willtoexist.com archive

If bacteria can poop the fuel we need how come I’m not hearing more about it? I had to hear about biofuels company LS9 from a nerdly co-worker. You would think people would be excited.

LS9 DesignerBiofuels™ products are a family of fuels produced by specially-engineered microbes created via industrial synthetic biology. Starting from raw, natural sources of sugar such as sugar cane and cellulosic biomass, these renewable fuels will fundamentally change the biofuels landscape and set the stage for widespread product adoption and petroleum displacement. LS9 hydrocarbon biofuels have higher energetic content than ethanol or butanol and have fuel properties that are essentially indistinguishable from those of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.

LS9’s technology provides a means to genetically control the structure and function of its fuels, enabling a product portfolio that meets the diverse demands of the petroleum economy. LS9 DesignerBiofuels™ products overcome a number of key challenges associated with first-generation biofuels, including infrastructure compatibility, product diversity, product economics, and quality consistency. LS9 products can go directly into vehicles or be further processed at a refinery. The products are designed to be cost-competitive with traditional petroleum products – without subsidies – and be commercially available within a few years.

Based on a highly efficient production method, LS9 products offer increased environmental benefits over production and refinement of crude oil and ethanol. LS9 DesignerBiofuels™ products approach carbon neutrality, with an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide consumed by the plant-based feedstocks as are generated from combustion of the fuels. In addition, LS9 products contain no carcinogens like benzene (commonly found in petroleum) and only trace amounts of sulfur.

Think of it – an unlimited supply of petroleum. We’ve got artificial diamonds better than the real thing. Fossil fuels certainly sound doable and cost effective in the short term. While I’m waiting for designer biofuels to catch on I’ve broken down and purchased a four cylinder fuel saver, the 2009 Mazda 6. I’ll review the car and it’s features at some point in the future when it’s fully broken in.

If you have a moment and a few soon to be worthless dollars now is a good time to donate to Lawson for Congress.

I’m still chewing on some massive demands on my time. While I do that, I’m debating the merits of dropping out of our system of governance altogether. It seems that we’re rapidly approaching a time where I must throw my hands up and actively become non-cooperative with the system.

How can I justify continuing to support (through military service) a group of financial children like Congress? They are robbing me and any children I produce. They are simply and plainly out of control. They’ve trained America to become dependent on their system of graft. Now that they are blatantly out of control in the creation of inflation and Americans want them to tap the brakes they are blatantly speeding up instead.

I’m sick to my stomach.

Electing another freedom oriented man to Congress might provide me with some small remaining measure of sanity for a few more days, weeks or months, so I made a donation to keep me from picking up a gun and starting a violent revolution.

What is on everyone’s mind in corporate America? Money. Same thing that should be on your mind. If you have significant savings then you might be in good shape for the time being. Or your might not. Depends on whether the banking system collapses completely. While the chances are low, I think we may well see major riots in our biggest cities in the next five years. That depends on how well Congress and their myriad myrmidons can prop up our faith in their system of theft, graft and faith based electrons.

Today I had to go to my boss and ask him for money to buy computer hardware because our storage arrays are full. The idea was better recieved than I thought it would be considering that the credit markets have dried up commercial construction projects short-term. A LOT of chains have put all their new building projects on hold.

The world keeps spinning. Those of us based in the Southeast still have a hard time filling up the gas tank, compared to a few weeks ago we have to do a lot more searching to find gas. This adds to the sense of foreboding a lot of people have. I’m only surprised it took this long to reach a moment in time when we had to say, as a nation, what the heck is really going on here? After all we’ve been trained for at least three generations now to a sense of entitlement, instant gratification and complete lack of any real hardships in life. Reality doesn’t always work that way, at least for most people.

The big question is: where are we going from this point? At least a few people are hearing from Ron Paul again.

Roberts: OK, OK. So we recognize all of the things that got us here. But, right now, today, what would you do, if not this bill?

Paul: You have to liquidate those mistakes. Those mistakes were made due to monetary policy. So you have to allow the market to adjust prices downward. And that’s what we’re not allowing to do.

If there are too many houses and the prices are too high, the sooner we get the prices down to the market level, as soon as we quit trying to encourage more housing — this is what we’re doing. They’re trying to stimulate houses and keep prices high. It’s exactly opposite of what we should do.

So, we should get out of the way and not buy up bad debt. There’s illiquid assets, but most of those are probably worthless. They’re mostly derivatives. And we’re sticking those with the taxpayer. So we have to recognize that the liquidation of debt is crucial. And if we did that, we would have tough times, there’s no doubt about it, for a year. But if we keep propping a system up that’s not viable, we’re going to have a problem for decades, just like we did in the Depression. That’s what we’re on the verge of doing.

Congress will most likely do what they do best – put off dealing with these issues as long as possible. They’ll vote an “aid” package in. The dollar will be further devalued. You will be immediately a little more of an economic slave than you were yesterday, assuming you plan to keep adding to the system we live under. The system will be that much closer to collapsing under its own weight. Beans and bullets will be excellent investment vehicles.

There will be less grossly obese people waddling around.

I’m just about through with the people in Washington, D.C. and all those who share their mentality.

Frankly, my dear, I no longer give a damn. My short term goals are to keep putting food on the table and gas in the tank so I can get to and from work. My long term goals are to watch the system collapse under its own sheer hubris and criminal arrogance.

The more Congress examines the Bush administration’s bailout plan, the hazier its outcome gets. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle complained of being rushed to pass legislation or else risk financial meltdown.

“The secretary and the administration need to know that what they have sent to us is not acceptable,” says Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The committee’s top Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, says he’s concerned about its cost and whether it will even work.

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Wow. If it wants to see a bailout bill passed soon, the administration’s going to have to come up with some hard answers to hard questions. Public support for it already seems to be waning. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday, 44% of those surveyed oppose the administration’s plan, up from 37% Monday.

If only this was a joke. Sadly, it isn’t. The money is just made up at the whim of Congress. It’s just binary data that holds value based on the faith of Americans. Americans are losing faith in the system, and the system is responding by losing value. The end result of this process should be obvious – a breakdown. Possibly a minor breakdown. Possibly a catastrophic train wreck. That remains to be seen.

All I am certain of is that more legislation is not the answer. More rules won’t help. More oversight is not a long term solution to the problem of the creation of 700 billion faith based electrons.

I spent most of the week in Portland, Oregon.

Interesting city, to say the least. Great food, great atmosphere and a lot of bat shit crazy types wandering freely downtown. I lost track of how many times I got panhandled. The vast majority of the people were very polite when I told them I didn’t have any change for them.

One incident wasn’t as polite. A lady got her purse snatched by another lady. I gave chase, along with a couple of hotel bellhops from the Westin. The Snatcher made it about a block when out of the blue she got clotheslined by a super guy, super happy guy. He was eating a sandwich and made a snap decision – throw down the sandwich and do a reverse purse snatch. He was ultimately successful and other members of the public caught the perpetrator and held her for police. The key point in mentioning this incident is that the public got involved and provided community security services, which I applaud.

I saw numerous people wearing Obamagear. At a used clothing store called The Red Light the sign outside proudly announced that they had Obama socks back in stock. I asked how well they were selling – like hotcakes. Nobody I talked to liked John McCain. I saw no stickers, no signs and no other evidence of any support for the old, pale white guy downtown. In fact, when I asked about him, people gave me weird looks, like I was asking if they would consider sleeping with an alien or how they would feel about performing surgery on themselves.

Beautiful city. I jogged downtown by the river a couple of times and the wide range of types of people was a fascinating study. I’d love to visit again.

My hosting company went DOWN this week, and the blog was out of commission for three days. MIdphase is not on my Christmas list right now.

One of the most popular stories today is about the ill-advised nature of allowing people to build homes on barrier islands.

“Every year there’s reporting on the foolishness of building on barrier islands, but people are going to do it anyway,” Morton told LiveScience. “We don’t learn from the past. If you look at the barrier islands on the Mississippi coast in particular, after both Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Katrina, what did they do? They rebuilt. It’s a perfect example of a coastal area that did get hit as bad as it can get, and they just go back and rebuild.”

Barrier islands tend to be even riskier places to live than coastal areas, because they bear the brunt of any approaching storm impact.

“If you think about their location, they’re basically lonely sentinels that serve as barriers for the mainland,” said Clark Alexander, a marine geologist at Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “Basically you’re in a vulnerable spot, because you’re located where you get the first effects of anything coming in off the ocean.”

Setting up residence in these vulnerable spots is particularly perilous.

“From a safety standpoint, it’s silly,” Alexander said. “Because the lifespan of a typical house is something like 60 years. But if you live on a barrier island, you can’t guarantee you’ll have land under your house in 60 years. It’s trying to put something permanent in a place that’s very dynamic.”

How come no one is saying anything like this about a place like New Orleans?

Political pandering and the socialist mentality. If two million people want to live in a place where hurricanes naturally land, below sea level and run by a base criminal named Ray Nagin whose management skills are far below those of an average kangaroo, want to continue to live there, then a freedom loving society should let them. The caveat is that they should be on their own the next time nature strikes.

More than half the people in this country say the flooded areas of New Orleans lying below sea level should be abandoned and rebuilt on higher ground.

An AP-Ipsos poll found that 54 percent of Americans want the vast sections of New Orleans that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina moved to a safer location. About 80 percent of the city was flooded at the height of the flood. The city, home to about 484,000 people, sits six feet below sea level on average.

Six feet below sea level. In this country, all productive citizens are expected to pay for the problems of all citizens. I disagree with this mentality but it is the fact of our times.

Why then are we not discussing moving populations out of the way of natural disasters. We wouldn’t build on an active volcano. Yet we build in active earthquake zones. We continue to insist on rebuilding cities and towns below sea level. Why? I do not want to pay for this foolishness when nature takes it course and wipes these population centers out.

Let these people build where they want, by all means. However, they should recover on their own when the ill-advised nature of their decision catches up with them. I am not heartless but this country is trillions of dollars in debt and cannot afford to continue to pander.

This mentality is bankrupting us and pushing the country towards the brink of a disaster that will wreak more havoc than every hurricane that ever was.

Government created the financial market climate responsible for the risky loans that should never have been given. Yet government has now appointed itself the savior that will rescue us from bad decisions made by government. How this guy can be so far off base is amazing.

Self-reliance. Individual responsibility. A faith in free markets and a belief that people should have the opportunity to fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity. These are qualities that have been as central to the national identity as they have been to the American economic model.

Which is why it is so extraordinary that the government now finds itself hip-deep in the direct management of the financial system, rescuing four of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and now Lehman Brothers — from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments.

This unprecedented intrusion of government is coming in the waning days of the administration of a Republican president who made privatization, deregulation and a faith in free markets the centerpiece of his economic policies and of his political agenda.

In case you don’t know it Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the federal government.

In recent months, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance lenders have come under increasing scrutiny at the hands of Congress, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, nicknamed Freddie Mac, have operated since 1968 as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This means that, although the two companies are privately owned and operated by shareholders, they are protected financially by the support of the Federal Government. These government protections include access to a line of credit through the U.S. Treasury, exemption from state and local income taxes and exemption from SEC oversight. A recent accounting scandal at Freddie Mac that resulted in the replacement of three of the company’s top executives has led to mounting concerns over the privileged status these GSEs enjoy in the marketplace.

Let’s say your daughter got raped. Would you hire the rapist to provide your daughter therapy? That’s as silly as bringing in the federal government to fix the problems it created by allowing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make irresponsible loans under the protection of law.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

Let me be bold. If this cycle of hiring the problem creator to manage the problem continues, foreign armies will one day arrive here to collect the debts we are unable to repay.

Meanwhile a retard named Steven Pearlstein prattles on about free markets with nary a glimmer of understanding.

If these actions had been taken in Moscow, Paris, Beijing or even Brasilia, they would have seemed merely confirmation of long-standing socialist instincts and traditions. But in Washington, they are revolutionary. As with the Great Depression, it has taken a full-blown financial crisis to shake the faith that free markets will always deliver better outcomes than politicians and bureaucrats.

What free market you moron? Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the stage for the socialist controlled market in 1938! The current conditions are the direct result of government interference in free markets. Your advocating more government interference is akin fighting a fire by pouring fuel on it. What the hell is wrong with you people?

It should come as no surprise that federal employees have been accused of being in bed, literally, with oil industry representatives. The nature of power almost demands such relationships exist.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. government employees received improper gifts from energy industry representatives, and engaged with them in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations, according to a report issued Wednesday.

A report says government officials accepted gifts from oil and gas company employees.

The report was issued by the Interior Department’s inspector general after a $5.3 million investigation “uncovered recreational marijuana and cocaine use” by “a handful” of Interior Department staff, and found two federal employees “engaged in brief sexual relationships with representatives from companies doing business” with the department.

Two Interior Department employees “received combined gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business — a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources,” Inspector General Earl Devaney says in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne accompanying the report.

Randall Luthi, head of the Minerals Management Service at the Interior Department, said the public had not suffered financial losses as a result of the employees’ behavior.

Some of the government employees tried to hide their close association with the industry they were supposed to be regulating, the report says.

The real problem here is not that human nature is what it is. Why does no one ever ask the question that is really important: why do we accept that government can police itself? It does a terrible job. These employees will never be appropriately punished because they are part of a monopoly that naturally protects itself. Its name is the United States Federal Government.

“The Bush administration put an ‘America for Sale’ sign on the White House lawn from day one and has been courting Big Oil ever since,” Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York and chairwoman of the House Rules Committee, said in a written statement. “Democrats have been saying it for some time, but this proves it. This administration is literally in bed with Big Oil. Little did we know they were such a cheap date.”

Representative Louise Slaughter is a part of the problem. She cunningly points the finger at a man we all love to hate. The truth of the matter is that Democrats are just as cheap to date as Republicans. To say that either of our two parties isn’t filled with whores would be disingenuous. Many Americans, though, remain happily oblivious to the fact that the two party system is a shell game designed for just one purpose – keeping the power in government where it can be abused with impunity.

As a legally naturalized citizen of these United States, and a trained disciple of the cult of big government, my first thought upon reading an article stating that the world would prefer a President Obama was why the hell should I care what choice the rest of the world would make if they got to cast a ballot.

The answer is simple. The U.S. government makes a habit of forcing itself and its policies on the world. Democrats have done it. Republicans certainly do it. The world is quite aware of it. Whether you were born in Kosovo, Mogadishu or Baghdad, you might feel you have a stake in who becomes the next U.S. president. After all, the decision may determine whether or not your family gets bombed in the middle of the night. Americans don’t have to worry about that (yet).

The longer I study U.S. history the more clear it becomes that the United States government has acted as an agression machine far longer than I have been alive. As a part of that factory of forced policy (a national guardsman) I would much prefer that the federal behemoth shrink to the point where I don’t have to worry about which war I’ll be fighting next. Make no mistake, some wars are probably unavoidable. I am not a fan of rushing headlong into as many as possible. That’s something only a complete idiot would embrace.

Yet there seems to be no shortage of complete idiots. We also seem to have an overabdundance of men and women willing to use force to make others comply with ideas that start off well intentioned and almost always turn into unmitigated and poorly managed disasters.

If the world prefers Obama, who am I to tell them they have no say? It seems to me that they do.

One of the problems I have is a lack of brevity – I tend to overcomplicate and overanalyze. Howard Zinn, on the other hand, does not.

Q: What should the world know about the United States?

HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don’t know is that there is an opposition in the United States.

Zinn says “corruption” of the US system enabled Bush to win office [EPA]

Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think ‘oh, he was elected twice’, they don’t understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.They don’t understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference.

So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have.

Seeing the U.S. through the eyes of the rest of the world is important, since the rest of the world isn’t too happy with U.S. policy at the moment. We’ve been jabbing everyone else with pointy sticks for far too long.

I wish I could summarize this well:

The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations.

So the US influence is declining, its power is declining.

However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining.

Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.

I’d never heard of Howard Zinn till I read this al-Jazeera article. Good stuff. We need more thinkers like this guy to present points of view that are clearly legitimate and are currently being mostly ignored. Two parties which are not very far from one another – the base problem in our country right now. Thanks for that summary Mr. Zinn.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we are a communist nation. As such, no one is free to fail. No one is free to succeed either. In fact, no one is free at all. We are all pawns in the hands of the politicians – those proud men and women who tell us that they take our money for our own good. Since this country wasn’t originally intended to become a communist nation, these schemers still mostly have to steal our money on weekends.

At irregular intervals, the weekend also brings news of the latest installment of the incremental nationalization of the investment markets. This began several months ago with the federally backed and brokered buy-out of Bear Stearns. Over the most recent weekend this process reached an important milestone when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were transformed from fascist entities — that is, “public-private” partnerships — into fully realized, federally owned socialist organs.

Legendary investor Jim Rogers, as usual, speaks the unalloyed truth when he observes that the Fannie/Freddie bailout demonstrates that “America is more socialist than China right now,” with government redistributing wealth for the benefit of the politically connected super-rich. (That’s how socialism always works in practice, of course.)

Once again, to the surprise of nobody who has been paying attention, this development was praised by the presidential candidates from both wings of the Ruling Party. And as with all such socialist undertakings, the very first priority of the officials who seized Fannie and Freddie was to assure the apparatchiks that their jobs were secure.

Security only lasts until there are more parasites feeding on the hosts than the hosts can or are willing to support. Once that tipping point is reached both host and parasite suffer, and one or both die. America’s current political class on both sides of the aisle have made their careers on fostering the mentality of parasitism. No matter how useless you are to society, no matter how little you contribute, no matter how poor the decisions you make someone else will always be there to bail you out.

Unfortunately that is how America, the land of the free and the home of the brave (gag) have arrived at a national debt so staggering that it cannot be comprehended, even by the thieves who were instrumental in creating it. We are reaching the end of the balance between the producers and the consumers. Each massive bailout defrauds the American taxpayer and inexorably speeds up the slow decline of the behemoth known as American government. When the flames are licking their way up the walls of the Capitol building don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

TANSTAAFL

People have always been afraid of things they don’t understand. They’ve made many dire predictions of doom and gloom. Thankfully, most of those turn out to be wrong. Hopefully that will be the case with the Large Hadron Collider.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.

Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.

The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.

On September 10, 2008 we’ll find out whether the latest end of the word predictions are right. I’m expecting a very large explosion – of knowledge about the nature of matter.

Remember the movie Gattaca? We’re getting closer.

The gene AVPR1a codes for the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A which influences altruism, monogamy, and other behaviors. Genesis Biolabs wants you to test your prospective spouse for versions of AVPR1a to discover if he or she will be altruistic toward you. But what if a woman wants a man who will be ruthless in his pursuit of higher positions in a corporation?

Screening for the “ruthlessness” gene is likely an indicator of marital happiness. Marriages born out of mutual respect and mutual interest rather than self-interest are much more likely to succeed and probably less likely to end in divorce. Is your fiancé just after your money? Those with the “ruthlessness” gene may very well be. Those with the altruistic version of AVPR1a probably aren’t. Ruthless people will lie, cheat and steal to get what they want. Genetics may not be a guaranteed indicator of human behavior and motivation [genetics is only one half of the nature vs. nurture debate] but genes don’t lie. Before you make a lifetime commitment, have your fiancé tested.

What if an ambitious high status man wants a woman who will give his offspring genes that will make his kids hard chargers and ruthlessly ambitious? People could easily use this test for reasons opposite of the marketing pitch for it.

