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Ford Derangement Syndrome: Presidential Assassin Sara Jane Moore released today

Who's Sara Jane Moore? Back in the oh-so-fun 1970's, she was one of a number of failed aassassins of President Gerald R. Ford. Presidential assassination attempts arent unusual, but what is unusual is that the assassin in this case was a woman. More unusual ( forgive the small pun ) is that this was the second assassination attempt on the same President by a woman. Just 17 days previous to Sara Jane Moores attempt, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, one of the Charles Mansons followers attempted to kill President Ford in Sacramento.

She too, failed in her attempt.

Sara Jane Moore was an bookkeeper and FBI informant. She also owned a .44 caliber pistol, which was taken away just days before the attempt at killing President Ford. She was sympathetic to the Symbionese Liberation Army and their cause. The closest that anyone came to determining a reason behind her attempt was that she believed that there was a "war on the left" being waged by the President. Quoted after the attempt, she said:

"...I do regret I didn't succeed, and allow the winds of change to start. I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos."

The FBI said that had she made the attempt with her own pistol, history might very well have been different.

The Tony award winning play "Assassins" made a characture out of Sara Jane Moore. Whats interesting to me is that the revival was met with rave reviews - in 2004.

Here is a scene from the play, where her character is presented during a song called " everyone's got the right"

PROPRIETOR

(to Fromme)
Yo baby!
Looking for a thrill?
The Ferris wheel is that way.

(Fromme comes over.)

No, baby,
This requires skill --

(Fromme puts money down; the Proprietor shrugs, gives her a gun.)

Okay, you want to give it a try...

(As Fromme plays with the gun, Moore is spilling keys, credit cards, lipstick, etc., over the counter.)

Jeez, lady--!
(indicates Czolgosz)

Give the guy some room!
The bumper cars are that way...

(Moore finds her money; Proprietor gives her a .38, which she accidentally points at his stomach.)

Please, lady --
(turning barrel away)
Don't forget that guns can go boom...

Every year there is a new flu, but its just a new strain of the old killer. Its worth remembering that Bush Derangement Syndrome is just this seasons version of an old killer, one that barely missed Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Truman, Roosevelt(both of them) and Kennedy, Mckinley, Garfield and Lincoln was slain by. Presidents come and go, but every assassination destroys the contract of democracy between the governed and the government in a small way,edging it towards the abyss.

Witness - The Pakistan situation.

What Mr. Sondheim wanted to say was that it was the American culture itself that produced these crazed killers. What he neglected to point out, is just how many of them were people of the left.

What we all fail to recognize is that history shows that Sara Jane Moore to be a crazed and failed assassin, but that current leftist sentimentality of the press and of popular culture works overtime to justify her insane actions.

I wonder if the left will ever understand the madness that they feed and their role in nurturing the insanity.

Posted @ December 31, 2007 02:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Achmed - The Dead Terrorist

As we close off 2007, we are reminded that thanks to the US Military, it is now safe to laugh at terrorists.

Posted @ December 31, 2007 11:53 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Christmas Gadgetry

I have a Nokia 8125 Cellphone thats about 2 years old. I love it, I can do most anything with it, from watching tivo-to-go downloaded movies from my tivo, to using it to watch my slingbox, why it even allows me to make phone calls, but it was, in my opinion, missing just one thing.

A GPS.

Now, having a GPS in a cellphone sounds silly until you realize that having a GPS in your cellphone is about as handy a thing as you could ever want. Let's say you're travelling to a new town and you need to find a bookstore. What do you do? ask someone? Oh come on now man... Wouldnt it be cool if you could just get the cellphone out, type on the GPS and get the directions, turn by turn instructions and even the phone number of the place and off you go! ( This actually happened to me in Denver last May, and it was got me started thinking about how much I wanted a GPS that was a part of my cellphone.)

GPS receivers are starting to become more prevalent ( Witness the newest incarnation of the 8125, the "tilt")
but for us "fogeys" who dont want to get a new phone every year, there is help.

You say you want GPS on your phone but you dont have one? Got a bluetooth enabled "smart phone"? Well try this, the General Satellite BT-359CS GPS Reciever

Yes, Thats the actual size! It's about a 1/2 inch thick.

