Sandcastles and Cubicles

Moving on down the road

2009-02-16T12:23:00.002+14:00

I feel that I have outgrown this blog. It was started that the height of the blog boom, since then blogs have matured and so have I.

My posting style has also evolved. I don't feel the need make to comments about the most interesting news articles of the day. I don't have anything funny to say. In the information area, others do a much better job than I. My thoughts and writing come slower and with the knowledge that I am responsible for what I write. I feel that my niche will be in well thought writing, pointing out the subtle issues that many have missed - not ranting - but providing calm and well reasoned input on the issues at hand. I feel it is best to make a clean break and start over at some place new. This blog was the first and you always remember you first - for better or worse.

My new home will be at this blog: Man of Issachar

Cubicle

The great economic experiment

2009-02-06T17:26:00.001+14:00

Prelude
This is the first post concerning the state of the economic world as I see it, maybe my last. The issues talked about affect all of our kin and all of our future namesakes. I probably will present the economic facts with a slight bit of distortion and with huge gaps in knowledge, but I think you will find these ideas potentially of some worth.

The history of money
Economy and civilization are tightly intertwined. If fact, I cannot see a situation where once can exist without the other. As our civilization grew, so did the complexity of our economic systems. Kings minted coins, countries printed paper. The reason why the countries and kings were involved is twofold I believe. First, economies function best when there is a common medium of exchange. Secondly, it is hard to tax your people if they all have different mediums of exchange or just barter. Of course, a system that only the King or state wants will only last so long.

The governed also enjoyed the advantages brought by money. Money did not rot like the food they grew, so it serves well as a means to store wealth. Is a lot easier to exchange, once everyone agrees on what it is worth, the than the raw goods and services they had.
For most of our history, “money” has been a tangible item. In some cases, it was an item that held utility: cows, wheat, or something else. I am not so sure you can call that money in the traditional sense. In other cases, it was an item that was highly desired (such as gold) or an item that was declared and agreed on as medium of exchange (seashells). For me recently, money really has just become some numbers on the screen. I watch the inflow; make sure it is less than the outflow. I monitor the outflow, for irregularities and look for ways to lessen it. Money for me is really just bits and bytes that buys me bites for the belly.

For much of our history, the amount money has been fixed to some degree because of it’s connection to the real world. Gold was real, printed money was able to be traded for gold. Recently money has been decoupled from the physical world. An American dollar is only worth what people will pay for it in other currencies. They decide the worth of the dollar based off the relative strength of the American economy or their economy - it is a strange circular relationship. Additionally, we have been able to manage money better because the advances in computers and software. The power of the electron has given us power over financial data that no other civilization as ever seen before. Needless to say we have come a long way from counting the number of cows that we are owed on our bare hands.

The system is the problem
Every system that has been put into place was an attempt to fix a perceived problem. Driving on the right side of the road, fixed the problem of not knowing which side of the road you are supposed to be on. Schools are supposed to fix the problem of dumb people. Money solves the problem of commerce, and it solves it remarkably well. We moved off of the gold standard to remove the limitations that gold placed on our money and our economy. The problems of a currency that has no inherent value are also painfully clear. If you hold on the cash, you slowly lose value due to inflation. If you take any real risk with your cash to maintain your wealth, you are “investing” and past performance is not indicative of future performance, as the last ten years have show you.

I am not some reactionary saying we need to go back to the gold standard. The system we had was flawed and our current system is not so hot either. We need to move forward. We need a system that can accommodate our powerful economy, our need for liquidity, our need for growth. It also needs to provide for stable growth to allow individuals to growth their wealth without having to get degrees in finance. Of course, if I knew the exact details I would start the system myself and become king.

What I really need

2008-11-20T17:22:00.002+14:00

preamble
This post was a really important idea and statement when the government was talking about buying up troubled assets. It is not so important now since the the government has moved to providing loans to banks and car makers. In other words, the post would have been great and insightful had things turned out different.

The point
What I really need right now is the government competing against me buying homes. In other words, the last thing in the world I need right now is the government propping up home prices.

The data
I don't think home prices are not going up in the near future. The number of people buying homes is not getting higher (higher unemployment). The supply of homes of the market is only increasing or at least it is not going down. I live in an area that has escaped much of the home depreciation. But I think there is a some of risk in buying a house, especially since I think the area I am in is just behind the rest of the nation.

If the government steps in and starts buying homes, they are just going to raise the price for all the other buyers. The government will not be inclined to get good (or as good) deals as a private motivated buyer would be. Keep in mind, that they will not be spending their money. They will pay more than what the market will bear and keep the prices higher than what the market would have paid. Both bad things for the first time buyer, who is the first link and spring board in the entire housing chain.

The score

2008-11-13T17:56:00.002+14:00

The little wife and I are looking to buy a house in the near future. In preparation, I recently pulled our credit scores. On average we had a higher credit score than about 75 t0 80 percent of the US population. We were in the second to highest level of credit scores, though not the highest. I am never satisfied with second best, so I have been trying to think of ways to raise the score.

There were several common areas, that while they were not negative and did not count against us, we did not score as high as we possibly could. One thing that we could have scored higher on, was amount of available credit. I don't know how much credit we should have available, and I am endeavoring to find that out. Mostly likely, i will end up speaking to a credit doctor. Unfortunately, just like a woman, good ones are hard to find.

We also have a lot of revolving credit accounts (credit cards). What can I say, we were both suckers for free stuff from credit cards that were offered to us in college. I still have a poorly made Chris Farly t-shirt from of those offers. We both canceled the cards as soon as they came in and have always used credit responsibly. Though the damage is already done. Just goes to show you, that there are always consequences.

We are also debt free. Which actually has some negatives. Oh sure, paying the loans off helps, but once the loans are paid off you have no installment accounts listed as active. In this case, no information is not good. I am sure that a person reading our credit reports, would understand and approve, but the machines in the ether apparently don't.

So i am considering taking a out a loan to increase our credit score. I know that sounds absurd...but I did not design the system, I am just trying to abuse it. It is almost as if, the rating agencies give better ratings to people who are in debt (within reason is suppose). It makes sense when you think about it. The rating agencies are not really on your side, they are the lender's side (their customer), and are just trying to make money off of your information in the mean time.

Les jones has twice linked to an article saying that stupid modern software makes us stupid.

"We borrow money when we don’t need to, for example, to feed the type of data to the programs that we know they are programmed to respond to favorably. In doing this, we make ourselves stupid in order to make the computer software seem smart."

Living inside of a system and adapting to the situation, manipulating the system to our own gain, doing what we need to do to survive (Or in my case, what I need to do, not merely to survive, but survive in style) - Does not make us stupid, it makes us extremely bright.

Visual Impressions

2008-10-10T14:50:00.002+14:00

One of my unique traits (or special abilities) is that I am really good with faces. I mean...I am really good. That guy, I haven't seen in 6 years , yea I recognize his face...immediately. The thing is that it does not extend only to real people. People on TV trigger the near spidey like feeling that I get when I absolutely know I recognize a face, but cannot place them.

For example, Cassidy Freeman who is now on Smallville. I was watching Smallville and realized that I recognized the face. I thought that I seen her before, but could not figure out from where. I thought that it was from Smallville because I had seen her on the show before, but I would have had the near spidey like feeling last time I saw the show if i recognized her face. So I must have seen her on something else, between the last time I watched Smallville and tonight. After some googling and reading around. She was on "Cold Case" True Calling (2008).

While I was on a roll, the guy who plays Jimmy Olsen, look familiar as well. Well it turns out that i have never seen Aaron Ashmore, but he has a freaking twin brother Shawn Ashmore, who was in the X-Men movies.

Check and mate.

New real life friends

2008-10-04T14:48:00.002+14:00

Well I went to shoot at my favorite range the other day, but some guys from Texas came and screwed up the range so bad, no one could shoot on it. While they were in town, i was able to meet a few of them. I met "The Girl", "Catfish", "SgtDave", and "JR". They are as fun in person as they are on the web, which is more than i can say for myself.

Goverment run service

2008-10-04T14:31:00.002+14:00

Recently (years in web terms), Kos made this comment on his blog.

"How could a government-run service be any worse than these unaccountable, unethical, disgusting creeps?"

He was talking about the health care\health insurance. This comment was after a fairly lengthly post complaining about some insurance troubles he was having. My only comment would be to ask, what makes him think that a service run by unaccountable, unethical, and disgusting government creeps, with the weight of the law behind them would be any better.

Sarah Palin reminds me of...

2008-10-04T13:40:00.003+14:00

Just thought I would mention how Sarah Palin reminds me of Annie Camden, the mom from 7th Heaven.

Bailout or optout

2008-10-01T17:23:00.002+14:00

I just wanted to drop some thoughts to the web concerning the “bailout”. First I would like to point you to a few posts by some very smart bloggers that are for the idea of the bailout. For example, Daniel Drezner is for the bailout. The Skeptical Optimist is also for the bailout. They state so here in these two posts.

I don't know if the bailout is a good idea or not. The way it was proposed and brought up in its initial form were absolutely horrible. The constant reminders that we have to do it now, only made the situation feel more and more like I was wearing wool underwear and running 6 miles. I just want to expand on the central idea of the bailout that bothers me and provide some basic information if you are having hard time keeping up.

One of the key issues that got us into this mess in the first place, was too much liquidity. The low interest rates of the mid 2000's help set us up for this calamity, in the first place. Easy money, help lead to bad loans, which led to bad investments, etc. So telling me that the government needs to buy investments, that no one else will buy, to make sure that the money keeps flowing, just does not set well. The only problem, is that there is an actual problem that needs to be solved concerning liquidity.

The LIBOR rate is climbing higher and higher. The LIBOR rate is the interest that a bank would charge another bank when the former bank makes a loan to the latter bank. The entire idea that banks would loan money to each other was a brand new idea, to me. It makes sense. If you are full on cash and you cannot find enough customers to loan to, why not loan it out to other banks instead of keeping it yourself. It also makes for an extremely efficient way of moving money around in an economy.

The problem is when banks don't trust each other and they start wanting to keep money for their selves. If LIBOR gets high enough it causes a liquidity crisis. It could lead to certain banks being unable to lend out money or at a worse case bank runs by the general populace.

I personally think that it would take awhile (time scale of weeks) for the liquidity crisis to affect the accounts of an everyday person. No data or anything to back that assertion up, just some basic understanding of process flow and human systems. It sometimes takes time for effects to work their way downstream. I believe that we have more time than we are being told to fix the problem, of course that is just speculation.

To summarize, liquidity helped get us into this mess, now no liquidity is the problem. I just don't know if more liquidity is the answer. I just hope for a solution that fixes the problem long term, not postpones it until after the election. I doubt i get what i want for Christmas.

Financial meltdown

2008-09-21T07:33:00.001+14:00

What to do about financial meltdown?

The recent global financial meltdown comes as no surprise if you read either of these guys (Survival blog and Mish). Their predictions are/were dreadful and horrifying. According to them, we have not reached the bottom yet, and we have a long way to go. So you can start preparing for the worst possible case, buying bullets, beans, and band-aids, or start looking for buying opportunities. I don't know if we are at the bottom yet, but I have made several moves, because I believe we are close.

One option is to Buy, buy, buy.

Earlier this year, I increased the percentage I was saving in my 401k. Admittedly, I would have taken this move regardless of what the market was doing. In this case though, I made the move with the full knowledge that the market was going to be trending downward for the next year or so. As a consequence I knew I would be losing money, in the short term. I saw this as a great buying opportunity to buy shares on the way down, through the bottom, and as things start to look up.

My new wife as an annuity she started her first few years of work. It was started out of the desire to save for retirement and not lose any money. With her change in jobs and some wise financial counseling on my part, we started her into a 403b account. We had planned to slowly withdraw money from the annuity and place it into the 403b to avoid penalties associated with moving the money. I personally think if we can dollar cost average the money in fairly close to the bottom, the penalty will be quickly made up over the next couple of years.

Current climate

What has amazed me the most has been some of the comments about those who work on Wall Street. Some people have as much love for those guys, as they do politicians. Kim highlighted what he felt was the true nature of the market in his post “When Bookies Fail”. The AnarchAngel wants to turn the virtual stock market that we have today, into an actual stock market, in “Three step plan to fix the street”. Mark Cuban thinks the fact CEO’s take no risk will is the real root of the financial problem and says so in “Stock Market Meltdowns – Why they will happen again and again and again.” Meanwhile, in the crime filled capital, Congress is looking at yet another bailout. Are we seeing money go down the drain, in hopes of preventing total financial meltdown? Will they succeed? I don’t know, but God help us if they fail.

Problems as I see it

My suggestion is not meant to cover all of the problems that I see in our current financial world just the main one that I see which is causing the bailouts. This is by no means meant to cover the history of how we ended up drunk and broke on the Las Vegas strip, either. Additionally, the suggestion is not meant to keep companies from failing or to provide for an every steady increasing stock market. No institution man has every created has been perfect and I expect no less out of our financial system. I just don’t want to have to pay for others mistakes, in the form of bailouts. Bailouts or the worst investment you can make: All the risk and no reward.

The free market is the victim of…

The free market and evolution have a lot in common: Constant pressure to survive, scarce resources, and constant competition from others in the ecosystem\market. That is why I am not surprised to hear examples of ultra success stories in the market. When you have evolved kill, you do it well – and then you get fat. The free market is the victim of its own success. At a certain point in time, you become too large, to unwieldy to operate in a changed environment and you die…or get a bailout.

Break up extremely large entities

While I think AnarchAngel's and Mark Cuban’s suggestions both have merit, I would like to suggest a different approach and would prevent the “too big to fail” phenomenon, and therefore bailouts.

