us watch government is a great idea, as long as it is run by an independent private organization. I’ll volunteer if someone pays me “a living wage.” I don’t think we’ll see real federal ethics reform until the two party system is crushed like the piece of garbage it is. We’d need to throw Congress out on its ass and pick an entirely new batch of people to have a chance. Can you do that Mr. Obama?

More to come. I’ve got at least four years to hold our soon to be President to the promises he made.

Waiting for a flight at Camp Striker, Iraq in 2006. Reading a Neal Stephenson novel – The Confusion.

Reading a book at Camp Striker, Iraq while waiting for the next day’s flight (2006).

According to the Wall Street Journal today, the Fed thinks we’re in good shape.

Dennis Lockhart, president of the Fed Bank of Atlanta, said the Fed’s key rate, which stands at just 1.0%, could “in theory” go down to zero if problems persist, and said this could be considered.

Speaking during a question-and-answer session after a speech at an economic conference, the Fed official also said that the creditworthiness of the U.S. is “in good shape…at least at this stage.” As such, he said officials still have the ability to fund measures to improve strained credit markets.

Despite concerns that even if the U.S. can get the needed funding, it should resist because of rising debt levels, Lockhart said the national debt is “still in an acceptable range.”

I may be one of the few left who think government shouldn’t be allowed to operate with funds it doesn’t actually have, or to print money that isn’t actually backed by anything but I’m stubborn and I’m sticking to my viewpoint.

The people who control America’s financial system do not have my support or my cooperation. In fact, I’ve been considering what I can do to move at least a significant percentage of my economic activity “off the grid” – I want to transition out of the system of economic slavery as much as possible while being practical about it.

Tips and ideas are welcome. Dennis Lockhart is entitled to his opinion but I think he’s a silly man supporting a broken system.