The Will

Wired has a story about Obama’s desire to inflict mandatory minimum three year sentences on computer hackers.

Hackers who breach and cause substantial harm to critical infrastructure systems would face a mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence if the White House gets its way.

The Obama administration is requesting the mandatory prison sentence in a legislative proposal it submitted to Congress on Thursday, which outlines a long but vague list of cybersecurity provisions the White House would like included in upcoming bills. The list includes a number of changes to laws governing hacking (.pdf), as well as laws authorizing the federal government to assist private companies in securing their computer networks when asked to mitigate threats.

The administration also wants to create a national data-breach law that would help standardize the patchwork of state laws and force companies that operate critical-infrastructure systems to produce a security plan customized to protect against threats to their systems. The plans would be subject to evaluation by an independent commercial auditor and give the Department of Homeland Security authority to request changes to the plans if the government deems them insufficient.

The government also wants to require critical infrastructure companies to report significant breaches to DHS and to give them immunity from civil liability for sharing information with the government.

Critical-infrastructure computers are defined as those that manage or control systems vital to national defense, national security, economic security, public health or safety. These include companies involved in production and management of oil, gas, water and electricity; telecommunication networks; finance and banking systems; emergency services; transportation systems and services; and government entities that provide essential services to the public.

There are already plenty of laws on the books that allow for sufficient punishment of hackers who cause real damage. Do we really need more federal micromanagement of

The Amazon Vine program is an invitation only reviewer’s opportunity to get free products (mostly books) from Amazon.com in exchange for providing a review. I’ve been a member for several years now.

Amazon gives away a lot of stuff through this program. I’ve recieved software, food products and lots of books over the years. Some people get expensive electronic items (I’m never fast enough). For some reason, Amazon doesn’t include electronic books in the Vine reviews program. I’m surprised by this.

Maybe another Vine reviewer can explain why the world’s largest bookseller wouldn’t want its top reviewers downloading some of their review materials? It only makes sense that a company that is at the forefront of pushing e-books would want its reviewers to be reviewing e-books. Maybe the retailer has some sort of complex deals going on that preclude it from including electronic versions of its books in the Vine program. I don’t know but I’m scratching my head here in Afghanistan wishing I could download the stuff I’m slated to review.

Now that I have Kindle software on every device I own from my tablet to my various laptops I really want the Vine program included in the e-book revolution. I cannot imagine how I would have lugged more than 150 e-books around with me in this godforsaken land.

Ah, self-defense. I love the concept that I have a right to exist unmolested by others. The 21st century’s primary defensive tool is the firearm. I will be developing this page of firearm resources as I expand my knowledge of weapons so bookmark it and check back from time to time for updates. Better yet, subscribe to this site’s RSS feed – I blog about firearms and firearm related issues often. Thanks to the guns reddit for helping me develop this list. Dedicated Discussions Rimfire Central .22 caliber rifles M4 Carbine dedicated to rifles from the AR family, somewhat elitist, technically proficient AK Forum dedicated to the most widely distributed assault weapon in the world, not useful without registration Single Actions a discussion of single-action revolvers Ruger Forum for those who love Rugers Single Action Shooting Society old school trick shooting and miscellany Marlin Owners for those who want to discuss Marlin rifles Generalized Forums Armed Polite Society great group of polite, knowledgeable folks, wide ranging Open Carry practical and legal discussions about firearms memes and laws The Firing Line large active forums, 80K+ members Handgun Forum everything you want to know about pistols Defensive Carry another place to discuss weapons carry…

You would think a professor would be smart enough to understand bans don’t work. They simply draw attention to subject matter that the would be banner(s) want buried. But no, Wesley “Scrotum” Scroggins wants books he finds distasteful banned.

Wesley Scroggins, a business school professor at Missouri State University, wrote an editorial for Gannett’s News-Leader condemning the teaching of Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five in Republic, MO curriculum. He said that the Vonnegut novel (considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century and widely taught in schools across the English-speaking world) contained too much cussing for children. He also condemned Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, a book about a girl who experiments with sex during summer holidays because it contained sex.

In response, the Republic school board has banned Slaughterhouse-Five and Twenty Boy Summer, removing them from both its classrooms and school libraries. Scroggins is disappointed that they didn’t ban another book, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.

Scroggins’s research specializes in international business and entrepreneurship (he teaches dull intro to management classes, apparently without much flair), and given those specialties, you’d think that he’d realize that, in most of the world, the material in all three of the books he’s picked on wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. It’s also bizarre to see someone who worships entrepreneurship simultaneously embrace a color-inside-the-lines, nothing-objectionable-allowed approach to education: Scroggins apparently wants to raise a generation of local children who never meet a challenging idea or experience an uncomfortable discussion. As an actual entrepreneur (and not just someone who researches entrepreneurship), I’m here to tell you that this is not how you teach people the imagination and creativity necessary to the process.

I find it embarrassing to be a citizen of a country with morons masquerading as people intelligent enough to teach college students. Information is not something that can be kept under wraps, nor should it be. If a thing is important, people will absorb it and pass it on. Suck on that in your tiny backwards empire of Republic, Scroggins.

I am in Afghanistan working for an employer who strongly discourages blogging. That means that for the next year or so my blogging on work related topics will be severely limited. My whole world revolves around assisting NATO and the Afghan government in building up capabilities and infrastructure in this country. I may still try to blog on interests that my employer has no business interfering in such as weapons collection, writing and technology.

Having been here close to a month now I can say the city is teeming with life and every driver on the streets is certifiably insane. There are no traffic rules and everyone is trying to get in front of everyone else all the time. I practice meditating during my commutes.

Ah Tennessee. Rolling green hills, pastoral scenes and gently grazing moronic lawmakers eating the long stalks of imbecility growing everywhere. And thus are dumb, unconstitutional laws born.

The new legislation adds images to the list of communications that can trigger criminal liability. But for image postings, the “emotionally distressed” individual need not be the intended recipient. Anyone who sees the image is a potential victim. If a court decides you “should have known” that an image you posted would be upsetting to someone who sees it, you could face months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

If you think that sounds unconstitutional, you’re not alone. In a blog post, constitutional scholar Eugene Volokhpoints out just how broad the legislation is. The law doesn’t require that the picture be of the “victim,” nor would the government need to prove that you intended the image to be distressing. Volokh points out that a wide variety of images, “pictures of Mohammed, or blasphemous jokes about Jesus Christ, or harsh cartoon insults of some political group,” could “cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities,” triggering liability. He calls the bill “pretty clearly unconstitutional.”

I am sick unto death of the micromanagers of America. If you want to make a society weak, then try to ban everything you disagree with or might possibly disagree with at some unknown point in the future. Don’t we have enough schisms in our society already without resorting to this sort of modern day foolishness? Bill Haslam you have earned my ire for allowing this buffoonery. In the future, I’ll be sure to post as many possibly offensive images as possible. I dare Tennessee’s dumbest legislators to take me to court. People won’t stand for this sort of reprehensible crap. We have real problems to worry about. Let’s get this dumb law off the books quickly. You have zero right to a life free of offensive behavior by others.

CIO has an article entitled Introducing the ‘Safe Social Media’ background check wherein the potential for more informed employment decisions based on social media background checks are lauded. The article touts the supposed benefits of finding out whether or not potential employees are sexually, racially or substance aligned deviants.

And boy does Social Intelligence find a mother load. In addition to sexually explicit and provocative photos, videos and text, Drucker has seen racist activity, violent activity, and pictures of people brandishing assault weapons, handguns, even samurai swords. “We see people looking to acquire Oxycontin,” he adds. “We see pictures of people using drugs.”

Racial slurs, photos of people with weapons or in sexually compromising positions are fair game for employers to consider, Drucker says, because they indicate an individual’s judgment and employers are allowed to make hiring decisions based on a job seeker’s perceived professional judgment.

Hmm. I have concerns. Since when does a video or picture of a person with a weapon create grounds for concern about a possible hiring decision? Are we really a nation that lives in such fear of anyone with a weapon that we shun employing those people? That certainly causes concern for a National Guardsman such as my self – I am a professional weapons handler as well as being a pretty good IT manager, consultant and systems administrator. Who decides whether the pictures of me online firing various rifles or posing with my handgun collection constitutes a danger to the public or to the employees and customers of a potential employer? Who decides the difference between brandishing and professional handling? Does it make a difference if I am in or out of uniform? Am I employable if the images show me conducting official training and unemployable if the images show me target shooting on my private range?

It’s quite insulting to have someone lump illegal drug use in with weapons ownership. How is a racial slur or sexual predilection lumped in with weapons ownership or possession? The article didn’t say anything about pictures of gang members doing a drive by. It specifically mentioned generic images of “racist activity, violent activity, and pictures of people brandishing assault weapons, handguns, even samurai swords.” How unprofessional to lump all these activities together as if they are inherently related. I find it unfortunate that our society has been dumbed down to the point that I now have to worry about someone finding a picture of me online enjoy target shooting or participating in marksmanship because those images might be blindly used as grounds for an employer to eliminate me as a potential employee.

What criteria are used by these resellers of personal information to determine the difference between a rational person using a weapon in a lawful way and a potentially dangerous or irrational person who is likely to use a weapon irresponsibly. It sounds to me like someone denied employment based on a picture of them handling a samurai sword online could sue for defamation of character. Unless the context is clearly illegal or irresponsible in the extreme it seems to me that there is nothing wrong with owning or posing with weapons.

Wired has a story about Obama’s desire to inflict mandatory minimum three year sentences on computer hackers.