The research that led to this test came out only 9 months ago. In a few years we’ll know of dozens of genes that influence fidelity, ruthlessness, and assorted other characteristics relevant to

Jerusalem, December 6, 2007 – Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers, including Dr. Ariel Knafo of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes that this could very well be the case.

Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers found that those who chose to give away some or all of their money differed genetically from those involved in the exercise who chose not to give their money away.

The scientists conducted the experiment with 203 online “players”. Each player could choose to keep the equivalent of $12 he was allocated, or to give all or part of it to an anonymous other player.

Those involved also provided DNA samples which were analyzed and compared to their reactions. It was found that those who had certain variants of a gene called AVPR1a gave on average nearly 50 percent more money than those not displaying that variant. The results of the study were published online recently in the research journal Genes, Brain and Behavior.

Do you want your wife giving all your hard-earned money away to charity? Do you want your husband to be an easy mark when his loser brother comes begging for money? I expect scientists will find genetic variations that contribute toward selective altruism for offspring and other genetically very close relatives. Maybe a woman will prefer a husband who is genetically more inclined to sacrifice for the kids and not for strangers.

Designer people are coming – it’s just around the corner on the time scale. I expect to be alive to see the first designer children pop out of the lab. I’m hoping to be present when society can produce a replacement body that I can swap myself into. I’m imagining and existence without back pain and the other physical ailments that sometimes plague me.

Other people will be imagining other things.Imagine a six-breasted showgirl or an eight legged marathon runner. As we unlock more and more genetic codes, these things step out of imagination and into reality.

Don’t worry though – the herd will stomp on the creativity once it realizes what is going on. Your ex-wife won’t want you to design a replacement that doesn’t talk back and wants to have sex all the time. The neighborhood busybodies will fume and rage when they realize you intend to design the kind of children you want. Your local church will sermonize against tinkering with plans for a replacement body. Politicians will write reams of rules and change them on a whim.

It’s going to be an interesting century. I’m rooting for the creative types to win. If you want to live your next life as a zebra centaur who can leap tall buildings that should be your choice. Everyone deserves a dream.

Personally, I prefer Reddit to Digg. They’re both good for some interesting stories, but the user quality is ultimately what determines the quality of any Web 2.0 application. Sooner or later, someone will engineer a Web 2.0 app that is designed to elminate what kills everything Web 2.0 – popularity. As soon as you invent something people like, the message spreads. As more and more people sign up for your thing, whether it be Digg, Reddit or one of the other social sharing sites, the quality of the body of material start to devolve.

You end up with stories like this one, where top users are whoring themselves out.

InvespBlog has published what it claims is an interview with a top Digg user – someone who has a 34% success ratio in getting submitted stories to the home page of Digg. The Digg user isn’t named – he or she says “I have a reputation to withhold” (we know what they meant).

In the interview the user talks a little about how he’s able to get stories to the home page of the Digg news site and drive significant traffic back to the destination, despite the increasing popularity of the site. There isn’t much that will surprise people, the user simply does a lot of networking and reciprocal voting with other top users.

But the user also claims to charge for his services. A submission is $300-$500 based on the “quality of the article,” with no additional “promotion.” If you want your article promoted it’s a flat $700 fee. An additional $500 is charged if it gets to the home page. That’s a grand total of $1,200 for a home page story, and you don’t even get guaranteed results.

I don’t mind an honest whore. The problem with Digg is that the quality of the content is devolving. I’m not sure if there is a point at which a social content sharing app like Digg reaches it’s climax and then starts the long inexorable slide downhill. In Digg’s case, I would cite the frequency and types of stories that have become popular of late. Lots of socialism oriented screeds, pictures of naturally occurring objects that look like genitalia and a bunch of conspiracy theory sensationalism blended together with more and more banal and vitriolic comments have left a sour taste in my mouth.

I’m looking forward to the first elitist Web 2.0 app that allows me to vote other brands of elitists off the social virtual island.

You may not have noticed, but America is in trouble. Our credit is overextended. Our military is overextended. Our welcome in the rest of the world is overextended. Civil liberties are disappearing and it’s only a matter of time before people start vanishing too. As a group, we’re getting fatter and lazier. Our political system is broken to the point that many people don’t think it can be repaired. There are not enough significant differences between the two parties in charge to matter in the long run. Both of them are driving us inexorably towards a point where we’ll either be a giant modern day version of a plantation or, depending where the technology goes, the majority of us will be converted into Solyent Green to feed the elite class. Anyone outside the two-party umbrella is marginalized or criminalized or simply ignored, depending what’s most expedient.

Jack Cafferty gets at least half of the picture.

It’s more than symbolic that when a million Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, the Republican candidate for president has lost track of his holdings.

McCain surrounds himself with people like former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners” and said we are only suffering a “mental recession.”

That’s the same problem the Republican Party has. It has lost track of what it used to stand for: small government, a disciplined fiscal policy, integrity.

In a way, the perfect storm of a rapidly changing population — old white people aren’t going to be in the majority very much longer (and isn’t that who most of the Republicans are?) — has combined with the total abdication of principles, Republican or otherwise, of arguably the worst president in the nation’s history to mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

The Democrats will be in charge of both the legislative and executive branches soon. This means they’ll have some opportunities to take over the judicial again. Things will change, as they always do, but not for the better. Government doesn’t offer inspiration. Government isn’t good at hope. Government has no idea what creative vision is and it doesn’t do invention well. When all you offer as a solution to every problem is more government, then the overriding problem becomes how much government you have. We’ve reached that point.

Instead we can expect the police state to continue to grow. Concepts like zero tolerance, a “war on terror,” the continual decline of individual choices, more monitoring technologies and the ongoing dumbing down of citizens as the rise of the nanny state continues. That’s what I predict when the ball passes from the Republicans to the Democrats.

I came across a very interesting article urging me not to pay my medical bills today.

As health-care costs continue to soar, millions of confused consumers are paying medical bills they don’t actually owe. Typically this occurs when an insurance plan covers less than what a doctor, hospital, or lab service wants to be paid. The health-care provider demands the balance from the patient. Uncertain and fearing the calls of a debt collector, the patient pays up.

Most consumers don’t realize it, but this common practice, known as balance billing, often is illegal. When doctors or hospitals think an insurer has reimbursed too little, state and federal laws generally bar the medical providers from pressuring patients to pay the difference. Instead, doctors and hospitals should be wrangling directly with insurers. Economists and patient advocates estimate that consumers pay $1 billion or more a year for which they’re not responsible.

In this world where consumers and citizens are constantly urged not to take responsibility for their own lives, I find this to be an interesting conundrum.

If my insurance agency is acting as my agent, then why should I be paying the bills or spending little pieces of my life arguing about the amounts? That seems pretty logical. On the other hand, I have an obligation to pay for services rendered. Yet the provider did not spend any time explaining what the cost of the services being rendered would be.

I received a bill for eight dollars for dental services the other day showing that my insurance company did not pay and explaining that I owed the difference. I think I’ll just forward it to my insurance company – they spend all their time making me prove that I was actually treated for whatever I saw the doctor for – they’ve wasted hours of my time rejecting claims that were clearly valid. Now it’s their turn to respond to my demands.

In a world where customer service often seems to be the last thing on people’s minds, I’m going to demand more from those I do business with.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of the state in my life. I’m interested in the limits on legitimate functions and how far those should extend. For more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about how the state’s role is bigger than I am comfortable with. I’ve concluded that the state itself takes too much and gives too little. Thinking about how to fix that could easily consume the next century of my life.

Luckily, I’m not alone in thinking about the role of the state. Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek is also thinking about government. The cleverly titled Your Dog Does Not Own Your House is well worth reading.

Even if we stipulate, for purposes of argument, that the state is the only possible, or the best possible, supplier of protection against violence and the best possible supplier of dispute-resolution services, society as we know it would nevertheless collapse were it not for farmers, tailors, home-builders, physicians, lawyers, stockbrokers, engineers,….. the list is long.

Get rid of any of these producer groups and people die by the millions.  And yet, no one proclaims that “Justice is whatever farmers claim it to be” or “Because society cannot exist if people aren’t clothed, then weavers and tailors are the foundation of society.”

What we are thinking about here is how government gets things done. Most of the interactions you have probably had in your lifetime with a government agency have been either banal or mediocre. Think of waiting in line for a driver’s license. For me, the citizenship process is one long blur of answering silly questions and waiting in uncomfortable chairs to be analyzed and judged by people following lists of arbitrary criteria. Someone else may think of an IRS audit.

Few people who don’t work for government think of government without a sense of apprehension, or fear, or mistrust. There are exceptions of course. Sometimes government does good things. Every now and then those good things are conceptions dreamed up by a politician. By and large though, government rules by the gun. That’s what it always comes down to. Government doesn’t create, it distributes after taking a cut.

No politician creates prosperity. It is created by countless entrepreneurs, businesses and workers competing and cooperating within markets. For government to avoid obstructing these markets is indeed desirable — but it does not create the resulting prosperity. To insist otherwise would be no different from my insisting that I, as a driver who did not run over Ms. Jones as she walked back from the supermarket, am responsible for the tasty dinner she cooked that evening for her family.

Whenever that rarest of creatures — an honorable politician — manages to loosen some part of government’s grip on us, he deserves acclaim. Even he, however, doesn’t deserve credit for whatever economic growth and cultural flourishing follow. Such credit properly belongs to the many persons who create, innovate, take risks, save and work to produce what consumers want.

The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom is a special case of the deification of government. When deified, government is mistakenly seen as responsible for all good that happens in society — with all bad things being blamed on devils who, of course, must be banished by government.

Most people, of course, don’t realize this about government. If they did, I wouldn’t have to shut off all the news channels after becoming physically sickened listening to all the lies, false promises and grand schemes coming out of the mouths of the politicians. All I hear is the sound of a gun being cocked and then pointed at my head.

It’s true that Barack Obama loves guns. But only for the privileged politician and bureaucrat classes. You see, without guns, the bureaucrats would get a lot less cooperation fighting all the wars they are engaged in. Gun control is not about protecting us from each other. Gun control is about protecting bureaucrats from their subjects.

You don’t have to go back that far to find Obama taking an extreme stance against gun rights. In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, he promised to bar citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. The Chicago Tribune reported then that Obama “backed federal legislation that would ban citizens from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement.” Obama explained his plan to pre-empt state concealed-carry laws with a federal bill: “National legislation,” Obama said at the time, “will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents.”

For a man who doesn’t know me to arrogantly make assumptions about my level of competence and tell me I am not allowed to defend myself is morally wrong. Government has lots of guns. Why can’t I have guns?

The assumption is that government is more responsible with guns than regular people. Prove it. How many individuals have declared war on a country and killed millions of its citizens? Take away every gun regulation. The equation would remain exactly the same. People would still go crazy from time to time without thousands of gun regulations. Some of them would still get access to guns. If all the guns were gone, they would use a car, or poison your food and water, or devise some other method. The mentality a society teaches its citizens is much more important than the rules it writes down in books.

Maybe you could care less about guns. Maybe your pet issue is social injustice. Fine. Let’s talk about that.

The basic problem with government is that it doesn’t actually solve problems. It manages them.

Name one of the social injustices that government has declared war and won. War on Poverty? Nope. We’re nowhere near winning that one. War on Drugs? Nope. Drug use is up. Doesn’t matter if you look at illegal substances or prescription abuse. Not winning. That particular boondoggle isn’t going away anytime soon. War on Terror? The term itself is asinine. The program isn’t designed to stop terror. It’s designed to make us all very afraid. Of real and imagined boogeymen, some of whom wear government issued uniforms and lord it over you at the airport, border crossings and increasingly, on your city streets. We’re not winning the War on Terror and we never will because you cannot wage war on something as broad as “terror” – the whole idea is idiotic.

Finally, the most important war the government is fighting. I see the bureaucrats making a great deal of progress in that particular campaign. The War on Intelligence is moving right along. No, they aren’t winning per se. But the federal government has certainly managed to dumb us down since it took over educating us in 1979. No Child Left Behind has to be one of the most intelligence damning pieces of legislation ever written. The Idiocracy is coming. We’re 23rd in math and 16th in science. Under the management of FedGov, those numbers are sure to get bigger.

Let’s get back to our next President Mr. Obama and his worldview for a moment.

He has promised to pick guardians of the Constitution who do not respect gun rights and believe that a comprehensive ban on gun ownership is consistent with the second amendment.

Senator Obama has a history of projecting a misleading moderation in his politics — and he does it very smoothly. According to his biographer, David Mendell, one of Senator Barack Obama’s greatest political virtues is “his ingenious lack of specificity. . . . While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his own often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own.”

It is my belief that Barack Obama has no interest in solving my problems. That’s good because I don’t want him to solve my problems either. The tricky part is that I don’t even want him to manage my problems. They are my problems, and I’ll deal with them.

Mr. Obama when you become President all I want you to do is leave me alone to live my life. I have the audacity to hope you’ll end the four unwinnable wars your predecessors have been managing so poorly in direct violation of the Constitution they swore to uphold. Let the states handle social issues. Let me handle my business. You worry about protecting our borders and getting us out of all those ill advised foreign police duties we’ve assigned ourselves over the last 60 years or so. I’ll worry about running my own life, saving for retirement, choosing which medicine and medical treatment is best for me, picking what kind of gun I want to keep for personal defense, educating my kids and living as long and as healthy as I can. I don’t need help managing any of that stuff, please and thanks. The more rules you try to make me follow in my day to day routine the less likely it is I’ll cooperate with you. Hint: the same rule of thumb applies to people in other countries. Most people who didn’t ask to be managed don’t appreciate it when you decide they need managing.

I appreciate your taking a moment to consider this American’s viewpoint.

In the most misleading headlines category, we have a story about AIDS in New York City.

For the same reason, however, the report said it was impossible to determine if there was an increase in HIV infection, but suggested that in New York the infection rate was three times higher than the national average.

The headline chosen by AFP for this story is a clear indicator that modern journalism is targeted to and written by people whose cognitive function appears to max out around junior high school level or lower.

If this story had been written by a true professional interested in disseminating useful information about AIDS the headline would have been New York AIDS infection rate 3 times higher than national average.

That is the key information. This leads to the question, why does New York City have such a high rate? Three times the rate of unprotected sex with multiple partners? Three times the intravenous drug use? Three times as many gay men? In our developing idiocracy, a casual reader would have scanned the headline and come away with the impression that the AIDS virus strain in New York City is three times as virulent as elsewhere. That’s just not the case.

Shoddy journalism irritates me because it dumbs down the audience that is exposed to it.

AIDS does not spread itself. The host organism’s behavior and activities are the primary factor in the rate of spread.

Protect the children is getting to be a tired old mantra. People tend to get out of hand though. Voyeurs and exhibitionists are everywhere. As long as they aren’t forcing anyone to watch them, I have no problem with what they do.

Unfortunately, we live in a sensationalist society full of hypocrites and people who enjoy watching others get punished for things they’ve done that didn’t hurt anyone else.

BARTLETT, TN (WMC-TV) – Bartlett Grove Park sits in the middle of a subdivision.  It’s a favorite spot for children, and was recently the site of an adult website porno shoot. The video clip we discovered begins innocently enough. “I thought I’d come out for the day,” says the “model.” She then exposes herself on the playground slide. “She’s definitely a tramp — just nasty,” parent Barbara Taylor said in reaction to the video. The part that upsets me is not that someone decided to get naked on a slide. As far as I can tell there were no children around at the time. Other then upsetting parent Barbara Taylor, Bartlett’s official tramp detector, I fail to understand what this woman did that hurt anyone.

Here’s the part that upsets me:

Bartlett Police Capt. Tina Schaber said the girl in the video is clearly breaking a law. “Public indecency right off the bat,” she said. Police got on the case after Action News 5 clued them in. “I don’t think this would be appropriate for an adult to see in a park — much less a child,” Schaber said. According to Schaber, the model and those video-taping her could be charged with a number of other crimes. “These days, who knows?” she said.  “She could be over 18 — she could be under 18.”

What crime? Anytime someone brings up crime the first thing I want to know is who got hurt. In this case the answer is no one. Don’t we have enough societal problems without making a mountain out of a molehill?

The unfortunate thing about our legal system is that anyone who disagrees with anything you do can probably find a person in a uniform with a gun who is willing to punish you for something. I’d much prefer we lived in a system where you actually had to commit a crime before authorities would come running with tasers and citation pads at the ready.

Who got hurt? No one? Then mind your own business.

Thomas Friedman’s Theory of McGlobalization has been proved wrong.

One minor casualty of the recent conflict in Georgia was the doctrine of peace through McGlobalization — a belief first elaborated by Thomas Friedman in 1999, and left in ruins on August 8, when Russian troops moved into South Ossetia. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s,” wrote Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Not that the fast-food chain itself had a soothing effect, of course. The argument was that international trade and modernization — and the processes of liberalization and democratization created in their wakes — would knit countries together in an international civil society that made war unnecessary. There would still be conflict. But it could be contained — made rational, and even profitable, like competition between Ronald and his competitors over at Burger King. (Thomas Friedman does not seem like a big reader of Kant, but his thinking here bears some passing resemblance to the philosopher’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” an essay from 1784.)

Is this the emergence of a New Cold War as author Scott McLemee seems to speculate? I’m dubious. I think Vladimir Putin is a cult of personality just as powerful as Barack Obama, except with a wider license to steal and write new rule books on a whim.

With former KGB man Vladimir Putin as head of state (able to move back and forth between the offices of the president and of the prime minister, as term limits require) and the once-shellshocked economy now growing at a healthy rate thanks to international oil prices, Russia has entered a period of relative stability and prosperity — if by no means one of liberal democracy. The regime can best be described as authoritarian-populist. There have been years of frustration at seeing former Soviet republics and erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies become members of NATO. Georgia (like Ukraine) has recently been invited to do so as well. So the invasion of South Ossetia represents a forceful reassertion of authority within Russia’s former sphere of influence.

The 21st century will be full of new paradigms, including the end of single world superpower. Whether or not we recognize it, the nation-state itself is dying, and the United States is leading the slow decline.

“It is difficult,” writes Furedi in a recent essay, “to discover clear patterns in the working of twenty-first-century global affairs….The U.S. in particular (but also other powers) is uncertain of its place in the world. Wars are being fought in faraway places against enemies with no name. In a world where governments find it difficult to put forward a coherent security strategy or to formulate their geo-political interests, a re-run of the Cold War seems like an attractive proposition. Compared to the messy world we live in, the Cold War appears to some to have been a stable and at least comprehensible interlude.”

Follow the fortunes of private mercenary army and megacorporation Blackwater, which despite its tarnished public reputation continues to thrive. The New Cold War will be a very different animal. The United States has been overextended for five years and the Georgian conflict is an exclamation point on the sentence that tells us where we’re headed.

The Duck of Minerva – an academic group blog devoted to political science – has hosted a running discussion of the news from South Ossetia. In a post there, Peter Howard, an assistant professor of international service at American University, noted that the most salient lesson of the invasion was that it exposed the limits of U.S. influence.

“Russia had a relatively free hand to do what it did in Georgia,” he writes, “and there was nothing that the U.S. (or anyone else for that matter) was going to do about it…. In a unipolar world, there is only one sphere of influence — the whole world is the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Russia’s ability to carve any sphere of influence effectively ends unipolarity, if there ever was such a moment.”

What if, instead of Russia invading Georgia in response to a stupid move by a politician, it had been China invading Taiwan in response to a stupid move by a politician? The conflict between Russia and Georgia is far from being over, and there are at least ten other flash points in the world that could blow up in the face of the world’s self-appointed policeman at any moment.