When a company captures over 20 percent of a market place, they should be split into two different companies.

Harsh? Yes. Will it complicate things for everyone? Yes. Will it increase the cost of goods and services? Possibly. On the positive side, it will give those busy bodies in congress something to do with their time. Instead of over regulating those willing to take a risk with their own money, they can spend their time searching for the next victim to split up.

Back

2008-09-18T16:38:00.006+14:00

Been real busy. I got married. The associated planning for the wedding, move, and process of combining two lives have taken up a not so small portion of my time. The wedding was great. We were on budget for the wedding and honeymoon. Needless to say i was pleased by that. Now on to the next task - getting a house. I hear they are easy to find these days.

Just to make the ladies jealous here is the engagement ring i purchased my beloved.

It was a custom job, I have three dimension wire frame pictures as well. The above is the final render. I choose the symbol of the Celtic trinity, because my wife has worn one trinity earring for as long as i have known her. The side stones ended up a little larger than the picture. Other than that and the changes that have been made to size the ring, it looks like the picture.

I also purchased a Sig P226, again for the wife. Stainless slide, so it matches the ring.

Feelings, Nothing but Feelings

2008-06-30T03:40:00.003+14:00

BEIJING, May 22 (Reuters) - China will move Olympic-bound and provincial-level athletes from quake-hit Sichuan, after coaches said low morale was affecting their training, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

The athletes, including 19 headed for the Beijing Games in August, escaped unharmed from the 7.9 magnitude quake that struck the southwestern province last week, though some had lost family members and a number of training facilities had been destroyed, state media said this week.

China's sports ministry had ordered authorities in other provinces to make arrangements for most of the athletes, who number about 500, after psychological counselling had failed to lift their spirits, Xinhua said.

"It's actually very serious. While we can manage people in such times, it is difficult to manage their feelings," Xinhua quoted Zhang Rongwei, head of a local sport institute, as saying. "At present, the athletes' coaches are not satisfied with their training," Zhang said. Several Sichuan teams had already moved to other provinces, and the rest would be moved over the next few days, Xinhua said. Many of the athletes had been training at damaged, albeit safe, venues in and around Chengdu where regular aftershocks have been reported.'

I can't stand those communists. It is thinking live the above that over time will make these less and less effective over time. Trying to control feelings is like trying to manage the raging Mississippi. Here is the original link which has expired.

cube

Dumbest headline I've seen in awhile.

2008-04-22T03:59:00.001+14:00

Found this article on the net awhile back. The headline was so spectacutally dumb that I had to share it with you.

One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century.

You know me, I can't miss an opportunity to poke fun at at an aging scientist. The problem with that statement is that, within the next 100 years, 6 billion people are probably going to die anyway ( i.e. old age). Upon actually reading the article, I found it quite informative. It covers the career of James Lovelock, who has made a profound influence on climate science. If you have time, the juice is worth the squeeze.

Of course, by actually reading the article you will find out what Lovelock said:

By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

Leave it to a reporter to screw up a quote.

cube

Cholesterol

2008-03-31T10:24:00.005+14:00

Here are the results of my latest blood test. To recap, I have been eating healthy for the past two years (Shorty after my first blood test). I lost some weight and have gotten in a lot better shape. This was the first post that I made concerning my cholesterol. Below are all the tests I have ever had.

Overall not great news, but not bad news either. My LDL, triglycerides, and VLDL were all higher. The triglyerides and VLDL were both still within the optimal levels, though. Which is great, I seemed to solve those poblems! The HDL has been rising slowly, which is good. It is now just within the optimal range. Keep in mind, at 60 it starts to confer a protective benefit.

The LDL is higher than it should be, less than 100 is Optimal. As you can see the LDL has been steadily rising since I have started monitoring it. That is really discouraging. I have put in a lot of work and effort. To see that number going to wrong way makes the task at hand seem...impossible. Talking with my doctor, eased some of my concerns. Your cholesterol can vary by a large amount day to day. He also was not worried, because I am young and it takes a long time for cholesterol to kill you. The only positive thing I can think of, is that because I am eating healthier and eating more antioxidants the LDL is not sticking to my arteries as much, so it is building up in my blood stream. The down side is that the LDL is building up in my bloodstream so their is more of it to stick to my arteries.

Recently, my dad (in his 60's) also had a quadruple bypass. His father also had serious heart problems which killed him in his 60's before I was born. My doctor is not worried, but I know the clock is ticking, ticking slowly, but still ticking.

After the test and Dad's bypass I made several changes. I have started drinking more tea. I was already drinking a lot, but I bumped up my consumption. I also have gone organic. Basically it is an experiment to see if my LDL is rising because of something I am eating. Next test we will know something. I also started eating more oatmeal and flax seeds. If that does not help, I am going paleolithic.

cube

CFLs: A Republican's dream?

2008-01-25T15:03:00.000+14:00

If you hate the environment and love money, the invisible hand has created just what you need. They are called CFLs (Compact fluorescent Lights). These lights save your money by using less of your electricity than the normal incandescent light bulbs and they last for thousands of hours.

They destroy the environment, because they have lead and mercury in them. When you toss them in the trash, they will poison the earth for thousands of years to come. You would recycle them if it was in your best interest. If you are caught just say you didn't know what "Dispose of properly" meant.

And get this, certain states want to make incandescent light bulbs illegal. So these environmental time bombs will be your only choice. Heh, those crazy eviron-ists think they are so smart.

cube

Match Ranking

2007-12-03T04:29:00.000+14:00

I only posted a few hours ago about how I did in my first IDPA match. Already, I have had many people ask how I did. I could give you a bunch of numbers to read and let you figure it out or...I could give you a picture.

Here are the match scores below. I am the one in the green.

My squad shot the match backwards. We started at the sixth stage and worked to the first stage. The first one I started out strong, but that was just beginners luck. From the fifth to the first, I steadily improved. My final place was third from the bottom. The first column is my overall rank. I shot ESP Unclassified and beat the other person who was unclassified and one who was classified as marksman. I have also discovered that I don't slap my women, but I slap my trigger.

cube

cube

Prickly Sheep

2007-12-02T14:26:00.000+14:00

I am on the path to becoming a sheepdog (background here). Recently, I took a two day shooting class with TDSA. It was only the entry level course, which taught me just the basics. After the two day course, I went to my first IDPA match. Let's just say I didn't come in last. I also recently started martial arts classes (ketsugo jujitsu if it matters).

cube

Follow the Red Ball

2007-12-02T13:39:00.000+14:00

One thing people fail to realize when wishing for total government health care is that all of the people employed in private insurance will lose their job. It will not happen all at once, by any means, but eventually the private insurance that we all know and hate will be put out of business.
If government run health care kicks into high gear, two things will happen at once: the number of people working for private insurance will drop, the number of people working for new the government health care system increase.

In a nation with about 4.7 percent unemployment, the people hired by the government will be the same people fired by the private insurance companies.

And certain people think that the government can do a better job running health care....

cube

Running with knives

2007-08-04T14:43:00.000+14:00

When I run, I like to carry a knife with me. Sometimes I run in some areas that are fairly remote; other times I run in the heart of the city. Whether I am on my on, where nobody can hear me scream, or coming in constant contact with people, I like to carry a bit of self defense. So I started carrying a folder on my jaunts.

After a few rainstorms it got a little rusty. Secondly and more importantly, there were several problems with deploying it. It is lot harder to present to an attacker than a fixed blade. Also, because some of my shorts do not have pockets, it would move between waistband and pockets, depending on the shorts I was wearing. When in the waistband, the knife tended to get flipped upside down. I set out to solve these different problems.

I was looking for a fixed blade knife that would be very resistant water, sweat, and dirt. It does not have to be too large, but I would like to fit the hand well. I had considered neck knives, but if I was on the ground in an odd position, the knife would not be in a consistent spot. I looked around and Gerber has a river shorty which is made for wet environments, like river rafting. I saw one in the store and the point was blunted. Great for making sure you do not pop you inflatable life jacket, not so great for poking holes in people, and let's face it that is what we are looking for here.

After some searching, I found a line of knives by Cold Steel, Nightshade, which look like they might fit the bill. The only catch is that these knives are plastic (ok fiber glass composite). After debating it with myself I ordered two. I ordered the FGX CAT TANTO and FGX BOOT BLADE II. Let us start with the bad, then I will move to the good.

The bad, these knives are NOT work knives, survival knives, or knives to be used for skinning game. While they could possible be put to use in those capacities, they are not designed for that. Their only goal in life is to poke holes in things. The edges on these knives are dull. The tanto is a little large to be concealed easily. The boot blade is a little thin and the point is fairly flexible. Additionally, they do not come with sheathes.

While the tanto is a little two large, the boot blade is just right. It fits the hand great and the rubber handle is grippy when wet and sweaty. While the boot blade is a little thin, it has a spine that runs the length of the blade, which I believe provides enough strength for simple thrusts. Another great advantage is that the knives are both very light, this makes them easily to carry while running. Besides, the blades were only about 10 dollars a piece. I also figured that I could make a sheath from duct tape. What better material to make a sheath for a plastic knife out of, than duct tape.

Here is the finished product.

Overall, I have been happy with my purchase, though I would prefer the boot blade to have a little bit less flexible blade. As I was gathering links, i found out about the river runner. It is a river shorty with a sharp point. I will probably replace the knives with that one, because I honestly have a hard time trusting my life to a plastic knife.

cube

My current favoite place

2007-07-31T15:36:00.000+14:00

There is not much I like better than TV, but I have found something that consistently makes me happy, makes me feel smarter, and better informed. I present TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Basically, it brings people in and lets them talk. You see wonderful presentations on a range of subjects. The best talks i have seen recently range from exploration of the earth, moon, and Europa to how we should reorganize our military. Most of the speakers are really good and compelling, others are just pandering there ideas and beliefs...but they do it very well. The videos can be anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes long, just when I am getting tired of something, it is over and I can move one to another neat idea.

cube

We had a zen breakthough

2007-07-31T15:04:00.000+14:00

My girlfriend finally got on paper a few weekends ago. In retrospect it was the Zen talk that did it. I had covered shooting stance, had her dry-fire till her nubbins were wet with blood, covered sight alignment. I didn't come out last weekend expecting her to hit the ten ring every time, but I was hoping that she had not lost much of what we had gained, though our hard work. Out of an entire mag, only two were on paper. I was near desperation. I had to go kung-fu spiritual on her. "Imagine you are a bird...flying...then pull the trigger so fast you don't know what happened." It worked, that whole zen like state, pulling the trigger slowly, while trying to foget about the big bang that is coming got all twelve rounds on paper, and many in the area where she was aiming. She when from no holes, to seeing the brass come out of the gun (I still close my eyes!).

It is hard to get better at shooting, when you can't even tell where the bullet is going. Now that she is on paper, the nature process of self correction can take place. And only a few more hundred thousand rounds before she can do it while running upside down on the ceiling like that matrix show.

cube

One of my favorite things

2007-07-31T13:24:00.000+14:00

Time is money and I have to little of either. Recently, I converted reading all of my lovely blogs over to RSS feeds. Being using Mozilla Thunderbird as my access client of choice. Liked it because i received posts like emails. Saved me from clicking around the net going to sites that were not updated. Then I upgraded....unsure of what transpired to during the upgrade to break the time-saving functionality I so much loved. Quick search on RSS readers shows that Google has one. Need to sign up, no problem - I sign up with my MSN Hotmail account. Now I can access my RSS feeds anywhere in the world. More access means more time to read, which means I can read more. I can even store posts offline and take them with me. Videos play inside of the reader, because it is web based, pictures show up. This is currently my second favorite thing on the internet.

cube

Heros

2007-06-02T17:00:00.000+14:00

No not the show that just ended poorly, the real kind.

Basically, i know one of the guys how help free those 42 Iraqis From Al Qaeda Prison.

His posts on the matter.

cube

Back

2007-05-22T13:47:00.000+14:00

Sorry I have been gone so long. I promise it will be worth it...well maybe not.

Reason for absence

I moved again, so was without the net for several weeks. Then once i got the net, i wanted to catch up on my blog reading before posting. The new apartment is nicer than the old house I was in. It is 3 times further away from work and the same distance to my girl. Funny, my gas usage is the same. There are several reasons for this. First, I was so close to work, that I was going home over lunch. Second, the entire trip to work did not allow the engine to get warmed up. Driving for 15 minutes twice a day at highways speeds uses the same amount of gas as driving 5 minutes four times a day on surface streets.

Also, I was able to swing not paying for rent for the last year so I was able to get my student loan paid off. I am now debt free!! Because of not needing to pay for the loan or a storage locker anymore, i am living on about the same amount of money I was before I moved, which ain't to bad.

What I have been doing with my time

I have been running and working out a lot recently. Yesterday, i ran 4 miles in about 37 minutes. Not stellar time, but pretty good for a guy who sits at a desk all day. I recently ran a mile in 7:45, a 5k in 26 minutes. Not the best times in the world, but I am getting faster and stronger. I run three times a week and try to do a maintenance workout to keep muscle mass, on my days off. The running is varied, sometimes low and slow with a 15 pound pack, sometimes hills, sometimes speed work. The maintenance workout consists of push ups, sit ups, pull ups, and stretching.

Also, I think i have found the thing to keep my shin splits at bay. I have been reading some of my sister's Running World magazines, from 2005. There were these very nice large advertisements for the Nike Free. I decided that if running barefoot is supposed to be good for you, then i should give it a try. I have been some some short sprint type runs on grass at the nearby park. They seem to have lessened the splits. And you also feel a lot faster, when you run barefoot for some reason.