Hackers who breach and cause substantial harm to critical infrastructure systems would face a mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence if the White House gets its way. The Obama administration is requesting the mandatory prison sentence in a legislative proposal it submitted to Congress on Thursday, which outlines a long but vague list of cybersecurity provisions the White House would like included in upcoming bills. The list includes a number of changes to laws governing hacking (.pdf), as well as laws authorizing the federal government to assist private companies in securing their computer networks when asked to mitigate threats. The administration also wants to create a national data-breach law that would help standardize the patchwork of state laws and force companies that operate critical-infrastructure systems to produce a security plan customized to protect against threats to their systems. The plans would be subject to evaluation by an independent commercial auditor and give the Department of Homeland Security authority to request changes to the plans if the government deems them insufficient. The government also wants to require critical infrastructure companies to report significant breaches to DHS and to give them immunity from civil liability for sharing information with the government. Critical-infrastructure computers are defined as those that manage or control systems vital to national defense, national security, economic security, public health or safety. These include companies involved in production and management of oil, gas, water and electricity; telecommunication networks; finance and banking systems; emergency services; transportation systems and services; and government entities that provide essential services to the public.

There are already plenty of laws on the books that allow for sufficient punishment of hackers who cause real damage. Do we really need more federal micromanagement of things that should be left to the states? The Department of Homeland Security is turning into an anti-freedom abomination. This stuff is nothing more than security theater and will not provide any real incentives for “evil doers” to turn from their ways. Meanwhile, the fed grows ever more powerful and intrusive. Good intentions are not enough to justify more rules and regulations. Government cannot protect citizens from privacy breaches because it is one of the greatest collectors and abusers of private data. You don’t hire a fat person to help you get in shape so why should the federal government be entrusted with regulating computer privacy? Does anyone really believe that all the current rules are doing a good job of protecting individuals from having their data exposed to strangers? It simply isn’t going to happen in my lifetime.

I am Afghanistan bound. After taking a position in Nashville and just beginning to settle in to what I thought would be 2-3 years of challenging work rebuilding and improving a massive data center or two, I received an offer that I just couldn’t refuse for a year-long contract in Kabul. I will be an IT mentor to Afghani National Police employees. This will be a real adventure and could be one of the most professionally rewarding experiences I will ever have. I am sure there will also be days that will feel like I made one of the worst decisions of my professional career. Those of you who know me are aware that I do not shrink from risk. My parents seem to think I am a little foolish for exposing myself to a war zone for the second time in my life and doing so by exercising direct free will (the first time I was ordered to go).

The logic of such a decision is simple. The challenges are bigger. The paycheck is bigger. The opportunity to influence a national organization’s information technology memes and culture is a good one. Afghans deserve the skillset I have to offer as much as anyone. Why should I let fear of personal harm stop me from travelling across the globe to help rebuild a national infrastructure in Afghanistan? The personal and professional horizon expansion potential offered by this contract position simply cannot be ignored. So I signed up.

My mid-life crisis, if I’m going to have one appears slated to happen in Kabul

Seriously?

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students’ proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law’s mandates.

The 2002 law requires states to set targets aimed at having all students proficient in math and reading by 2014, a standard now viewed as wildly unrealistic.

Someone remind me why the federal government has oversight of a national education system again? Where is that in the Constitution?

I think the idea of uniformity in education is an interesting one but I am not so sure I support it in the context of a national set of standards. For one thing, the federal government seems to be successful in getting teachers to cheat on test scores but less successful in breeding a culture that encourages students to excel.

Parents should be the primary decision makers when it comes to educating their children. After parents, local communities should have a say. States, and not the federal government should make the final decisions about public education. Every state should allow for an ‘opt-out’ for parents that want to educate their children privately. If this system was in place education would cost a lot less and those who actually valued learning would have a lot more options.

When 82 percent of students are failing to meet the standards either the standards are completely broken or the culture is. Clearly, something is broken in American education. How do we fix it? I would rather have 50 grand experiments going on so that parents have 50 opportunities to vote with their feet and allow for some healthy competition for kids’ minds. Let the states that want to wallow in ignorance do so – they will reap the consequences down the road.

82 percent of schools set to fail No Child Left Behind

I am currently waiting to go to Iraq on a contract job for a year. In the mean time I am doing lots of paperwork and medical testing. On the home front though, I am working on a project for my parents.

When they came down for Christmas they brought a bunch of audio cassettes from the 1970’s and I am turning the cassettes into MP3s and putting together a compendium of the Snyder family’s greatest hits from 1975. The days of our lives pass by quickly. It’s very interesting to listen to myself as a child. Amazing how time changes everything.

In the 1970s I lived halfway around the world in Bangladesh. Personal computers were not yet available to the vast majority of people and the ones that were available had only a tiny fraction of the computing power that the computer I am writing these words on has.

So which is it? Do CIOs want more tech skills or are they unconcerned about tech skills? My bet is they want more tech skills.

I was terminated from my position as Director of IT at EMJ Corporation on December 6, 2010. This should not really have been a surprise to me – I just finished blogging about the “recovery” and wondering where it was. I was somewhat surprised though, to receive a message from a former employee encouraging me to commit suicide. Allen Williams of Chattanooga, Tennessee you are a class act dude. Stuff you post to Facebook is stuff you better be willing to defend. I’m putting your note out here for posterity. I have done and said many dumb things in my lifetime but I could never possibly compete with you.

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First of all Allen, I’m not the type who would ever commit suicide because I was downsized. I am not embarrassed or ashamed of my performance or technical skills. If you want to call me out let’s put it on the record. I think it is shameful that you would write such a letter to another human being. The fact that you have not moved on after more than two years is an indicator of your lack of maturity. Perhaps you should focus on developing your own technical skills rather than worrying about what is going on with me. On your deathbed you will only have to look back on who Allen Williams was. What kind of man were you? We are all accountable for our thoughts, deeds and actions. I know that I am not perfect. Do you? Worry about your own problems. I wish you no ill and hope that at some point in time you pull that cancerous attitude out of your brain stem and retire it for good.

I was terminated. It is not the end of my world. I will move on with my life and learn what I can from the experience. Life is too short to get hung up on the kind of absolute garbage you seem to be stuck on. Get right in your head and your reality will change for the better. I hope your holidays are meaningful and filled with people who love you unconditionally. You probably need some of those kind of people in your life.

Your permanent record is now updated.

Allen Williams of Chattanooga, Tennessee encourages me to commit suicide

[media-credit name=”Robert Mugabe” align=”alignright” width=”292″][/media-credit]I’m writing this blog entry for the few remaining Americans intelligent enough to understand that America is a nation in decline. I’m writing this blog entry for the few remaining Americans who understand that our consumer feeding frenzy is now nearly over and the time to pay has come. I’m writing this blog entry for the few remaining Americans who understand that we are not the land of the free or the home of the brave. American has become the land of the dumb and the home of the foolhardy.

We are a nation of instant gratification and right now answers to every problem. I started writing this post in 2008 and just let it sit. It is now 2010. Where is the recovery we were promised? Show me some signs. My employer is still downsizing and has been since 2008. What does that mean?  The federal government has a web site tracking the “recovery” but all it shows is where the made up “stimulus” is going. The “funds awarded” is not a sign of recovery. It’s just money taken away from your kids and grandchildren to try and fix things now that got started right after World War II. You cannot fix basic problems in systems of governance and finance by building new roads and fixing some old crumbling infrastructure. Government itself has become the problem.

If I am wrong about that someone explain to me how spending during a decline is responsible behavior by a government. Are the Greeks spending buckets of money to stimulate a recovery? How about the government of Zimbabwe with its trillion dollar notes? How many of them are busy stimulating things in that country? The U.S. probably won’t end up in the same situation Zimbabwe is in. We have more real property worth fighting over when other nations come in and pick up the pieces after the slow decline ends.

The thing that bothers me most about the way government plays with our money is that I have no say in the process whatsoever. The interest rates, tax rates and inflation/deflation are all controlled by people I haven’t voted for. In fact, the system is rigged so that no matter who I vote for the money will still be out of my control. How is that any different from the situation early Americans found themselves in when they revolted against the King of Britain? I feel unrepresented or misrepresented. I would not be spending massive amounts of money I didn’t have were I in charge of this “recovery.” I would be talking about belt tightening, services cutbacks, frugality and so on. How can an entire economy based on instant gratification and cheap labor from other countries sustain itself long term? I see no way that is possible. The federal government is spending half a billion dollars to deploy smart meters in Maryland. What’s the payoff? Who can explain to me where the money is going to come from? The tax revenue base is being shredded.

I think the U.S. is a nation in decline. Jobs that require real intelligence are moving offshore. Engineers, scientists and other intellectual workers come to the United States to get educated but they go somewhere else to stay. Tell me I am wrong and the vibrancy, daring and entrepreneurial spirit needed to stay the world’s top producer of culture and technology are still here. I don’t think they are. I think India and China are doing the things we once did while we fight over the shreds of greatness that are still left inside U.S. borders.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters explains what many of us already understand – the TSA is focused on the wrong things.

Seriously folks! The TSA is not making you safer. The only reason that we have not had a repeat of 9/11 is a lack of interest by those already in civilized countries. The saving grace that keeps our planes in the air is the fact that there are not currently a dozen like minded martially trained suicidal fanatics who have agreed on an attack plan and executed it. If that had happened it is entirely possible that more planes would go boom. In the mean time, your friendly federal government is wasting billions of dollars on a sideshow.

If you have never heard auto tuned Carl Sagan you haven’t lived.

What a great messenger he would have made for the whole human race. The guy was a genius and a wonderful teacher. His Cosmos show is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched. Few things make me smile unreservedly – watching Carl on Cosmos give me hope for humanity. Maybe we really can achieve great things. Maybe we can rise above the inclination towards an intellectual downward spiral. Right Snooki? Aw shit. We might be doomed.

Rest easy Carl. Somewhere out there in the universe there is intelligent life and I hope you are watching and smiling.