This GPS receiver runs for 11 hours on battery power and communicates to the cellphone via bluetooth. With the addition of free software like Yahoo Go! and Google maps, you can now have a helpful GPS for travel or for your car, right there on your modern electronic swiss army knife, the cellphone. Better still, the the GPS software will also display route, Points of Interest and traffic information at the same time, which is an advanced feature on most car based GPS'es.

You say you got a small business and you need to track all your folks as they travel on a webpage? You say you got teenage kids and you want to know their whereabouts through the day?

Well, Try this.

Here you have one GPS device that can work with your cellphone or your PC which you can carry with you anywhere. And for hobbyists, the USB connection and high battery time makes it an intriguing update for your Lego Mindstorms NXT

What? Doesnt everyone have an NXT? Doesnt everyone have an NXT attached to their Remote Control Airplanes? No?

So, its just me then?

UPDATE: I've just finished testing this with the phone/gps. It works, and it works very, very well and costs nothing.

Posted @ December 27, 2007 11:17 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Yeah! - Im a Dork! So what?

	I received 100 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

Well, its not news to me that I am, but some of you might be surprised.

Posted @ December 23, 2007 04:32 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Mars Under Attack

Bullseye...

From UK Times:

"...Mars is in danger of being struck by an asteroid at the end of next month, astronomers have calculated.
The newly discovered space rock known as 2007 WD5 has a one in 75 chance of colliding with the planet on January 30. While the probability of an impact is only slim, the odds have been cut from one in 350 when the object was first identified, and they are much shorter than is usual for new asteroids.
If 2007 WD5, which is about 100 metres in diameter, does strike Mars on January 30, it would cause an explosion equivalent to several megatonnes of TNT...

So, theres two ways to look at this. First, the natural inclination on some folks part to want to do something to stop it from happening, which is silly on the face of it, despite your best desires, there is no man made technology that will get us to Mars by jan 30th, so its a non-starter.

The second way is to think of it this way. If we were going to spend any money on this issue, it should not me to stop it, it should be to actually see that it happens. What better place to test and observe the effects of an asteriod collision with an inner ring, terran style planet than to have something whack Mars. You want to wait till an asteroid hits us here on the blue/green earth to learn what the cost will be, or do you want to see how this looks in the Nevada of the solar system?

I thought so.

But what about the poor Martian ecology Frank? Screw the Martians, they've been asking for this for a long time. Those green skinned, three fingered, anal probing, fly all the way across the solar system with your landing lights on bastards, I've had it up to here with them...

All kidding aside, I really hope we get to see this happen.

Posted @ December 21, 2007 10:25 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Useless Information Department

Question #1: Which has the greater population?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

Question #2: Which has the greater GDP?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

Question #3: Which has the bigger military?

A - Canada
B - Australia
C - State of California

UPDATE: Yes, It's California. California now surpasses Canada and Australia in Population ( California Population - 38 million, Canada 33 million and Australia with 21 million) and GDP.( Australia 718 billion, Canada 1.1 trillion and California $1.7 trillion) California also has more military strengh as measured in manpower and budget. The one area that both Australia and Canada have more military presence than California is the sea. Both Canada and Australia maintain Naval craft, while California has few aside from "Fish and Game" assets.

Why do I bring this up? It's for perspective. People use Canada and Australia as examples of "What the US should be more like" in terms of foreign policy and health policy as if they were all equivalent. But to understand this idea properly, you have to understand the size of the countries involved. Most people tend to think of Canada or Australia as "Big" countries that are in some way equivalent or at a peer level with the United States in terms of population and economic size. The truth is both of those examples are best thought of in terms of being more like another California rather than a peer to the entire United States.

Everyone should understand that I have a great affinity for both of those countries and am part Canadian myself so its not that I'm trying to say that these countries are good or great, its just a size comparison Im attempting to make. Canada and Canadians - great place, great country, great people. Australia - great place, great country great people.

They just arent as big as you would think.