The cult of Obama apparently doesn’t extend to everyone. Four idiots are being held on suspicion of plotting to kill our next President. The story itself is highly suspect. The parts don’t add up.

Law enforcement sources told Maass that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

The story began emerging Sunday morning when Aurora police arrested Tharin Gartrell, 28. He was driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner, according to sources.

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

A 750-yard shot from a high vantage point is very difficult on a human sized target, even with an high caliber rifle and an appropriate scope. You’d need to pre-sight your weapon from your actual vantage point, or have a spotter assisting you. Maybe both.

The last person who could make such a shot is a methhead. Look carefully at these two individuals. They are supposedly charter members of the Methhead Presidential Assassin’s Club. These doofuses don’t look competent enough to tie their own shoes, let alone carry out the type of plan that would end the life of Barack Obama from 750-yards away.

I think there are two possibilities.

A) These idiots were actually plotting to kill Obama. If so, they had a snowball’s chance in hell. I’d put 200,000 to 1 odds on failure.

B) This is just some sort of publicity stunt set up by the campaign to help further the cult of personality Obama seems to have become.

Either way, Obama was never in danger. He’ll be the next President and I’ll be irritated by most of what he says and does for the next four years. Remember kids, drugs and hitmen don’t really mix. Competent assassins don’t get high and drive around in pickup trucks with their weapons waiting to be arrested.

This whole story is just a plot to distract us from the fact that Obama’s only meaningful contribution to society is that he promises to take money away from some people, take a cut, and give the remainder to other people – all in the name of fairness.

I’ve long been a big fan of “assault” style AR-15 weapons. I own a Bushmaster Varminter and I’d like to collect a few more weapons in this class. The Para Ordnance AR-15 is about as attractive as 5.56 NATO/.223 weapons get. The folding butt stock is something I haven’t yet played with.

Specs:

Caliber: 5.56 Nato
Barrel: 16.5 inches Chrome Lined
Twist: 1 in 9 inches
Sights: Flip up front sight and fully adjustable flip-up rear sight
Overall Length: Stock Open and Fully Extended – 36 inches
Stock Open and telescoped in – 33 inches
Stock Folded – 26.25 inches
Weight: 7.6 pounds
Additional Features: Field strips with no tools
Multiple sling mount points
MSRP: $2,297

You can find more on the Para Ordnance TTR AR-15 over at The Firearm Blog. I would like to see the company offer a 6.8mm version as I am looking for something in that caliber as my next purchase. For some reason, there is no info about the weapon on Para’s web site.

More thoughts on the Para TTR AR-15 over at Snowflakes in Hell.

The Wall Street Journal recently opined that For Most People, College is a Waste of Time. Actually, Charles Murray did the pontificating, under the Journal’s masthead. I digress.

Here’s a nutshell:

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

In information technology, certifications are important. Five years ago, you were nothing without an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer). Now it seems those are a dime a dozen. Which leads me to an opinion from fellow transhumanist Aschwin de Wolf at Depressed Metabolism.

Charles Murray is on the right track when he draws attention to the  poor value of most college degrees for predicting performance in the work place. His solution is questionable, however. Certification can become just as meaningless as BA degrees if the prevailing egalitarian mindset in society persists. Furthermore, as a libertarian, Murray must be aware of the artificial barriers certification can raise to competition. One only needs to look at the  requirements to obtain Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification to realize how certification can create formidable obstacles for entering a field of business.

Although there is a place for certification for certain professions, more important than substituting certification for college degrees is to create better mechanisms to recognize and differentiate between the ability to acquire, process, and apply skills and knowledge versus sterile and unimaginative testing of textbook knowledge.

I don’t really give a rat’s ass whether I have a degree or certification. Given the chance, I can sell myself to anyone. If you don’t want to give me the chance, someone else will.

I am working on a master’s in computer information management from Bellevue University. I suppose I could get analytical and worry about whether or not I’ve made a good decision. I prefer to focus on the learning process itself and see where that takes me. When MCSEs were the new hotness I didn’t have one. Now that they are passe, I still don’t have one. I survived.

It isn’t the degree or certification that matters in life (although they do help). The learning is important. Knowing which lessons matter and remembering those is critical. You will always benefit more from political knowledge and skills than you will from a degree or a certification.

I’m not giving up on education but the degree is secondary. Learning is what matters. Like the universe, if you are not growing, you are shrinking. Stasis is not an option.

Government, by its very nature, engenders some pretty idiotic news stories. This is one of the dumbest I’ve read in years. Intent is no longer an issue in the giant plantation of subjects we called the United States of America. Nancy Pelosi, being one of the overseers, must be protected, even when no one is trying to harm her.

Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said 29-year-old Joseph Calanchini of Pinedale, Wyo., faces a charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon after police officers at the Grand Hyatt hotel noticed him carrying a rifle-type case while checking in. Calanchini did not have a concealed weapons permit, said Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

Wiley said authorities were not releasing information about whether the weapons were loaded because the case remained under investigation. Wiley said the charge is the same whether the weapons were loaded or unloaded.

Pelosi and other guests briefly evacuated the hotel but were never in danger, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said.

The charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon is ridiculous. Carrying a rifle in a rifle case is perfectly reasonable by anyone’s definition, unless you’re dealing with the government. Since government makes up the rules as they go they don’t have to be reasonable.

Authorities were investigating a report that Calanchini was in town on business and had had the weapons worked upon to prepare for the trip.

“The speaker was never in any danger and she appreciates the quick and professional response of the police,” said Daly.

So what we have is a situation where Speaker Pelosi appreciates “the professional response” of armed thugs. If these police were professional they wouldn’t be charging Joseph Calanchini with anything. They would have simply determined that he was a hunter passing through the area and let him go about his business. Unfortunately we are being treated as subjects instead of citizens by our government. That’s why Calanchini had to be charged with something. He needed to be reminded that he isn’t really free, and America isn’t really the home of the brave.

The biggest taxpayer bailout in the history of the United States is inevitable.

The inevitability of a taxpayer-funded bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the hobbled mortgage behemoths, shook investors last week, and shares in both companies plummeted on fears that existing stockholders would be wiped out.

These government-sponsored entities guarantee or hold $5.2 trillion in mortgages and have been hammered by defaults across the nation. Fannie Mae’s shares closed on Friday at $5, down from almost $70 a year ago. Freddie Mac fell to $2.61, which is down from about $65. Their heavily leveraged balance sheets magnify even a small rise in delinquencies.

Irresponsible loans given by government using money guaranteed by the taxpayers of America are defaulting and someone has to lose.

ON its Web site, and in language that only a lawyer could love, Fannie Mae describes some terms of its subordinated debt. For the debt to qualify for capital calculations, it must require the deferral of interest payments “for up to five years if (1) Fannie Mae’s core capital falls below minimum capital and, pursuant to Fannie Mae’s request, the secretary of the Treasury exercises discretionary authority to purchase the company’s obligations under Section 304(c) of the Fannie Mae Charter Act, or (2) Fannie Mae’s core capital falls below 125 percent of critical capital.”

Here’s a translation: A bailout could mean no interest payments on the subordinated debt.

“If we reasonably assume that the Treasury would only intervene in the event that Fannie or Freddie is declared significantly undercapitalized by its regulator,” UBS analysts wrote, “then interest payments on the qualifying subordinated debt is automatically deferred for up to five years.”

Only government can do this – write arbitrary rules stating that if it is irresponsible the rest of us must suffer, since government ultimately draws all its funds from our pocketbooks and bank accounts.

The complex nature of the way government protects its own deals means that no one really understands what is going to happen next. What is certain is that the taxpayers and those foolish enough to invest in Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac stand to lose the most. Even more certain is that the stakeholders (the taxpayers) will not be asked for their opinion when the government makes its move.

Alabama is about to begin charging state employees $25 a month for being overweight.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Alabama, pushed to second in national obesity rankings by deep-fried Southern favorites, is cracking down on state workers who are too fat.

The state has given its 37,527 employees a year to start getting fit — or they’ll pay $25 a month for insurance that otherwise is free.

Alabama will be the first state to charge overweight state workers who don’t work on slimming down, while a handful of other states reward employees who adopt healthy behaviors.

Alabama already charges workers who smoke — and has seen some success in getting them to quit — but now has turned its attention to a problem that plagues many in the Deep South: obesity.

While I like the idea of providing incentives to be healthy, I am uncomfortable with the idea of charging penalties for being unhealthy. From a libertarian perspective, I want the most choices possible. On the other hand, insurance companies who have to treat fat people are either going to charge the fat people or spread the cost of the treatments around. That means I might have to pay for someone else to be fat. I’m not that interested in paying for the health care of others, particularly when the health issues are self-induced.

It is not my job to pay for you to be fat, anymore than it should be my job to pay for your children’s upbringing.

Incentives are much more appealing than penalities though. My company recently paid for me to enter a triathlon. For $48, the company motivated me to train heavily for three months. I dropped an inch off my waist and nine pounds off my frame. Long-term I’ve signed up for another triathlon and I’ve joined a gym near work. If the company had instead threatened me with wage garnishment I would have fought tooth and nail against them. My personal productivity would have declined and I would have been likely to complain and spread dissension.

Mac McArthur, executive director of Alabama State Employees Association, said the plan is not designed to punish employees.

“It’s a positive,” he said.

Taking money away from someone is a positive? This guy has been smoking some government ganja.

Bureaucrats are always good at using penalties to try and force people to make good choices, but they hardly ever choose positive incentives as a motivator. Why is that?

Someone named “Spengler” writes an interesting article entitled: Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

What an interesting supposition. The author is saying that the Bush Administration is playing “fake it till you make it” – a dangerous game because a lot of those who play make believe never actually achieve the reality of their fantasy. Believing you are free and actually being free are two different things.

We all play political games in life. Nation-states play these games with rulebooks, guns and lives in ascending order.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman’s crusader in The Seventh Seal.

So one side is fighting for “freedom” using Monopoly rules. The other side is fighting for “survival” using chess rules. As usual, the pawns are dying while the politicians move the pieces around on the boards. All we can count on is continued upheaval in former vassal states of the USSR. As usual, America will seed these conflicts by playing the world’s SuperNanny™ at our taxpayers’ expense.

The Federal Trade Commission has implemented new rules banning those annoying recorded sales pitches.

The FTC amended its Telemarketing Sales Rule after reviewing more than 14,000 comments made since October 2006, when proposed amendments were published for public consideration.

There are two stages to the change: By December 2008, robocalls will be required to include an automated key-press or voice-activated opt-out. Beginning September 2009, telemarketers won’t be able to send out any robocalls without “the prior express written agreement of the recipient to receive such calls.”

I have long since stopped answering my home phone. I don’t even look to see who is calling. I don’t really think the FTC is going to stop the phone version of spam with these new rules. Telemarketing calls like these must get results or they would die a natural death. It’s a little scary to think that people out there are responding to the types of messages I sometimes hear on my answering machine.

While I understand that the FTC is trying to do something good for consumers they fall short, as government bureaucrats usually do.

There are no exceptions for telemarketers to send robocalls to customers with whom they have an “established business relationship,” as an earlier policy allowed, but there are some exceptions. Health care-related calls subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 are still allowed, as are charitable fundraising robocalls made to members of the nonprofit charitable organization for which the call is placed, or to people who previously donated to it. The fundraising calls must still include an automated opt-out, however.

The strict limits won’t stop robocalls from political campaigns, either.”Political calls are not placed for the purpose of inducing purchases of goods or services, and therefore are not ‘telemarketing’ within the meaning of the TSR,” the FTC notes in a footnote of the amendment.

All these well intentioned rules just end up making it more expensive to do business in America. Those expenses are always passed on to the consumer in the end.

What I would like to see happen is a true free market solution to robocalling. How about a system that responds to autmated calling systems with a massive EMP at the source? That would be a reasonable response to a devilishly annoying sales tactic. If automated telemarketers knew that they stood a good risk of being electronically executed for their annoying tactics they might think twice.

David Olofson is sitting in jail. Like many non-violent citizens who represent no threat to anyone, Olofson is a victim of paper pushers and their endless rule books.

There are several ways for a person to unintentionally commit a felony, but most of them are looked at by prosecutors, judges, and juries as the accidents they are and dealt with accordingly. Such is not always the case however, especially when firearms are involved; for the past 2 years David Olofson has been learning that the hard way. Olofson is a regular guy who happens to be fond of AR15 style sport-utility rifles. He loaned a rifle to a friend. While the friend was shooting it he moved the safety switch to a point beyond the Fire position. The rifle fired a couple of short bursts and jammed. Someone at or near the club called the police to complain about machinegun fire. The police notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and David Olofson was subsequently charged and convicted of illegally transferring a machinegun.

You may not be a weapons collector, as Olofoson was, and as I am. You should still be worried. If the government can arbitrarily make up its intrepretation of its own unconstitutional rules as it goes to the point where the intrepretation doesn’t match the reality of the situation then it isn’t just people who collect guns that are in trouble – we’re all subject to the whims of dishonest bureaucrats who believe they are demigods.

As the years pass I find myself having a harder and harder time respecting the rule of law. That is because the rule of law is increasingly corrupt. Intent used to matter. That is no longer the case.

The cornerstone of this charge is the government’s contention that it doesn’t matter whether a gun fires multiple shots as a result of malfunction or modification because the law defines a machinegun as; “… any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” While on the witness stand, firearms expert Len Savage asked the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting the case if that would make his grandfather’s old double-gun a machinegun if it malfunctioned and fired both barrels with one pull of the trigger. The AUSA responded by paraphrasing the legal definition of a machinegun with emphasis placed on “any weapon which shoots… more than one shot… by a single function of the trigger.”

What I or any reasonable person would call a weapons malfunction is being used by our federal government to put a non-violent citizen who represented no threat to anyone in a cage and hold him there for a period of years. That is unconscionable.

These people intend to control us all one day, from the moment we are born until the moment we stop breathing. By these people I mean petty bureaucrats. I mean the enemies of freedom. I mean the faceless men and women who, by typing something on a keyboard thousands of miles away are able to turn you into a criminal in the eyes of the law without you even knowing anything just happened. These are the modern evil wizards of our time, and they are plotting to take over the kingdom.

If you care at all about freedom in America, I encourage you to donate whatever you can to David Olofoson.

Getting out of the water after the swim.

Another mental patient has died while in government care. The solution being touted, as usual, is more government oversight.

The state sent a team Tuesday to help Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro draft new procedures to ensure patients receive proper care.

An investigator’s report released Monday found that 50-year-old Steven Sabock died in April after he at one point choked on medication and had been left sitting in a chair for close to a day at the facility about 50 miles southeast of Raleigh. Surveillance video showed hospital staff watching television and playing cards just a few feet away.

What the article doesn’t make clear, and what journalists almost never explain when writing about these types of deaths is the fact that government is what failed.

Cherry Hospital is a 274-bed inpatient psychiatric hospital serving the citizens of 36 eastern North Carolina counties. We are operated by the state of North Carolina, the Department of Health and Human Services.

Government can’t fix government. We don’t ask doctors to operate on themselves so why do we tout more bureaucracy as a solution to problems of human indifference?

Yes, we can pay someone to watch the people who are watching the patients. Is that cost effective? No. Is it a long-term solution to the problem of people playing cards and watching television while a mental patient sits dead on a nearby chair? No. If your culture and civilization failed to build a conscience into these people, or snuffed out one that was there to being with then you have failed as a society.

Address the culture of indifference. How did that get created?

Some college bureaucrats around the country are banding together to send a message that the federal nanny system isn’t working in regards to drinking age.

Top university officials in Maryland – including the chancellor of the state university system and the president of the Johns Hopkins University – say the current drinking age of 21 “is not working” and has led to dangerous binges in which students have harmed themselves and others.

Six college presidents in Maryland are among more than 100 college and university presidents nationwide who have signed a statement calling for a public debate on rethinking the drinking age.

One of the biggest gripes I’ve had with the drinking age is the mentality that goes with it. Parents should set the drinking age. When the state sets the drinking age it sends a subtle message that the state owns you. This is the same message that is sent with any prohibition type rules, regulations and legislation.

If you believe, as I do, that you own your own physical being and your own mind, then the state has no place telling you which substances are legal to put into your body. As long as you are not injuring other people you cannot commit a crime by ingesting a substance. Injuring yourself is not a crime because you are damaging your own property. The problem with this is that our current society teaches that the state has an obligation to take care of all of us individuals collectively. That means that all of us are expected to give up individuality to some extent.

We teach young adults that they are not responsible enough to decide for themselves what they put into their bodies instead of explaining the available options and allowing them to decide for themeselves in responsibly managed environments. Because of the nanny state, young adults have to hide their experimentation with substances that alter reality. This means that they are more likely to get into serious trouble or be injured during the learning process.

Instead of patronizing young people, we should teach them individual responsibility. Few legal adults, no matter how young or old, want to be coddled and talked down to. It’s time we recognized the hypocrisy of making someone a legal adult at 18 while telling them they are still not responsible enough to consume an alcoholic beverage. It’s time we understood that prohibition always causes more problems than it addresses.

Scientists have created the first rat cyborg.

Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes, the researchers explained in a statement released today by the University of Reading in England. In response, the brain’s output drives the robot’s wheels left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects.

The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, the scientists state. Its sole means of control is from its own brain.

“This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences,” said the university’s Kevin Warwick of the School of Systems Engineering. “This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine.”

Factor in Moore’s Law. I am envisioning ratbots providing airport security screening as one possible application. Only a few years away. TSA cyborgs with a prediliction towards stealing your cheese will decide whether or not you get to travel. No worries, they’ll have a badge to make it all seem more normal to you.

So what exactly is the legal status of the nearly 20,000 people who forgot or simply didn’t want to present ID in order to fly?

The TSA began storing the information in late June, tracking many people who said they had forgotten their driver’s license or passport at home. The database has 16,500 records of such people and is open to law enforcement agencies, according to the TSA.

Asked about the program, TSA chief Kip Hawley told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday that the information helps track potential terrorists who may be “probing the system” by trying to get though checkpoints at various airports.

Do officials and authorities consider these people to be troublemakers? Terrorists? Future felons? After all, according to Mr. Hawley, it is likely many of these people were “probing the system.” The usual response is that government bureaucrats will “probe their systems.”

Later Tuesday, Hawley called the newspaper to say the agency is changing its policy effective today and will stop keeping records of people who don’t have ID if a screener can determine their identity. Hawley said he had been considering the change for a month. The names of people who did not have identification will soon be expunged, he said.

Civil liberties advocates have been fearful that the database includes passengers who have done nothing wrong yet may face extra scrutiny at airports or questioning by authorities investigating possible terrorism. “This information comes back to haunt people,” said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Frankly, there is no security oriented reason to present ID in order to fly. If you’ve been physically screened then you present very little security threat once you have boarded the plane. Knowing who you are serves no security purpose. Should you decide to cause trouble on the flight, it is very easy to land the plane and find out who you are for the purpose of putting you into the “bad people” databases that have sprung up in the last 30 years almost as fast as tax rates have increased.

I think it is great that the TSA has the common sense to realize that lack of ID doesn’t automatically represent a threat to airport or in-flight security. Now when in the hell will they develop a screening program so I no longer have to wait in the retarded lines and go through the idiotic boarding process? It’s been seven years since the towers went down. How long does it take to identify the 99.89% of passengers who represent a zero risk of terrorism? Is Homeland Security just a big jobs creation program or is it a massive exercise in permanent stupidity?