You may be fine with giving up your civil rights to fly. Let’s assume you are. Let’s assume you are part of the crowd that feels security theater is more important than civil rights. Are you willing to have the TSA give you cancer for the “privilege” of flying?

A small, but growing, group of scientists is now saying that low levels of radiation emitted by airport body scanners might be the bigger concern – not our naked junk.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration acknowledges that the X-ray technology used in the scanners poses a cancer risk, albeit one they say is “so low it presents an extremely small risk.”

What the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should be acknowledging along with the rest of the federal government is that the risk of terrorism being mitigated by the full body scanners is so low it presents and extremely small risk. There are thousands of other risks in the United States that outweigh the risk of being on a hijacked plane which do not require a vast authoritarian infrastructure inside of which all civil rights and common sense are suspended.

The TSA could come up with dozens of better less intrusive ways to ensure that passengers are not a threat to flight security. Ultimately the next attack (which is inevitable) will probably focus on some area of the U.S. infrastructure other than aviation. And then we’ll all look like the morons we have allowed ourselves to become. And some of us may have cancer that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

And our kids will be properly trained to obey without questioning. After all, if someone from the government needs to touch your genitals or see you naked it must be for a good reason right? Right.

The bad news, the report said, is we won’t really know what exposing millions of people to the machines will do until we actually expose millions of people to the machines.

As for Tyner, his videotaped refusal to let TSA officials scan him or pat him down has made him a bit of a folk hero. But long after his 15 minutes of cable news fame have expired, Americans will have to consider whether they want to get zapped by body scanners or get used to having TSA officials touch their junk.

Humanity is on the cusp of being able to repair the damage caused by aging.

What can be done about the failing immune system? It could – and I think should – be argued that more than enough is known to make inroads into immune system repair for the aged.

What keeps human beings from taking the possibility of extreme advances in longevity and improved quality of life seriously? Authoritarian ingrained attitudes. Religious positions and beliefs. Government mediocrity. Information overload and junk information. Memes that are hundreds of years out of date.

I am not a medical doctor but I am a researcher. Others suggest starting with more research on the thymus. Is this a good starting place for serious research into fixing the effects of aging on the immune system? Until I have more time to read and talk with experts I am hoping educated people will stumble across this post and give me good information.

Googling the thymus briefly generates a bunch of near garbage articles from poorly written sites and lots of “thymus thump” results – near mumbo jumbo.

In the meantime, I am still popping reseveratrol to try and curb the aging process a little. I also continue counting calories and cutting back on intake to the point my wife is calling me “gaunt man.” That’s not me in the picture.

DEA agent Lee Paige is the only one professional enough to shoot himself in the leg.

There are a lot of ideas out there in the humansphere about where the future is going to take us. One of the questions worth asking how technology will affect the direction of human societies. It is harder and harder to embrace the Luddite lifestyle. We are directed, reflected and protected by the technology we wrap around ourselves.

Phil Bowmaster speculates that technology is just a reflection of humanity’s wants and he is correct.

In other words, technology wants exactly what we want. And that shouldn’t be all that surprising, because our technology is us. We evolved to top out at a certain running speed, but that wasn’t good enough for us so we decided to build bicycles, trains, cars, and airplanes. We wanted to go faster. What did the technology want? The same thing.

We found that recording and having access to information was extremely helpful in many facets of our lives, and that often we needed more than we could relaibly maintain in our brains or within the brains of all the members of a community. So we invented writing, and then printing, and then all manner of media, and then the Internet. We wanted better information access. That’s what those technologies wanted to provide for us.

What happens when technology no longer wants what we want? Take speeding cameras as an example. Phone menus. Auto dialers. Obviously someone wants these technologies or they wouldn’t exist. But it is worth thinking about the ways that technology improves and lessens our quality of life simultaneously. Phil concludes that technology wants us to be happy. I’m not ready to go there. Technology is just a force multiplier of whoever controls it. Control is key. Whoever controls advanced technology has the ability to control us. That should be scary.

Books are dying. Long live books on screens.

As I walked through the bookstore, I passed stacks and stacks of books. Barnes and Noble used to carry around 100,000 titles. I don’t know how many they stock now, but they have a lot of books. I love books. I probably have something around 1000 books in my personal library. But I was struck by how strange all those books looked, all piled up, taking up so much….space. Books have lost much of their appeal for me. I like reading on my iPad. And seeing all those books piled up everywhere seemed so strange looking, like some wasteful warehouse.

I love my Nook and will most likely buy a color e-ink reader in the next year or two. There are several problems to overcome with e-books though:

• Once I pay for it I own it. You people can make up whatever licensing rules you want but I’m going to go looking for DRM removal tools if I ever decide to switch from Nook to Android.
• Battery life – it’s not even close to being long enough yet. That technology needs to improve.
• True versatility – make an e-ink pad with a 10″ screen that does everything my cell phone can do. I’d pay $1,000 for it.

The idea of abolishing the Federal Reserve (our system of made up money) is not a new one and Ron Paul has been advocating drastic change for quite some time. The Federal Reserve has made a mess of the economy. Unfortunately it appears to be fighting the economic firestorm more bad policies. Google Fannie Mae or student loans if you want to read about the lessons we have not learned in our third year of economic freefall. Personally I think we are at the beginning of this hard road and not the end. This path we are one was decades in the making.

Ron Paul just wrote a book called End the Fed. Now it appears Paul may be headed for a slot as the overseer federal monetary policy. In case you have been focused on other matters federal monetary policy is the root cause of our current economic apocalypse.

Here’s a little irony in the House GOP sweep: The next chairman of the monetary policy subcommittee — overseeing the Federal Reserve?

None other than Ron Paul (R-Texas), who’d just as soon abolish the Fed.

Paul is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology on the Financial Services , which oversees the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Mint and American involvement with international development groups like the World Bank. Unless someone bumps him, he’s next in line for the subcommittee gavel.

Paul is critical of all the institutions he would oversee. He’s long called for killing the Federal Reserve, and this year tried to get an audit of the Fed into the Wall Street reform bill. He’s asserted that the dollar should be tied to the gold standard in order to keep it from losing its value.

The committee has been low key under Rep. Melvin Watts (D-N.C.). His web site says he plans to hold hearings on “equal access by the visually impaired to U.S. coins and currency.”

It’s safe to say that a Paul chairmanship might be a little more intense.

It will be fascinating to see whether the Republican power structure actually lets “Dr. No” step up to the plate and take charge of the area of federal government that needs the most tweaking.

I voted for Ron in 2008 because I think that business as usual in Washington is absolutely killing us. Ron got a lot of flak and a bunch of made up smear. Cries of racism in the 80’s and wing nut who wants to destroy America were pretty loud because the status quo zombies are scared of the guy. Good. We are overdue for change I can believe in and Obama hasn’t given me any of that.

I am a transhumanist. This is a book written by and for transhumanists and people who want enjoy thinking about the future and what it might bring. If you have ever been interested in cryonics, longevity, sexual mores, future technology and the legal existence of corporations then you will most likely enjoy The Unincorporated Man. Unfortunately the main character, Justin Cord, is a cult of personality. For this reviewer Cord’s lack of any real challenges left something to be desired. A man who gets the girl, keeps all the money and is also the most popular guy in the universe is not my type of drinking companion.

For those of you who think dying is a stupid and unnecessary waste of time this book is highly recommended. The big ideas are what’s important.

If you want a more in-depth review of The Unincorporated Man, go over to Digital Sextant for a longer paean. If you really want to dive beyond enjoyment and into silliness visit io9.com and read their review of The Unincorporated Man:

Written by California brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin, the novel has garnered advance praise from Kage Baker and Robert J. Sawyer, as well as earning its first-time authors a three-book contract with venerable science fiction publisher Tor Books. It’s easy to see why. The book, in bookstores at the end of this month, will appeal to Heinlein’s legions of fans with its themes of personal liberty and one man’s political struggle with the State.

In many ways, this tale of a twenty-first century man awakened from cryosleep in a centuries-away future is a conservative rejoinder to the political science fiction of left-leaning authors like Charles Stross and Ian McDonald. While those authors explore futures where diverse cultures and social systems thrive alongside each other, the Kollin Brothers depict a world where Asia has snuffed itself out with biological warfare and New York is the solar system’s greatest city. Justin Cord, the man from our time, is a fierce individualist and entrepreneur who awakens in a world space travel is easy, cars fly, war is a distant memory, and there is zero unemployment. But he believes there is no freedom, and he must fight to liberate the solar system.

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I did not vote. Most certainly not. Most of the choices were insulting. When the menu is a medium shit sandwich and a large shit sandwich I skip the meal and look for another place to eat.

I did, however, donate to Rand Paul’s campaign because I hope he will be another Constitutionalist like his father. The bottom line for me is that the federal government is too powerful. I do not have any interest in a homogeneous nation ruled by centralized bureaucrats. I would much rather live in a country where my feet can vote up to 50 different times in one life.  Choice folks, that is the only thing in life that really ends up being important. If you let some unknown make all your choices you deserve the shitty world you end up with. Ask a North Korean about that. Never mind, those people are about the most brainwashed fearful lemmings on the planet.

In any case, I look forward to seeing my man Rand vote against more federal interference in my private choice making activities. In the mean time, I am flexing my civil disobedience thought processes and working them out in case they need to be used.

The more we can keep choices in the hands of individuals, municipalities and states the happier I will be. While Rand Paul and I do not see eye to eye on everything I think he does represent a political school of thought I can grudgingly tolerate. My money was probably well spent. I will be watching and commenting from the sidelines.

In other political soapboxing, I can truly say I am disappointed that California’s attempt to decriminalize marijuana failed by a slim margin. Hell, I would vote to switch alcohol and marijuana in the roster order on the federal list of things they are smarter than we are about. Isn’t that right Nancy Pelosi you arrogant bag of mouth-wind?