Posted @ December 19, 2007 07:08 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Dead Week

Theres a tradition in the software business called "dead week”. That’s the week between Christmas and New Years. Hardly anyone works during this week, most everyone around the globe are out on vacation, taking personal time off and so on. Since so many people are out, there is no "critical mass", no quorum of managers, so "Dead week" is a nice quite time to work in the business. Theres almost no expectations for your time during that week, theres not enough people around to add up to any sort of possible surprises. If anyone gets ambitious, you can quickly bury them behind a wall of signatures they cant possibly get, because at the end of the day – everyone in authority is gone. Better still, it’s the Christmas holidays, and unless there is some deep disaster afoot no one will call anyone at home.

Unless you are unfortunate to be a part of some “year end - go live” project, the time from December 15th to the day after New Years is total bliss. Its quiet, and it gets quieter every day as you move through the end of the calendar. You just have to be creative on how you use your time.

When I worked in San Francisco, we created minature golf courses in our cube farms and played a "round of 9". We held little contests like how many coke cans could you crush in 30 seconds and posted the scores in main conference room. We went shopping, ate lunch for 4 hours, made margaritas in the breakroom and caught up on our technical reading (and by “technical reading” I mean we set up DOOM and played it on the company LAN).

I pretty much do those things every day now that I work from home so in some ways “the thrill is gone”, but back in the days when I commuted to work, it was the one time of year I actually didn’t mind the time and effort spent getting to work.

Tommorrow I will finish the last of this years meetings and presentations and with that, “Dead week” for me at least, officially starts. It’s been a busy year for me this year, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks of no phone ringing, no emergencies and no email panics from “amature night” managers with no real clue what is going on.

The luxury of free time. It really is hard to beat.

Posted @ December 18, 2007 08:18 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

So this new Amazon Kindle thing....

Apparently its not just a newfangled way to read books with a 400 dollar electronic device, its also an easy way to get your book distributed.
Say....That gives me an idea...

Posted @ December 16, 2007 04:55 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

A note in passing - Triticale

Tom Arnold.

Over to the right, you will see a blog noted on my blogroll for a Triticale. He was one of the very first people to help me get a blog started.

Triticale, The Wheat Rye Guy, Tom Arnold died of leukemia yesterday. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Posted @ December 15, 2007 10:38 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

100 years ago - The 'Great White Fleet' Sails

On December 16th 1907, The Modern United States Navy came into being with the sailing of the "Great White Fleet". Here is a terrific article on that great event.

In December 1907, there was:

No Panama Canal.
No State of Arizona.
No State of New Mexico.
No State of Alaska.
No State of Hawaii.
No Penicillin.
No Freeways.
No Radio.
No GPS.

Very few cars.
Very few aircraft.
Very little electric power.

Women did not vote, nor did they serve in any of the Military Services.

Travel by the fastest known form of transportation of the day, the locomotive would allow you to travel 800 miles in 14 hours. Today, 14 hours can take you to any spot on the globe.

Most people of that era ever travelled more than 100 miles from their homes. Yet the sailors of the Great White Fleet would travel around the world in the two years of their adventure. In the end, they would travel 42,227 miles in their journey with little or no contact with home except by occasional slow mail postings.

The ships of the fleet, like most of the world at that time, was powered by coal. For all intents and purposes, the sailing of the 'Great White Fleet' around the world in 1907 was equivalent to sending a modern day US Airforce Bomber Wing off to the planet Mars.

Three signifcant US Navy officers were in the fleet during the circumnavigation. Their names were Nimitz, Spruance and Halsey. They would each become legendary later in history.

In my little game of "six degrees of separation", Teddy Roosevelt shook Nimitz's hand, Nimitz shook my grandfathers hand, and I of course shook my grandfathers hand. Maybe its just me and my "geological way" of looking at things, but 1907 doesn't seem like that long ago, and yet, the world has most certainly changed since a coal powered fleet plowed its way across the seas.

( ** - The State of Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in November 1907 )

Posted @ December 14, 2007 01:34 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Has anyone considered that Huckabee is doing so well in Iowa because of no other reason that he hasnt had enough money to be able to run around and annoy the hell out of those folks out there in Iowa? Is it possible that Huckabee is in fact the "none of the above" candidate? and it really wouldnt matter who it was in his position, because he's essentially bounded by the idea that hes not "not one of those guys"

Heck anyone could fit that bill.