Author’s Note: I’m a member of Gun Owners of America (someone tell them to modernize their web site). I’m also a non-commissioned officer in the Georgia National Guard, sworn to defend the Constitution. I trust my fellow law abiding citizens, whether they have ever worn the uniform or not. The current “dialogue” about whether or not CCW holders and private citizens should be able to pass through airports conducting their daily business while carrying guns is puerile. The TSA is an inherently bureaucratic organization that will naturally protect the bureaucrat class and hoard power to that class. Banning private weapons in public airports is unconstitutional. Since I’m sworn to defend the document, and have a great deal of respect for the ideas that spawned the document, I sent this letter to the President.

Dear Mr. President:

Law abiding civic minded individuals like me are under increasing assault by bureaucrats in this country and it is high time that someone stood up for us in government. I am a citizen soldier with years of firearms training yet with each passing year I find more and more hurdles put in place by bureaucrats designed to discourage and intimidate me when it comes to the responsible use of firearms in my daily life.

The August 7 issue of USA Today reports that the TSA is considering letting airports across the country ban firearms in areas that currently allow for self-defense. What’s at stake here is not the ability to take guns past surveillance points. What’s at stake is the right of self-defense outside of these areas — especially where drivers are either dropping off or picking up passengers. In other words, drivers who have permits are the ones who would be affected the most because they would now have to leave their guns at home — thus contradicting the very reason they got a concealed carry permit in the first place… the fact that they wanted to carry their guns outside of the house. I hope that you will rein in the rogue TSA and prevent them from making such a foolish decision — if not for the Second Amendment, then for the sake of your own administration and party.

You must understand how harmful it would be to impose a brand new gun ban in an election year, when the campaigns of people like Al Gore and John Kerry have amply demonstrated that the gun rights issue can cost a party dearly.

If the TSA is allowed to arbitrarily ban firearms in the manner it is considering doing so, then law abiding citizens will have two choices – break the law when traveling through airports, or face the choice of being disarmed by a bureaucrat who is highly unlikely to appear when a firearm might be needed in self-defense.

Sincerely, SGT Trevor L Snyder, Georgia National Guard

The bottom line in regards to weapons carry in an airport is the mentality of the people carrying the weapons. I am much less likely to go crazy in an airport with a gun than most people because I have what I believe is a correct mentality about when it is appropriate to use firearms (in self-defense). As a combat veteran and a regular shooter, if I did decide to engage in a massacre at an airport, the laws and rules surrounding the facility would be completely irrelevant because of the change in mentality. Mentality cannot be legislated or otherwise regulated by a bureaucrat.

Soon to be President Barack Obama has a plan that involves how much of your money the government will take away, by force if necessary. Some people won’t pay anything. Some people will pay a lot. The plan, like those that have come before it – the only constant being that tax rates have grown vastly since World War I – is based not on common sense or fairness, but on economic voodoo.

Senator Barack Obama declared recently that he wants to “reform our tax code so that it rewards work and not just wealth.” We think that is a great goal if it means a simple tax system with low marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, a close inspection of Obama’s proposals reveals something disquieting: he would raise marginal tax rates for many middle-income taxpayers, a bad move for anyone seeking to promote economic growth.

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives. First, whether or not you get those breaks will depend on your income. In Washington, taking away tax breaks as families work harder to make more money is called a “phase-out.” Economists have a different name for it—we call it a tax. Reducing a person’s tax credit as his income goes up also reduces his incentive to earn more income.

The keys to our current tax system are manifold. Although touted as voluntary, our tax system is based on force. If you don’t pay whatever the government determines you should pay then force comes into play. First you are threatened. Then your wages are garnished. If you continue to try and avoid paying whatever “fair share” the bureaucrats say you owe the rest of the country, you’ll end up in jail, with all your real property forfeit to the Fed. If you ask questions about the laws that entitle the government to seize however much of your money it wants, you’ll soon find yourself surrounded by armed goons.

Just ask Edward and Elaine Brown of New Hampshire. You’ll have to visit them in jail to do so. The couple is currently sentenced to 63 months in federal pound me in the ass prison for refusing to participate in the “voluntary” tax system because the government wouldn’t answer their tax questions honestly.

The law they were accused of violating was the personal income tax law and the Browns asked to see the law before they handed over any more money. Their quest for proof of the existence of such a law began over 10 years ago when they first found out the income tax was being misapplied to include taxing all Americans labor. Once the browns realized they, along with the rest of us, were being defrauded of our hard worked labor by the irs they decided to make a stand and challenge the government, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the people in this country, so that they also will be made aware of the terrible injustice being carried out on each of us every day.

You may agree or disagree with the Browns methodology. That’s your right. However, I would strongly encourage you to take a few moments to understand how the upcoming Obama presidency is likely to affect your pocketbook.

While Obama has publicly embraced a tax rate of 40 percent for couples earning over $350,000, his tax policies would result in a staggering 45 percent effective marginal rate in the $110,000 to $120,000 income range for this family. That is 11 percentage points higher than under current law.

Here’s a graph:

Bear in mind that if you ask to see the current tax law, no one will be able to show you anything that a) is Constitutional or b) vaguely resembles a coherent, interpretable English document. The current federal tax code is purposely obtuse and also completely against the highest law of the land, the United States Constitution. At least, that is my opinion.

One question I’ve always asked those who feel it is OK for the federal government to skim money off of every paycheck I’ve ever earned is: if God himself only requires 10% why is it OK for people I’ve never met to take more than that? No one has ever given me an answer that made any sense.

Fighting the tax man may be difficult and dangerous, but it is also a moral imperative. I have the audacity of hope on my side.

Scientists sometimes introduce a predator into an ecosystem in order to take care of a pest that is threatening say, the potato crop. These experiments often go wrong – the predator turns out to be more dangerous than the pest. Social engineers do the same thing as scientists, except with human beings. One example is China’s one child policy to control overpopulation. The jury is still out on whether or not that policy will benefit the world or China in the long term. It certainly doesn’t benefit human freedom.

In the United States, our greatest social engineering experiment is something most people called The War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is actually a war on freedom, when thought about literally. It is also an experiment in introducing a predator to take care of a pest. What do you do when the predator you introduced to take care of the pest turns out to be much worse than the pest?

WASHINGTON (Map, News) – The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law.

But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out to be a big mistake. After reviewing the case, State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey acknowledged that the Calvos were victims of a multistate drug ring that used innocent people’s names and addresses to hide shipments of contraband drugs. But the mayor and his family were also victims of a home invasion by the SWAT team, based entirely on what turned out to be a false premise.

Some of you who read these words may want to argue with me. The police are here to help us you’ll say. Yes, some of them help some people some of the time. Unfortunately the helping is on the decline and the abuse is on the uptick. Survey 100,000 random citizens of the United States before the so called drug war began on their level of trust in the police. That would probably be a pretty high number. Survey 100,000 random citizens now. Most likely the numbers will be pretty low. Chances are that a lot of these people know someone who has been locked up for a consensual non-violent crime. You only have to be beaten up once by uniformed authorities to develop a lifelong distrust of all authorities. You only have to be locked up for a few months to learn to lie to the cops when they come around. After all, they are not your friends. They protect and serve only themselves. That is the lesson many have learned.

Public servants do not shoot family dogs. Peace officers do not initiate violence, they are supposed to prevent it. SWAT teams should be used so sparingly that when they are used, people are amazed. Instead, they are used so frequently it is almost like a car alarm going off – no one pays any attention. We’ve learned to ignore the sights and sounds of our freedom going away.

When the men in masks come to your neighborhood with concrete barriers and rolls of concertina wire just remember that they are there to protect you from yourself. If your family dog gets shot or you get beaten while trying to stop them from raping your daughter or your wife it is your own fault for questioning the authorities. They are just here to deal with pesky drug addicts and you got in the way.

Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so willing to give away the Constitutional rights of others. Maybe it is time to stand up and let your government know that you aren’t going to tolerate this sort of behavior.

I used to hate running. All that has changed since I quit smoking. While running is still tiring and sometimes painful depending how hard I’m pushing myself, I really enjoy the scenery and being outside. Now that I know I’m improving my statistical chances of living longer I am doubly enervated.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People who want to live a long and healthy life might want to take up running. A study published on Monday shows middle-aged members of a runner’s club were half as likely to die over a 20-year period as people who did not run.

Half as likely to die is significant. Reduced risk of heart disease? Significant? Reduced risk of Alzheimer’s? Significant. Not dying as early? Significant.

The team surveyed 284 members of a nationwide running club and 156 similar, healthy people as controls. They all came from the university’s faculty and staff and had similar social and economic backgrounds, and all were 50 or older.

Starting in 1984, each volunteer filled out an annual survey on exercise frequency, weight and disability for eight activities — rising, dressing and grooming, hygiene, eating, walking, reach, hand grip and routine physical activities.

Most of the volunteers did some exercise, but runners exercised as much as 200 minutes a week, compared to 20 minutes for the non-runners.

At the beginning, the runners were leaner and less likely to smoke compared with the controls. And they exercised more over the whole study period in general.

“Over time, all groups decreased running activity, but the runners groups continued to accumulate more minutes per week of vigorous activity of all kinds,” the researchers wrote.

Of note is that any vigorous activity seems to be appropriate! Bad knees? Swimming will work? Don’t like running at all? Bike instead. All you need is 200 minutes a week! There are 10080 minutes in a week. That translates to slightly less than 2% of your available time. That seems well worth the payoff to me.

I complain often that bureaucrats have purposefully made complying with gun regulations so onerous because they want to discourage individuals from defending themselves at all. Sheep are easier to control than wolves and bureaucracies are all about control.

The recent ruling that I cannot take my gun into a “non-secure” area of the airport is unfortunate. I am now a criminal in waiting, according to the bureaucrats.

U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the city from enforcing the airport gun ban. Shoob ruled against gun-rights group GeorgiaCarry.org and state Rep. Timothy Bearden (R-Villa Rica).

Bearden sponsored House Bill 89, which became law on July 1 and permits people with firearms licenses to carry guns in state parks, restaurants that serve alcohol and on mass transit.

But Shoob said allowing concealed weapons into non-secure areas of the world’s busiest airport will make the airport less safe and require it to substantially revise its security procedures.

I live 70 miles from the Atlanta airport. I carry a gun at all times, and I am licensed to carry the gun by state bureaucrats. I am a pistol expert, according to the U.S. Army. Yet bureaucrats do not want me to carry my gun if I pass through the airport. Apparently, I am supposed to find somewhere off the airport property to store my weapon if I need to pick up a passenger or drop one off. This is impractical, unrealistic and burdensome. It degrades my respect for the law, and makes me wonder what in the hell happened to common sense. When the law abiding are treated as if they are the enemy they eventually become the enemy.

I will continue to operate “under the radar” if possible. I am not going to stop carrying a gun with me at all times. I’d rather take my chances and fight any resulting charges in court. If some bureaucrat wants to remove a productive citizen from the tax rolls because of a stupid rule so be it. When the system becomes obtuse enough that it creates too many political prisoners it will collapse under the weight of its own unthinking idiocy.

What we do in the name of “public safety” is increasingly creating an atmosphere of distrust and resentment of the privilege of authority. It’s an us against them mentality fostered by egocentric and arrogant bureaucrats who think they own everything and know better than everyone. It’s dangerous, counterproductive and ultimately destructive to the fabric that holds our society together.

When will we finally be safe enough? When we are all chained together and naked as we shuffle through the airport with our heads down waiting to be tasered if we dare to question the authority of the men and women in their polyester suits with their shiny badges and their rule books thick and weighty? Go to hell you damn bureaucratic overlords of the kingdom of banal mediocrity. I don’t need you and I reject your demands that I become your myrimidon.

Today, Mikheil Saakashvili has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal wherein he expounds on the reasons the West should intervene in the conflict.

On Friday, hundreds of Russian tanks crossed into Georgian territory, and Russian air force jets bombed Georgian airports, bases, ports and public markets. Many are dead, many more wounded. This invasion, which echoes Afghanistan in 1979 and the Prague Spring of 1968, threatens to undermine the stability of the international security system.

AP

An apartment building, damaged by a Russian air strike, in the northern Georgian town of Gori, Saturday, Aug. 9.

Why this war? This is the question my people are asking. This war is not of Georgia’s making, nor is it Georgia’s choice.

The Kremlin designed this war. Earlier this year, Russia tried to provoke Georgia by effectively annexing another of our separatist territories, Abkhazia. When we responded with restraint, Moscow brought the fight to South Ossetia.

Ostensibly, this war is about an unresolved separatist conflict. Yet in reality, it is a war about the independence and the future of Georgia. And above all, it is a war over the kind of Europe our children will live in. Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe.

I understand the yearning for freedom. I have it too. And I have a different perspective than most on what freedom is. You see, I don’t believe the West is all that free.

Georgia (the country) used to be a part of the USSR. Georgia (the state) is a part of the United States and happens to be my state of residence. If most Georgians today decided that the United States didn’t represent the type of government they wanted and declared independence by seceding from the United States of America, I think the same thing that is happening in Georgia would happen in the United States. I’m certain that the federal government of the U.S. would use force to keep a member state from declaring independence. That’s not freedom.

When Mikheil Saakashvili asks for the West to intercede in Georgia he is just trading one master for another. Perhaps one master is gentler than the other, and maybe existence under that other master is more tolerable. And that might be OK for some people. It’s not enough to satisfy me.

A truly free society always emphasizes as wide a range of choices as possible. That is not what the West offers, although it may offer more choices than Russia is most matters, it is still a master. Georgia will not be independent in the foreseeable future, anymore than South Ossetia has been. Georgia is a pawn in larger struggles between Western authoritarians and Russian authoritarians.

The most powerful thing about independence is a that it is a state of mind that the state cannot defeat. Have you really thought about your state of mind? Or the state you live in? Or the range of choices available to you in life? War can visit anyplace, at anytime. Are you mentally ready to fight the important battles? Do you even know what is important to you?

I participated in and completed my first ever mini-triathlon on yesterday. The Quintana Roo Sports Barn Sprint Triathlon had quite a bit of personal meaning for me because it was an opportunity to measure the results of recent lifestyle changes I have been pursuing.

Dietary changes. Sleep habit changes. Attitude changes. Quitting smoking. I wanted to know if these changes were paying off in increased health. They certainly are. I am not a top competitor, but I am holding my own, and now I have a yardstick to measure my own personal progress. I came in 289th out of 611 participants in the triathlon.

I need to work on my swim time, my transitions and my general conditioning, although I met my personal goal of completing the event in an hour. Time to get ready for the next one, which is double the distance in every event and only two months away. The Sunbelt Cohutta Springs Triathlon feels a little intimidating. Thinking of how tired I was after half that distance, I cannot imagine what I’ll feel like after a 1/2 mile swim, a 16-mile bike ride and a 4-mile run. Only one way to find out and that is by participating in the triathlon.

The U.S. has courted the country of Georgia for some years now. But why? It’s a tiny nation of only five million. One part of the complex answer is simple – oil.

Georgia sits in a tough neighborhood, shoulder to shoulder with huge Russia, not far from Iran, and astride one of the most important crossroads for the emerging wealth of the rich Caspian Sea region. A U.S.-backed oil pipeline runs through Georgia, allowing the West to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil while bypassing Russia and Iran.

The dispute makes the Bush administration the middleman between a promising ally it wants to help and the powerful former adversary next door whose help it needs.

Washington praises democratic development in Georgia, delights in its contribution of combat troops for Iraq and acknowledges valuable intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation.

As usual in this region of the world, when conflict erupts, there are deep seated reasons on many fronts.

The conflict is so one-sided that Georgia has already submitted a request to have at least some of its 2,000 Iraq based troops flown back to their home by the U.S. to help fight in the conflict.

The ball was lobbed into Russia’s court by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Where that ball will be played is now anyone’s guess, but the potential for a regional conflagration is high. The United States could become involved at any moment if the diplomats don’t do their jobs.

Citizens of Tbilisi are being asked by the government to shelter in the subway. Apparently Russian attacks are anticipated.

The evacuation of strategic points and main state structures has been launched.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs confirmed to InterpressNews the above mentioned information.
The evacuation of the vicinity of Avlabari district has begun as well. The civilians, living in Avlabari district are being taken away from the district. As is well-known, the residence of the President of Georgia is located in Avlabari.
The evacuation of the Ministry of Defense and the vicinity of it is being carried out. The civilians are called to seek shelter in Metro station.

The country of Georgia’s entire population is only 5 million people, less than the metro Atlanta area of the U.S. state of Georgia. Russia, the other combatant, has a population of 150 million.

Not much of a contest.

The reasoning for Georgia’s initiation of the current conflict may be based in Iraq, and in the fact that Georgia was coaxed into participation in the ill named Global War on Terror.

Georgia has about 2,000 troops in Iraq, making it the third-largest contributor to coalition forces after the U.S. and Britain.

It is aggressively lobbying to join NATO, a campaign that has infuriated a Kremlin loath to see its former vassal state slip further away from the former Soviet sphere of influence.

One analyst suggested Georgia’s unexpected assault may have been
rooted as much in a sense that its NATO bid was faltering as in
antagonism with Russia.

Earlier this year, NATO quashed Georgia’s drive to get a so-called
road map for alliance membership amid alarm that President Mikhail
Saakashvili was backtracking on democracy with his violent suppression
last year of opposition rallies.

Georgia got assurances that it could eventually join, but “this
pushed Georgia into a philosophy of self-reliance — the idea that
Georgia will be able to regain breakaway entities only by its own
means,” said Nicu Popescu of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

What do I know? I served alongside Georgian troops in Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2005 and 2006. Russia has been posturing. South Ossetia has broken away. Georgia is testing to see what the West will do. Another potential war for U.S. troops to engage in. As if two wasn’t enough. I’m pretty sure Iranians are watching the developing events with great interest, as are many others in the region.

Transhumanist technologies are going to explode in the next two to three decades. We already have a crude artificial heart on the market. Now it appears that an artificial pancreas is just around the corner.

Today, people with diabetes have a range of technologies to help keep their blood sugar in check, including continuous monitors that can keep tabs on glucose levels throughout the day and insulin pumps that can deliver the drug. But the diabetic is still responsible for making executive decisions–when to test his blood or give himself a shot–and the system has plenty of room for human error. Now, however, researchers say that the first generations of an artificial pancreas, which would be able to make most dosing decisions without the wearer’s intervention, could be available within the next few years.

Type 1 diabetes develops when the islet cells of the human pancreas stop producing adequate amounts of insulin, leaving the body unable to regulate blood-sugar levels on its own. Left unchecked, glucose fluctuations over the long term can lead to nerve damage, blindness, stroke and heart attacks. Even among the most vigilant diabetics, large dips and surges in glucose levels are still common occurrences. “We have data on hand today that suggests that you could get much better diabetes outcomes with the computer taking the lead instead of the person with diabetes doing it all themselves,” says Aaron Kowalski, research director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s Artificial Pancreas Project.

The artificial pancreas project is good news for diabetics. However, barriers to implementation remain.

Technologically, the remaining obstacles for researchers are those of refinement–for example, constructing algorithms that are exquisitely honed to predict in which direction glucose levels are moving and at what rate. Other researchers are working on sensors that can monitor blood glucose over an extended period of time (currently, sensors must be replaced every three to eight days) and with improved accuracy.

Despite the fact that much of the technology is on the market, researchers must still prove to the FDA that their system is safe when combined with the algorithms, and that if anything goes wrong–if a sensor goes wonky or the insulin pump clogs up–the computer can sense it and either set off an alarm or turn the whole system off.