Today’s elections will change the face of the United States. It will not be for the better. No matter who we elect the rotten at the core bureaucrat insiders that are running the United States into the ground with unsustainable fiscal policies will still be there like a cancer hanging out on your vital organs. Today’s elections won’t change the fact that we have a federal government that makes too many decisions affecting the daily lives of Americans. The core problem in this country is that individual and states rights are too subservient to federal mandates. Figure out a way to make the United States a loose alliance of 50 small countries again. Then we can re-bill America as the land of the free. Then people will have 50 different choices that they can vote with their feet on.

The United States of today is too big and powerful for its own good or the good of anyone that crosses it. Like a person afflicted with gigantism, the fed is destined to keep growing and growing until it can no longer stand under its own weight. Eventually, it will collapse and die without proper treatment.

Go vote for your Democrat or your Republican but remember that both of them are killing the country.

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When you believe in the cult of government it makes sense to reward people for choosing government careers.

This April, while hashing out the bill that reconciled differences between the House and Senate versions of health reform, lawmakers tossed in another overhaul as well. They completely remade the student loan industry.

As a result, college students will pay more for their school loans … unless they go to work for the government.

Is it fair to me to charge a higher interest rate on my student loans because I’m privately employed? Hell no. Does Congress care what I think? Hell no.

Here’s how it works. The College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 established a loan forgiveness program for all full-time public-service employees. It provides that, after 10 years of public service, the remaining balance on all student loans issued under the Direct Loan Program (the only program in town, post-Obamacare), is forgiven.

To appreciate what a sweet deal this can be, let’s assume that the wife in our example above works for the government – federal, state or local, it doesn’t matter. The couple still qualifies for income-based repayment, paying only $975 a month. But because she works in the public sector, they are only responsible for making payments for the first 10 years – approximately $117,000 in principal and interest.

Meanwhile, her identical twin sister, in the exact same financial situation but working in the private sector, is responsible for making all 13 years-worth of payments, totaling $151,000.

In this case, the loan forgiveness program boosts the after-tax value of the public job by $34,000. With a huge bonus like that on the horizon, few workers could be tempted to leave their jobs after eight years of service.

In this way the loan forgiveness program turns student loans into golden handcuffs for government workers.

It’s highly unlikely that private employers will be able to pony up a compensation package more attractive than what the public service wife has even without this incredible student loan premium. Recent studies show that government compensation levels are 12- to 40 percent than those of the private sector.

In the end, the new student loan program will hit the economy hard. Young people who chose to go into the public sector will find themselves “job locked,” with few opportunities to leave the public sector without suffering a large financial loss.

This will increase labor market rigidity and drive talent away from the private sector, resulting in a slower economic growth. Meanwhile, taxpayers will continue to be hit with ever increasing tabs for government payrolls, employee benefits and student loans.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/11/3095396/when-student-loans-become-golden.html#ixzz12ZaSGzqK

My personal situation is already perilous. My private sector employer (construction) is shutting down for a week-long furlough in December. The furlough is without pay. My employer is slipping financially. We’ve shrunk at least 40% in the last few years. While I work on my doctorate degree I must think very carefully – where will I go when I am finished? If my employer has not grown drastically by the time my student loans come due and given me commensurate compensation increases I will be forced to move on so that I can pay back my school debts.

The federal government holds all the cards and may be able to force me into the modern day equivalent of indentured servitude. The overarching message here is clear: government is good. Working for the government should entitle individuals to financial payback. The problem as I see it is that private employers are now at a disadvantage – an unfair one. If private employers cannot compete with government to attract new college graduates then government just continues to grow while private employers shrink. Doesn’t that further reduce the tax base? Where is the tipping point? I think we will find out soon.

I am a curmudgeon when it comes to standing up for government growth and government power. I would love to hear from educated readers who feel differently. Why should students get a loan repayment discount in exchange for a government service career?

Fans of Linux – I was on a Delta flight today. The screens kept rebooting the entire flight. This isn’t the first time. What gives? Who makes the Linux app that runs the in flight entertainment system?

Delta and their IT people look like they dropped the ball.

I have started my time as a “doctoral learner.” That is what the University of Phoenix’s school of advanced studies calls them. The program I am pursuing is called Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership/Information Systems and Technology. It is going to cost me $770 per credit hour. That is a crazy amount of money. The 62-hour program is going to cost me about $50,000 to complete. Some of this will be on the taxpayer’s dime in the form of veteran’s benefits. The rest will be student loans.

Here is what the University says is going to happen for me:

The mission of the Information Systems and Technology specialization of the Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership degree (DM/IST) is to enable professionals from any industry to understand and evaluate the scope and impact of information systems and technology (IST) from organizational, industry-wide, and global perspectives. The DM/IST curriculum lays a foundation of knowledge in critical thinking, leadership, and the application of IST content areas. Learners integrate this knowledge with their professional experiences and doctoral-level research to create innovative, positive, and practical contributions to the body of IST knowledge. Graduates will be able to influence their organization and environment positively with transformational IST leadership practices.

This doctoral specialization in IST incorporates coursework in fundamental management, organizational, and leadership concepts to engender the development of IST leadership perspectives. As such, learners with a professional leadership background in any discipline will be able to add their unique perspective to the study of the context, breadth, and processes of IST management.

I am about three weeks into the program and I have to say that I am impressed by how many calls I get every week to check up on my status. I almost feel as if the University is babysitting me. The hands on approach to counseling and leading me gently into the first three week course designed to weed out non-serious students is pretty nice even if I am already overwhelmed with phone calls due to my professional duties. Two weeks into COM705, I am learning how to be a scholar practitioner with bleary eyes.

Here’s a course description:

The mission of the Information Systems and Technology specialization of the Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership degree (DM/IST) is to enable professionals from any industry to understand and evaluate the scope and impact of information systems and technology (IST) from organizational, industry-wide, and global perspectives. The DM/IST curriculum lays a foundation of knowledge in critical thinking, leadership, and the application of IST content areas. Learners integrate this knowledge with their professional experiences and doctoral-level research to create innovative, positive, and practical contributions to the body of IST knowledge. Graduates will be able to influence their organization and environment positively with transformational IST leadership practices.

This doctoral specialization in IST incorporates coursework in fundamental management, organizational, and leadership concepts to engender the development of IST leadership perspectives. As such, learners with a professional leadership background in any discipline will be able to add their unique perspective to the study of the context, breadth, and processes of IST management.

My advice to any prospective doctoral student thinking about the University of Phoenix: be very very serious about the time commitment and the financial commitment. A $50,000 degree better lead you somewhere you want to be because those student loans won’t pay themselves off. It remains to be see what wonders I will see in the next three years but they are sure to be painstaking and expensive! Stay tuned.

If you are lucky enough to live in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee then you probably have to option to select EPB Fiber Optics as your Internet, television and phone provider. I recently signed up for the Fi-Speed Internet 20 package, which promises 20MB of bandwidth both up and down for $70 a month. Today, EPB upped the amount of bandwidth to 50MB up and down for the same price – $70 per month. Yes, you read that correctly. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee (during the workweek) and I pay $70 a month for 50MBps of synchronous bandwidth. The image included in this blog post shows that the speeds aren’t just advertising. Of course, the Internet flows a lot like a river – there are bottlenecks. In three different speed tests to three different locations at varying physical distances from my node, I got speeds as low as 7.74MBps up and as high as 56.73 MBps down.

Having paid as much as $100 a month for much, much slower service in years past I can definitively tell people who make their living surfing the web from home that Chattanooga is a good place to live if you love cheap bandwidth. EPB Fiber isn’t just cheap and plentiful bandwidth though. They have great customer service and quick turnaround on change requests. If you’re unfortunate enough to have lived somewhere served by a non-customer oriented monopoly provider like Frontier Communications you’ll really appreciate EPB if you get the chance to sign up for their service. Where Frontier tells you the speed will be 1.5MBps and delivers 1/10th of that on a good day, EPB tells you that you’ll get 10 times that much for the same price and then delivers double what they promised consistently. Maybe that is why Frontier gets and overall rating of 62% satisfaction from its customers while EPB has a 100% positive review rate from its customers – even one guy who complained about a billing problem said the service was great.

If you have a hefty disposable income and live in Chattanooga, you can get 100MBps up and down, unlimited domestic calling and every television channel you could possible ever want from EPB Fiber for $286.41 a month. That would have been a crazy idea five years ago. Americans should be screaming for bandwidth like this at these prices. South Korea is way ahead of most of the U.S. in average data pipe size and speed. That’s a game changer when it comes to be intellectually and economically competitive.

For total Internet connectivity, the study ranks the US fifth worldwide, but 15th in broadband penetration. Akamai defines “broadband” (perhaps rather generously) as 2Mbps or higher. Compared to speedier countries, the US ranked a lowly 35th place, with just 57 percent of connections at 2Mbps or higher. The US fared better when comparing the percentage of connections with “high broadband” speeds of 5Mbps or higher. Here, the US ranked 12th globally, with 24 percent of its connections counted as “high broadband.”

If you happen to live in Chattanooga though, you can get better or at least equivalent broadband to the average South Korean. That’s worth a lot if a fat data pipe is your version of heroin. If you don’t plan to move to Chattanooga at least scream for your local officials to visit Chattanooga and learn a lesson or two about how to get real broadband going in your chosen community.

Much to my displeasure, I recently discovered that my primary partition for Windows 7 was dangerously full. Windows 7 will tell you about such maladies when they reach a dangerous point (which according to the engineering gods is between 10-15% remaining free space by volume.) This is all fine and dandy. However, with more than 5 terabytes of total storage and a setup that reserves most of my primary partition for applications, there should be no reason why I would need to buy a larger hard drive to store my files. I have about 200 gigabytes of photo files on the partition and of course Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate as well as a buttload of applications. That should be about 450 gigabytes.