Think about it. Fred Thompson was doing fine until he started running. He starts running and look what happens. Tommy Thompson stopped running and his numbers went up!

But lets think about it for a second like an Iowan (Iowan? Iowander? Iowandite?), youre an average Joe standing in line at the local "Maid-Rite" and practically every day some schmoe from the political class who wants your vote is going to show what an average guy he is by "Just showing up and getting something to eat here at good old Maid-Rite, all impromptu dontcha know. Why it happens every day here in the Senator/Govenor Haflblab campaign office, we love Iowa dontcha know. Hey buddy, let me and my 6 sharp elbowed campaign staff get in there for the katchup bottle and a quick photo, ok my friend?, how 'bout those Buckeyes hahahaha..."

After 6 months or so of this sort of daily nonsense, your vote is probably going to go to whatever candidate or party doesnt show their face and disrupt you in your all to short lunch hour. Oh look, its John Mccain - again! Well check him off the list. Romney? get outtahere man, im trying to eat fergodsake...

Maybe the way to wrap this sucker up is to not run at all and to tell everyone thats what you are doing? Heck by that logic, I'm probably doing pretty good in this campaign.

Posted @ December 14, 2007 12:40 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

How many foreclosures - and what kind of loans?

The world economy is melting down because of the US Real Estate market, at least thats the story that we are being fed by the nightly press. The story is that millions of homeowners have joined the likes of Tom Joad and his family and are sleeping in boxcars, thrown out by predatory lenders who couldnt wait to steal a little money from the little man.

Those thieving capitalists...

Here's a little perspective:

Gee. Most people have either a Prime Fixed or dont have a mortgage at all. Only a small number - a single digit small number - of "Sub Prime" loans.

So how many foreclosures are there and from what category:

Gosh, 43% of forclosures are in the subprime adjustable rate area.

( from the fantastic Larry Kudlow Money Politics)

What we have just proven here is the far out Nobel prize winning theory that that the subprime adjustable rate loans are risky to lenders.

I don't deny that there is trouble in the housing industry, what I do deny is that this is a shock and a surprise. Banks and lending institutions work diligently every hour of the day in figuring out who is a good risk and who is a bad risk on who is the best person or company to loan money.

It's fundamentally what they do.

Someone telling me that the banks didn't know that these loans were risky is like telling me that the insurance companies didnt know that insuring homes on the coast of florida was a big risk.

Of course they know, that's their job.

They play the precentages. You bet that paying a small amount of insurace premium each month will cover you if anything goes wrong, and the insurance company bets that lots of people paying the monthly premium will cover any losses.

So if you are a bank, and you have lots of "subprime loans", are you really that surprised when they go to straight to hell? No. You knew it was a risk. You probably had the person taking the loan get Private Mortgage insurance.

Oh wait, you mean to say that some of these loans were so risky that the person getting the loan couldnt qualify for Private Mortgage Insurance? or that by getting PMI the person would have enough money every month to get the loan?

And you're telling me that it didnt send red-lights-a-clanging-and-warning-bells-a-flashing on the loan officers desk?

Really?

Ok, so youre a bank, you are flush with cash because of the booming economy and you dont make money by sitting on it, you make money by lending it. The only part of the market you can expand into now ( because most everyone who can buy a house already has one ) is the sub prime market. This would be the market of people who dont own a house, and have had some problem with their credit score.

Sure, rich pickings in there, but that area comes with risk. So it would seem to make sense to me that you would as a bank, prepare for that risk, maybe set aside a certain amount of money to cover those potential losses in the event of, God forbid, the risky subprime loans dont get paid on a right honorable payment schedule according to the terms therein.

And here's where Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley come into the game.

You see, back on the last boom and bust cycle some 8 years ago, some geniuses in the Congress decided it was those nasty capitalist companies telling people things about their companies that got all those poor consumers in trouble.