Funny things I have thought up.

Peanut butter comes out the same color it goes in.
Kiss my muscle mass.

Things to save you time

I have learned how to cook oatmeal while I am in the shower and how to cook brown rice while I am running. It is like being in two places at once and it is great.

Shooting

Signed up for a basic tactical two day course later on in the year. Have been looking forward to this for a couple of years now. Should have done it earlier, but better later than never.

cube

Hmm

2007-05-07T07:48:00.000+14:00

My body is a cage, that keeps me from dancing with the one(s) I love, but my mind is the key
-the Arcade Fire

Not going out like James Kim

2007-03-03T14:33:00.000+14:00

Well the entire James Kim epeisode inspired me to do a bug out bag overall. This is my BOB (bug out bag), survial kit, and fugitive kit (fukit). It weighs about 35 pounds, most of that is in fluids. It is a little heavier than I want it to be, but it will have to do for now. I am sure I could carry it for quite aways, but still need to be in better shape to ensure survial.

Here is my list. I have divided my gear into two different sections. The car kit is in a big container and the Bug out bag is in a...uh...bag.

Car Kit
1 pair Leather Gloves
1 cheap Ice Scraper
1 Tri Fold Shovel (derusted myself, painted with rustoleum, and oiled)
1 Heated Ice Scrapper
1 pair Jumper Cables
1 Car powered Air Pump
1 half used can of Ice Melt chemical
1 cheap Pressure Gauge
1 Deluxe Tire repair kit from Wal-Mart
1 pair of Stabilicers Anti-Skid Soles
1 Trioxane fire starter bar
1 emergency poncho
1 Cheap mini mag light knock off
2 Bottles of Tire Slime
4 Extra Rags

Stowed In car
1 Large US, Canda, and Mexico Rand MacNally Map
1 Window breaker\Seat beld cutter

Bug Out Bag
1 medium alice pack

Colthing
Winter\Outdoor\Walking
1 thick wool blanket
1 Grey Basic kit stocking cap
1 Large Poncho
1 Pair of Dahlgren Hiking socks
2 Extra hiking boot laces

Food
1 can of tuna fish
1 can of pork and beans
1 can of black beans
1 box of FulFill (Vitiam Enhanced Drink mix)
2 64 oz bottles of Gatorade

Self protection
1 Handgun with full mag
1 half case of extra ammo (about 25 rounds)
1 extra IWB holster
2 extra full mags

Fire
1 Trioxane fire starter bar
Normal Matches in water proof container
2 boxes of water proof matches

Other Gear
1 roll of duck tape
1 Black Diamond Hybrid head lamp (one led bulb and one Xenon buld)
1 swiss army knife
1 Whistle\compass\singnaling mirror\ water proof contianer
1 Pencil
1 Pen
1 whistle
1 first aid kit (anti diarrhea medicine, lots of Moleskin)
1 pair of binoculars
1 fixed blade knife
1 car charger for cell phone
1 can of BREAK-FREE CLP
Extra Batteries
Tin foil
50 inches of Cord

Gear: Cheap\Charity\Extra
1 mini mag light
1 emergency space blanket

Wish list
4 epipens
Personal Bivey
Sleeping bag
Water filter\purifier
Gas mask
Full sized tire and rim

cube

Almost coolest night ever

2007-03-03T13:45:00.000+14:00

Well last night was almost the coolest night ever. My girlfriend and I had been following the "Safe Escape" segments on the local NBC news. Last years series was about child abductions, this years series was about school shootings. I thought that I had heard the exact same thing from Say Uncle (here), well it turns out that the DARE program that was mentioned must have been safety expert Bob Stuber, which you can see in the videos from the first link.

In the news series he taught the difference between cover and concealment, mentioned to use fire extinguishers for cover, and the option of putting soap on the floor in a bathroom so that they bad guy will slip and fall (which for the record i think is a bad idea). What was most interesting was the way he taught those things to the students. The school he was at let him drill a select group of students on a Saturday. He drilled them once, about half were killed by a pretend gunman. The talked about what went wrong made suggestions for corrections, then drilled them again. More survived, but he changed the game on them and the ones that did the exact same thing as they did the first time were killed (again by a pretend gunman.)

The girlfriend and I DVRed the entire thing and watched it before we went to the stage presentation last night. We had a chance to win an X-Box 360 and I wanted to hear what he had to say. Most importantly I wanted my girlfriend (who is a teacher) to hear what he had to say. It was really good, he did not pull liberal bull crap and got right to the point. He even mentioned once that the guns were not the problem, it was the jacked up kids.

About half of his presentation was talking about the violence cycle of school shootings, they tend to come in threes. He also talked about how to recognize a potential school shooter and what to do about it before they potential shooter becomes an actual shooter. The last part of his presentation was mostly a repeat of what he mentioned on the news cast, but he got people from the audience to help. My girlfriend was one of the helpers.

She thinks she was picked because she is hot, i think she was picked because he looks like a 12 year old. Either way - she was on stage and could end up on TV. The best part is that she also got the job of sending a chair through a window!!!! I am proud to say that she would have escaped. She even got to answer some after event questions for the camera. Because of her excellent command of the English language I have no doubt will be used to promote the program in the future. If I could have won the XBox, it would have been the coolest night ever.

If your children get the chance to particpate in the Safe Escape program, i would make sure they go. It is the real thing and could save their lives.

cube

Funny Picture

2007-03-01T18:06:00.000+14:00

This picture was taken off of the DVR with my camera phone. It is of a man accused of child porn. Funnest thing i have seen in awhile. For those of you who can't see the picture, it is "courtesty of myspace.com".

My sources tell me that it was some sort of computer child porn. I wonder exactly how the goverment traced the kiddie porn to this man. I wonder if the goverment is setting up fake kiddie porn sites and tracking down and charging the people with child porn on their computer.

cube

You found me

2007-02-11T15:09:00.001+14:00

I am the father of Anna Nickole Smith's baby.

cube

minimum wage

2007-01-14T09:07:00.000+14:00

Alright so lets go through the consequences of what happens when the minimum wage is raised. Wal-Mart will then have to start paying more to it's employees. Wal-Mart will also raise it's prices to keep the profit margin constant, go to make a buck you know. At that point in time, all the people who work at Wal-Mart will start paying more for all the things they also buy from Wal-Mart, and they will be just as poor after the minimum wage hike as they were before.

Secondly, I will get screwed because my prices at Wal-Mart will also go up, but my wages won't.

A little sunlight will clear the air

2007-01-13T16:29:00.001+14:00

I have been thinking and reading about credit because it is so important these days. I have learned a lot and have also learned how little I actually know about it. Such as, how is my credit score figured out, how do i improve my credit score, can I trust these companies that have so much control over my life?

Credit – how to figure it. When i first started reading about credit I though that I would find a few sites that gave me a some formulas. I thought figuring out my credit score would be as easily as figuring out my BMI. Well it is not. You can get a credit history report for free (best site is this one: https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp) , but you have to pay money for your credit score. Hear that!! You have to pay money for something that is supposedly already yours. Truth in advertising would make them say, “You have to pay money for their ranking of your credit”. Also, the formula the three different credit companies use to figure out your credit score is apparently classified. The best the FTC can do is this (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre03.htm):

“Information about you and your credit experiences, like your bill-paying history, the number and type of accounts you have, late payments, collection actions, outstanding debt, and the age of your accounts, is collected from your credit application and your credit report. Using a statistical formula, creditors compare this information to the credit performance of consumers with similar profiles. A credit scoring system awards points for each factor. A total number of points — a credit score — helps predict how creditworthy you are, that is, how likely it is that you will repay a loan and make the payments on time. Generally, consumers with good credit risks have higher credit scores.”

You do not have exact details on how your credit score is calculated. All you have are general details on being a good indebted serf, and making all your payments on time like a good boy. Remember to eat your veggies, too. Keep in mind these credit companies sale YOUR information to other companies. Is it possible that they are telling those companies information that they want to hear. For example, a credit card company would want a person who would never default on their payments, but who also carries a balance. Best of both words. You do not pay these companies, anything you really have no say in what they are telling their clients, the banks and profiteers of the world.

How do we solve the problem of these private companies having so much control over your information. For most people, dropping off of the credit map would be impossible. I think all they would have to do is post their formulas to the web. Once we know how they are computing our scores, we can determine for ourselves if they are fair and honest and which companies to trust.

cube

Open immigration

2007-01-13T14:24:00.000+14:00

There are many ideas in the immigration. Close the borders with wall or electronic fence. Open those borders, because we can't close them anyways and it is the nice human thing to do. An idea occurred to me recently. I have never heard the idea before, though I am sure someone has brought it up, but like i said I have never heard the idea before.

Do not get rid of all immigration quotas, just get rid of them for one country at a time. Make a bid deal of it in the news, maybe hire some pr guys from these international corporations to advertise for us. There would be requirements of course. Such as the person, should be trying to learn English, any American flare (office space lingo) would also help speed the process of acceptance. A test for any incurable and communicable diseases would be nice. Though if it was curable or not communicable, i don't see why it should matter. We could pay for the people's moving expenses, this will ensure that we will get the most people possible. Also put an expiration date on the offer, maybe a year or two.

A year after closing the offer we should then turn around and declare war on the country we opened quotas on and KILL every single living human thing in it using our new citizens are soldiers. This will have the effect of weeding out the ones who are weak or really did not like America as much as they though. Obviously the people that were left did not like America enough to move, or they were fence sitters, which are just as bad. We could probably solve a whole heck of a lot of problems if we were able to separate the good American loving civilians, from all the other people. We could clear out those last hand holds of communism, terrorism, drug lords, and circus clowns.

cube

Giving Conundrum

2007-01-13T13:56:00.000+14:00

Being generous is one of the key traits that separates humans from the animals. The animal kingdom is famous for its brutality and its pecking orders. Because of our humanity we are able to give to the lessor among who don't share our own genes or who we will not receive any direct benefit from.

In the past you could be reasonably certain that when you give money to people, they were in real need and that they had done all that they could to secure the three basic necessities. Even further back, you would not give cash because all you had to give was your time or physical belongings. In my society, these assumptions no longer hold true. We are at near full employment. There is a free public education system to take advantage of (and if you are nice you can even stay there a few years longer than normal). There are tons of sources to get free money to go to college – the government, the army, the sweat of your own brow, private loans from financial institution. If you are poor it is most likely because of the choices you have made. Are there exceptions? Yes. Are they the rule? I do not believe so.

Secondly, the progression of the welfare state has created a class of people dependent of the government for food, education, health care, and even reduced cost transportation.

Therein lies the dilemma. Giving makes you human but giving to unworthy causes creates guilt. I have no good answers to this problem, though I can tell you the strategy that I have taken. I try to give to local causes or local causes dealing with children. The children are the future and that means you are the past and therefore less important. I also try to give to organizations that share my value of hard work. One organization I give to, is willing to give you money for work (mowing the yard, picking up trash, etc.). They seldom have takers.

cube

The State of Security

2007-01-12T10:51:00.000+14:00

So as the count of dead soldiers surpasses the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks, can you really say that Bush has been keeping the country safer? Or just selecting which ones die? 0 senators, 0 fortune 500 members, 0 investment bankers. The Global War on Terrorism has a lot more to do with us enforcing police measures at home rather than overthrowing governments through military measures.

Trite Wanderings

2007-01-08T11:22:00.000+14:00

So I may have missed a step by talking about candidates. Who cares who they are? What is important to me? Or you? So here is my list of concerns for the next four years, in no particular order; Iraq-win or leave, Global Warming-dying polar bears and the rest of the environment, Controlling the Mexican Border, which leads into the next one-National Security, and finally balancing the budget and keeping the economy healthy. To be honest, I am don't take a polarizing view of abortion. I support it in extreme cases but not as a form of birth control. I don't advocate legalizing drugs. I support gays having the same rights as everyone else, as long as it doesn't ascend into preferential treatment. I support free trade generally, but I think Friedman makes good points about each country, company, and person being held responsible for making decisions to benefit the whole.

Pick Your Pony (Part 2)

2007-01-03T10:42:00.000+14:00

BTW, here is a list of the official and announced presidential candidates care of wikipedia; John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, and Joe Biden. You can read more about them and the potentials at wikipedia.

Pick Your Pony

2007-01-03T10:36:00.000+14:00

I recently completed a poll at selectsmart, and was matched with these presidential candidates as ones that most supported the issues that I valued.
(100%) 1: Gov. George Pataki (R) Information

(95%) 2: Ex-VP Al Gore (D) Information

(91%) 3: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) Information

(89%) 4: Gov. Bill Richardson (D) Information

(87%) 5: Sen. Joseph Biden (D) Information

(86%) 6: Ex-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R) Information

(86%) 7: Sen. Barack Obama (D) Information

(84%) 8: Gov. Mitt Romney (R) Information

(81%) 9: Sen. Evan Bayh (D) Information

(79%) 10: Sen. John Kerry (D) Information

Which is strange because I am not particularly fond of any of them. Kerry is a huge a loser. Biden's daughter is not the most upstanding of individuals (I knew her in college), and I would be reluctant to let her dad lead the country. I am also not a huge Newt Gingrich fan, and admit to being fairly oblivious toward the rest of them.