Money is tight and I’m not interested in spending a few hundred bucks on terabytes without good reason. That led me to search for a program that would analyze my used space and tell me what the heck was going on. Google led me to Gizmo’s Freeware and a fabulous article entitled Best Free Disk Space Analyzer. The article is right on target in my opinion.

SpaceSniffer is my #1 for two simple reasons first, and foremost it’s free, and second it seems to be far and away the best free space disk analyzer I’ve seen to date. Using SpaceSniffer is fairly simple, I just clicked on the drive I wanted to work with and hit scan. Right-clicking on a box gave me several options such as delete, cut, copy, paste, etc, depending on what I had install on my machine. With these commands and the visual representation of SpaceSniffer I was able to quickly spot and delete forgotten and useless files, that otherwise would have gone unnoticed, bloating my hard drive and pulling down performance. When I left-clicked on a box I found myself zooming into the specific heading containing the box allowing me a much clearer picture of what I was looking at. The toolbar also has some interesting options such as the more and less detail buttons. These detail buttons allowed me to decide just how many file levels I wanted to view at once.The green star button toggles the option to see the the free space left on my drive. Under configure I was also able to change the colors of the treemap, because brown and blue just wasn’t doing for me.

I have a co-worker who uses WinDirStat religiously and it’s also quite good at telling you where the horror of waste files is hidden in the bowels of your hard drive. Important note if you’re exploring for lost files that take up lots of room – WinDirStat hasn’t been updated in several years. SpaceSniffer has, and it is Windows 7 compatible.

In any case, when I ran my search, I discovered that half of my terabyte partition was being consumed by acr*.tmp files. That revealing fact gleaned thanks to SpaceSniffer led me to this article pinning the blame squarely on Adobe, a company long maligned for a multiplicity of reasons. If you’ve never been to the Dear Adobe blog it’s worth a visit just to read the gripes. In any case, rather than spending  bucks you will have to apply for federal stimulus aid to pay back your credit card fraudsters with, clean up your temp files. Adobe may not admit they make bloatware, but they do tell you how to use Microsoft’s built-in tools to get your hard drive humming again.

I spent the last three days at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. It’s very hard to explain the amount of micromanagement of trivial details that goes into an existence in the Army. Every moment is tracked, every detail analyzed, every problem multiplied, divided and multiplied again. Because there are so many levels of management in a typical unit (mine included) it takes five times as long to solve a problem as it would minus the additional layers of bureaucracy.

Serious bloggers might want to check out Blog Desk. It is a totally free application for WordPress (and other less popular blogging systems). A key feature for me is the ability to cross post to multiple blogs.

Blog Desk works with Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista and 7. The interface is very simple. I find it easy to work with, particularly when it comes to images. However, I think the best feature is the cross posting ability. Blog Desk can post to multiple blogs easily once it has been set up.

The interface is spartan but has the features that I need to share my opinions, views and topics of interest with the world. Good stuff. If you are serious about putting out a lot of content across multiple blogs you should check out Blog Desk. Be sure to read the frequently asked questions as some of the more useful features do not necessarily jump out and beg a blogger to use them.

After listening to Sirius radio yesterday and hearing numerous “educated” discussions regarding Rand Paul’s alleged racism I had to make a donation to the man’s Senate campaign. I hope most people understand that the civil rights movement of the 1960’s in the United States would have eventually had the same result without the heavy handed federal intrusion into personal freedoms.

If a business owner wants to run a race based business that is his or her choice in a free society. Every other free human can then choose how they want to react by either patronizing or protesting or ignoring the new establishment. You don’t need people with guns and batons to enforce basic racial harmony in most segments of the United States today. It is pretty well ingrained. Rand Paul isn’t arguing in favor of racism, he’s arguing in favor of allowing people to steer their own ship. If they are dumb enough to steer it into a reef, that’s their issue to deal with. Of course, many people would just be more comfortable pushing racism back under the surface where it hides under our current political climate. Personally, I would rather have it out in the open where it is easy to see and punish. Rand Paul is an advocate of choice, not a racist. He deserves your support just as people in general deserve to be allowed to make bad choices so they can learn from them. The alternative is a society of lemmings dependent on overlords for their food and shelter.

It is fascinating (to me) to ponder the nature of self. I recently came across this article in Scientific American that explores the ease with which we can be separated from reality.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions—and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different—in evolutionary and neurological terms—from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Outlandish as such a notion may seem, what you think of as your self is not the monolithic entity that you—and it—believe it to be. In fact, it is possible to pharmacologically manipulate body ownership with a drug called ketamine, which reliably generates out-of-body experiences in normal people. Patients on ketamine report the sensation of hovering above their body and watching it. If someone gives them a sharp poke, they might say, “My body down below is feeling the pain, but I don’t feel it myself.” Because in such patients the “I” is dissociated from the body it inhabits, they do not experience any agony or emotional distress (for this reason, ketamine is sometimes used as an anesthetic).

At the risk of being judged and found guilty of thinking too independently, I would be very interested in trying some experiments with this product. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be legal. The Office of National Drug Control Policy does acknowledge that some people don’t care about little details like legality. They have published a helpful list of street terminology associated with ketamine.

In any case, the key point is that it is important for humans to explore how the sense of self impacts our existence and the societies we create. Go read, Hey is that me over there?

Based on this data, I tend to drive 9 or so percent faster than the average American. Except when I’m testing engineering limits of the various vehicles I drive, of course.

Based on anonymous driving habit data from customers in 45 states, GPS navigation firmTomTom reckons that Americans tend to drive at about 70 MPH on the freeway, regardless of the posted speed limit. More specifically, most Americans tend to stay within a few miles per hour of the speed limit on interstate freeways. The WSJ [sub] reports that these findings are consistent with efforts to raise freeway speed limits around the country, as Virginia recently became the latest state to raise its freeway speed limit to 70 MPH or above. Naturally, there are still safety advocates still sticking to their “speed kills” talking points, but despite these state-by-state speed limit increases, America’s road fatalities per vehicle mile traveled has been dropping consistently. That Americans rarely drive over 70 MPH, even when limits are as high as 75 MPH, shows that motorists tend to find their natural comfort limit at that speed anyway. And the fact that states with higher freeway speeds tend to be large, sparsely-populated Western states indicates that motorists tend to vary their speed only slightly from the 70 MPH “state of nature” even when faced with longer distances and less traffic. [Hat Tip: ClutchCarGo]

There are a few points worth noting. The only reason the data is currently “anonymous”is because the GPS maker wants it that way. Market forces combined with social mores dictate that anonymity is dead or dying in America. If lawmakers and manufacturers decide we aren’t going to fuss about it, your car and/or GPS will soon track you. Rental companies track your every move. OnStar does as well (read the privacy policy very carefully; there is no expectation of privacy). Eventually, vehicles being driven contrary to acceptable societal norms will auto alert authorities who will come punish you in various nefarious ways to include clumsy attempts at re-education.

I wonder if my 9% deviance from norms will be tolerated when that day arrives.

It may be worth mentioning briefly that I have completed my final course in a master’s program at Bellevue University.

The Master of Science in Management Information Systems is a customized degree tailored specifically to prepare students for management positions in the Information Technology profession. It consists of multiple components: the core and concentrations. The core explores the characteristics of information systems with emphasis on critical management issues. After completing the core, students may select one or more of six concentrations to obtain additional depth in business administration, computer information systems, healthcare, information security, project management, or solutions architecture. To satisfy the requirements for degree, students must take 27 semester hours of core courses and at least nine semester hours from one of six concentrations.

For a guy who got started pretty late on college, I feel pretty good about my achievement. I ended the program with a 3.9 GPA while working full time in a civilian job and part time for the National Guard and with a 3-hour a day commute. I’m not quite sure how I kept it together.

I can highly recommend the Bellevue online program. It felt a bit more personal than the similar online program from the University of Phoenix and I would note for the record that the quality of student effort was much higher. In the irony department my final course at Bellevue was Information Technology Ethics and a student in the course was kicked out for plagiarizing.

Information Warfare had to be my favorite course of the bunch. I really enjoyed planning attacks on information infrastructure for some reason. Everything is more fun in theory than in reality. Bellevue was much more reasonably priced than the University of Phoenix. I am planning on starting on doctorate work in a few months in the same field.

I complain a lot about government. That’s because government has a monopoly on force. The federal government of the U.S. also has a monopoly on printing money. If you control the guns and the butter, then you should be watched closely and criticized often and loudly, particularly if you are dishonest.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are dishonest entities. They have added $5.4 trillion in debt to the national bill.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act suit last August after FHFA refused the watchdog group’s request for such documents. Officials at FHFA acknowledged having control of such documents but said they weren’t obligated under the FOIA to release them. Fannie and Freddie were established as semi-independent government-supported entities. But they went under FHFA control after taxpayers had to bail them out. It is estimated that taxpayers are on the hook for at least $5.4 trillion in liabilities that resulted from bad mortgage investments by Fannie and Freddie.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Time-for-sunshine_-Fannie-and-Freddie-87252627.html#ixzz0hsxqQeVN

The members of Congress who have received campaign contributions from these quasi-government, government controlled entities should be subject to criminal trials for accepting bribes. These are the same entities that helped create the current landscape of massive foreclosures and bankruptcies by facilitating irresponsible loans to unqualified, irresponsible borrowers.

Open information models should be legally required for all government and quasi-government entities by Constitutional amendment. First, though, and more important, we need to restore federal respect for the limitations placed on government by the Constitution. At this point, I’m not sure how that will happen without a complete do-over of some kind.