I’m irritated anytime the FDA is mentioned in a news article. Personally, it’s not clear to me that this organization has helped more people than it hurts. FDA rules slow down the medical technology development process and make it much more expensive. If I ever become a chronically ill patient, I’ll goddamn well seek the medical treatment I want regardless of FDA rules. If I have to leave the United States to get a particular treatment, so be it. I own my own life.

I’m not too familiar with the history of South Ossetia. I don’t know too much about Georgia either. What’s very clear is that the current conflict in South Ossetia could easily explode into a larger problem, drawing in neighbors.

TBLISI, Georgia (CNN) — Russian television Friday showed a convoy of Russian tanks and said they were heading into the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia as escalating tensions over the region threatened to boil into full blown conflict.

Russia’s Channel 1 shows heavy tanks purported to be on their way to South Ossetia.

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The move came after Russia denounced as “aggressive” a Georgian troops military offensive to regain control over the province, vowing to respond.

Russian authorities earlier said several of its peacekeepers died in a Georgian attack in South Ossetia, which borders Russia and has strong ties to its vast northern neighbor, and they vowed not to leave Russian citizens in the territory unprotected.

“The Georgian leadership has launched a dirty adventure,” a statement from Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday. “We will not leave our peacekeepers and Russian citizens unprotected.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Georgia started the fighting and warned that Russia would respond to their actions.

I had a lot of contact with Georgian soldiers in Baghdad’s Green Zone during my stay from 2005-2006. Not sure how good they are as fighters, but they didn’t seem too phased during the frequent mortar attacks. Russia has a hell of a lot more troops.

South Ossetia is another Kosovo in the works. 98-99% of Ossetians want independence if you believe the results of their referendum. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of the world. Independence for South Ossetia is no more likely than say, Vermont seceding from the United States. Either Georgia or Russia will dominate the territory for the foreseeable future.

Remember those “rebate” checks Uncle Sugar sent out earlier this year? They failed to achieve a “stimulus.”

The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.

These conclusions are significant for evaluating the likely impact of Barack Obama’s recent proposal to distribute $1,000 rebate checks to low- and middle-income workers at an estimated cost of approximately $65 billion. His plan, to finance those rebates with an extra tax on oil companies, would reduce investment in refining and exploration, keeping oil prices higher than they would otherwise be.

I fail to see how giving me back some money that you’re just going to steal again from my next paycheck is going to solve 50 years of rampantly irresponsible entitlement programs and the deleterious effect said programs have had on the American public, which is now, by and large, a bunch of whiners and gimme, gimme sycophants who vote for whichever stinking rotten liar promises the most free stuff.

The poor effects of the Bush tax rebate as fiscal stimulus, however, let Feldstein now attack the Obama plan for a $1000 tax rebate.  Nothing wrong with that – McCain has nothing better however – but what Feldstein doesn’t say is that if you follow the logic of his two op-eds (and this is not something I would necessarily buy into) the conclusion should actually be that fiscal stimulus would work better if it ran through government spending.

Government will always do the most expensive and least efficient possible job of managing any given problem. Government has no motivation to solve any given problem because if it did, then it would have to shrink itself. How many bureaucrats do you know who would be willing to eliminate their own job?

Most people are at least dimly aware that regular exercise generally produces health benefits. But not everyone knows that those benefits extend beyond the body and into the human brain.

The bottom line: Exercisers learn faster, remember more, think clearer and bounce back more easily from brain injuries such as a stroke. They are also less prone to depression and age-related cognitive decline.

But why should a mindless half-hour on a treadmill affect your brain?

Exercise, like hunger, is a stress on your body. “And sometimes,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla of UCLA, “stress can be good.”

Exercise alone, however, isn’t the complete prescription for an extended and healthful life.

“Diet, exercise and sleep have the potential to alter our brain health and mental function,” he said. “This raises the exciting possibility that changes in diet are a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities, protecting the brain from damage, and counteracting the effects of aging.”

Gómez-Pinilla analyzed more than 160 studies about food’s affect on the brain, an analysis published in the July issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

If you’re wondering why it is so hard to get off the couch and get outdoors, maybe it’s that bag of Cheetos you’ve been masticating for the last hour. Try skipping those next time you sit down to watch Paris Hilton acting retarded in reruns of The Simple Life.

Calorie restriction

Controlled meal skipping or intermittent caloric restriction might provide health benefits, he said.

Excess calories can reduce the flexibility of synapses and increase the vulnerability of cells to damage by causing the formation of free-radicals. Moderate caloric restriction could protect the brain by reducing oxidative damage to cellular proteins, lipids and nucleic acids, Gómez-Pinilla said.

The brain is highly susceptible to oxidative damage. Blueberries have been shown to have strong antioxidant capacity, he noted. And smaller food portions with the appropriate nutrients seem to be beneficial for the brain’s molecules, he said.

Junk food, junk brain

In contrast to the healthy effects of diets that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, diets with high contents of trans fats and saturated fats adversely affect cognition, studies indicate.

“Junk food” and fast food negatively affect the brain’s synapses, said Gómez-Pinilla, who eats fast food less often since conducting this research.

Brain synapses and several molecules related to learning and memory are adversely affected by unhealthy diets, said Gómez-Pinilla.

If hundreds of banks are going to fail, we need to be asking why. Who is responsible?

NEW YORK, Aug 3 (Reuters) – The United States is in the second inning of a recession that will last for at least 18 months and help kill off hundreds of banks, influential economist and New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini told Barron’s in Sunday’s edition.

Taxpayers will pay a big price for helping bail out the rest of the financial services industry as well, Roubini said — at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion.

The banks will become insolvent because of mounting losses as a result of the housing bust and because they have only written down their subprime loans so far, he said. Still in front of them are their consumer-credit losses, for which they lack the reserves, Barron’s reported.

The entity responsible for oversight of banks (a self-appointed entity) is the federal government.

U.S. consumers, meanwhile, are “shopped out” and saving less, while the Federal Reserve’s performance in handling the crisis has been poor, Roubini said, because it failed to see that the problem extended beyond subprime mortgage debt.

Now, Roubini told Barron’s, the government is overregulating, bailing out troubled participants and intervening in every market.

“The regulators should investigate themselves for bailing out Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the creditors of Bear Stearns and the financial system with new lending facilities. They have swapped U.S. Treasury bonds for toxic securities,” he told Barron’s. “It is privatizing the gains and profits, and socializing the losses as usual. This is socialism for Wall Street and the rich.”

We should be demanding that a bailout be off the table as an option. We should be demanding jail sentences for those officials responsible for this fiasco. A bailout will mean that the half trillion dollars in new debt the government is currently projecting will grow to an even larger number. It boggles the mind. Do we really want to saddle future generations with this sort of a ball and chain around their economic ankles?

The age of easy credit may be drawing to a close. The age of bailouts needs to die with it.

Having trouble sleeping? Here’s some advice.

This is the classic not-so-shut-eye experience of many Americans who think they are sleep-deprived and possibly need pills or other treatment to fix their insomnia, teeth grinding, jet lag, restless or jerky legs, snoring, sleepwalking and so forth.

Reality is quite different.

For instance, insomnia is said to be the most common sleep disorder, but these dissatisfying sleep experiences only get in the way of daily activities for 10 percent of us, according to the National Institutes of Health. And in almost half of those cases, the real underlying problem is illness (often mental) or the effects of a substance, like coffee or medication.

The most interesting thing in the article was the concept of polyphasic sleep.

So-called polyphasic sleep is seen in babies, the elderly and other animals (and Thomas Edison reportedly slept this way). For the rest of us, it is more realistic and healthy to sleep at night as best we can and then take naps as needed. EEGs show that we are biphasic sleepers with two alertness dips – one at night time and one mid-day. So talk to HR about setting up a nap room, like they have for NASA’s Phoenix mission team members.

The rest of the advice was kind of mixed. If I tried to get away with a “mid day desk nap” I probably wouldn’t be working at my current job for much longer.

At least that’s what Aubrey de Grey believes. I want to believe it as well. I am not interested in dying at this time. Transhumanists may not be in the media spotlight now, but it’s likely the future will change that.

…James Hughes, an administrator and instructor at Trinity College in Hartford, is a leading transhumanist theorist. The executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded when he was the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, Hughes has written several books on transhumanist ideas, including Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.

It would appear that Hughes, a buttoned-down professor-type with a close-cropped goatee, is dealing with ideas better suited to science fiction than the real world. However, he traces transhumanist history back to old, earth-bound traditions.

“It goes back to the enlightenment, about 400 years or so,” Hughes said. “And when you go back to those original ideas, you see a number of things emerging, among them the notion that science and tech can be applied to human affairs, and things can be engineered and improved upon.”

While the average earth dweller of 2008 may feel uncomfortable with the idea of engineering a human being they will still pay for LASIK surgery or a hip replacement. If they could safely and cheaply replace the human heart with a model that wasn’t prone to spasms we call heart attacks that often lead to death, most people would get the replacement put in without much serious consideration. In the next two decades, we should see a massive increase in the number and type of life extending, life quality enhancing surgeries available. This is assuming we can avoid universal health care, which will cause stagnation, in my opinion. I am unaware of pioneering surgeries recently developed in France or Britain. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that government socialized health care is statist in nature.

There is no reason not to expect to live 150-200 years if you are 20 today and in good health. Assuming you’re not a partner in a meth lab, wearing a soldier’s uniform or engaged in extreme sports, you have a shot at living a very, very long time in comparison to people born 50 years ago. Depending on social upheaval and battles over the world natural resources you might live to see the middle or the end of the millenium.

Many people are not interested in this idea, particularly those who have not yet faced death and found it to be a distinctly unpalatable notion. For those among you who do not believe in one or another of the various death cults of the world, I highly recommend keeping an eye on the activities of the Methuselah Foundation.

Stem cell research is just the beginning of the end of aging.

Author’s note: photo and story are completely unrelated. Photo is just here to piss off people searching for the term “angry hummer” on the Internets.

There really isn’t anything like giving someone a Hummer to show how much you care.

Of course some people may argue that ramming your own Hummer into a house you own in order to let your renters know they should pay is is a real boner of a move, so to speak.

NEWARK, Del. – Police have arrested a Newark area landlord who allegedly rammed his Hummer into a renter’s house, claiming the tenants were behind on their rent.

New Castle County Police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said the 30-year-old landlord crashed the SUV into a home on Lute Court in Harmony Woods about 3 a.m. Thursday.

I’m not sure how intelligent it is to damage your own rental property with your personal vehicle all because your renters didn’t pay. Seems counter productive to me.

FuturePundit notes that Vitamin C injections may be a promising new method of fighting cancer.

High-dose injections of vitamin C, also known as ascorbate or ascorbic acid, reduced tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report in the August 5, 2008, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers traced ascorbate’s anti-cancer effect to the formation of hydrogen peroxide in the extracellular fluid surrounding the tumors. Normal cells were unaffected.

Natural physiologic controls precisely regulate the amount of ascorbate absorbed by the body when it is taken orally. “When you eat foods containing more than 200 milligrams of vitamin C a day–for example, 2 oranges and a serving of broccoli–your body prevents blood levels of ascorbate from exceeding a narrow range,” says Mark Levine, M.D., the study’s lead author and chief of the Molecular and Clinical Nutrition Section of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the NIH. To bypass these normal controls, NIH scientists injected ascorbate into the veins or abdominal cavities of rodents with aggressive brain, ovarian, and pancreatic tumors. By doing so, they were able to deliver high doses of ascorbate, up to 4 grams per kilogram of body weight daily. “At these high injected doses, we hoped to see drug-like activity that might be useful in cancer treatment,” said Levine.

Michelle Obama doesn’t strike me as a person I would get along with. She’s got the air of someone with a huge chip on her shoulder. To be fair, some people might say the same thing about me.

Interviewed by Ebony magazine, Michelle Obama was in no doubt about life after the November election when voters will decide between her husband and Republican John McCain.

“My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief,” she said, “making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.”

Malia Obama, 10, and her sister Sasha, seven, are being brought up with the help of Michelle’s mother as their parents campaign. They would be the youngest residents of the White House since president Jimmy Carter‘s daughter Amy.

Michelle Obama’s certainty of tone could rile some on the right and foster charges by the Republican Party — which has set up a website called “Audacity Watch” — that her husband is arrogantly assuming the election is won already.

Obama, who is a style icon for her admirers and a lightning rod for conservative critics who question her patriotism, said she embraced the challenge of answering any concerns felt by voters.

I’m in agreement that this election is already as good as won for Barack Obama. I also think Barack Obama is highly likable. That’s why he’s going to win. Michelle Obama is not likable. She seems mean and grumpy. I am not looking forward to being exposed to her opinions for the next four years.

Seven more City of Philadelphia employees suspended in neglect case that ended in death of teen with cerebral palsy.

In announcing the discipline at a news conference Monday, Mayor Michael Nutter choked up while noting his own daughter is just a year younger than Danieal was when she died.

“I am fully, thoroughly and completely pissed off,” the normally reserved Nutter said angrily. If any city employee neglected his child the way Danieal was, he added, “I would kick their ass myself.”

An ass kicking seems kind of after the fact. The kid is already dead and buried.

“The fact that so many workers failed Danieal, however, speaks to a larger problem than some profoundly negligent DHS employees: it reveals an agency that is broken,” the report said.

One of the now-suspended employees was even promoted to head the agency committee that reviews child fatalities.

“We’re establishing a new culture of accountability,” said Nutter, who was out of the state when the 258-page grand jury report was released last week. “There’s not a shadow of doubt in my mind that this department will turn around.”

A culture of accountability huh? Let’s see where that promise goes. More dead welfare cases is my guess. Government can’t solve apathy because government creates apathy.

Nine people have been charged in Danieal’s death, including her parents, three family friends, two private employees and two city social workers. The city employees, who face charges of child endangerment, were suspended last week and face disciplinary hearings this week that may result in their dismissals.

Culture is the problem. That’s for sure. But the culture is a culture of big government. It’s a culture where personal responsibility is not taught and we’re not willing to talk about that fact.

What lesson are we supposed to learn from the story of a Thai teenager who robbed and murdered a taxi driver while trying to live out the fantasy world of Grand Theft Auto IV?

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A Thai video game distributor halted sales of “Grand Theft Auto” on Monday after a teenager confessed to robbing and murdering a taxi driver while trying to recreate a scene from the controversial game.

“We are sending out requests today to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games,” Sakchai Chotikachinda, sales and marketing director of New Era Interactive Media, told Reuters.

“We are also urging video game arcades to pull the games from service,” Sakchai said. An 18-year-old high school student, now in custody pending further investigations and a trial, faces death by lethal injection if found guilty of robbing and killing a 54-year-old taxi driver with a knife at the weekend.

There are several lessons to be learned.

1. Governments are reactionary – when something bad happens, government’s solution is generally to limit individual choices, which is not a solution to the problem.
2. Individuals make choices, video games do not. Video games will get blamed anyway.
3. Parents have no responsibility for their children. They are not even mentioned in the article. It is the state’s job to raise the young, discipline them and inculcate moral values into their young impressionable minds.

Grand Theft Auto is a morally bankrupt game. That much is true. But the inability to distinguish between a software product developed to entertain adults and reality has little to do with Grand Theft Auto. People play Grand Theft Auto precisely because they can do things in the game without the same consequences that take place in real life. Pulling the game from store shelves will only create more buzz and a black market for the game. No product in the history of humanity has ever been successfully banned by authorities. Grand Theft Auto isn’t going to be any different. Teens who want to play the game will still find a way.

One thing is certain – more teens are going to want to play Grand Theft Auto IV now that the game has been banned in Thailand. If you’re a parent, take the time to pay attention to what your kid is using as a moral compass. If you aren’t giving him or her a complete education, chances are good that he or she is lost and wandering, and absorbing values you might not think are healthy.

Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times interviewed me for a story about freecreditreport.com – a web site run by Experian. I’ve complained about the company a few times on this blog. Their phone reps are pushy and aggressive and their service is deceptively advertised and certainly not free. Stephanie did a good job of presenting the facts and it is always nice to see yourself quoted somewhere that draws a large audience.

“I took advantage, I thought, of a good offer,” said Mr. Snyder, 37, an information-technology manager for a construction company. “Unfortunately, I think the offer is purposefully designed to make it easy for you to get your credit report, and then forget that you’ve just signed up for an in-perpetuity fee.”

“My wife comments continuously on their TV commercials because she likes the ditty,” Mr. Snyder said. “I get irritable and tell her that it might be a catchy song, but I don’t like the company.”

When a credit reporting agency is dishonest it is important that that company be called to task. I’m glad that Experian’s deceptive marketing tactics and sneaky ripoff scam is finally getting some of the attention it deserves. Credit reporting agencies are supposed to be keeping consumers honest, not the other way around.

If border agents decide to seize my personal laptop, they better be willing to throw a whole lot of resources at the thing. I’ve encrypted the entire hard drive. Hopefully it will make them suspicious – I’d welcome an opportunity to sue the feds over this policy.

As part of border search policy, government agents are now authorized to seize electronic devices and inspect documents in them, the document states. The electronic devices might include laptops, cell phones, portable music players or storage devices such as portable hard drives.

Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection will also be allowed to translate and share documents with other government agencies.

The DHS document, issued July 16, appears to state publicly a policy that has already existed. Laptops and electronic devices have been subject to search in the past, and travelers have reported not getting their devices back. The policy has drawn strong criticism from lawmakers and nonprofit groups, who charged that the searches were invasive and a violation of an individual’s privacy rights. Computers contain a vast amount of private information about family, finances and health, which could be easily copied and stored in government databases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has complained.

The new policy is not only directly in violation of the United States Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, it is anti-common sense. In the long term, the jack-booted agents of the borders of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” will do little to nothing to make Americans more secure.

What will border agents accomplish by seizing people’s private computers as they attempt to travel into or out of the United States?

• Train citizens that private property doesn’t actually exist in the U.S.
• Give people reasons to avoid traveling to the United States
• Waste time and money
• Speed up the decline of the economy
• Encourage civil disobedience

Americans just 30 years ago would never have tolerated this sort of behavior. Of course, the government has an excuse. It is “protecting us” from evildoers. Yeah right.

The policy document states that being able to examine documents and electronic devices is crucial for “detecting information concerning terrorism, narcotics smuggling… contraband including child pornography, and… other import or export control laws.”

Osama bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. By attacking the twin towers, bin Laden created a virtual police state in less than a decade. Where is the outrage? Americans should carry old laptops with encrypted hard drives full of useless junk repeatedly when they travel internationally. They should act suspicious and tie up the resources of the idiotic bureaucrats who are disrespecting us all with their new policy that spits on the Constitution.

If you think I’m just being alarmist or whiny, please read this person’s story of what I have to assume is a typical experience with crossing the border of the United States in 2008.

The small penises and social skills part is just made up. Sorry about that. Had to grab your attention somehow. It’s my big brain. I can’t help myself. The truth of the matter is that researchers have concluded that smart people have larger parietal and frontal lobes.

Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect.

Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is 100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks [see “Solving the IQ Puzzle,” by James R. Flynn; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2007].

Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.

I’m not sure how I feel about all the brain slicing and dicing. As a cryonicist, I really prefer that knives by kepy away from my body post-demise. I don’t want to end up in slices like Albert. That’s not really relevant to the big brain equals big intellect thing.

In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier’s team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with higher IQs.