The state of the CCW union

2006-12-20T16:33:00.000+14:00

Judging to the reaction to my post entitled "Almost First Draw" (here), there seems to be a major disconnect between those who carry weapons and those that do not. Even the ones go weaponless AND support the right to bear arms, seem to not understand the basic tenants Conceal and Carry Wavier (CCW) holders operate under. It is my goal to bridge the gap between the two groups. Concealed carry is tightly intermixed with the subject of "justifiable use of deadly force" and mindset of self defense, which we will cover in due time. For the beginners, and any that might stumble along this post, I would like to give a little primer on the subject, both political and statistical, to explain where the state of CCW is. I would suggest, you take your time and read the links I provide. They will help your understanding of the CCW culture.

In the beginning

Way back in 1987 Florida was the first state in the Union to pass a modern shall issue CCW law. Since then 39 states (2 this year) have passed similar laws "shall issue" laws and many have reciprocity agreements with each other to respect the licenses of other states, much like drivers licenses. In 8 other states you might be able to get a CCW license if your sheriff is gun friendly or you are well connected enough. In 2 states, the right to carry a gun is denied. You cannot drive coast to coast yet, but a recent national conceal and carry bill that was introduced in the U.S. House might change that.

Since the introduction of conceal and carry laws our nation has experienced a continuous drop in crime, to the point of record low level today(1), this year being a notable exception. There are now more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens, than ever before in the history of America (Page 47). (2) Too determine if you have the ability to get a CCW, please visit www.packing.org for more state by state information.

In fact studies have shown that conceal and carry holders are more law abiding on average than the police who protect us, which should put to rest many people's of the fears (Page 9) . There have been no shootouts between conceal and carry holders over fender benders, that I know of (3). In fact, I can think of a couple stories where conceal and carry holders saved lives, in crowded settings. The right to carry has come a long way, though it is now considered a "privilege" instead of a right by many states. Eventually I hope that situation is remedied along with several other major gun rights issues.

Justifiable use of Deadly force and its requirements (4)

I have not done a survey of all the states, but in the right minded ones, the main principle that determines if the use of deadly force is justifiable or is murder, is if the victim feels that great bodily harm or death could result from an attack. For the most part this does not apply to criminals in the commission of a crime. You can also shoot to defend the life of another, but that is a little more complicated because there are more unknowns. The deadly force test is normally applied both in the grand jury and at trial, if the case makes it that far. This fact has pushed some people to go to great lengths to ensure that IF they do appear in front of a grand jury, their actions are just and that their weapons are politically correct. Appearances could matter to an jury that is uninformed about guns. I personally wonder if you can be sued for NOT intervening to save another's life? I am sure a suit could be brought, though I do not know if it could gain traction.

Another point to note, is that in some states if your home is being invaded while you are present you are presumed to be in danger of your life or limb and can use deadly force against the home invader. Again this only applies to states where common sense actually plays apart in making the laws. In several states this year, castle doctrine was strengthened inside of you home and car. Also, in several of those states the duty to retreat was removed while in public.

Personally, I believe you should also be able to shoot in the defense of property, though the law in most states does not agree with me on that. For example, in my one of my CCW classes it showed a video clip of a man robbing a car and the owner stepping outside of the house. In one version the crook ran away, in that case you could not legally apply deadly force. In another version, the crook turned around with a screwdriver and approached the homeowner, at that point in time the homeowner could legally use deadly force IF he feared for either his life or limb. The one exception that I know of is Texas, there you can shoot in the defense of property, and in some situations you could just be watching the property for someone else, for example house sitting. If you state has a CCW program, it most likely has a CCW class. In that class is where the nuisances of your states laws are explained along with examples of situations and what to do in those situations.

Other comments on the law

It should be pointed out that there are typically laws concerning the brandishing weapons, these typically have a wider variety between states. These laws have led to the general accepted philosophy that if you are going to draw your gun, you had better use it. In other words, before drawing a gun there should be a clear and present danger to your limb or life. Drawing a gun for deterrence is seldom recommended, though according to studies it actually happens more than two million times a year.

Also, in most of the right minded states your attacker (or preferably their family) cannot sue if your use of deadly force was found justifiable based on the attacker's actions. This is the case in Oklahoma. This provides a great peace of mind to the gun owner who uses their gun to defend their self or their family.

Another thing to keep in mind that, if you fire you gun you will most likely be responsible for any damages you bullet causes outside of the attacker. Just because the criminal cannot sue does not mean your neighbor next door cannot sue for bullet holes in their house. Even pistol rounds will penetrate walls. One thing to note, and I will expound on the implications of this later, is that as a civilian you are at a tactical disadvantage in many dynamic self defense situations because "Action always beats reaction".

Preparing to carry

As you can see from the proceeding passages, the choice to carry a gun has its own set of problems legally and morally. In spite of the legal risks and the moral implications many choose to carry everyday. Some have decided that the upside, survival, is worth the downside, possibility killing someone and then having to go through the required legal proceedings, which will be extremely expensive and time consuming, not to mention emotionally disturbing. Some feel that rights are lost if not exercised. Regardless of how you feel you must come to terms with the moral, ethical, and legal issues surrounding conceal and carry -- BEFORE you carry your gun. If you let the issues linger, doubts, second guessing, and indecision could haunt you when action is needed most. Most likely, you would have died with or without the gun, but the sad thing is that with proper information beforehand and forethought on your part a productive and useful life (yours) might have been saved. In other words, if you have a flawed understanding of the law, are unwilling to use the gun for your defense, or if you do not have the skill to properly use a gun for your defense (5), you might should rethink your decision to carry and just run at the first sight of trouble. The one thing conceal and carry does bring to the table is options, which are not present if you are gunless.

The state of mind while carrying

Once you have thought critically about carrying an weapon and have decided that it is the right decision for you, you have crossed an important milestone but your journey is not done. A gun is an important part of a personal protection strategy, but it is not a magic ward against the threats you could face. Should you be faced with a threat you will go though the OODA loop. In order for you to get to the response level (act) of the loop you have to elevate the threat past the threat threshold level. Fortunately, this is easy to achieve though situational awareness or more of a hyper-awareness. The tool of a color coded threat system helps out tremendously in explaining the topic of situational awareness. Once a threat is recognized, the level of the threat must be accessed, and then you can choose an appropriate course of action to save yourself or your loved ones. If you are aware, you can complete the OODA loop quicker than your attacker and hopefully survive to pass on your genes. Failing to orient quicker than your attacker seals your fate. Even if you do recognize the threat early your life is far from safe because you may lack the skill to properly deploy the means to protect yourself. I feel that training is the part many CCW holders skip.

Fight as you train, train as you fight.

I believe training is absolutely necessary to if you are going to carry a concealed weapon. Without training, you will not be able to complete the OODA loop quickly or effectively, which will hinder your chances of surviving a life and death encounter. I do not believe it should be mandated by the state (the quality would decline), but I do believe that the CCW community should place social pressure on its members to be as well trained as they can afford to be. It takes time to develop the muscle memory to draw and aim a gun accurately, especially from the varied locations a gun could be (your glove box, your purse, inside your waist band, etc.) Also, when you are placed under stress many of your fine motor skills will disappear due to the adrenaline surge. This is the one part that I have not completed. I currently am saving the money and the class I am eyeing will be two days and cost about 400 dollars not including the nearly 1000 rounds of ammo I will use.

In conclusion

When you are carrying a weapon, I believe you also carry a responsibility. You must prepare yourself mentally, buy knowing the laws of the land and by being aware of your surroundings. I also believe that your must be fully aware of the deep emotional and moral issues surrounding the use of deadly force in the protection of yourself or others. Lastly, but maybe most importantly, your must train so that your reactions will be sure and quick. This will increase the chance of your survival and decrease the chance that you could miss and injure someone else.

(1) This is not to say that conceal and carry has lowered crime, but it has not risen because of it either.
(2) This is not to say that guns have lowered crime, but it has not risen because of it either.
(3) Probably because when one person pulls a gun, the other person then asks if the have a CCW, if the other person does, both then hug and kiss like Italian brothers.
(4) I am not a lawyer, yada yada, please consult one for laws in you area.
(5) Keep in mind, the skill level for using a gun at typical self defense distances is extremely low.

Doing research

2006-12-20T14:53:00.000+14:00

I want to move away. Away to a better place. Do not get me wrong. I am completely happy where I am now, but when I ask myself if i am in the best place, the answer is a resounding no.

So while doing research on other places i got this message from the CIA website.

Funny.

cube

6 imams walk on to a plane...

2006-11-22T14:04:00.000+14:00

I know you have heard that one before. Well I wanted to share a bit of information with you. Specifically, the recent survey that Pew took of Muslims feeling about terrorists and terrorism.
You can read it yourself, if you want. I didn't, though. I just looked at the numbers on the front page and averaged them out for you. Basically 2.7 out of ten Muslims surveyed support violence against civilians often or sometimes. Three out of ten Muslims have some or a lot of confidence in Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the "right" thing regardless of world affairs (whatever that means).

Statistically, there was a decent chance one of those imams probably had very strong beliefs you should be blown up. Think about that next time you see him complaining about getting kicked off the plane.

cube

Cholesterol

2006-11-19T15:13:00.000+14:00

As I may have mentioned in the past, my cholesterol is high for someone my age. My first test was in April and I recently went and got another one. Since April, I changed my diet, lost 20 pounds, and started exercising again. It took quite a bit of work to lose the weight and get back in shape. Buy the end of the running season (when daylight savings turned off) I was up to three miles again. I am going to try to maintain during the winter by running occasionally and lifting weights. My goal is to lower my body fat percentage by several points to bring it more in line with what is considered normal.

I had some dramatic changes to my blood chemistry, but not the ones I expected. I expected there to be a significant change in my cholesterol, because I heard triglycerides where tough to move with our medication. It turns out that triglycerides are very weight sensitive, and were adjusted the most. I think a picture will explain it.

Triglycerides and VLDL both decreased dramatically. HDL and LDL increased. LDL had the largest increase. Looking at the data, I have come up with my own theory concerning cholesterol and I think it holds a bit of truth (further research revealed my theory to be somewhat true. Read here and here).

First a little background. VLDL, LDL, and HDL all make up your total cholesterol level. VLDL is the smallest, LDL is the next largest, and HDL is the largest of all (update: actually the size information is wrong.). I believe that my VLDL got rolled up into LDL. Additionally, some LDL was rolled up into HDL. The decrease in VLDL shows a general trending of my body creating larger lipids (or cholesterol). How much of this is true, I am not totally sure. Either way, I feel my overall cholesterol improved a bit more than my raw number shows.

cube

Truth in googling…

2006-11-05T16:13:00.000+14:00

"At the suggestion of Say Uncle here’s a google bomb effort to counter the anti-gunners google efforts.

Sensible gun laws

Ban all guns

Ban gun ownership

Just doing my part, feel free to join in."

via Moral Flexibility

cube

Don't Forget

2006-11-05T15:05:00.000+14:00

Don't forget, it is National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month. Heh, that never gets old.

cube

A few Zim Dollars for your soul.

2006-11-05T14:42:00.000+14:00

Recently a friend just happened to be passing through Zimbabwe and picked me up 200,000 Zim dollars. These dollars happened to be right during the currency redenomination, before three zeros got cut off the national currency. These 200,000 Zim dollars would buy you a coke, from what I am told.

Philosophy of self-defense: What is your life worth?

2006-11-04T10:11:00.000+14:00

Remeber your life is only worth the price of a bullet, to a criminal with a gun.

cube

Global Warming Debate

2006-10-17T14:39:00.001+14:00

Recently, Justus gave his point of view on global warming and I thought that I would chime in with my particular take. I feel my insight into the situation, is fairly unique.

Naturally and without any real thought, I tend toward the environmentalism side of the argument. This tendency is based purely on the fact that I grew up in a very rural area and also enjoy hiking and backpacking, when I get a chance.

Most importantly, I feel that the entire topic of global warming and the environment has become a political football, which each side supporting the science it wants to hear. The few scientists who do not know the answer and are seeking the truth, don't get the airtime they deserve. Their voices are drowned out by the scientists, political activist, and media on both sides who have already made up their mind on the issue. In other words, the information you hear on global warming is devoid of objectivity and useless for making up your mind.

I also feel few key facts poke holes in the environmentalists and anti-global warming arguments For example, the air is cleaner than it was 20 years ago, which might actually cause more heating of the earth because more sunshine reaches the ground. Then on the environmentalists side, there is the correlation of CO2 gas with the estimated temperature of the earth.

So without a clear answer on Global warming, I am forced to decide that I am neither for or against polices that could stop, slow, or even reverse global warming, within reason.

Political maneuvering

On the way to Europe I watched Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". During this movie, it became apparent to me that the left has done a great job of spreading the faith of global warming to the American people. The right has attempted to fight back using science and other political means. The right, by putting science in the middle has done the debate a disservice. By trying to oppose environmental rules and regulations, they have made themselves easy to demonize. I am not proposing that they right should lay down and give the left what they want, that would be disastrous You would probably be forced by law to wipe your butt with recycled cardboard, spend a minimum of two years getting to know nature in North Dakota, and be forced to save all of your poop in a big plastic bag to avoid harming the environment. So what should the right's response be to the talk of Global warming?

Al Gore's Idea

Recently, Al Gore suggested replacing the income tax on American businesses with a tax on CO2 (it is there, I read until I found it then threw up.). As long as the tax was revenue neutral, the GOP should take the idea and run with it. I am sure other unique combinations could be created that achieved the environmentalists goals while reducing the tax burden, rolling back gun laws, privatizing social security, removing the personal income tax, removing the capital gains tax, removing the death tax, applying term limits on lawmakers, disbanding the ATF (all those goons could be made to work for the EPA), strengthening eminent domain, letting principals and other teachers carry guns, making sure every person has castle doctrine in their own home and the ability to enforce it, etc.