From an article I recently read claiming that pornography might be good for us:

According to the conservative media watchdog group Family Safe Media, the porn industry makes more money than the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

Without debating the relative merits of porn, if there are any besides temporary satiation of carnal desires, I find it fascinating that moving and still pictures of naked people copulating generate more revenue than the top technology companies combined. I suppose it makes perfect sense. After all, every human being on the planet is pretty much hard wired to enjoy looking at naked people of one or both sexes. All the counter programming that human societies attempt to instantiate (mostly via religion) cannot overpower basic biological programming.

Whether we admit it or not, our genitals and our brains work together to influence our thoughts and actions.

The illegality of prostitution in most U.S. jurisdictions continues to bother me on about the same level as the federal government’s continuing need to pretend that the War on Drugs is somehow making the United States a better place to live. As a society, we are doing a woefully poor job of channeling natural behaviors into more constructive venues. If violent video games are outlawed too, we’ll have an unholy triumvirate of repression and suppression of natural human urges. While I don’t think that will happen, it really makes me wonder how long we’ll continue the juvenile societal attitudes and puritan set of mores we have towards human sexuality in America.

Tech is definitely changing sexual mores in this country. I get the distinct impression from generations younger than mine that ideas like polyamory, open relationships and casual sex with many partners are getting a new look. And when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality, I know attitudes are changing drastically. My feeling is that porn must have played a role in the changing attitudes. Even more important, technology was the delivery vehicle for most of the porn.

Technology and porn aren’t just changing sexual mores in the U.S. Sites like 4chan have worldwide reach, and they affect the way their audiences think. They change the memeset. In two generations, human sexual mores of the technorati will be completely alien to a typical 20th century American.

I have more than a dozen books and several dozen technical PDF books on my Nook at this time. I’ve been using the product for about a month.

If you are considering buying a Nook here are some things to think about:

• Barnes and Noble isn’t doing a good job making store employees into Nook evangelists. At my local store in Chattanooga they could care less about Nooks or Nook accessories.
• Barnes and Noble keeps promising different dates for Nook and Nook items to be carried in stores. I’ve been waiting to look at and touch covers for my Nook for 60 days. This is frustrating.
• Nook software continues to improve. The last update took me to version 1.20. Pages turn more “naturally” now and the Nook itself powers up and down a bit quicker.
• Sometimes while holding the Nook, pages change by themselves or the color navigation screen lights up and kicks me out of my book. This is due to oversensitivity of the controls.

Buying books is a fairly simple process but there are not enough technical books available yet for the Nook. Additionally, I’m used to Amazon’s web site telling me about the kind of books I want to buy. Barnes and Noble’s site keeps pushing garbage I don’t want to read. It is insulting to be directed towards Twilight novels when I am absolutely not and never will be a part of the demographic that wants to read about glittery morally upright vampires who enjoy dating humans and attending high school prom even though they are hundreds of years old.

(Nanowerk News) NanoProfessor, a division of NanoInk, Inc.® focused on nanotechnology education, is pleased to announce that its NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program is currently underway at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC), in Rosemount, Minn. Once completed, students enrolled in the DCTC program, will possess the knowledge and hands-on experience needed to pursue a career in the high-tech world of nanotechnology. DCTC offers a 2-year AAS Degree in Nanoscience and was the first 2-year technical college to offer a multi-disciplinary nanoscience AAS degree. The NanoProfessor program will provide in depth experimental opportunities for students in the first semester of the program. Comparable hands-on nanotechnology education programs have traditionally only been available at large, prestigious 4-year universities with graduate programs.

“Nanotechnology is a growing aspect of virtually every industry in Minnesota, the U.S. and the world, and it will require a workforce that has a fundamental knowledge of nanotechnology and the hands-on skills to complete the nanotech-oriented jobs of today and the future. Exclusivity to an education in nanotechnology is not the answer,” said Deb Newberry, director of the Nanoscience Technology Program at DCTC. “Together with NanoProfessor, Dakota County Technical College is helping meet this demand by creating opportunities for our students that previously they could only dream about.”

(Nanowerk News) NanoProfessor, a division of NanoInk, Inc.® focused on nanotechnology education, is pleased to announce that its NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program is currently underway at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC), in Rosemount, Minn. Once completed, students enrolled in the DCTC program, will possess the knowledge and hands-on experience needed to pursue a career in the high-tech world of nanotechnology. DCTC offers a 2-year AAS Degree in Nanoscience and was the first 2-year technical college to offer a multi-disciplinary nanoscience AAS degree. The NanoProfessor program will provide in depth experimental opportunities for students in the first semester of the program. Comparable hands-on nanotechnology education programs have traditionally only been available at large, prestigious 4-year universities with graduate programs.”Nanotechnology is a growing aspect of virtually every industry in Minnesota, the U.S. and the world, and it will require a workforce that has a fundamental knowledge of nanotechnology and the hands-on skills to complete the nanotech-oriented jobs of today and the future. Exclusivity to an education in nanotechnology is not the answer,” said Deb Newberry, director of the Nanoscience Technology Program at DCTC. “Together with NanoProfessor, Dakota County Technical College is helping meet this demand by creating opportunities for our students that previously they could only dream about.”

I probably will have to wait until after I get a doctorate in management of information systems to expand my formal education into this fascinating field but eventually, I believe I will attend a similar program, even if I have to wait until I am retired to do so.

In the mean time, if you are young and wondering what career to pursue, read this:

By 2015, the National Science Foundation has projected that the world will require a skilled workforce of more than two million nanotechnologists. The field of nanotechnology is already pioneering breakthroughs and innovations in the areas of energy, medicine and electronics, which will have a profound impact on lives in the 21st century.

If you want to be involved in what will be one of the most exciting and controversial as well as life changing fields in human history, think about nanotechnology.

I used to live in Haiti as a child. I haven’t commented on the earthquake until now because I really have nothing worth your time to add to the conversation.

Edwidge Danticat, on the other hand, does. Her tale of a dead cousin is well worth reading.

Maxo was a hustler. He could get whatever he wanted, whether money or kind words, simply by saying, “You know I love you. I love you. I love you.” It always worked with our family members in New York, both when he occasionally showed up to visit and when he called from Haiti to ask them to fund his various projects.

The last time I heard from him was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild a small school in the mountains of Léogâne, where our family originated. The time before that, someone in the neighborhood had died and money was needed for a coffin. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, Maxo made each request sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him or herself.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/02/01/100201taco_talk_danticat#ixzz0djv9vWHp

Haitians, by and large, are not included in the technorati. Their lives do not leave large digital footprints behind, at least for the ones who remain trapped in Haiti by the policies of strangers. Haitian lives though are worth re-examining at this time, as are American immigration policies related to Haitians. Why do we have one standard for Cubans and a completely different one for Haitians? Haiti has been a breeding ground for dictators for hundreds of years, and the people living under them suffer greatly as a result. Even more though, Haitians suffer because their giant Northern neighbor fails to care enough.

Now that we have a humanitarian disaster of nearly unprecedented proportions on our hands, maybe some of our politicians and diplomats can find new solutions as they try to rebuild a country that has (as long as I’ve been alive at least) been given more than its share of misery and despair.

It is too late for Maxo but not for the millions of Haitians who remain.

When I was about 14, I had an earth sciences teacher whose name, I believe, was Mr. Privett. I liked Mr. Privett because he took pains to keep the class engaged and because I am, in my heart, a complete nerd. Mr. Privett was a nerd too. He loved science and he cared about his students and their welfare. Near the end of our class year he put the class in a big chair circle and made us go around the room and talk like we were in an AA meeting. One of the things we were supposed to talk about was our positive qualities. I said “adaptability” and to this day, I still believe in the answer I gave more than two decades ago.

Aging is an unnecessary disease process and I will fight it as hard as I am able. For many people, at least from my perspective, part of giving up on life and accepting the inevitability of death is a slow process whereby one stops accepting and embracing new technologies. This rejection of the new and insistence on resisting the inevitable change that is part of being human is usually counterproductive. I have never felt inclined to say anything remotely approaching “that’s how we’ve always done it” when arguing for any given process, policy or procedure. In my experience such an argument almost always comes out of the mouth of a self-serving idiot who wants to force me to follow his or her way of doing things primarily due to intellectual laziness.

Technology is a stronger social force than “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Those who refuse to see that become obsolescent despite their best efforts. They grow old and are ignored, marginalized and pushed further and further from the center of things.

And that is why I asked for a Nook for Christmas. I love books but I am also of the mind that they are a dying technology. Paper is on its way out, at least as far as the technorati are concerned. Knowledge will no longer live between hardbound covers. No, it now spins on hard drive platters and flits across radio waves to land on your NAND. I must embrace the idea that my beloved paper tomes with their lovely smell and their wonderful weight will no longer be the way I collect and organize information.

I’ve been absorbing data, knowledge and information from screens since about 1977 or so but I’ve never read a book on a screen until recently. I started with an author I knew would be easily digestible, Stephen King. His new novel, Under the Dome, served as a good introduction to the world of E Ink. Having now digested 828 pages of delicious and often chilling pulp, I can report that I found the experience of reading a novel using the Nook quite pleasurable. With a few caveats, of course. I’ve never had to recharge a book before. I’ve never accidentally turned a page before and become confused about how to go backwards or forwards to get back to where I used to be. Nook and Kindle are infant technologies but they are developed enough that I will be moving my library from paper to electrons and reporting on the pros and cons of doing so.

Meanwhile, go buy Under the Dome. It’s well worth a few lazy hours in your favorite recliner. Buy a Nook or Kindle while you’re at it because the only constant in the universe is change. E-books are here to stay, and they are Mr. Privett approved.

The TSA does a miserable job when it comes to the things it is supposed to be doing – providing security at airports and on airplanes. The TSA does seem to be good at bullying people without guns and badges though, in the name of its agents who do have guns and badges. Oh, and lists too.