My IQ is around 127 on tests. If someone sold brain hats, I’m guessing I would be wearing the medium size. Size isn’t the only thing that appears to matter however. Let’s not forget about that sexy part of our thinking organ called the cerebral cortex.

Scientists have identified other shifting neural patterns that could signal high IQ. In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain’s exterior part. They discovered that academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex, which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational thought processes.

The article concludes with a couple important notions. The brain shrinks with age which translates to use it before you lose it because you’re going to lose it. Also, your bigger brain is like bonus points. You have stacked cards, but that doesn’t mean you are going to win at life. Practice and persistence are more important than that huge noggin.

As this American nation enters the same end state that Rome did before it fell, we begin to see signs and portents. When guns are not readily available, battleaxes will do in a pinch.

Two men were arrested Tuesday by Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputies after investigators say they attacked a teenager with a medieval battle ax.

The key to catching the men was their apparent affiliation with Juggalos.

The men, both 21, were booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of aggravated assault. The two were at the home of a 17-year-old Kearns boy at about 4:30 a.m.

One of the men was jealous of the victim text messaging a girl, according to jail documents. He also believed he contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the girl, which she in turn got from the victim, jail documents state.

During the altercation with the victim, that man stabbed the teen with a knife and the other man struck him with a medieval battle ax type of weapon in the back of his neck, said Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. Paul Jaroscak. Doctors needed about 300 stitches to close the wound, he said. He was last listed in critical condition at a local hospital.

Ah, for sweet lost morality. In the age of easy porn and functionally illiterate fucktards with the attention span of the common gnat, we are bound to see many more such cases in coming years.

When children are raised by the state and by television and by the Internet they will find a four sided battleaxe, a bucket of STDs and a banal existence more often than not.

Anybody want to take bets on how long it will be before people are calling for a ban on camouflage? No one will, of course. People will blame the rifle for this tragedy, not the pissed off mentally ill guy with the rifle.

NIAGARA, Wisconsin (AP) — A man wearing camouflage clothing and carrying an assault rifle walked out of the woods and shot four young people who had gathered at a river to go swimming, killing three of them and wounding one.

More than 100 law enforcement officers from at least 10 agencies searched Friday for the gunman, a middle-age man who was last seen near the town of Niagara, across the state line from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Officers set up roadblocks and evacuated an unknown number of homes.

Nine young adults had gathered near a railroad bridge on the Menominee River when the gunman came out of the woods and opened fire about 5:30 p.m. Thursday, according to Sheriff Jim Kanikula.

Authorities have not determined a motive. The sheriff said there was no communication between the gunman and his victims.

What is clear in this story – we have a mentally ill individual with hostile intent who has an efficient killing tool. His victims are not similarly armed and are in a non-defensible position when attacked. Without more details, I can only guess that the attacker will a) have a history of violence and b) not be a concealed carry permit holder and c) would have used some other tool to carry out his attack had a rifle not been available.

We’ll see as this story develops.

Those of you excited about the idea of “free” health care would do well to remember that government programs tend to promote mediocrity and indifference, not hope and transcendence. Unless of course, you count death as transcendence.

PHILADELPHIA – Four social workers were among nine people charged Thursday in the death of a disabled 14-year-old girl who authorities say wasted away from neglect before dying at 42 pounds.

Danieal Kelly’s mother was charged with murder; counts against other defendants range from involuntary manslaughter to perjury. District Attorney Lynne Abraham said any of the nine could have foreseen the horrific fate of Danieal, whose emaciated body was found in her mother’s squalid house covered with bone-deep, maggot-infested bedsores in August 2006.

Abraham had scathing words for the city’s Department of Human Services, calling its handling of the case “callous, indifferent, unconscionable” — and all too familiar.

Starving to death is a horrible way to go. I realize that children in state care do not all starve to death. However, the common theme among those in state care seems to be mediocrity at best and callous indifference and worse seem to be omnipresent. My wife is the product of the state foster care system of New York and was abused by her foster parents.

Danieal had the misfortune to be born to a mother unfit to care for her, or so indifferent and depraved that she didn’t have enough humanity in her to give a shit.

A 258-page grand jury report recommending the charges said not only that Andrea Kelly refused to get her daughter food, water and medical treatment, but that she repeatedly prevented one of her other children from calling an ambulance “for his obviously dying sister.”

A listing for Andrea Kelly’s attorney, Vincent Giusini, rang unanswered Thursday. It was not immediately clear if Daniel Kelly, 37, of Darby, had an attorney; two phone numbers listed in his name were disconnected.

Two employees of MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, a now-defunct company that DHS hired to provide social services to Danieal, falsified documents to cover up the fact they rarely, if ever, checked on her, the grand jury said.

Julius Murray and Mickal Kamuvaka were charged with involuntary manslaughter and tampering with public records.

Under Obamacare, we should expect more stories like this one. Think of all the horror stories you’ve read recently in relation to the Veteran’s Administration – the giant bureaucracy entrusted with caring for our wounded troops. Our wounded troops receive mediocre care precisely because the Veteran’s Administration is a giant state run monopoly. While there are undoubtedly many humane and motivated caregivers within the organization there is no motivation to excel at providing wounded troops with the care they need because there is no competition. You get whoever you get. The level of care is decided not by common sense and your need. It is decided by bureaucrats with rule books.

State run child care services follow the exact same bureaucratic structure, albeit on a smaller scale. And children die because of the arbitrary nature of the organization.

DHS social worker Dana Poindexter was charged with child endangerment for what the grand jury said were his “less than meager” efforts to look into several reports over three years that Danieal, who had cerebral palsy, was not receiving medical care, social services or schooling.

“He did not complete a single investigation or risk assessment,” the report said. “Indeed, his file on the family was buried at the bottom of a filing-cabinet-sized box, beneath food wrappers and unopened envelopes relating to other children’s cases.”

In a bureaucracy, it is hard to fire an employee. In a bureaucracy, you are promoted primarily based on how long you hang around, not on merit. In a bureaucracy, problem employees are shuffled around into dark corners where they can thrive like a fungus, causing problems for untold numbers of citizens with little fear of repercussions. Only blatant and horrible outcomes will draw enough attention to the nature of their existence for anything to be done.

Unfortunately, the typical reaction is to put in place more bureaucrats and more arbitrary rules. This costs money. Arbitrary rules rob the people forced to follow them of creativity, motivation and hope. The problem self-perpetuates until almost everything coming out of the giant bureaucracy is completely mediocre and homogenous. More little girls are burned with cigarettes, starved to death, and abused in myriad ways.

People with a conscience complain and vote for more government. Eventually, the system collapses under the weight of its own inefficiency. In the mean time, expect more of this:

Also charged were Andrea Miles, Marie Moses and Diamond Brantley, all of Philadelphia, who were friends with Andrea Kelly. The report accuses them of perjury for telling grand jurors that Danieal had been fine on Aug. 3, 2006, the day before her festering corpse was taken from the house.

It was not immediately clear if they had attorneys. A message left for Moses was not immediately returned; phone numbers could not found for Miles and Brantley.

The report should “outrage the entire Philadelphia community” and bring about “earth-shattering, cataclysmic changes” at the Department of Human Services, Abraham said.

Abraham said that although at least 55 children have died under the agency’s watch, it has given only “lip service to halfhearted corrective action.

Monopolies by government agencies will never solve our social ills. They only make them worse in the long run. Remember Danieal when you are voting for more government.

You can limit access to guns, but crazies will still find a way.

As horrified travelers watched, a Greyhound Canada bus passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated the young man sitting beside him, who was sleeping with his head leaning against the window, a witness said Thursday.

While not all the details of this horrific knife wielding incident are yet available, I would rather be shot than be stabbed and decapitated.

This sort of tale reinforces my viewpoint that society should be investing resources in mental health improvements instead of implementing bans on various weapons. In Canada, Mr. Crazy McStab doesn’t have access to a pistol but needs him some killing. So he gets a big butcher knife, sits quietly on the bus for a while and then chops up the guy next to him. Maybe it was planned. Maybe he knew the guy and wanted revenge. Who knows?

The point is this – if you really, really want to kill someone horrifically you will find a way. If you want to kill a large group of people, you will find a way. There are, in fact, thousands of ways to kill a large group of people with readily available means that are not projectile based. They can all be researched on the Internet or found elsewhere. Think of the guy in China who poisoned 30-plus of his competitor’s customers.

That’s why we should be focused on what makes people mentally ill in the first place instead of on the inanimate tools these people use to go on rampages when their sicknesses take control of them. No one in Canada is calling for a knife ban but some idiot will. And it won’t fix anything.

Georgia resident Andisheh Nouraee writes about what it is like to exercise his freedom to carry a weapon for self-defense in the great metropolitan melting pot of the South – Atlanta. The article is worth reading and the pictures are inspiring – in particular because Nouraee is of Middle Eastern extraction.

If you intend to rob me, stab me or punch me in the neck because you think I looked at you funny, I recommend you glance at my waist before lifting the pull tab on that can of whoop-ass.

I may be carrying a handgun.

Nearly everyone in our state can legally keep guns in their home. I am one of the few, the proud, the Georgia Firearms Licensed – one of a reported 300,000 Georgians permitted to carry a gun in public.

I am also one of Georgia’s 300,000 gun carry license holders. I don’t really worry too much when I don’t have my gun with me (which is rare). I do find it extremely useful when I bike, run or travel by automobile. It’s reassuring to be packing heat when I’m practicing for a triathlon on the rural roads around where I live and a pack of wild dogs decides they need to chase me and nip at my heels – I haven’t yet had to fire a shot but it certainly reassures me to know that if I feel teeth sinking into my calf I don’t have to try and hop off and beat the mutt into submission while his pack mates chomp down on other extremities or worse yet, my throat. If you’ve never experienced the pack mentality, I suggest you watch some video of a pack of dogs attacking a human being. Not pretty.

Humans in packs are even worse than dogs. Enough said about that.

People have many reasons for self-defensive weapons carry. Most people only need to be mugged once to realize that police provide an illusion of safety but not much else – they generally won’t be there to stop whatever bad thing happens to you while it’s happening.

I got my gun license a year and a half ago after I was relieved of my wallet at gunpoint at my front door by a man who threatened to come back for me if I cancelled my ATM and credit cards.

Since he was clearly comfortable dropping by the house unannounced, police told me to take the threat seriously by carrying a gun myself.

I’ve had handguns for target shooting since I was a kid, but never carried one for self-defense. After the robbery, I applied for a permit so I could carry a gun without breaking the law. And even before the license arrived, I started to carry my gun from my driveway to my front door, which is legal; I was scared the guy would keep his promise and come back for me.

Amazing! Police told Mr. Nouraee to get a gun! That’s wonderful. Let’s move on to the meat of the story.

Nearly everyone I spend time with regularly has a visceral and fearful reaction to guns. Having so many gun-dreading friends and acquaintances has taught me to keep guns where no one will ever see them. Carrying a gun in public seemed like peeing in the sink of a public restroom. Not illegal, but definitely a first-degree jerk move.

I was also afraid of the reaction of strangers. I would hate to be the subject of this 911 call: “Hello, police, I’m at the Publix on North Decatur Road and there’s a swarthy bald man here with a gun. He’s headed for the Lean Cuisine.”

So, although I had a permit, I was less than thrilled that the General Assembly passed H.B. 89 in April. The new law would give licensed firearms permit holders the right to legally carry guns into places that used to be off-limits: city and state parks, public transportation, and restaurants that serve alcohol.

We Americans are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to just this mindset. Guns are bad, MMMKAY? If a dude has a gun and he isn’t in uniform he must be planning something nefarious, MMMKAY?

The truth about guns is that they are merely an extension of the mindset of the person who has control of the trigger. I have never understood why we cannot focus on changing the mindset and instead insist that the gun itself is the problem. But our bureaucrat class feels threatened anytime control is taken away from their clerks and myrmidons. Which is how we arrive at these sort of stupid press conferences.

Mayor Shirley Franklin and airport General Manager Ben DeCosta held a press conference at Hartsfield-Jackson to publicize their intention to keep the airport a gun-free zone. They were joined by the media and a half-dozen members of the gun rights group GeorgiaCarry.org, there to protest the city’s position.

Bearden and his gun never showed up at the airport, though. But later that day, he did file a lawsuit against the city for banning guns from the airport. A hearing is scheduled next month.

The city argues the airport and its parking lots are municipal buildings, and therefore not subject to the law’s public transit provision. In their speeches, both Franklin and DeCosta emphasized the 9/11 attacks as reason to keep guns out of the airport. The city’s found a powerful ally in U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who’s demanding that the Transportation Security Administration ban guns from all parts of major airports.

“I keep hearing the phrase ‘in this post-9/11 society’ and I’m so sick of that,” said Mark McCullough, a GeorgiaCarry.org member who was at the press conference. “What 9/11 showed me was that the government has no ability to protect me. I don’t want to be walking around the parking lot here with [my cell phone] being the only device protecting me.”

While I was at the airport, GeorgiaCarry.org treasurer Michael Menkus invited me to a party. To celebrate their newly granted right to carry guns in restaurants that serve alcohol, members of the group planned to meet at Christos, a Greek-style pizzeria in Marietta, to eat dinner with handguns strapped to their waists.

I hope you’ll take the few minutes out of your life to read the rest of the story. I hope this because I hope to one day live in a place where guns are not the problem. I hope to live in a society that values rational discussion enough to realize that it is what lives in your mind that is important. A society that values individualism and self-determination will inevitably also value the life of the individual and allow individuals to defend themselves from aggressors. Societies that ban guns just end up with lots of stabbings. They also tend to end up with lots of people who cannot think for themselves in life threatening situations.

Reports today indicate that John McCain has finally injected some negativity into the Presidential race, despite his much ballyhooed rhetoric about positive, dignified campaigning. The reason for this is simple. John McCain has finally figured out he doesn’t have a chance in hell of being President.

The old happy warrior side of Mr. McCain has been eclipsed a bit lately by a much more aggressive, and more negative, Mr. McCain who hammers Mr. Obama repeatedly on policy differences, experience and trustworthiness.

By doing so, Mr. McCain is clearly trying to sow doubts about his younger opponent, and bring him down a peg or two. But some Republicans worry that by going negative so early, and initiating so many of the attacks himself rather than leaving them to others, Mr. McCain risks coming across as angry or partisan in a way that could turn off some independents who have been attracted by his calls for respectful campaigning.

The drumbeat of attacks could also undermine his argument that he will champion a new brand of politics.

“The McCain campaign, I think, is being pulled in two directions,” said Todd Harris, a Republican strategist who worked for Mr. McCain in 2000. “On the one hand, this race is largely a referendum on Obama, and whether or not he’s going to pass the leadership threshold in the eyes of voters. So being aggressive against Obama on questions of leadership and trust and risk are important, but at the same time I think they need to be very careful because McCain is not at his best when he is being overly partisan and negative.”

Let’s be honest with each other, shall we? John McCain doesn’t represent hope for the parasite masses of helpless, hopeless Americans who need someone to manage their otherwise out of control lives. America is totally ready for a President who will promise us a big-screen TV in every living room. America needs a man at the helm who believes everyone is entitled to be equally mediocre. This nation believes in taking money away from producers and giving it to non-producers with very few strings attached. This nation believes that thick books filled with rules are more important than common sense. This union of states is perfectly comfortable with the idea of zero tolerance. Our huddled masses are focused on fake boobs and reality TV these days. That is why this nation wants and needs the cult of Barack Obama. That is why Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States of America.

That our next President will be a tall, black good-looking, cigarette smoking socialist specializing in speeches filled with powerful but ultimately empty rhetoric backed up by graft based on force of arms is as inevitable as the fall of Rome.

If I wanted to be President and I knew I was doomed to lose because of ignorance I had helped perpetuate during my career, I’d probably be negative too.

Some stories absolutely disgust me. This story about a mentally ill woman who refused to come out of the bathroom for two years and became physically stuck to a toilet because of sores on her body is one of them.

Babcock‘s plight became known in February when McFarren called the Ness County sheriff, expressing concern about his live-in girlfriend. When authorities arrived, they found Babcock physically stuck to the toilet.

McFarren told police Babcock had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Medical personnel estimated she’d been sitting on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body.

She is now under the protection of a guardian who was appointed through the legal department at the hospital where she received treatment.

Six months on probation as a punishment for not alerting authorities to someone’s mental illness. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It is possible that this woman will receive appropriate care from the bureaucrats now in charge of her life. It’s also possible she’ll be abused, molested and generally thrown away and forgotten by society.

I don’t know what Pam Babcock’s mentall illness is, or her long term prognosis. I hope that she has a hope for recovery and the semblance of a normal life, but I’m dubious. If someone has reached the point where they are stuck to a toilet by the pus oozing from sores on their body, they are very ill indeed.

If people choose to live like animals, I don’t know that it is my responsibility to force them to live as a ward of the state instead. The boyfirend, Kory McFarren, doesn’t sound like a prize catch. However, he wasn’t physically hurting this woman. The story mentions no physical abuse. What was he charged with that resulted in six months probation?

If someone wants to sit on a toilet until they die why should the state intervene? Someone explain it to me. Why do we spend so much time and effort trying to protect people from themselves?

The Wall Street Journal complains that Barack Obama is economically ignorant. I completely agree.

What if I told you that a prominent global political figure in recent months has proposed: abrogating key features of his government’s contracts with energy companies; unilaterally renegotiating his country’s international economic treaties; dramatically raising marginal tax rates on the “rich” to levels not seen in his country in three decades (which would make them among the highest in the world); and changing his country’s social insurance system into explicit welfare by severing the link between taxes and benefits?

AP

The first name that came to mind would probably not be Barack Obama, possibly our nation’s next president. Yet despite his obvious general intelligence, and uplifting and motivational eloquence, Sen. Obama reveals this startling economic illiteracy in his policy proposals and economic pronouncements. From the property rights and rule of (contract) law foundations of a successful market economy to the specifics of tax, spending, energy, regulatory and trade policy, if the proposals espoused by candidate Obama ever became law, the American economy would suffer a serious setback.

Here’s a question though – how does Obama differ from George W. Bush? Not much. Bush is economically ignorant too. And we’re already in a recession. Sure, it would get much worse under Obama, but that might be a good thing. Americans need a wake up call.

We aren’t going to learn economics in school, so maybe we need to learn by the hungry belly method. Maybe we need to make government theft so blatant and so oppressive that all those with any talent flee the country.

I think we’re too far down the road to lowest common denominator economics to turn around without some bloodshed and human suffering. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it. For now, we continue the redistribution programs and the rule books filled with arbitrary stupidity grow thicker and more onerous.

If you disagree with me, I invite you to write me and explain, as succinctly as possible, how you think Mr. Obama is going to fix the nation of obesity, instant gratification and ADD teenagers addicted to porn on the Internets by giving away more free stuff to people who aren’t really starving in the first place. How is the King of Redistribution going to make me any smarter, or more ethical or more productive? Unless he can do that times about 150 million people, he’s worthless before his sycophants have even elected him.

Virgin Galactic revealed WhiteKnight2 yesterday. I’m a big supporter of the idea of private space flight.

MOJAVE, California — After years of secretive construction, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic presented the first stage of their commercial launch platform, WhiteKnightTwo, today at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Sir Richard Branson explains his motive for creating Virgin Galactic: “Seeing the planet from out there surrounded by the incredibly thin layer of atmosphere helps one to wake up to the fragility of the small proportion of the planet’s mass that we inhabit and to the importance of protecting the Earth.”