The environment is a loser for the republicans. The GOP could get some serious swing votes
with a few moves that make republicans and environmentalists happy.

cube

Friend

2006-10-17T14:27:00.000+14:00

Friend,

The xd is a great gun, but there are certian key drawbacks. I probably would choose a glock or a 1911 if budget allowed, if i could do it over again. Keep in mind, that I have never had a misfire, FTF (failure to fee), or FTE (failure to fire). It has functioned flawlessly, though I don't shoot much. I probably only have a few thousand rounds through the gun.

I purchased the 4 inch .40 caliber version. I like the XD because it is a bit heavier than glocks (by six oz if i remember correctly), it has a grip safety, which I think is a wonderful feature. I don't understand why all guns don't have them. It has a better grip angle than glocks (it has the same grip angle as the 1911). The cocked and loaded chamber indicators are also wonderful additions.

My main complaint is that the finish sucks. I have holster wear marks. If the finish was better, i would not have that problem or rust. I did experience some rust once, it was not serious, just cleaned it off with a little oil. It happened when i was carrying it and sweated a little on the back part of the slide. Sweat is especially corrosive. Springfield has fixed the finish issue on the new XD 45's, but i don't know if they have rolled out those changes to other models yet. I could send the gun off to be finished somewhere (springfield would do it for me) or do it myself, but i have not really messed with it.

Other problems include springfield parts policy, which is due to either liability concerns or supply problems, depending on who you talk to. Basically, if something small goes wrong I cannot replace the part myself, because i can't buy it. I would have to send the gun to springfield and have them replace it. Glocks and 1911's don't have that problem. Springfield will do it for free, though. Also because the xd is a bit newer there are less aftermarket items, though there are a lot more than there were two years ago.

They only modification I have made was changing out the guide rod: http://www.pistolgear.com/products.php?id=8

I feel the stock guide rod is the XD's greatest weakness. I choose a 22 pound spring, but I am going to try a weaker spring to see how it shoots (the stock on is 18 lbs.). I think that the slide could be causing my sights to dip when it slams home, though not sure.

Here is an xd forum, if you want to do additional research: http://www.xdtalk.com/

I choose the 4 inch model because it is easier to conceal than the five inch and is more accurate than the 3 inch. Basically, it is a good compromise between lengths. I choose the .40 cal, because it was a compromise between the 9mm and .45 cal.

Presently, my gun feels fairly snappy when shot. Don't know if it is just he .40 caliber round or the strong spring, but my next handgun will probably be a .45 of some kind.

Here is a video for complete assembly and disassembly for you XD.

http://gunvideo.com/pgroup_descrip//6762/?return=%3ftpl%3Dsearch%26search_val%3Dxd

I would suggest at least breaking down the slide every few years if you don't shoot much and carry it a lot. If you shoot a lot and carry, I would probably clean the slide once a year.

If you buy it, you won't be disappointed. Springfield also has a great warranty and will fix it if anything goes wrong at all.

General questions

How do you plan on using your gun? House gun? Car gun? Conceal and carry? Range gun only?

Have you looked at other pistols? Sig, S&W, and Beretta have entered the polymer market with the last few years. HK and glocks have been around a long time and are time tested. I have fallen in love with the 1911 myself. As to metal framed guns, you can't go wrong with a 1911, though in general they are more expensive, though Tarsus recently came out with one for about 500 dollars.

Are you going to get your CCW?

if you have any more questions please email me.

hope this helps

cube

You Tube + Google = ????

2006-10-15T01:30:00.000+14:00

The thing that has me most confused about the whole You Tube thing is that Google already had a video service. Here is the site. You can find it form their homepage. Why would Google purchase another video service?

The only reason i can think of is that, there must be a video that can bring Google to its knees on You Tube and Google wanted it.

Unlike Les, i don't feel this purchase is odd. It is either genius (because I don't understand it) or Google just made a 1.65 billion mistake.

cube

Greatest treasure

2006-10-04T13:34:00.000+14:00

America's greatest treasure is not the lives of it's young men, it is the freedom that those young men protect.

cube

Europe

2006-09-24T02:44:00.000+14:00

Leaving for Sandcastle's wedding today. It is not till next Saturday, but the girlfriend and I will be enjoying some time off before that. I have become less and less excited about traveling as I have gotten older. I get settled in my ways and really don't want to change. All I see is the risks associated with traveling and none of the reward. My ways might be boring and unnaturally regular, but I kind of like it that way.

So did you hear about the experimental train accident? It was probably Japanese engineering. Just another thing to add to the list of things to watch out for, while I am over there. So far the list included terrorists, Nazi's, airplane crashes, and lost/stolen luggage. I feel the time of my death is near. The dark horse in the race of things that will kill me, is spinach. I can see myself being the unlucky bastard who eats the only helping of American spinach and dies because I can't get enough fluids while on the plan ride home. Which indirectly, the terrorists caused the fluid scare, so I would have to score another one for the bad guys.

Wish me luck (not like your sentimental thoughts could change the course of my history anyways, but at least you can say you tried.)

cube

John Titor, CERN, and me

2006-09-21T13:18:00.000+14:00

Earlier posts on Titor. I am going to Europe and might visit CERN, so the fox article here caught my eye. Also for the conspirators view point of what is going on at CERN please take a look at this site

On the top towards the left there is a combo box that says posts by date. You can read all of John titor's posts. I will give you one of the FIRST one in November 2000.

"I was just about to give up hope on anyone knowing who Tipler or Kerr was on this worldline. The basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first "time machine" built by GE. Too bad we can't post pictures or I'd show it to you."

Another one in February 2001

"When I first started posting online a few months ago, I said that major breakthroughs in particle physics were around your corner. Soon, CERN will bring their big machine on line and they will be smashing very fast and high-energy particles together. One of the more odd and potentially dangerous items produced from this increase in energy will be microsingularities a fraction of the size of an electron."

From the fox article, which prompted me to look the above quotes up.

Black holes possible

"The accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is under construction in an underground circular tunnel nearly 17 miles long at CERN, the world's largest physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland. At its maximum, each particle beam the collider fires will pack as much energy as a 400-ton train traveling at 120 mph. By smashing particles together and investigating the debris, scientists hope to help solve mysteries such as the origin of mass and why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. If theories about the universe containing extra dimensions other than those of space and time are correct, the accelerator might also generate black holes, Landsberg and his colleague Savas Dimopoulos at Stanford University in California calculated in 2001." (emphasis mine)

Please Play X-Files music.

cube

On the pope

2006-09-17T07:20:00.000+14:00

Link:"In Iraq, the main Sunni party warned the pope's comments could lead to violence between Muslims and Christians. The pope "should not be lured into returning to the Crusades," the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party said in a statement."

The muslim leaders constantly speak in veiled threats. They use our own political correctness against us, while preaching hate and intolerance. Could lead to violence!?!? From whom would the violence come and to whom would it be directed.

From the same article, "Two churches in the West Bank were hit by firebombs Saturday, and a group claiming responsibility said it was protesting Benedict's words."

If you have been following Dilbert's posts on the middle east (here and here), I think you will understand how serious this problem is and also how fruitless it is to engage religious fanatics.

Do you welcome the coming war or are you afraid?

cube

1 degree of separation

2006-09-16T13:22:00.000+14:00

Romans 1:28 - 32
Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Each of these events happened with one degree of separation between myself and the victim in the last week or so..

A man moved into an apartment and was robbed at gun the very next day. No link.

Jesus "Jesse" Talavera and his mother were killed by a career criminal. Jesse had cerebral palsy.

A 11-year-old boy who was mowing his own yard was killed when he was struck by an overturned vehicle which had been taken out for a joy ride by some teenagers.

cube

Steve Irwin

2006-09-06T16:07:00.000+14:00

You know I actually saw Steve in person at his zoo in Australia with the United States Track and field in 2000. That was awesome and somthing I will always remember. I feel sorry for his family, though I also realize that he knew the risks he was taking.

Though on a more morbid level, I really would like to see the video. Can you imagine the look on his face? Can you read his lips saying, "Oh Crikey"? You know this would have been a lot funnier if he had just lost a leg, eye, and hand.

I would also like to thank Steve, for making me say, read, and write the word crikey more than I had at any other time in my life.

cube

Coworkers theory

2006-09-02T14:15:00.000+14:00

My boss is not a supporter of hybrids or technologies that reduce the amount of gas that America uses. He wants a complete end to end solution, such has fuel cells, not patches on the current state of things.

His reasoning is that as oil and gas consumption is lessened the price of gas will actually go up because as the oil companies lose money, they will raise the price of gas to make up for the loses. Is there anyway for this to happen, without illegal activity, assuming supply stays at its current level?

I actually think it is possible, if for some reason that alternatives to gas are only sold in some parts of the country and not others. The areas without options, will see the price of gas rise. If the government stays out of it though, it lessens they chance of that happening.

There is also the fact is that oil companies are heavily invested in new forms of energy and probably will still be making money off of you, though not from gas.

Are there any cases of commodities not following the supply demand curve when the market has been allowed to work?

cube

Shooting

2006-09-02T12:54:00.000+14:00

In sequence to this post I would like to catch you up on the recent adventures and also throw in a teachable moment that I forgot the first time around.

At the range I shoot at, they have a Springfield 9mm 1911 for rent, that looks like this. I know I am probably going to hell because I shot one, but I guess you could say I was curious and just wanted to have a good time. Well, it shot well and handled great. The girlfriend likes the size, weight, and aesthetics of the 1911, but I will not let her get on in 9mm. I guess you cannot have everything. Ours had adjustable sights which seemed to crowd the top of the slide and make it harder to operate for Stewardess.

This gun really marked a milestone in our gun search. We settled on a caliber and Stewardess also decided that she does not like the plastic guns, after shooting my 40 caliber and holding many others. So we are looking at metal framed 9mms. We have finally made enough progress to start hitting the gun stores. So far we have been to one and the only one she found that she liked was the 9mm Sig 226, in stainless. She has expensive tastes.

In out next shooting session before the gun shop, I got Stewardess to shoot a Smith and Wesson model 64. I really did not think there was a chance Stewardess would like this gun and I was right. Though I felt of I was necessary to at least shoot a revolver once, just to make sure. She shot high with it, but she was more accurate with it than she was with other guns. She also shot it better than me. Revolvers are weird.

As to the teachable moment. Have you ever shot 9mm ammo in a .40 caliber gun? I have. It happened to the Sig we shot first. It was my fault, I should have checked the gun before I loaded it up with 9mm. It could also be related to the fact that I was probably less than clear in the gun I wanted and did not actually see the gun range worker get it. If I was watching more closely, we would not have made it to the range. Make sure you gun matches your ammo. In fact I think that should be the real (as opposed to Jack Bauer's) 5th rule of gun safety, if it is not already. Oh well, it was a rental anyways.

cube

Unintended consequences

2006-08-20T05:52:00.000+14:00

I would like to mention one possible unintended consequence. I will throw out the idea, without any fanfare, to the blogsphere to see what you think.

The media is partially to blame for the successful adoption of CCW laws in the many of the States.

The news at 5:00, 6:00, and 10:00 shows all the bad things that have happened in you area today. They show the murders, robberies, and all the ultra-violence they can to get their ratings up. They have increased their coverage of crime, even though crime is lower than it was 10, 15, or even 20 years ago. You could believe that they had other motives, such as making the average person believe they need more police or to have some other unknown effect on the population. If that was the case, I doubt the coverage of crime would be so uniform, because producers would make widely different choices nationwide.

The result of bracketing prime-time with crime, has been the feeling that you must do something to protect yourself. Which most reasonable people come to the conclusion that a gun is a fine protection mechanism. I believe this is evidence of the interrelated nature of the media and the consumers of media. The concentration on crime by the news media is not the only reason for the success of CCW laws, but it is one influence. Of course the fact that CCW laws, at worst do no harm and at best save lives, probably has something to do with it.

In other news, there was a recent study linking sexual songs that teenagers listen to with teenagers that have sex. What if it is the other way around? Teenagers who have sex tend to listen to songs that talk about sex. I have no doubt, that both influence the other. The media you consume has an effect, those effects might be fairly predictable or they might even have some unintended consequences.

cube

Hindsight on information processes

2006-08-20T05:26:00.000+14:00

We recently made it to the finial stages of a project at work. It was a major project, started before I arrived. It has been needed by the business for quite awhile and has already provided great benefit by giving the business better metrics on a core (I would say THE) business process.

As we are coming to the end, we are having problems achieving certain goals that were established for a key group. The reason we incorporated this group into the project in the first place is because they are on the front end and if their process was not rewritten, they would screw up the middle and end part of our process, thereby causing the entire project to fail. Essentially, scope creep.

Since their part of the project was an afterthought, we did not do as good of a job as should have been done. So we are going to have to rewrite their part of the process to meet their needs and the business needs. After the meeting with this group, that is when I realized that with strongly coupled information processes you should probably start with the first steps and work to the last steps, instead of starting in the middle. I also pointed that out to my boss.

cube

5th rule of gun safty

2006-08-14T04:36:00.000+14:00

aka Jack Bauer's rule 5th rule of gun saftey.

tip of the hat to Texian Tattler

Red hot poker in the eye

2006-08-13T08:20:00.000+14:00

Seen at Say Uncle's where he blazing says he will break the law. Specifically the McCain-Feingold act.

"Any organization* that wants to run a political ad criticizing any politician in that window can do so here. Not only will I run the ad free, I’ll do a post on the ad on the front page."

If you want to join drop him a line. I have no ads, though i probably will link if it really pisses off the goverment.

cube

Recent

2006-08-10T14:04:00.000+14:00

Recently.......