“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said in a statement that security directives “are not for public disclosure.”

“TSA’s Office of Inspections is currently investigating how the recent Security Directives were acquired and published by parties who should not have been privy to this information,” the statement said.

Frischling, a freelance travel writer and photographer in Connecticut who writes a blog for the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, said the two agents who visited him arrived around 7 p.m. Tuesday, were armed and threatened him with a criminal search warrant if he didn’t provide the name of his source. They also threatened to get him fired from his KLM job and indicated they could get him designated a security risk, which would make it difficult for him to travel and do his job.

This sort of behavior by governments, when pervasive enough for long enough, leads to revolutions. Governments should protect life and liberty. Governments should not bully citizens because they have internal leaks. Organizations with internal leaks should probably a) re-examine the logic and ethics of internal policies or b) implement better internal security policies or c) do both. The problem here is that the federal government doesn’t get it and probably never will. You cannot improve security by making living conditions worse for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you are destroying the economy or making people stand in herd lines and treating them like herd animals. You’re just pissing everyone off a little more each day and that is a recipe for long term fail.

Some of the idiotic directives make no sense at all. Someone explain the purpose of inflicting these foolish rules:

Passengers are also required to remain seated during the last hour of flights, and cannot access carry-on baggage or have blankets, pillows or other personal belongings on their lap during this time.

What the hell does this accomplish other than making everyone miserable? Generally speaking that is all the TSA has done during its existence. Western society is slowly but calmly ensuring its own demise by breeding and encouraging retarded memes to prevail. Once enough of us are miserable enough and have had enough of being mindlessly herded from point to point everything will burn and we’ll start over. I hope to God we find a way to keep the cretins from running things eventually.

This is the closest thing I’ve taken to a Christmas photo this year. Enjoy and may your holidays be full of love and tolerance.

Please, someone, explain the reason why Barack Obama is being given a Nobel Peace Prize. I just don’t get the thought process behind this.

OSLO – President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners with humble words Thursday, acknowledging his own few accomplishments while delivering a robust defense of war and promising to use the prestigious prize to “reach for the world that ought to be.”

A wartime president honored for peace, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president in 90 years and the third ever to win the prize — some say prematurely. In this damp, chilly Nordic capital to pick it up, he and his wife, Michelle, whirled through a day filled with Nobel pomp and ceremony.

And yet Obama was staying here only about 24 hours and skipping the traditional second day of festivities. This miffed some in Norway but reflects a White House that sees little value in extra pictures of the president, his poll numbers dropping at home, taking an overseas victory lap while thousands of U.S. troops prepare to go off to war and millions of Americans remain jobless.

While I have to agree that non-violence doesn’t defeat armies I cannot understand the type of twisted thinking that has to take place to give a guy fighting two different wars a peace prize. Shouldn’t we wait for him to broker peace somewhere in the world before we reward him for it? Perhaps I’m just mentally slow.

I’m working on my photography site, trying to get it to integrate with this blog. I’m having limited success with Lightbox, as usual.

This is my first post from an iPhone. I didn’t think I’d ever do this type of blogging but what the heck. Malleable is good. Availability maybe not so much.

Do I want a Kindle or do I want a Nook? Barnes and Noble seems to be making a great entry into the field of e-readers. The Kindle has been around longer. The Nook looks like it takes all the best the Kindle has to offer and improves it slightly. The libraries of books available to both devices are huge. Prices of the books are similar. Both devices can download periodicals and other third party content. Neither of these devices really goes too far beyond being a good reader while stuck in an aluminium tube in the sky but they are worth getting to know. Chances are we’ll soon be using them to blog, twit, text and prepare keynote addresses. I wonder how many years it will be before I can dump all my devices in exchange for just one device – a connected everywhere all-in-one portable phone, entertainment, reading and storage device. Probably not that many.

[media-credit name=”Martin Howard ” align=”alignright” width=”400″][/media-credit]If you want to kill as many American soldiers as possible just attack them outside a “combat zone.”  As a soldier and former marine, I’ve thought about this issue for many years because I am effectively deprived of my right to self-defense about 98% percent of the time I am in uniform. All it takes to slaughter American troops currently is a little willpower, access to weapons and enough intelligence to find troops on maneuvers around their home base anywhere inside the United States or anywhere outside a so-called combat zone. Just ask Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. He managed to kill 13 and wound 42 with two pistols inside the biggest Army base in the United States. And here you were thinking soldiers have guns. You were wrong. Soldiers mostly have paperwork these days.

Imagine what would happen if a professional cadre of determined aggressors armed with sniper rifles and the right training and experience actively started attacking the hundreds of unarmed military convoys that travel on U.S. highways daily. Just this weekend, I was traveling in such a convoy and I thought about exactly this scenario. We had rifles, to be sure. But they were locked up and we had no ammunition. My personal concealed carry pistol, an H&K .45 USP, is prohibited on base or when in the field even though I am a staff sergeant with combat experience. I carry this pistol every single day as a civilian and take my responsibility to defend my own life and the lives of those around me very seriously. The Army doesn’t believe in my right to defend the lives of myself and my fellow citizens. Except when a bureaucrat says it is OK, of course. The circumstances of my ability to engage an enemy with years of training are dictated by the faceless and the nameless. Men and women unknown to me decide whether I might live or die based in irrational criteria and flawed thinking.

A gun free zone is only gun free until someone ignores the rules and brings a gun into the so-called zone. There is no such thing as a safe zone. We live on a tiny little ball of matter spinning wildly through a universe filled with danger. That doesn’t mean we should live paranoid existences filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth. It does mean that we should encourage human beings to think. It means that we should understand our own infinitesimal fragility. It means that those of us who can should carry fire extinguishers, first aid kits, emergency food rations and guns and ammo at all times. These are basic survival tools and may be needed at the drop of a hat. No one locks up firefighters’ axes while they are off duty. That would be silly. Yet soldiers who are not actively engaged in security operations are deprived of weapons and ammunition. That makes our domestic military installations the biggest targets in United States. Sure, there are quick reaction forces. They are small and if there really were sleeper cells in the U.S. as we’ve been told it would be easy to attack and overwhelm these forces.

In the name of political correctness, we have murdered our own protectors by depriving them of their second amendment rights. This should shame us. The very people we train to protect us are disarmed by our own political class because of cowardice and mistrust. Do not give a man a gun if you do not trust him. Maybe you shouldn’t give him a uniform either. God didn’t design snakes with removable fangs for a reason. An Army that uses the motto “train as we fight” but disarms it soldiers the majority of the time might be broken. Is anyone going to step up and ask that we fix this? I am.

If you are a member of the “armed services” you should be armed. At all damn times. That way, when a psychopath is loose in your midst and is also armed, you don’t have to die running away from the danger.

How do we avoid another massacre such as the one perpetrated by Nidal Malik Hasan? We do the following:

• Encourage all officers and NCOs to carry loaded weapons at all times
• Train all uniformed servicemembers to respond to enemy shooters in domestic environments
• Begin training enlisted troops regarding the serious responsibilities they are being entrusted with (carrying a firearm at all times) beginning with basic training/boot camp – by the time they are NCOs 99.9% of them will be completely adjusted to the idea and comfortable with it
• Encourage retired military to be armed at all times wherever they are
• Create widespread awareness of these programs in the media

Ideas are always more powerful than weapons. Ideas kill people every single day on this planet. Bad ideas like gun free zones kill more people than they save. Stupid ideas like disarmed military population clusters are so asinine that I would quit the military if I didn’t need health insurance and supplemental retirement income to offset my huge tax burden, without which I could be paying for all the health care I need while saving for rainy days and my “golden years.” Thanks Congress. Thank you entrenched career busybodies in Washington, D.C. Thanks for nothing.

Sincerely,

An idealistic staff sergeant

P.S. If you think I’m just a nutjob read what other veterans and servicemembers are saying:

http://www.defensivecarry.com/vbulletin/concealed-carry-issues-discussions/90455-dont-know-source-but-might-good-news.html

http://www.defensivecarry.com/vbulletin/concealed-carry-issues-discussions/90344-no-cc-military-base-example-fort-hood.html

I have been keeping this blog since 2004. I’ve written well over 1,000 entries including a year of blogging from Baghdad, Iraq. This blog has become a combination diary, political screed and memory lane for me. Needless to say, I’ve been extremely irritated that the blog crashes every other day. I’ve switched hosting providers three times now trying to get the issue corrected. Finally, I decided enough was enough.

After countless hours of troubleshooting my conclusion was that CPanel on CentOS is what has been causing my WordPress blog crashes.

I bit the bullet and created an Ubuntu virtual server using the LAMP stack at my hosting provider VPS.net. After two weeks of trial and error learning, I’ve migrated my entire blog from a CPanel managed environment to one where I am controlling everything using FTP (Filezilla) and SSH (putty).

I’ve had numerous problems with Apache mod_rewrite, setting up an FTP server from a command line and so on. For others who might be trying to setup and install their own WordPress instance or migrate an existing WordPress blog at the most basic levels, here are some links I think you may find useful.

Useful links for setting up or migrating WordPress to an Ubuntu server

HOWTO : Create a FTP server with user access (proftpd) – Ubuntu Forums

How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system

Migrate WordPress to a new server or directory | Richard Castera

Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex

Editing wp-config.php « WordPress Codex

WordPress SuperCache-Plus plugin | The Murmatrons

ApacheMySQLPHP – Community Ubuntu Documentation

phpMyAdmin

Changing File Permissions « WordPress Codex

Former Chattanooga police officer Kenneth Freeman should be in jail. Freeman has been re-fired by the Chattanooga City Council but that’s not enough. Police officers shouldn’t be held to a lower standard of conduct than private citizens, they should be held to a higher standard.