I have no idea why Branson is rambling about protecting the Earth. I suppose that’s a good idea, but I’m more interested in exploring the universe around us. If humanity does not destroy the Earth it will still eventually run out of room. We need pioneers to explore off planet. NASA will never do so at the necessary pace because it is a government bureaucracy. Private companies are the only realistic option for getting out getting out into the universe. That is my current perspective.

The unveiling of WK2 comes one year and two days after the fatal explosion that killed three Scaled Composites employees. Shortly thereafter one of Richard Branson’s close friends, Steve Fossett went missing during a small-plane flight. The second WK2 (or possibly the SS2) will be named The Spirit of Steve Fossett in his memory.

Although SpaceShipTwo is still under development and construction, Virgin Galactic expects to fly its first commercial space flights somewhere between 2009 and 2011. Virgin Galactic has not set a deadline for Scaled Composite’s delivery of the SS2, giving Scaled ample time to manufacture a craft that will be safe, “Safety first, we are not in a race, we will launch only when Scaled and Virgin feel it is safe to do so,” Virgin Galactic said in a statement.

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are ushering in a new era of transportation, travel and tourism. Currently entry into space is only provided by government institutions. Soon anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars laying around will be able to leave our atmosphere, if only for a few minutes.

I hope that space tourism leads to space exploration on a scale we are not talking about seriously in 2008. I grew up reading Ben Bova, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. I have an imagination and I want to see what’s out there. It’s a big, wonderful universe. Let’s go see it!

My weekend was busier than my week.Saturday we went white water rafting on the Ocoee River. Everyone seemed to have a really great time, and I can highly recommend the company we used – Ocoee Rafting. Our trip lasted about four and a half hours, and our guide, Emily, was pretty competent. She ran our raft through some fun spots.

I used an Olympus Stylus 1030SW 10.1 megapixel camera that is waterproof and shockproof to take pictures of our eventful trip. I was pretty happy with the performance and the fact that I was able to take pictures while floating in the Ocoee River was cool. I still remember the first digital cameras. Hell, I remember the first personal computer. The distances we’ve covered, electronically speaking, in the last two decades are just incredible. I don’t take any of it for granted. It’s awesome what we can pack into a tiny metal box these days.

Sunday morning I did a practice run for the upcoming mini-triathlon I’ve been preparing for. I was happy with my results – no problem finishing all three events. The Quintana Roo Sprint Triathlon will be my first but hopefully not last entry into the world of middle aged fitness rediscovery.

For those of you reading this entry who may not be in the shape you want to be – drag yourself out of the chair, off the couch, away from the TV and into the outdoors. I have been training for three months now on the run and bike portions (I’m already a strong swimmer and don’t have easy access to a pool). I feel better at 37 than I can ever remember feeling. This mini-triathlon begins with a quarter mile swim followed by an 8.2 mile bike ride and culminating in a two-mile run that crosses a bridge across the Tennessee River. I’m really looking forward to seeing how I do against my own age group and younger age groups.

It become quite evident to me that my hybrid bike is nowhere near as fast as the road bikes that were being used by some of the other participants in the practice run. My Diamondback Insight is great for the combination paved/gravel course that I train on, but cannot keep up on city roads. I’m going to need to save up for a road bike.

Rafters make their way down the rushing Ocoee River in Tennessee.

I used an Olympus Stylus 1030SW to take pictures on a recent white water rafting trip down the Ocoee River. I was impressed with how well the camera did.

Hamming for the camera on the Ocoee River.

This is me – the blog author – showing off my white legs.

I used an Olympus Stylus 1030SW waterproof/shockproof camera to capture the day’s events.

My staff voted for white water rafting when we planned our first annual IT trip. We spent four and a half hours floating down the Ocoee River.

My parents just bought me The Last Lecture as a present for graduating from college (at 37 years old I’m no whiz kid).

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

Randy Pausch emphasized the joy of life in his “last lecture,” originally given in September 2007.

Pausch died at his home in Virginia, university spokeswoman Anne Watzman said. Pausch and his family moved there last fall to be closer to his wife’s relatives.

Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet. In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death.

As much as I am looking forward to listening to the audio CD of The Last Lecture, I find it very strange that Carnegie Mellon named a footbridge after him and an AP author felt that was one of his significant achievements. If I die and you want to remember me, please mention something other than a footbridge. Thanks.

I like freedom. I like liberty. I like choice. To have these things, a society must be willing to tolerate a variety of activity and behavior that might be described as odd, eccentric or weird. Unfortunately, most of the world does not have freedom, liberty or choice due to petty men in robes and their enforcers who carry guns and other implements used for forcing you to obey them.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A family court judge in New Zealand has had enough with parents giving their children bizarre names here, and did something about it.

Just ask Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. He had her renamed.

Judge Rob Murfitt made the 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name could be changed, he said in a ruling made public Thursday. The girl was involved in a custody battle, he said.

What arrogance. What hubris. Who is this Rob Murfitt character to rename a child because her name irritates him? He is her owner. That’s who he is. As a representative of the state, Judge Rob Murfitt owns Talula Does The Hula. Our story from New Zealand does not tell us what Talula Does The Hula was renamed. That’s not important. The important lesson is that the state owns you and your children. If you step outside very narrow boundaries you will be forced back inside the lines. One way or another.

The age of Soda Pop and Ponyboy, two of my favorite fictional characters, is over. The nanny state is here. It will protect us from our own worst impulses. It will not challenge us to be smarter. Instead it will dumb us all down. It will not reward us for working harder. Instead it will steal more of the fruits of our labor. It will not encourage us to explore the universe. Instead it will help us stay focused on our reality shows. It will not teach us not to procreate until we are mature enough to handle the responsibility. Instead it will take our children away and reeducate them to worship the state. And they will have names that come from the Book of Bureaucracy. So sayeth the man in black robes, for He is Your Lord and you shall not name your children except according to His Will.

The signs and portents have been around for some time. If you use a cell phone you might want to pay attention. And who doesn’t use a cell phone these days. If you can talk, and you live in the United States, you probably have a cell phone. Guess what? You might also have cancer.

PITTSBURGH – The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don’t find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Personally, I hate phones. They add one more layer of distraction to my life that I really don’t need. I would much rather you email me or send an instant message. Despite the recent warning from Dr. Herberman, I know that I’m in the minority. Most people simply love their cell phones. For those of you who fall into this category, rest assured. Not everyone is preaching the doctrine of cell phone brain cancer.

Joe Farren, a spokesman for the CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group for the wireless industry, said the group believes there is a risk of misinforming the public if science isn’t used as the ultimate guide on the issue.

“When you look at the overwhelming majority of studies that have been peer reviewed and published in scientific journals around the world, you’ll find no relationship between wireless usage and adverse health affects,” Farren said.

Frank Barnes, who chaired the January report from the National Research Council, said Wednesday that “the jury is out” on how hazardous long-term cell phone use might be.

Speaking from his cell phone, the professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder said he takes no special precautions in his own phone use. And he offered no specific advice to people worried about the matter.

It’s up to each individual to decide what if anything to do. If people use a cell phone instead of having a land line, “that may very well be reasonable for them,” he said.

I’m going to keep not calling anyone every chance I get. If we can’t get together in person, let’s Google Talk. Can you hear me now? No? That’s because I’m not on the damn phone.

You may be wondering what the root causes are behind why your real income has plummeted by a quarter on every dollar in just the last year (those numbers are my best guess). I’m not an economist but I don’t really need to be to notice some really odd things going on behind the scenes. I say odd but I could as easily replace the word odd with stupid or rash or criminal. I could even say with a high degree of confidence that policy makers and politicians behind the scenes are doing a lot of odd, stupid, rash and criminal things to ensure that our dollar cannot hold its value. Let’s get into the meat of things.

First and foremost, I want you – the reader who happened across these words however you did – to  remember that the people you elect make decisions that will ultimately help or hurt everyone around them.

TAUNTON, Mass. – A 53-year-old wife and mother fatally shot herself shortly after faxing a letter to her mortgage company saying that by the time they foreclosed on her house that day, she would be dead.

Police said that Carlene Balderrama used her husband’s high-powered rifle to kill herself Tuesday afternoon, shortly after faxing the letter at 2:30 p.m.

The mortgage company called police, who found Balderrama’s body at 3:30 p.m. The auction was scheduled to start at 5 p.m. and interested buyers arrived at the property in Taunton, about 35 miles south of Boston, while Balderrama’s body was still inside, according to Taunton police chief Raymond O’Berg.

I am not suggesting that a politician forced Carlene Balderrama to shoot herself in the head with a high-powered rifle, but I am suggesting that our system of governance set her up for failure. How many young Americans are taught sound economic policy in government run schools? I certainly wasn’t. Of course, it is hard for a fiscally irresponsible entity like government to teach sound fiscal policy. Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever realized. So it makes perfect sense that Carlene Balderrama found herself in the situation she found herself in. I understand why some people would rather end it all than face losing their only anchor in life – for many people their home is their sanity bubble in a crazy world.

Let’s discuss for a moment some of the individuals and organizations that are responsible for the current mortgage and real estate climate we find ourselves in. We’ll start with the Fannie Mae Gang.

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal’s editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie’s competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide’s bantam rooster strutted off.

The federal government controls banking in this country with an iron fist. A huge arm of banking is the mortgage industry. Thus we can logically conclude that the federal government controls the mortgage industry. I’ll take that a step further and blame the federal government directly for creating a climate of instant gratification and greed. By taking responsibility for educating Americans, government also takes responsibility for the complete lack of economic common sense the average American has. By encouraging lenders to offer easy loans to people with bad credit and low incomes and then buying these questionable loans the federal government takes responsibility for the massive foreclosures and slumped real estates markets that are currently plaguing the economy.

In our ignorance and because we’ve been well trained not to think for ourselves Americans will demand as a solution to these government created problems – you guessed it – more government. Yes, yes, Obama is going to save us all. Good luck with that. It’s a pipe dream.

A nation cannot survive without sound economic policy. Until we start cutting entitlements and eliminating unnecessary government programs and employees we’re going to continue to slide downhill. Unfortunately, as a nation, we are so collectively stupid that isn’t even on the agenda this election cycle.

I read. A lot. I’m also working on a series of novels set in a reality called the Evermore Universe. I am one of a dying breed, the bookworm.

Want your book reviewed? I’d be happy to give an opinion. It will be an honest one.

The review will be posted here as well as being posted to Amazon.com. See all my Amazon.com reviews or take a look at a list of book reviews I’ve posted here on Will to Exist. Expect to find more and more reviews of various books and audiobooks as time passes.

How anyone could possibly justify tasering a restrained human being nine times is a mystery to me.

WINNFIELD, Louisiana (CNN) — A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge.

Baron Pikes, 21, was Tasered nine times by a police officer in January in Winnfield, Louisiana.

He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner’s report. Soon afterward, Pikes was dead.

Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes’ January death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.

Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old sawmill worker was jolted so many times by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might have been dead before the last two shocks were delivered.

Nine times for what? The man was not actively in the process of committing a violent crime when he was arrested. Nine times. He was handcuffed. Even if he was struggling and spitting, cursing and biting, or acting out violently I cannot imagine he was moving after nine taser shocks.

Nothing really shocks me anymore – I’ve seen too much of what humans are capable of. The longer I study our legal system though, the more I realize it is not designed to help citizens and protect us from one another. The legal system enables and encourages an us against them mentality between the bureaucrats who support the system and the segments of society who have decided that our system of rules is not for them.

While some of the lawbreakers are violent people who need to be put down like dogs that is the exception to the rule. In the case of Baron “Scooter” Pikes we have the typical legal authoritarianism against criminal anarchist scenario. The legalcrats tell us that Pikes got what was coming to him because he was being uncooperative. Death seems like a pretty harsh penalty for being uncooperative.

Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes — shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station — where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.

Folks, if you support this kind of behavior by your peace officers, then damn you to hell. No one needs to be tasered seven times in a row. If this guy was resisting after being tasered six times then he was superhuman, which I don’t believe for a second.

You think this could never happen to you? Just keep supporting the growth of the police state and roll the dice. In the mean time, I hope Mr. Pikes family sues the hell out of Winnfield. I hope the town goes bankrupt and the officers involved are convicted of felonies so they can never “serve and protect” anyone like this again.

The global banking crisis continues but should we really be worrying about doom and gloom? Not according to Bank of America Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis.

Bank of America (BAC) Chairman and Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis strongly believes that his bank, the largest in the U.S., is successfully navigating the credit crisis.

However, not everyone buys Lewis’ story, even if his bank’s second-quarter results bolster his case. BofA reported earnings of 72¢ per share, down from $1.28 a year ago, but above the 53¢ that analysts were expecting. It’s the latest big bank to beat Wall Street’s low expectations this quarter, following Citigroup (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Wells Fargo (WFC).

I’m not convinced that Bank of America’s recent purchase of Countrywide was a good move. I’m even less convinced that being a customer of Bank of America is a good move. That’s why I recently stopped doing business with the bank. Bank of America operates on a typical big bank model – a model that isn’t friendly to small business customers. The bank gave me a fee free two-year trial when I opened my account. The month after that two-year “grace period” ended the fees started being withdrawn from my business checking account.

Perhaps that is a good business model for Bank of America – they weren’t making any real money off my limited funds. However, if I ever become rich and famous, it’s unlikely I’ll do business with Bank of America again. They left a sour taste in my mouth.

Let’s get back to that Countrywide purchase for a moment. What was Bank of America thinking? I’m not sure.

BofA’s problems in real estate lending are many. Leading the list are home equity loans, hit hard by the drop in home prices. But the biggest challenge for BofA may be its July 1 acquisition of Countrywide Financial. The purchase of the U.S.’s largest mortgage lender is designed to help BofA dominate the mortgage industry in the long term. But in the near term, the Countrywide buyout brings BofA lots of trouble. The quality of Countrywide’s loans is much worse than the loans on BofA’s balance sheet.

In fact, according to the linked article referenced above, Bank of America absorbed $40 billion in problematic loans. In my mind, that’s antoher 40 billion reasons not to give my business to the bank. What do I know though? I’m not smart enough to understand why a quasi private shadow entity runs the U.S. banking system and I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around the concept of fiat currency yet. As far as I can tell, it’s all just made up money.

Maybe someone from the Federal Reserve Bank can drop by this blog and explain to me why our dollar is spiraling downward in value and how we’re not really in economic trouble.

Scientific American has an interesting article that discusses how decision making wears out the human brain. What makes the article so interesting to me is that my brain is constantly overloaded. I am bombarded at any given moment with multiple streams of input. I face situations multiple times on a daily basis that require me to make strings of decisions. This has caused a long-term symptom in me. More on that in a moment.

Presumably, trying to control one’s attention and to ignore an interesting cue exhausted the limited resource of the executive functions, making it significantly more difficult to ignore the existence of the otherwise irrelevant inferior decoy. Subjects with overtaxed brains made worse decisions.

These experimental insights suggest that the brain works like a muscle: when depleted, it becomes less effective. Furthermore, we should take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we’ve just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn’t try to make a major decision. These deleterious carryover effects from a tired brain may have a strong shaping effect on our lives.

I strongly suggest reading the full text of Tough Choices: How Decision Making Tires Out the Brain. What conclusions can be drawn from this article? If the brain is like a muscle, then it needs time off. What sort of information processing exercises should I be throwing the gray matter that makes me who I am?

These findings have important real world implications. If making choices depletes executive resources, then “downstream” decisions might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Indeed, University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues found exactly this effect: individuals who had to regulate their attention—which requires executive control—made significantly different choices than people who did not.

I know for a fact that I often make choices differently than I would have if I was not forced to operate under multiple time constraints. I do not relish making decisions on the fly, and I try to delegate as much as possible. Unfortunately, American business is not geared towards ensuring “executive function” will be carried out competently. There are no “smoke breaks” for your brain taken into consideration in a modern corporate organization, at least not a typical American run corporation. How much bad decision making does that lead to and how much does it cost? These are important questions.

While I cannot answer them, I do know that I need to be more conscious about taking brain recuperation breaks during the year. I cannot imagine anything but good effect from rest periods.

Credit Karma pays for its credit reporting through advertiser supported deals, some of which might actually appeal to the consumer who is pulling his or her scores.

Unlike Freecreditreport.com and other similar services, there are no trial periods and hidden fees that you’ll have to pay down the road. Credit Karma is completely free. You can pull your credit score whenever you want and it doesn’t cost you anything (except ad views). Nor does it affect your credit score.

I use MyFico.com because I discovered it prior to being made aware of Credit Karma by founder Kenneth Lin. His site says:

Our services start with a FREE credit score. No credit card is required and no strings are attached. Return as often as you like and use our service to track your credit file and stay informed. Credit Karma believes this is a fundamental consumer right. Credit Karma will continue to provide these FREE credit scores while doing the most to protect your privacy regardless if you use our other services.

When you access the FREE credit score, Credit Karma will show personalized offers to you based on your credit profile . These offers are from advertisers who share our vision of consumer empowerment. If you wish to take advantage of Karma Offers, it is up to you. Credit Karma will never share your information without your consent.

Mr. Lin blogs on Credit Karma, and it was through his blog entries that I found out about another useful service. CheckingFinder lets you search by zip code for the closest high yield checking account.

As the dollar continues to slide in value, smart consumers are going to be looking for every opportunity to save money that they can find. Higher interest rates for your own banking accounts, and better credit resulting in lower interest rates on your credit cards are both significant ways to beat the economic downturn.

Credit Karma is a great way to beat the credit scoring fee scammers who hurt people that may already be struggling with a less than perfect credit score by charging them outrageous amounts to keep track of their credit score.

Credit Karma doesn’t necessarily report your exact credit score per Transunion, Experian or Equifax. Rather, it uses a proprietary technology to average the three scores – with fairly accurate results. I have a number of friends and relatives try the service and all of them said that Credit Karma was very accurate.

Get your credit score free.

Jumping through hoops is not my style. If you put a series of hoops in front of me, I’m likely to just turn around and go somewhere else. Not Dick Heller, of Heller vs. District of Columbia fame.

Dick Heller showed up at the District of Columbia Courts with his gun in his hand. Sort of. Yesterday the victorious plaintiff in Heller vs. D.C. showed up downtown to register his gun but hesititated to bring it with him; cops told him to show up packing. So this morning at 9 a.m. Heller rendezvoused with advisors Dane von Breichenruchardt and Brad Jansen carrying his 1911 single-action Colt .22 revolver in a cherry-red vinyl case. “Concealed carry!” Heller said. “It doesn’t look so bad, does it?”

The three men walked over to the courts to greet a small throng of libertarian activists and reporters from local news amd NRANews.com. “There were more cameras yesterday,” mused von Breichenruchardt. “There were vans outside”—he waved his hand and pointed to the curb—”just more reporters, generally.” There were just enough reporters to pack the room when Heller entered and handed the gun over to police to start what became a 90-minute registration process.

Heller emerged from the courts with a thumbs up: He’d met with partial success. The city had taken finger prints, administered a 20-question exam, and subjected the gun to a ballistics. He could take the gun home as long as it was empty and trigger-locked. But he’d have to come back in a week with two passport photos, and wait for the city to process the rest of his information with a background check. Part of the reason for the delay is the city’s law defining “machine guns”—anything that loads from the bottom or can hold more than 12 rounds at a time qualifies. “It’s in the city’s hands now,” Jansen said.