I replaced the outside light, that was 60 watts with a 150 or 200 watt bulb, because light is the opposite of darkness and the more the better as far as I am concerned. The light is so hot, that it melted the plastic casing covering it. I am going to have to fix it this weekend.

A poor homeless hard working black man told me that all white people look a like. Then I gave him a led that apparently got him a job, because he came by at midnight to tell me. I slept through the knocking and my roommate got the door. The thing that I feel I really missed, was not congratulating him, but covering the door while my roommate opened it. My roommate said he turned on the light (150 watts or 200 watts, I forget) and the guy put his hands in the air...heh heh.

I paid off my truck, then I created a oil leak by dragging the oil pan off the side of the road when I was trying to make room for someone else to pass on my left. One step closer to being debt free.

I bought tickets to see Sandcastle get married. Stewardess and I will be spending a week in Germany, then we will finish the vacation by going to Sandcastle's wedding. I can honestly say, that will be the biggest event in this blog's history.

I changed the message on my cell phone to just my number, instead of saying. "You have reached so and so's number, please leave a message." I think it is more secure, if people are looking for you, they want know if they have the right number unless you call them back.

Oh, and Samuel L Jackson gave me a call.

cube

Shooting

2006-07-30T15:11:00.000+14:00

Well I bit the bullet and bought a membership to the local gun range. You can see my earlier post about them here. To bad these guys where not open and renting (I don't know they will do that.) Tulsa Firearms was the only place in town that had what I was looking for – rentals.

My girlfriend and I have been renting around for several reasons. One, she is going to get a gun soon and I want her to shoot several of the major calibers to get a feel for them. Secondly, we are going to get our Oklahoma CCW together, and she needs a little practice before the shooting part of the class. After about 3 weeks on the fourth week, she started to show improvement. After a few more sessions she will be as good as me, which is not saying much. The only good thing about Tulsa Firearms, is that the money spent on rentals can go down on a new gun. Kinda like layaway, but more fun. So far we have shot a Sig 239 in 9 mm, a full-size Springfield 1911, and a Ruger in 9mm.

I was not really impressed with the Sig. It was a little small for my hands. Though all of the controls where reachable and operable (none of the springs where too strong) for my girlfriend. I also did not feel real accurate with it either. Of course, it is a rental and probably has seen better days. Another downside is that the sig is a little more complicated than your you basic Glock, it being DA\SA.

1911 – the handgun used by the US army for nearly 70 years. It probably has killed more bad guys than any other handgun in the world. Needless to say I was looking forward to shooting it, as I have never had the pleasure. It did not disappoint. My girlfriend let out a yelp of glee on the first shot. The felt recoil was felt about the same or less than my Springfield XD in 40 caliber. I also seemed more accurate with it, though I was shooting low. I am going to get a 1911, just a matter of time. What do you know about high capacity 1911's?

The Ruger's controls where hard to get to. The trigger pull was really long and the gun only fired after the trigger was pulled all the way back. Also the slide to frame fit was a little loose. It was easy to operate though. Our example had hogue grips, which te girlfriend liked.

After shooting, the three major calibers my girlfriend settled on 9mm. It was really settled when I told here I was going to get a 45. She then seemed ok with being able to get her 9mm and shoot my 45 every once and awhile. The 9mm is a good choice for now. Low recoil, lots of choices, and lower price, means lots of practice without tiring and at a lower cost.

We probably had three or four more guns to shoot, i hope to update you on our progress and the gun we choose

cube

Landis and testosterone

2006-07-30T12:09:00.001+14:00

The other day I was listening to Dr. Dean Edell (sounds like Dena Dell), who was advising a caller about testosterone patches. The doctor said, that testosterone varies widely and in the case of replacement therapy, you must monitor it carefully. It can go up or down for many reasons. When the story about Landis and his high testosterone came out that segment was the first thing that came to mind.

Of course Landis could have just held a gun.

cube

Hot as hell, dry as the dust bowl

2006-07-30T11:51:00.000+14:00

Recently, the Tulsa area has seen dust bowl like conditions, literally. It stayed above 100 degrees for several days in a row. The Tulsa area is doing better than the western part of Oklahoma, with is about 6 to 8 inches of rain below average, whereas Tulsa is about 1 to 2 inches below normal.

fortunately, I am not a person who has to go to work in the heat. About the best thing you can do for heat like this, if you are out in it a lot, is to drink plenty of V-8 juice. It is high in potassium and sodium, but of which you are sweating out. Another disadvantage of the heat is that all the talk about it and the dust bowl scares old people, so stop it.

cube

The Answer to Peak Oil

2006-07-19T22:35:00.000+14:00

I read much more of the book and found the problem answered within its very own pages. The US doesn't have much oil, and the world may some day run out, but we will be fine. Apparently, gasoline and diesel can be synthesized from coal by a process known as coal liquefication. We do have abundant reserves of coal. Oil shale can also be used to produce oil. While it is less effective and more costly than drilling for oil, our reserves are enormous. Most of the world's oil shale is contained in the US and Canada. Between these two sources, we should be able to run our country for decades after the rest of the world loses their oil. This will give us time to rebuild our infrastructure in ways that can be support by alternative energy sources.

WW3

2006-07-19T15:24:00.000+14:00

There has been a lot of talk about WW3 and the fact that we are in it right now. I disagree. While the world is in a state of constant low grade conflict from several sources, but I do not think we are currently in World War 3. It is possible that the world could enter into another global war, though I doubt the path to that global war lies though the middle east.

In my mind for a war to be called a "World War", it must be truly global in reach and involve all or most of the major power players in the world. The first condition is fairly easy to satisfy in my mind. The second one is a little harder as the major superpowers have to feel that their very existence is at stake to participate in such a huge war. Gone are the days of taking overland and spreading your influence through beating your competitor on the battlefield. For the most part the major powers compete on the economic stage. Though there is a good bit of competition on the world political stage inside of the UN. This is not to say that another world war is not possible, it is just less likely.

So the real question is what possible events could involve Brazil, China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States in a battle to the death? I think there are several main paths to world war three, some of which are listed below.

Possibility 1
Israel is attacked or attacks Syria, which pulls Iran into the regional conflict. If Iran was somehow able to convince Russia or China to join them, then there is a good chance World War 3 would be on. But what are the chances that Russia or China would actually risk that by supporting Iran, a county that while it does have oil, no one really likes anyways. I suspect that Russia and China would view this as an UN problem, not a problem to actually fight over. Russia has its own oil reserves and China is and has made deals with other middle east countries to buy oil, so it might view the loss of Iran's oil as unfortunate, but nothing to go to war over.

Possibility 2
North Korea is attacked or attacks South Korea or Japan. There is a good chance that China would then get directly involved. Unfortunately, the US is already directly involved and has been involved for the past 50 some odd years in that area. If North Korea is let off of it's short chain by China or just gets out of the fence, they could cause some tense situations (like Cuban missile tense). I view this as the shortest and most likely path to WW3. I think of China as the country that we are most likely to end up in a war with in the next 20 years. I also think that if North Korea acts with out China's help or without their permission nothing will come of it. What I am afraid of is China using, North Korea, to draw the US into a larger conflict.

possibility 4
If Hugo Chavez goes "Saddam Hussein" land hungry in south America, you could see another a world war or more than likely see a worldwide rescue like in 1991, in the Gulf War.

Random possibility 5
It is possible, though not probable, that any of the major powers could stage a random attack on one of the others. We have already seen that the US can take over a couple little countries and no one big is willing to fight about it. It would have to be on the scale of China attacking India, Japan, or Russia, for the big boys to get involved. China could probably take over a few smaller countries and no one would really try too hard, though there would be a lot of talk about getting ready for war.

I don't see a global war in the near future, but the seething low level global conflict sure ain't going away. There is also not an easy or clear way of ending the global conflict, with out giving in to the wants of those causing the problems. If I missed something in my global analysis, please chime in with treaties to back up you claims.

cube

Update: I was going to include the fact that Iran and North Korea could team up as one of the potential outcomes, but the fact that Iran was at the missile test for North Korea had not been confirmed. Well know it has.

What I have learned recently

2006-07-18T16:44:00.000+14:00

Whenever salad dressing does not come out easily though the small plastic hole, don't squeeze harder.

High quality knives are really worth it. I recived a M21-02 CRKT bot my birthday this year.

Macanudos and mountain dew go really well together.

cube

The Beginning of...well who the hell knows?

2006-07-17T19:58:00.000+14:00

This morning I heard Newt Gingrich announce the start of the Third World War. I used to dismiss Gingrich as a racist redneck and the rightwing nut bearing the name of the sixth most popular amphibian, but even some of his opponents have described him as politically brilliant. And why not the next world war? He has a point. Start a conflict based on culture, religion, and fundamental points of view in an area that contains the holiest of holies for three major religions and also the largest reserve of the planet's most important natural resource (which some claim is becoming increasingly scarce). Add to that scenario that three regional powers possess nuclear stockpiles (Israel, Pakistan, and the US) and nothing good can come about. To further confuse matters, hostilities are being carried out largely by non-state actors that refuse to negotiate. So what to do? Bombs away.

immigration reform

2006-07-15T14:56:00.000+14:00

How did our immigration problem in America start? It started by not enforcing the laws that we have on the books. Adding more laws to those same books will not solve the problem. Our immigration problem was also worsens by our tremendous econmic success compared to our southern neighbor.

Link "Mexico's per-capita real GDP has grown at only 0.7 percent annually since the early 1980s."

The realtive riches that America has to offer are worth the risk. If you are caught, you will be no worse off than you were before. Heck you might have even put on a few pounds in jail, learned a bit of english, and gathered skills that you will need to evade the police next you cross over. Nothing short of shooting people as they cross the border and torturing them when they are caught will stop the tide. I don't support that.

The recent strategy that ICE is taking is one of intrest. It will also provide the most bang for the buck in the short term. They are going after the high value immigrants, the ones with outstanding warrants and who are wanted by the police for some reason or the other. While this is a necessary step to securing America, it will not solve the problem, though it will make america better.

We also cannot support anyone and everyone who wishes to come to american. For us to be healthy and problem free mexico will also need to be healthy and problem free. The only way we are going to do that is by a targeted and agressive exporting of American values to that country. I think that we are rich enough that we could bribe...errr...offer economic incentives in exchange for the lossening of certian restrictions that pervent Mexicans from becoming a great country theirselves. Such as privatizing certian industries, destorying certian unions, and cleaning up the police force.

I think it has about as good of a chance of working as the walls do.

cube

Internal Affairs

2006-07-15T14:36:00.000+14:00

Well, i thought i would update you on the south beach diet and how it is going for me. In the past four months I have lost about 20 pounds. Most of that due to diet, not exercise. My biggest fear when i started the diet was that I would have to spend a large amount of time cooking. I don't mind cooking for myself and others, but I view cooking for just myself as a waste of time. Fortunatly I was able to find several meals that were filling and easy to make, for lunch and dinner. I am still cooking for breakfast, which I view as a reasonable tradeoff.

I actully stopped running because I self dignosed myself with medial shin splits. I kept running because I thought that I didn't have shin splints. After a little research i discovered that I needed to take 2 to 4 weeks off from running. I decided to stop running until the tenderness disappeared, well it has been almost two months and the tenderness is still not gone, though it is much better. I am hoping that the weight loss, the shin strengthing exercises i found, and the core exercises I am doing will pervent their return.

cube

New Wars

2006-07-15T00:01:00.000+14:00

Israel continues its attacks against targets against Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of Israeli troops and rocket attacks against Israeli cities. This has the potential to really escalate into a major conflict. Israel already has troops in parts of Palestine, and neither the Palestinians or Lebanese seem willing to contain the terrorists attacking Israel.

A Better Explanation of Peak Oil

2006-06-29T00:03:00.000+14:00

I have only recently started reading about peak oil, but there is a great page about the theory here. The basic argument is clear and sound. As the world population increases and more countries become heavily industrialized, we will need more and more oil. Oil is a finite resource, so this has to catch up to us at some point. The only solution would be to cut energy use or find new ways to create energy. I know we have nuclear power plants, solar panels, flexible fuel vehicles, and wind generators, but nothing is prepared to fill the gap if we were denied the amount of oil we have become accustomed to using.

Buffet Gives it Away

2006-06-27T20:59:00.000+14:00

Warren Buffet recently decided to give his fortune to charity (story here). This is significant because he is the second richest man in the world, and doubly significant because he is donating to the Gates Foundation. When coupled with the donations of Bill Gates and his wife, this charity will have a bigger budget than the UN, the CDC, the WHO, and many small nations. Let's see what they can do with it.

Peak Oil

2006-06-27T20:50:00.000+14:00

I have been looking at some articles discussing the theory of peak oil. It hypothesizes that after we use half of the world's oil, then we will see production decrease and prices increase as we try to squeeze out the last half. It seems logical. The main point of argument is when we are going to reach that point. Some people think we are there now. Other say it is not far out. However, people live like it won't be met within their lifetimes. We have discussed some alternative energy sources before, and the general concensus is that there isn't anything that can replace oil right now. So what would you do if the shit hit the fan next year? Gas is 9 bucks a gallon, home heating oil is absurdly expensive, airlines start to shut down en masse due to prohibitively high fueling costs. I just ordered a book called The Long Disaster that discusses what this new world would look like. I know it is kind of sick and twisted, but I am the kind of person that looks forward to these major world changes. Am I the only one?

Finally

2006-06-18T05:29:00.000+14:00

Today while reading the Skeptical Optimist, he finally put into words something that I have always felt, but have never been able to express.