After five hours in front of the Chattanooga City Council, fired Chattanooga police officer Kenneth Freeman will stay that way. Fired.
First, a little history of Freeman’s story. Last summer, Freeman was relieved of his duties amid domestic assault allegations.  Authorities told us then that they responded to a apartment complex on Mountain Creek Road.  That’s where Rose Blanks told police that she and Freeman were arguing.  That’s when she says Freeman threatened her.
He was fired in August after an Internal Affairs investigation into several different incidents.  Police spokesperson Sgt. Jerry Weary said one of those incidents, “..alcohol was involved and he was found to have been carrying a firearm at the time which he consumed alcohol.”  She said investigators at Internal Affairs were actually looking into two cases involving three violations of department policy and procedures. “One was for turning in overtime sheets for time he had not worked,” Sgt. Weary explained.  Weary added that amounted to fraud, among other things. “And then the third was for conduct unbecoming,” Sgt. Weary said.

Peace officers should never be allowed to hide behind a badge, a department or a flag. An armed peace officer who shoves an old Wal-Mart greeter is not a professional, he is a criminal.

In one case, Officer Freeman was investigated for consuming alcohol while armed, carrying an unauthorized off-duty firearm and conformance to law. In the second case, he was investigated for insubordination and two complaints of conduct unbecoming an officer, police spokeswoman Sgt. Jerri Weary said in a news release.

Three complaints were sustained — consuming alcohol while armed, conduct unbecoming an officer relating to fraud by turning in hours not worked and carrying an unauthorized off-duty firearm, she said. His termination is effective immediately but he can appeal the decision to the Chattanooga City Council, Sgt. Weary said.

Officer Freeman served a 28-day suspension earlier this year after an internal affairs investigation that he exhibited conduct unbecoming an officer, improper procedure and excessive use of force in connection with an assault of a Wal-Mart greeter.

If I did all the things listed in bold, I would be going to jail. Kenneth Freeman got fired. That’s getting off easy. While I think it’s great that Mr. Freeman no longer has the ability to hide behind a uniform, gun and badge I believe he should be held to the same criminal penalties that I would be times two. If an armed police officers abuses his or her authority the penalty should be doubled. Frankly, I’d like to give Kenneth Freeman a good shove. He violated the trust placed in him by the citizens of Chattanooga acting through their proxies. He abused his authority. Kenneth Freeman should pay a heavier price for his criminal behavior.

A lot of dollars are being wasted and stolen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The amounts are staggering. One of the primary avenues for theft, waste, fraud and abuse of these funds which may eventually have to be paid back by your children and grandchildren is that much of the day to day war effort is being undertaken by private contractors who under perform and over bill the government. Since the government forcibly passes the costs of the wars on to the public taxpayers end up footing the bill for frittering away billions of dollars to ship people from all over the world to dusty guard towers where they can sleep in uncomfortable chairs.

Demand for contractor services is heavy, while oversight of their work isn’t. That means problems often aren’t discovered until long after the payments have been made.

A major trouble spot is the business systems and procedures that companies use to bill the government. The numbers are eye-popping. Defense auditors have found at least $6 billion in questionable charges generated by sloppy accounting or, worse, contractors trying to bilk the military.

Yet, the Pentagon has done a poor job of recovering the money and forcing companies to improve, according to the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting. The panel cites dysfunction among auditors and contract managers, a shortage of personnel and a failure to be more confrontational with contractors who don’t measure up.

To be fair, I never saw a guard sleeping when I was in Iraq from 2005-2006. I did, however, see lots and lots of examples of money being wasted on ridiculous projects. Retrofitting conference rooms that were perfectly serviceable at a cost of millions per room is one example that immediately springs to mind. I sat in several meetings where we discussed spending money just to keep budgets at their current levels or to justify increasing them in the coming fiscal year. This is how government thinks.

In late 2007, the military belatedly began paying attention. Numerous contract violations were found, several of them serious, leading to a flood of what contracting officials call corrective action requests. Last fall, the Army Criminal Investigation Command opened an inquiry to determine if Combat Support Associates overbilled the government. The case is ongoing.

While the army says it is breaking up many of the abused private contracts into smaller more manageable pieces maybe the key is to minimize the use of private contractors to fight America’s wars. It might also be helpful if the government considered reducing the size of the war fighting machines it has created in the first place. I’m pretty sure Obama has been a great disappointment thus far to those who hoped for any change in foreign policy regarding how we win wars. After all, you are still paying for contractors to collect money and build nothing in return while empty job sites are guarded by imported private contractors being paid six figures to sleep in uncomfortable chairs. Open your pocketbook and smile at the man with one hand out and the other hand resting lightly on his gun.

Ah, self-defense. I love the concept that I have a right to exist unmolested by others. The 21st century’s primary defensive tool is the firearm.

Why anyone would want to wage war on behalf of his or her country is beyond me. I’ve done it and certainly don’t look forward to any repeat performances. Military service is a Catch-22. They tell you you’re a hero and then treat you like a criminal. They tell you the martial profession is honorable and then treat you like scum.

Sergeant Jermaine Nelson is pending court martial at Camp Pendleton for murder.  He could receive life imprisonment.

This is all over speculation, innuendo and testimony from events that happened in Fallujah more than four years ago.  Let me ask you this. Why would anyone sign up for the Marines and volunteer for combat missions if they have a high chance of being charged with murder after the battle? I sure as hell wouldn’t. If someone has been shooting at me all day and killing those around me it is highly unlikely that they are going to survive close contact with me.

Yes, there are rules of engagements. Yes, prisoners should be treated humanely. But this is war. War cannot be won without warriors. If you treat your warrior class like your peasant class your chance of winning conflicts declines on a rapidly sliding scale. This should make every American in uniform ask him or herself who is going to get their back when they have bullets coming downrange at them? What sort of welcome are they going to receive when they get home? How many years later will it be when the same people who started the war they fought in come to arrest them for fighting in it?

Bureaucrats make the rules that soldiers live and die by. Bureaucrats judge how the rules were followed. I’d like to all hand to hand missions in America’s next war fought by bureaucrats. They’ve earned the honor.

The United States Constitution seems pretty clear to me most of the time. The federal government, on the other hand, has a lot of trouble interpreting and following the highest law of the land in a manner I can fathom.

Here is the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

I may be wrong but as far as I know the federal government of the United States has no legal authority to regulate much of anything that happens inside the borders of a sovereign state. That is, unless that state asks for help in regulating this, that or the other matter. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, in which case, please explain how I’m wrong. It might help me decide to live somewhere else in the near future.

You see, I much prefer the idea of diffused power to the idea of a strong central authority that micromanages the lives of its subjects. I don’t want to be thought of as a subject. I want to have choices. A country with 50 distinct political flavors and 50 different approaches to solving problems is inestimably more palatable to a man like me than one where people I have no access to can reach out and jail me on a whim at any given moment for violation of some dictate or another.

Let’s talk for a moment about federal arrogance. If I am right, and all powers not specifically granted to the federal government are reserved to the people of the states themselves then how a letter from a federal employee to gun distributors in Tennessee, a sovereign state, is acceptable? The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate weapons inside the borders of a state. Yet we have a career bureaucrat lecturing weapons dealers in the state on how the federal government and not the local population will decide what is and is not acceptable when it comes to citizens and firearms. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Assistant Director Carson W. Carroll warns Tennessee gun dealers in a letter written in his glass and concrete tower that:

The act purports to exempt personal firearms, firearms accessories and ammunition manufactured in the state and which remain in the state from most federal firearms laws and regulations,” Carroll wrote. “However, because the act conflicts with federal firearms laws and regulations, federal law supercedes the act and all provisions of the (federal) Gun Control Act and the National Firearms Act and their corresponding regulations continue to apply.

This is the kind of thinking and action that almost guarantees another American civil war in the 21st century. The federal government’s many arms already routinely ignore the documents that are supposed to bind them. The federal government is supposed to have control over interstate commerce, not regulation of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. There is no constitutional mandate for stepping into state business. Where does the federal government derive its authority to legislate anything that goes in inside a state’s borders in the first place?

The federal government gets around this by pretending that interstate commerce is somehow tied to how many rounds a pistol magazine should hold or what the maximum percentage of alcohol should be in beer. In order to ensure compliance with the vast array of illegal rules that the feds have created a choking mechanism is needed. In the case of tax compliance the government chokes employers. In the case of weapons compliance the government chokes dealers. Dealers must obtain a Federal Firearms License to operate a successful arms dealership in the U.S. This unconstitutional requirement forces you to sign documents giving up your right to due process and at the same time levies taxes on every weapon you buy or sell. The ATF can search and seize any property you own at any time for any reason and it does so all the time. In fact, the ATF has a reputation for harassing, bullying and intimidating gun dealers.

Over time the arrogance of men and women you’ve never met deciding exactly how much self-defense is acceptable for you, the law abiding citizen, makes a lot of people consider being a little less law abiding. The real point though, is that America would be a better place to live if the feds stopped blundering around stepping on everyone else’s toes all the time. The constant arrogance generate letters like this one:

I am not an FFL holder. I never wanted to put myself at the mercy of your unconstitutional, bully-boy agency whose malfeasances, misfeasances, perjuries and deadly misadventures are legendary. I have observed first hand your agency’s ability to cow FFL holders into not fighting you in court when you violate your own rules. Your agents often push the line of what constitutes statutory compliance with the threat that they will come back with a raid party if the FFL holder doesn’t knuckle under. Having my business, my livelihood, my family’s safety and my life at the whim of brutal thuggery such as exemplified by “Waco Jim” Cavanaugh at the time of the Trader’s Gun Shop raid here in Birmingham, or Jody Keeku’s railroading of David Olofson, never interested me.

Go Google David Olofson. It’s worth your time.