Heller is doing the rest of us a service by drawing publicity to exactly how ridiculous the process of trying to be a legal gun owner in Washington, D.C. is. Always remember that D.C. has one of the highest crime rates anywhere, unlike areas of the country with higher rates of gun ownership. I suppose the criminals might be attracted to all the crimes being committed on the hill, but I don’t think it hurts any that they are the only private citizens with guns in a city where authoritarianism is more important than common sense.

Frankly, you’d have to pay me more than I’m worth to get me to move to a city where I’m not allowed to defend myself and must jump through hoops all day to keep massa happy. In this case, the plantation has changed and the slavery is economic instead of physical, but it’s still slavery as far as I am concerned.

Career bureaucrats are making America safer. At least for career bureaucrats.

The Air Force’s top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on “comfort capsules” to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules’ carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

Production of the first capsule — consisting of two sealed rooms that can fit into the fuselage of a large military aircraft — has already begun.

Let’s get this straight for the historical records. While your government is making you take your shoes off and searching through your dirty underwear in exchange for allowing you to get on a plane (obedience training) engineers somewhere else in the country are being paid out of your tax money to design “comfort capsules” for military brass, dignitaries and other “public servants” because Lord knows we wouldn’t want them to have to fly commercial and submit to the same cattle herding treatment as the common man.

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be “aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule,” with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.

The effort has been slowed, however, by congressional resistance to using counterterrorism funds for the project and by lengthy internal deliberations about a series of demands for modifications by Air Force generals. One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table’s wood be darkened.

The Congressional resistance is only because Congress didn’t think of this idea themselves. We might as well just declare feudalism as our way of government. Global War on Terror my ass. We’re fighting a war all right, but it’s against our own stupidity.

Time Magazine has some advice for Obama (who is planning a little trip):

Still, there are a few ways Obama can reach out to ordinary Iraqis and make his trip more meaningful.

First, he should invite a group of Baghdad journalists — mostly Iraqis, but also a few Westerners who’ve been in Iraq for several years — for a chat. This would not be a press conference; Obama would be asking all the questions. The majority of journalists live in the Red Zone and see much more of Iraqi life than anybody in the Iraqi government or the U.S. embassy. Iraqi journalists don’t need to “embed” with U.S. troops in order to get to dangerous districts like Sadr City or Amariyah — they live in those neighborhoods, and they could tell Obama a lot more about the Iraqi condition than he could glean from any number of official briefings.

The advice is good.

I still remember, and always will, the time George W. Bush visited the Green Zone briefly while I was there. I wasn’t allowed in the Palace because I didn’t want to give up my pistol to walk through and get to my hooch. And that was one little symptom of what’s wrong with our mentality in America.

I don’t think Obama is going to do much good for this country I adopted, but I’ll take what I can get. If he listens to Time Mr. Obama will visit with people who live in the Red Zone while he is in Iraq.

If there’s not enough time to organize such a meeting, there’s one surefire way Obama can meet Iraqis. At the main entrances to the Green Zone, there’s almost always a long queue of folks waiting to get in, usually to visit a government office or a member of Parliament. Once they get past the elaborate security checks, they’re usually made to wait on the lawns of the building that serves as Iraq’s Parliament. It would be relatively easy for Obama to send a member of his entourage, accompanied by an Iraqi translator, to invite a random selection of these Iraqis for an informal chat — few would turn down the chance to meet him.

If Obama is too scared or too controlled to go to one of the major checkpoints, then he should be able to get on the buses that run from point to point within the Green Zone. Those buses are populated by a mix of contractors, soldiers and Red Zone folks, and could provide our next President with a real viewpoint from someone who actually has to suffer the consequences of the occupation.

I’m expecting that this will be a typical political visit, however. My belief is that Obama represents business as usual.

Since I lived for a year in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I felt it was necessary for me to read what happened before I got there, under L. Paul Bremer, bureaucrat extraordinaire. That is why I recently found myself reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

To say that the Bush Administration and its chosen Iraq occupation overlords made poor choices during and immediately after the invasion of that country would be an understatement so vast that I have no words to describe how big an understatement I would be making. Reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City reinforced for me many of the reasons why I heard the impact of so many mortars during my 2005-2006 sojourn to Iraq’s largest city and at the time one of the most violent if not the most violent city in the world.

I met Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Baghdad in 2006, when I credentialed him for access to military bases. The man was humble, unassuming and patient with the bureaucratic process he endured, which is much more than I can say for Geraldo Rivera, who had sycophants hanging all over him and required that we open for a special session to credential him. In any case, the book itself is superly written in a professional tone.

The damning indictments of cronyism and poor decision making due to a complete lack of understanding of the culture and history of Iraq are presented artfully, without the forced overtones of sarcasm that would have appeared had I written Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

From the story of the Iraqi expatriatate who returns post invasion to open a five-star pizza shop only to find his American customers cannot leave their fortified enclave to the tale of the minor minister who is assasinated for trying to help his country without being politically involved, to the detailed descriptions of the “little America” inside a several square mile compound in downtown Baghdad, this book is well worth reading.

I do not know if L. Paul Bremer has yet publicly admitted how arrogant and stupid many of the decisions made in that first year of occupation were, but he knows it in his heart. If he doesn’t that would mean the man has no heart.

Having served in Iraq, and having been to a few locales outside the “Emerald Palace” I called the Green Zone, I still hold pain in my heart for the people I met and for their suffering. Things may be turning around now in that country. But in reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, it becomes clear that much of the violence that wracked the country and the city of Baghdad could have been avoided if things had been done differently in the beginning. We’ll never know how many died because of bad decision making, but it is clear that the numbers are in the tens of thousands and possibly much higher.

If you’ve ever wondered what was really going on in those first days of the occupation, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Highly recommended.

All areas of health care that are regulated are experiencing huge price increases. Areas that are not regulated, like LASIK surgery (which I had in 1999), are experiencing price drops.

According to the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics the cost of the Lasik procedure has dropped from $2,106 in 1999 to $1,626 in 2004! The quality of the procedure has also improved dramatically, even though the cost has fallen.

The Comprehensive Health Care Reform Act itself is a very modest attempt to get choice back into the health care equation. By “choice” I do not mean making the decision that people who haven’t done anything to earn it will be given money taken from other people in order to fund their various ailments. That’s not a long term solution to anything, as demonstrated by the cost of the “prescription drug benefit” which is more than double the amount of theft initially promised.

In my lifetime, I am unaware of any federally administered program that has actually seen cost decreases. If the Fed was in charge of television production, it is my opinion that I would not be able to afford the 52″ LCD hanging on my wall. Do you know of a federal program that has actually reduced costs for the product or service being administered? Let me know about it!

If you agree with me that Congress doesn’t need to be overseeing a health care monopoly then please head over to Downsize DC and sign up to make your voice heard.

This is one of the scenarios I have to worry about. My IT department isn’t in charge of a city, but we still worry. Most security breaches happen from the inside.

The purported takeover of the San Francisco government’s new fiber optic network by an employee who locked out all the other administrators sounds extreme, but disgruntled or fired employees have always used computers to get a dose of revenge.

The city is still scrambling to regain control of the municipal network that handles everything from the mayor’s e-mail to San Francisco’s electronic court records, according to Ron Vinson, the deputy director of San Francisco’s telecommunications and information services department.

Terry Childs, a city tech employee, allegedly modified the system so that only he had top level permissions. Childs was arrested Sunday and is being held on $5 million bail, after allegedly refusing to hand over the passwords.

If an employee is willing to go to jail over an issue, there is very little you can do to stop it from happening, except to not hire someone who will become disgruntled in the first place. That’s why so many company run psych profiles and background checks these days. Because of pinheads who think revenge is a good idea. The Wired article has a bullet point list of some of these evil IT folks, but I’m sure a few who were never caught failed to make the list.

If you are an IT employee reading this blog entry my suggestion to you is simple – you work in one of the most robust jobs of this century. Instead of focusing on how you can hurt the company you just left, focus on how you can help the next company you’ll work for – it will allow you to retire comfortably.

My iPod classic is one of the technology tools that enriches my life the most. I have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gadgets but the iPod gets the most use. It’s my traveling companion. It reads my audiobooks on my long commute. It plays my Free Talk Live and Dan Carlin. By the way, Dan Carlin has two of the best podcast shows I’ve ever heard, Common Sense and Hardcore History. If you check him out and you like him, give him a couple bucks. Totally worth it.

When my iPod doesn’t work right (which hasn’t happened until this morning) I get a very off kilter feeling. What am I supposed to do on the hour plus drive? I usually listen to the first half of Free Talk Live and then hit the second half on my way home. This morning, I couldn’t do that because my iPod was locked up. I took it off hold and it just stayed on hold.

This particular iPod has been gold. I was once running on a treadmill when I accidentally jerked it off the ledge it was sitting on. The iPod flew across the room and just kept playing without missing a beat. This morning, however, it wouldn’t respond to my commands to download my podcast. Plugging it in had no effect. I had no idea what to do and I was running late for work. iPods, in case you’ve never owned one, have no obvious reset button.

Long story short, I left for work in a bad mood, without my podcast. I was forced to listen to Wall Street Journal on my XM Radio. When I got to work, I was in the doldrums, thinking I would be shelling out for a new iPod. I was wrong. An iPod classic can be reset. In my case, that cleared up the issue. My audiobooks, movies, music collection and massive set of podcasts is once again available for me to have eargasms.

I’m back in balance with the universe.

The fit is just beginning to hit the shan. Two pseudo-private companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are wobbling a bit. Teetering a little. Standing on the brink and realizing the drop is pretty far. Washington is in a tizzy. This is what happens when you have a monetary system that is faith based. Fiat currency, baby.

So what are our overlords doing to fix the cracks in the faith based dam that holds back the tide of easy living debt America has amassed and is now having a hard time paying back?

At the core of those proposals, as outlined by Paulson, is a request that Congress grant Treasury a temporary increase in the credit line it can extend to the GSEs, as well as the ability to purchase equity in the firms should that prove necessary. The moves are designed to reassure bond and stock investors that Fannie and Freddie will have both the liquidity and the capital needed to weather the current crisis, key to getting the markets, and ultimately the economy, back on track. With the Treasury proposal in the works, the Fed also agreed to temporarily grant the GSEs access to the Fed’s discount window, should they need emergency liquidity before Congress can authorize the Treasury moves. “The GSEs now touch 70% of new mortgages and represent the only functioning secondary mortgage market,” Paulson told the senators. “The GSEs are central to the availability of housing finance, which will determine the pace at which we emerge from this housing correction.”

I don’t want to be a fear monger, but I’ve lived lots of places around the world. When the money becomes worthless the new currency is always bullets. I’m not saying that’s where we are at. I’m just saying it could happen, and it could happen in a few months, a few years or a few decades. If we continue borrowing it will happen. And lots and lots of people will suffer needless misery. Are you paying attention?

What kind of government forces people to make gasoline out of food, artificially boosts the price of corn to $6 a bushel, guarantees that inflated price as the “base” for higher federal subsidies to corn farmers in the future, and then tries to hide its own depredations by excluding high food prices from its measure of “core” inflation?

The money is all made up. The real debt is being fudged every year. Your children may be learning something in their public high school. I don’t know what, but I’m damn sure it isn’t economics. And that’s why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are teeter tottering on the brink. How many bail outs later will those fools on the hill realize the nation has no more credit left? When will you start sounding off and telling them to stop the bailouts because we cannot afford them?

The people responsible for FISA are busy investigating internet service providers for gathering up their customers’ surfing habits.

ISPs seeking to find new ways to make money by profiling their customer’s online habits are likely reconsidering after powerful House lawmakers turned their anti-tracking ire on a second large telecom in recent months.

In June, Charter Communications — the nation’s fourth-largest ISP —  shelved its plan to make money by letting others snoop on and categorize the web-surfing habits — including searches — of its customers, following a May inquiry from Congress about the plan.

This go round top members of the House Commerce committee, including chairman John Dingell (D-Michigan) and top Republican Joe Barton (R-Texas) and telecom subcommittee head Reps. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) are targeting the Fortune 500 telecom company Embarq.

The lawmakers want to know whether the company informed its customers earlier this year that it was testing web-tracking technology that would chronicle their every move online. They also want to know whether the test of web-surveillance technology from NebuAd complied with federal communications law.

Anti-tracking ire? Seriously? How about turning your anti-tracking laser beam of wrath on yourself? When is someone going to stand up and tell Congress to go to hell? Come on. Am I the only one who thinks that putting criminals in charge of jails doesn’t make any sense? If that doesn’t make sense then how does putting professional busybodies in charge of making rules about busybodies?

I don’t want anybody spying on me. Not my ISP and not Congress. But in my lifetime, to the best of my knowledge, Congress hasn’t fixed a single problem that was affecting me. They just made every one of them worse as far as I can tell. The pot calling the kettle black doesn’t even begin to cover the sheer arrogance repeatedly displayed by this group of human beings. Shame on them.

Recent changes to FISA are a disgrace, but instead of dealing with their own unnecessary nosiness, Congress is busy worrying about the speck of sand in someone else’s eye.

Now go read about your dishonest Congress over at Downsize DC.

Why did nearly half the Democrats in the House vote for the “FISA Amendments Act” that’s now pending in the Senate, when most of them had opposed warrantless spying and telecom immunity before? The answer is that they were bribed, using your tax dollars.

The Washington Post claims a deal was cut: the Democratic Leadership would support the FISA bill if the President would agree to add $95 billion in DOMESTIC spending to the latest Iraq appropriation.

Lots of Americans like to complain about how dishonest corporate America is. Guess what? Until we fix the even more dishonest oversight body nothing is going to change in corporate America.

David Walker says we’re in trouble. Since David Walker has spent a great deal of time making management decisions inside of our federal government, and since I’ve been under the impression that we’re in trouble since long before I ever heard of David Walker, I decided to attend when I was invited to participate in a conference call hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

I don’t agree with all of what was said in that conference call, but I am intrigued enough by the messages I heard to report them to you.

First, and most important, is the immutable fact that the United States of America is in serious financial trouble. Second, and nearly as important, is the hardly debatable evidence that the people in charge of managing the finances of this country are irresponsible. They are teaching Americans to be irresponsible, fiscally and otherwise. Since Americans elect these entrenched purveyors of instant gratification who preach a message of borrow now and worry about it later, we are caught in a vicious cycle.

David Walker wants to break the cycle. I want to break the cycle. What are the tools for doing this? Awareness is one tool. The vehicle for spreading awareness that Dave Walker and his foundation are currently marketing is a new movie called I.O.U.S.A. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but based on the conversation I participated in yesterday, and based on the pitch, I plan to watch.

Buzz about “I.O.U.S.A.,” the PGPF-supported, nonpartisan documentary that tells the story of the national debt, is growing in Washington. The film will screen for reporters in the area on Monday night.

The screening follows a private showing last week on Capitol Hill for members of Congress and other invited guests. In attendance were House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Senate Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg, among others. Since then, a number of other members, including several in the congressional leadership, have asked to see the film. The movie also will screen for attendees of both presidential conventions courtesy of a brand-new film festival being announced on Tuesday.

As CEO Dave Walker announced at PGPF’s official launch in New York last week, “I.O.U.S.A.” will premiere with an unprecedented national media event broadcast to 400 theaters on August 21 before opening in 10 cities around the country the following day. The August 21 event – stay tuned for more details! – is one example of how PGPF intends to make innovative use of media to raise the public’s awareness and inspire them to act on the fiscal challenges threatening America’s economic well-being.

“I.O.U.S.A.” is directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Patrick Creadon (“Wordplay”) and is being distributed by Roadside Attractions (“Super Size Me”). It tells the story of the country’s four key deficits – budget, savings, balance of payments/trade, and leadership – and their implications for the nation and its citizens. We are faced with an ever-expanding government and military, increased foreign competition, and financial obligations that will become ever more difficult to honor absent meaningful reforms. As 78 million baby boomers begin to retire and collect benefits from the government’s over-extended entitlement programs, an economic crisis of epic proportions awaits.

I hope you’ll watch too. If you cannot attend the premiere on August 21, at least make arrangements to screen I.O.U.S.A. at some point in the near future. I really don’t know how much time is left to turn the federal fiscal debacle around, but I know that each passing moment adds millions of dollars to our national debt and that each passing moment ensures the dollar will be further devalued until we make some serious changes.

PGPF publishes a document called State of the Nation’s Finances. Download it. Read it. Pay attention to it. There was a lot of talk yesterday about “entitlements” and how to deal with them. My personal preference would be to get rid of all federal entitlements and let the states handle them. But I understand we live in a culture of entitlement and we’ve trained at least three generations now to demand and expect the Fed to steal money from some Americans to redistribute it to other Americans. It will take another three generations to change this attitude that stealing is OK. That’s assuming we can start to turn things around before we reach a tipping point where the system eats itself in violent revolution or some other major calamity.

For now, go watch I.O.U.S.A. And start thinking about where we’re headed before we can’t turn around. You’ll hear much more from me on national fiscal issues in coming days, months and years. We can’t keep satiating our every whim. We can’t keep consuming more than we produce. We cannot keep borrowing and distributing “stimulus” checks.

File under irony.

If you’re going to engage in pedophilia (which I do not recommend or support) you should probably not wear a t-shirt that claims you are the “World’s Greatest Dad.” Of course, people who get caught doing this sort of stuff generally aren’t armed with a very high IQ.

No one should be alone when crimes are being committed. A dumb criminal needs a dumb attorney general – they were meant for each other.

A spokesman for Attorney General Mike Cox could not confirm whether Everett has children. But Cox says in a statement that the arrest is a reminder that “a parent can pose a threat to our children.”

You don’t say? How stupid does Mr. Cox think the rest of us are? Anyone can “pose a threat to our children.” I don’t need to be reminded that the world has some bad people in it. But thank you, Mr. Mike Cox for being so patronizing and reinforcing the mindset that we should continue to support a police state, government stings, reduction of civil rights, a bloated court system, zero tolerance stupidity, 500 alphabet soup agencies full of armed bureaucrats, the highest per capita prisoner rates in the civilized world, ignoring our own founding document and a complete lack of all common sense – it’s for the children. Thank God for the children, and for the World’s Greatest Dad and thank God for you, Mike Cox.

You’re my hero. The “World’s Greatest Dad” may have been a total pervert, and he may have been trying to hump someone’s daughter, and that is all bad. On the other hand, I’m not particularly enamored of the public “servants” who spend their days emailing child porn to pehophiles and posing as little children on the Internet. Isn’t it the Devil who is supposed to tempt us, not the government?

The Wall Street Journal reports that someone in government has a plan. Unfortunately, that plan is, as usual, to steal more money from the productive among current and future generations so the unproductive can continue to live in their big, comfy houses which they really cannot afford.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking lawmakers for unprecedented power in his plan to address the current crisis over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And lawmakers, even if they may approve the proposal, don’t appear to be thrilled about handing over unlimited authority.

Paulson

Mr. Paulson’s plan would increase Treasury’s line of credit for the two mortgage giants for 18 months, but without a specific dollar amount. (The credit lines are now at $2.25 billion for each firm.) It also would give Treasury authority for 18 months to buy equity in the two firms if necessary for the firms to have adequate capital.

If I like your house, and I come take it away from you with a gun, I’m a thief. If you like your house and you come take my money away with a gun so you can make your payments, well then, you’re a damn thief.

Why are we tolerating this garbage thinking? Why are we even talking about this stuff? If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cannot make it without stealing, they don’t deserve to make it at all.

The government, once it fully embraces the business of stealing from one group to bail out another group, will not last long. Thieves in uniforms are still thieves.