Link: "Any given generation will need to pay down the debt only if the economy starts shrinking. In a growing economy, we do not need to pay down the debt; we can continue to add to the debt, without hurting our financial condition. That is not an egregious policy, that is a mathematical fact that has been tested over and over again in private sector business as well as public sector government. The debt burden for a nation is indicated by the ratio of its debt to the size of its economy. To maintain a constant ratio, a nation's debt must grow no faster than its economy grows -- or its debt must shrink at least as fast as its economy shrinks. (I shudder to contemplate the latter scenario; it would probably lead to an overthrow of our government.)"

I fully agree with the that Debt to GDP ratio is the correct measurement, but we do disagree on what the correct level of debt is. Unlike the Skeptical Optimist, I believe that hard times are a coming. They could be in my lifetime, they could be in my children's lifetimes, or my grandchildren's lifetimes. The severity of the disturbance could be as mild as the recession a few years ago, as bad as what is happening in Zimbabwe or even worse, right now. If you believe that hard times are a coming and you also think that they debt could cause problems WHEN the economy tanks, then it makes sense to maintain as small amount of debt as possible. The good times will never last and I feel that the good times are a gift from God to get us through the bad times.

cube

Something unexpected

2006-06-18T04:28:00.000+14:00

I can't stand the sound of Anne Coulter's voice. Her voice is exactly the type of accent that I would associate with a New England liberal. Hearing her voice, ruined anything I ever read from her. I now think that she is a undercover democrat. I doubt her voice sells her many books in middle America.

Link: "In an extraordinary show of toughness against one of their own members, Democrats voted 99-58 Thursday evening to strip Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat from New Orleans accused of accepting bribes, of his seat on the Ways and Means Committee. The vote allows Democrats to maintain that they do not tolerate impropriety, yet the sanction already has placed a strain on the caucus."

Go democrats...of course I would like to see the republicans do the same thing if any charges are brought against any of their members that are on committees. I wonder what would have happened if this was not an election year. The democrats played it right politically and morally on this one. I wonder what morons voted against this measure. I hope they loose next time they are up for election.

Link: "Republicans want to avoid a minimum wage floor fight, where Democrats would point out that House members Tuesday, for the eighth straight Congress, raised their own pay. The latest $3,300 increase puts the House's annual salary at $168,500. "

The article does not say if the raise was a vote or whether it is tied to another indicator, like inflation. If it was a bill, the article does not offer any information on who voted for or against. Though, I doubt it could have passed with republican support, so I blame the bastards in charge for this. They could have saved the money and paid off the national debt a little bit, but no, they had to line their own pockets.

cube

Fat tax

2006-06-17T14:24:00.000+14:00

I really like the idea of the "“new urbanism” style of planned communities" I have heard about. They sound great. Easy access to all the cities pleasures, less people, and a more relaxed environment. My only question is who would the local goverment would kick out to build them? Or maybe they would tear down the ghettos and build a nice middle class place to live. I guess the biggest problem is the people who would live there, like Sallis, below.

Link: "Sallis contends change will come only when the public demands walkable development, more federal money for parks and bike paths and even a tax on industries that promote sedentary lifestyles (he pointed to video game makers, movie theater chains and even electric Segway scooters). "

First, if you want a more walkable community why does the federal government pay for it. Why don't you pay for it yourself.

Secondly, a tax....come one. If you tax sedentary lifestyle products, i probably would not have read anything this guy said. The phone lines would have been taxed (why call someone when you can just walk to talk to them), my chair would have been taxed, my computer would have been taxed, and the newspaper that published the article in the first place should have been taxed because it encouraged me to be still.

His statements are really odd considering the fact that "Doctors are planning to declare war on America's soft drinks industry by calling for a 'fat tax' to combat the nation's obesity epidemic."

Stop providing free buses to poor people and take away their food stamps, I bet that would solve half the obesity problem. For everyone else, make them pay for their own heart surgeries, that would solve most of the other half. The rest you can't really do much about.

cube

Why is Bush's rating so low?

2006-06-10T13:47:00.000+14:00

Where the hell is my tax reform?
What about my social security reform?
You are giving who a nuclear power plant, WTF man?
Pedro is knocking at my door, "Hi, I am a illegal immigrants will you go to the polls and vote for my man." A wall won't work and taking them back home won't work either, well hell let them in.

The freaking Chinese are having a huge build up of arms over there and we should be investing more in our army, just in case. There are like 1 billion of those suckers, I hope they fall down easy when out guys shoot them, it is going to be like fighting a zombie invasion, except they probably will run faster.

Man, what they crap is going on out there.

cube

Green healthy poop

2006-06-10T12:52:00.000+14:00

Well, my girlfriend and I are on a diet. And not just any diet my, real life web friends, I am on the trendy and heart friendly South Beach Diet. It was her idea (that phrase been around since Adam and Eve). Normally, I would have fought this change tooth and nail, but several things conspired all at once to make me more inclined to give the diet a try.

The first was my move to Tulsa, over the past two years I have gained about 20 pounds. It was a combination of big lunches and a lack of exercise. When I moved to Tulsa, I decided to drop a few pounds. I started eating smaller lunches and I started running again. I lost about 6 to 8 pounds with no major effort on my part. I really have not put on any real distance on running, but I expect once I start hitting three miles on a regular basis, I will probably drop a few more pounds.

Recently I got a routine blood test for free, from a third party that was hired by either my company or the insurance company my company uses. Basically, the insurance company gets generalized statistics on the group that took the test. I think my company could get price breaks based on that information. I get a free blood test and a chance to win a prize. The results of the blood test did not tell me anything I did not already suspect. I am my father's son and I inherited his genetic tendency toward high triglycerides. Mine were hanging around the 300 range, they should be less than 150. My dad's, when he first got tested a few years back and started his heart medication, was around 700. His has since returned to normal My cholesterol was borderline, at 201, but I had low HDL (good cholesterol) and high LDL (bad cholesterol). Otherwise I was normal. The blood pressure fine. As of the test, I could lose a few pounds ( which I had already started on that)

Based on the information from test, I made a few small dietary changes fairly quickly. For breakfast, I changed from skim milk to soy milk, which has heart healthy fats. It also omega-3 fatty acids, which your body does not produce naturally. I cut out cheese from my lunch sandwich, bought a leaner meat and incorporated carrots into my lunch routine. I started eating more fruits - apples and bananas mostly. I also started avoiding some potential sources of cholesterol for dinner. I started eating some frozen salmon with frozen vegetables for some dinners. I switched popcorn to a non-buttered variety. For snacks during the day, I bought some almonds and I try to eat a handful daily. If I don't eat almonds, I try to have some dark chocolate, I eat a few squares of. I also bought some oatmeal breakfast squares. My goal was to lower my total cholesterol, increase good cholesterol, lower bad cholesterol and triglycerides. Once I made these changes, I continued running and I lost another 5 to 7 pounds.

The third piece of information that pushed me even further closer to the line was anecdotal. Recently, the girlfriends younger sister graduated from college and moved back home. She convinced her parents to give the south beach diet a try. My girlfriend's dad, who is in great shape (He is 65 and ran a 5k run in about 25 minutes a few weeks back) was able to cut his heart medication in half after being on the diet for about a month or a month and a half. Her mom lost some weight, her dad may have also lost some too, though he really didn't need to.

In addition to those reasons, my girlfriend wanted to go on the diet after catching the bug from her parents. She said that I didn't have to, but we all know that means I had better do it. Her reasoning is long term. If we eat healthier now, we will avoid many of the problems out parents have or at least delay them. I personally suspect that I will probably be placed on a statin eventually, no matter how healthy I eat or how far I can run. Also, I am not opposed to anything that makes my girlfriend hotter. If I have to eat a salads and low fat plain yogurt to make that happen, then I consider it a pretty good trade.

The diet's stated goal is heart health, but it also archives weight loss. The diet operates in phases, with phase one being the hardest and most drastic. This lasts for 2 weeks. Phase two is more gentle and lasts until you reach your target weight goal. Phase three, is the maintenance phase where you just maintain the weight lost. The diet operates on a several simple principles. Eat good fats over bad fats, eat good carbohydrates over bad carbohydrates. That is the first basic idea, the second idea is the concept of the glycemic index. You goals is to avoid foods with high glycemic indexes, because these foods cause your blood sugar to spike higher. That causes your blood sugar to crash lower later on, when the insulin does it's job too well. Which you then eat other foods with high gylcemic indexes to feel better, and so the cycle continues and you consume more food than you need in the process. The diet also stresses the importance of fresh foods over canned or heavily processed foods.

For phase one, the foods consist mostly of salads, low fat dairy, fish, eggs, and other lean meats. Fried food, bread, alcohol and fruits are out. For breakfast on day one I had, an omelet, with green and orange bell peppers, fat free plain yogurt, and some V-8 juice. For lunch I had a tuna salad, fat free cottage cheese, and some more V-8 juice. Tonight, salmon is on the menu. Phase two, you can start adding back in foods that you enjoy, but slowly and with an eye on the weight. If a particular food makes you crave more of it in a few hours you should consider not eating it as much.

I would say that I did feel a little different on day one, but not hungry or tired, which is good. What I am missing the normal rush of energy that I normally received from my meals. This isn't saying eating did not make be feel better, it just did not make me feel as good as quickly. So I guess the diet is working. As of day 5 of phase one, I have removed some of the reactive hypoglycemia that I was getting a lot. I can now be hungry with out my blood sugar crashing, which feels different than I am used to. Now I am just waiting for my poop to turn a healthy green color.

cube

Firearms Caching

2006-06-03T15:09:00.000+14:00

Recently, there have been several letters or articles at Survival Blog on caching your firearms in case they are needed. Obviously, I have no experience in this area, but several readers have written in about tests they have done. Apparently, there are several keys to long term storage of firearms underground. First you must store them properly, to protect them from the moisture. The key with this trick is a completely waterproof container and a backup plan of moisture absorber. When burying, you do not want to bury the tube vertical, it is harder to get out of ground that way. You can also seed the area with scrap metal to hide the signature of the tube. You can also store ammo and other essential gear, because if you are digging up your guns, you will probably need other gear also.

(I will leave the discussion of what kind of situation would necessite such drastic action to another day, but I am sure you will understand that if such drastic action is needed then what I am about to say would be a sane response to insane times.) I had another idea on the long term storage of guns, that is a little more expensive than the military sonar buoys mentioned. What is large, perfectly normal to have one of, and is guaranteed to keep the contents protected like tupperware in a refrigerator. A burial vault (above ground would be best) of a loved one would make a perfect place for long term storage of weapons, ammo, and gear. If you don't have time to prepare such an elaborate scheme you could possibly break into a graveyard and bury a casket underneath a current one in the dead of night or preferably bribe the caretaker to do it for you. The gravestones would make an excellent long term marker to find your cache later.

cube

Joining the Order of the Jedi

2006-06-03T13:17:00.000+14:00

A few weekends ago I performed the sacred rite of passage for a gunnie. I disassembled and reassembled my pistol, a Springfield XD. The only parts that were not removed were the sights and the extractor, so i did almost a complete break down. I followed the steps and procedures lined out in this DVD, which i purchased online at cheaper than dirt, so i was not flying blind in the least.

Primary, I wanted to gain a better understanding of how the internals of my pistol worked. This knowledge can come in handy if something breaks on the gun. I will be able to perform a more detailed analysis of the problem and determine if i need to send it off or if a part can be ordered, this could save me money and time. Which presently Springfield's policy is quite restrictive on what can be ordered, but I figure the knowledge, skills, and tools I gained will help when I standardize my defense pistols in other guns, where parts can be ordered without sending the gun into the manufacture.

As a side note, I probably will standardize in 9mm (Glock) and .45 (1911). Both he Glock and the 1911 have tons of parts that can be bought on the open market, which will is a necessity in preparation for a SHTFS. I have chosen two different calibers to have a choice for potential shooters, to hedge my bets against choosing just one caliber, and because I could not make a final decision between the two. The more choices the better, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to handguns, mainly because of their versatility and ease of carry. I doubt I will use this reasoning with long guns.

Back to the topic at hand, I also wanted to clean and oil every single metal part. Which as I got into the process, I realized that the frame will seldom ever need that level of detail stripping. Though my trigger has always felt gritty and it now feels a lot smoother, which just goes to show that a little cleaning and oil never hurt metal. The slide is a different story entirely, I can honestly see the need to break down the slide regularly if you use it in harsh conditions (heat, sand, mud, etc.). Fortunately, the slide is the easy part to break down, unlike the frame. I can also see the need to break down the slide every X number of rounds, though I have no idea what that number might be. If you have any suggestions on that number or would like to leave your personal philosophy on disassembling and cleaning you gun, please comment below, because I would love to hear your thought on the matter. I will probably break down the slide once or twice every two years, to check for unusual wear and keep my knowledge current.

The only advice that I can over for breaking down your XD is to be inventive when it comes to the magazine release assembly. I was able to do everything, but that part in one afternoon. It took me a couple of tries with different tools, over several days, to get it magazine release assembly back in. Another thing that might help, is a vise to hold the frame while your other hands are free. I used my knees as a vise and that made my inner thighs and back sore the next day. I bought a pick and hook set from Wal-Mart to try to get the last leg of the spring under the magazine catch, but that did not work. The spring leg was too strong and I could not push it far enough over. As a another effort, I bought some cheap guitar string and looped it through the hole in the magazine catch and around the spring leg to pull the spring leg in close and then move it over with a pick. This worked a lot better, but I still had problems getting the spring to move far enough over. At that point I could either give up and take it into a gunsmith or try a risky idea I had. My idea was to cut a small amount of the spring leg off, so that when the leg was moved over, I would not have to move it as far to get it under the magazine catch. I removed about 2 millimeters of the spring leg, and was able to pull the leg in using guitar string easy in ONE TRY. I tested and retested the magaize catch with empty and full mags and it seemed to work fine. I am fairly sure that the gunsmith would have probably ended up doing the same thing, of course I could be wrong on that.

Even though it took quite awhile and caused a lot of hassle, I still felt it was worth it. Better to gain the knowledge now, rather than in other more stressful situations. All in all i felt like a jedi, who built their first lightsaber. Though i did not build anything and I had a DVD guiding the way instead of a wizened old man or short green alien.

cube

Thompson on Nixon

2006-06-02T10:13:00.000+14:00

This was originally published in Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced without their permission.

'He was a crook'

Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of
every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all the way to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

vacation

2006-06-01T18:39:00.000+14:00

I am packing this weekend, and then I will be in Greece for two weeks. I will blog more when I get back.

It's Lonely At the Top

2006-05-25T23:48:00.000+14:00

But mostly just because anyone else up there won't bother to glance twice in your direction. A British man died while climbing Everest. Tragic. The terrible part is that there are reports of up to 40 other climbers passing him by without offering assistance. The climbers say they would have put themselves at risk if they tried to help him. So they let him die. Is it more important to get to the top? Would you rather summit the world's biggest mountain or help someone live? I really can't believe that 40 people passed him by. This isn't a story about one selfish asshole, it is a condemnation of our society.

Nature of Justice

2006-05-24T16:55:00.000+14:00

The reactions to the recent jury deliberation over the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui had some ideas that I would like to address. Several of these ideas i picked up form the net, others spurred other ideas of mine, i will try to reference the ones i remember. The first one is the simplest and easiest to see the incorrect thought and was addressed here by Bob Kurm (via Say Uncle)

I’m sorry, but those who wring their hands over state executions, while laughing at the idea that prison gang bangs are a convict’s just reward, lose their right to claim human rights as a motivating force for their objection to the death penalty.

While I don't remember reading anyone in particular who felt that way, I am sure there are some out there.

Secondly, there are the ones who seem ecstatic that Moussaoui is not going to die. That idea also strikes me as wrong.. Who's side are they on anyways? I am not saying that you have to support the death penalty, but it seems backwards and wrong to support murders.

Additionally, there are the ones who perform reason backwards from the punishment then explain why life is worse than death. A good example of this is here.

Pamela,

You may be right, and it is sad ’tis so.

I can think of no better punishment for Moussaoui than spending his life in solitary confinement, limited in his contact to only his warders.

Imprisonment was the right decision, no question in my mind about that. That statement has nothing at all to do with my opinion of the death penalty.

Even if he had been captured at the controls of an aircraft on its way to the White House, I would have spoken against the death penalty.

Deprive him of the status in both life and death that he believed was his due as a martyr.

Let him live - let ANY terrorist live - in imprisonment after due process of law. Remind him every day and every night that he FAILED. He failed his beliefs, he failed his Prophet, he failed his God… as long as he is alive he failed.

True justice is independent of a person's situation. For this person's opinion to change, it sounds like all Moussaoui has to do is decide that he wants to live or even that he likes prison and does not want to go home.

Many people have a hard time with justice, i think some people even fear it. Justice in it's purest form is not vengeance. It is the entire goal of America's justice system. Ideally justice is done by an impartial third party, but in our case the best we can do is a group of humans.

Another quality of justice is that you cannot arrive at the correct and just punishment by coming in the back door. It considers the crime and only the crime, it cannot consider political climate, actions of accused after being caught, what others will say, what other countries will say, what they enemy will say. A just punishment stands up under scrutiny. A just punishment is consistent with the crime. A just punishment will apply to all who commit the crime.

cube

Listening and Reading

2006-05-24T09:28:00.000+14:00

Right now I am listening to Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs. I am reading Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Amazing Legacy by Kip Thorne. Thumbs up on both. The Raconteurs is headed up by Jack White, and although he has more instruments at his disposal it doesn't quite measure up to his White Stripes stuff. But still good. Kip Thorne is a physicist, and does a good job of explaining things for those of us that aren't. The book has tons of interesting information, but nothing that you really need to know if you plan on staying on Earth.

Bears One, Monkeys Zero

2006-05-23T00:07:00.000+14:00

An Amsterdam zoo rethinks its cohabitation plans after bears capture and eat one of the macaques living in their area. Sad but funny, read more here.

Alien News Not Involving Mexicans

2006-05-22T23:59:00.000+14:00

According to a South African story a UFO crash landed into the ocean. A search was conducted, but no craft or aliens were recovered. There were no reports of any missing or overdue human aircraft. This once again brings up licensing issues, with a small but vocal group insisting that alien visitors must pass a UN flight test to be able operate their vehicles in Earth airspace. As the number of UFO crashes continues at a steady rate, I am starting to side with them.

Alligators and Alcohol

2006-05-17T19:18:00.000+14:00

The Onion has recently published a new scientific study detailing new behavioral insights into alligators and their relationship to humans.

I don't know if i should publish this to the net...

2006-05-17T15:59:00.000+14:00

....but the other night i could have shot Garth Brooks.

I had heard that Garth Books lived in town. My office mate's girlfriend, his girlfriend's mother, and his girfriend's sister have all seen him.

But the other night was my moment. He wasn't all dressed up like a cowboy and that was a little disappointing. He was just in a ball cap, t-shirt, and jeans. He was also not as tall as i thought he would be. I did not bother saying hi. I was eating and explaining to my girlfriend how useless a marriage license is.

A couple of my friends suggested that I call him by his wrong name. The funniest name suggested was Lyle Lovett. Now that would have been somthing worth blogging about.

cube

Cubism

2006-05-17T15:56:00.000+14:00

If you see a man lose the ablity to walk, help him, but ask him for his shoes. He does not need them any more.

cube

Yea right.

2006-05-17T15:14:00.000+14:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516/ap_on_re_us/illegal_immigrants_initiative_2

Roberto Arreola, 30, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, addressed the council before the decision.

"We are not criminals and it doesn't make sense for the city to pass a law against us," said Arreola, speaking in Spanish with a translator.

Illegal, but still not criminal. yea right.

cube

Almost the frist draw

2006-05-17T12:57:00.000+14:00

A few weeks ago, I was in a situation where I almost drew my pistol in self defense. I would like for you to lend me your time and mind as I share what I learned.

It was easter morning and I was seeing a family member off for a long absence. My parents and I had said our good byes and were looking for a church to end our easter morning. We where having problems finding the church which I had mapped out, then transcribed the directions. It was a hassle and we were doing the typical lost tango. U-turns and slow driving was our dance. It was made a little more difficult because were were in two vechiles. I was in my truck and my parents were in their car.

My typical lost and found algorithm is slow, but comprehensive. I will do a lot of short peaks down a road to see if it is the one i need. I did a short peak down a potential sleepy 2 lane road and realized I was going down the wrong street. I pulled into a driveway one the left hand side of the road to do a 3 point turn. As I was putting it in reverse from point one going to point two, i saw a car coming down the road I had just traveled.

I thought about waiting for the car to pass, but I was in a hurry and flustered from not being able to find my way. Secondly, the car was far enough away I thought i could finish my second point and get straighted out and onto my side of the road before we met. Well i was wrong on the second point and the car had to slow down a good bit to allow me to clear the way. As I straightened out, I saw the car stop behind me and the driver opened the door and start yelling at me. Their were two passengers, both were young and black. They were in a late model Lexus. The driver was also wearing a baggy wife beater. He yelled and waved but did not get out of the car.

Here is what I did: I turned around and flashed him the meanest look i could muster while putting my hand in the position to open the center console and draw my gun. After I flashed him the look, i put the car in gear and and drove off. I drove off quick enough to let the guy know i was leaving, but not quick enough to look like i was running. He also left, and it looked like he left quickly, but honestly I don't know because I only made sure he was not following me.

Normally, if it was just me I probably would not have even bothered with the look, i would have just left as quick as possible, but the problem was that he was stopped between my car and my parents who were also in the process of turning around.

There are a few lessons that I gathered from this experience. One was that real life confrontations will seldom match up to your preconceived notions. I had always imagined the threat coming from the front or the side, never directly from behind. Which if I was unable to run and had to defend myself, would be a tough situation to get out of, because I would be a huge target if i tried to get out on the driver's side.

Another thing i noticed was that I did not make myself as ready to defend as possible. I could have opened and pulled out the pistol in case the young gentleman started firing. I just moved to the ready position, I did not actually make myself ready.

Of course, the worse case situation I was the most unprepared for. If they young man had opened fire, should I have ran, which I was in a great position to do, or should I have attempted to to attack and protect my parents, whom he was in between. I could have used my truck as a battering ram, parked it at an angle and used it as cover, I could have tried to flank him in my truck and then attacked, or i could have tried to exit using my third door as cover to shoot from. The fact is that if he would have started to fire, i would not known what to do. That was the final point that was driven home, the importance of training.

cube

SSN

2006-05-16T17:07:00.000+14:00

Let's play a game. This game is a fun one to play with your children in the car on longish road trips. It is kinda inspired on this comment here

"I dont expect we'll see any "bad things" happen as a result of big government databases any time soon. But if the trends continue, someday that entire database could be availible on the laptop of every squad car (technically, its achievable today) so that when your pulled over an officer would know you purchased four cans of diced pineapple at the local supermarket fifteen minuets ago using your visa, and called X five minutes ago, passed through lane 6 of the I-56 toll, and.... " and the book by , John Twelve Hawks

Who has your SSN?

Me
The Goverment (IRS, Social Security Agency)
The state goverment
My Bank
My Work
My student loan company
My car loan company
My Credit cards.
My Insurance Agency.
My Cell Phone company.
My 401 k company.
Ohh and the gun show where i buy all of my weapons...

What about you?

cube

The First Step

2006-05-15T20:15:00.000+14:00

The White House has announced plans to activate the National Guard to secure the Mexican border. No matter what you think should happen to the illegals that are here, this is the first step to confronting the problem. Securing the border will help stem the drug trade and make the country safer from possible terrorists crossing over from Mexico.

Check links

2006-05-04T09:41:00.000+14:00

If you don't read Justus For All (link at right), then you should. There is some really good discussion happening over there.

Kill them all.

2006-05-04T00:34:00.000+14:00

I just saw this on the O'Reily Factor. There is a group that shows up at the funerals of people killed in Iraq and saying, "I am happy that your son/daughter died." They are happy that soldiers are dying because this is God's way of punishing America. I am not in favor of the war, and I normally don't condone violence, but I would beat the shit out of these people if I ever saw them. I am in favor of rounding up these people and releasing them into Iraq. I don't hold many things sacred, but respect for the dead should be universal. You can speak your mind about them, but not at a funeral.

Work

2006-05-03T13:46:00.000+14:00

Today I was "talked to" about my internet usage at work. Don't worry I am not hooked on the porn, just reading the news, checking my mail, logging into the bank, and reading a few choice blogs. So what is a man to do....RSS baby. Thank you if you have an RSS feed. If you don't please try them out. Funny think is that my open source email client (thunderbird) that work installed handles RSS like email. I don't know how the RSS registers with work's tracking software, but I think I am going to find out.

Funny thing is, you want belive how much i cut back on the web and still i was "Number one". I don't know if that is company wide or not, but I probably was.

cube

Gas is a gas

2006-05-02T13:39:00.000+14:00

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/04/25/D8H72NF00.html

"Consumers around the nation have expressed concerns about what they have perceived as anticompetitive or otherwise unfair conduct by the world's major oil companies," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. Their letter said federal agencies had substantially increased efforts to monitor, detect and prevent any violations of the law.

Something occurred to me that changed my opinion of the basic idea that the fuel market has any unfair or anticompetitive practices. I DO dismiss the record profits by oil companies because of the facts. More people than ever are driving thanks to richer countires. There are more cars than ever before thanks to richer countires. America has not added any new refineries since the 70s. The record profits are partly due to inflation. Lastly, centralization of oil and gas companies leads to large numbers.

Though i cannot readily dismiss the concerns of consumers. American consumers are probably the most astute and aware consumers in the world. If a lot of Americans think somthing is fishy in the gas market, then I am inclined to at least hear out their concerns. Unfortunately, it has to be played out on the national scene.

cube

A Pool Story

2006-05-02T13:24:00.000+14:00

Link"It's not clear why young African Americans, males in particular, are more likely than other racial groups to drown. But the new findings point to the places where prevention efforts are most needed, according to the investigators, led by Dr. Gitanjali Saluja of the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development."

Let me tell you a story....

NOTE: I heard this story second hand from Sandcastle himself. Names have been changed...yada, yada, yada.

It was high school graduation summer and several friends were over at Dustin's house. One of the friends named Ruby did not know how to swim. He was a linebacker for the school about 5'9'' and built. He was also black. Well he hopped into the deep end because some friend were going to teach him how to swim. Well, he sank to the bottom like a rock. (Don't worry he did not drown.)

I was just realating the story because the researchers seemed to overlook body composition in the drowning deaths.

"Researchers have speculated that the higher drowning risk among African Americans has to do with income; lower-income families are less likely to be able to afford swimming lessons. However, Saluja's team found that the racial discrepancy persisted even when they factored in income. More research, they say, is needed to understand the underlying reasons.

The researchers lacked information on whether drowning victims had ever had swimming lessons, but they point out that pediatric experts recommend that all children age 6 and older learn to swim."

Morons.

cube