You remember dont you?, The glory days of the stock market when there were people who bought Pets.com for 60 dollars a share, expecting, ( nay demanding!) that they make a profit and angry to the point of lawsuits to find that dog food really doesnt ship well in 60lb bags through the USPS when you can just drive down the street to get it at the same price - right now.

"Something must be done", said the people and Congress stepped in to make it so. So of course, Congress began to make sure that companies didn't send out too much good information about how they were doing, so as to unnaturally influence the poor and hapless victim, the consumer and shareholder. That horrible deceptive activity by those nasty captalists resulted in the passage of the Sarbanes/Oxley act, which is to American business what the McCain/Feingold act is to politics.

Oh good, Congress has saved us all from the predatory stock market profiteers, we can all rest easy now.

Sarbanes Oxley did a lot of things to American companies, almost none of them good and almost none of them solved any of the problems they were intended to solve. One thing it surely did was invoke the law of unintended consequences. Now under Sarbanes Oxley, companies have to be very careful about how they communicate and what they communicate. Unfortunately, that means that when there is good news, they rarely talk about it because things might change for the worse but when there is bad news, they wont shut up about it because if things get better no one will notice the bad activity. Since Sarbanes Oxley, you constantly see cases where stocks have "exceeded their quarterly projections".

What Sarbanes Oxley did was to cause companies to muzzle good news, and to amplify bad news and this is what you see happening today with the US Real Estate Market.

Either that or all banks suddenly lost their ability to determine who was a good risk and who was a bad risk, or its just possible that many banks are using this problem as an opportunity to throw lots of underperforming loans in risky areas and bad properties out under the rug of "the nationwide sub prime disaster - "which is not our fault dear shareholders but the fault of unforseen consequences and market forces...". After a few bad quarters the bank suddenly finds itself in the land of 'milk and honey' because the only loans they have are of the "high return, low risk" category.

"...Wall Street reports today the surpising rebound in the mortgage industry after 4 straight quarters of bad news..."

I'm not saying that banks and lending institutions arent deceptive - they are. I'm just saying that I find it hard to believe that this "Subprime lending disaster" is a surprise or as big of a problem as its being made out to be.

I mean, who would have thought that folks with 70,000 a year income couldnt really afford to make payments on a 750,000 house?

Probably the same people who bought Pets.com stock in 1998.

Posted @ December 14, 2007 07:13 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

MV-22 Osprey: First footage from Iraq

Interesting.

Posted @ December 13, 2007 06:54 PM | Aviation | Comments (1)

What I'm reading

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories.
Yeah you are right, I probably should get a hobby.

Posted @ December 09, 2007 07:17 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Eight Lessons from Pearl Harbor

Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura (second from the left) and Ambassador Saburo Kurusu (center) after meeting with the U.S. President at the White House. Photographed on November 27, 1941, at the White House.

From the US-Japan War talks site.

1. Nothing starts a war faster than someone having the stray idea that you really dont want to fight.

2. Just because your enemy has its ambassadors in your capital speaking to you about peace doesn’t preclude the fact that they don’t also have a fleet of aircraft carriers on their way to strike your fleet.

3. Talks about peace are almost always diplomatic cover for the military to do what it does at a time of their choosing. A wise man once said that “war is diplomacy by other means” but the truth is that diplomacy is often war by other means.

4. Do not mistake the absence of war as being the same as peace. The history of mankind can be written as the transition of civilizations in one of the two states of preparing for war or recovering from war. Peace only comes with capitulation.

5. Your enemy doesn’t work to your schedule. Things will happen at the worst time of day on the worst day of the week at a time when you will be least capable of responding.

6. Your estimates about what the enemy is up to and what it is that motivates them are biased by what it is you most want your enemy to do, but your enemy doesn’t labor within those biases. They will do what they do for their own reasons because they think that it will benefit them and not you.

7. Smart people often do really stupid things. Don’t depend on a persons resume to save you from harsh reality. On December 6th, Admiral Kimmel and General Short were considered the best in their business. 24 hours later, facts would interfere with that assessment.

8. Your big bad battleship is tommorows sunken target. Don’t get lulled into believing that you can’t be beat, because just as sure as some man made that big bad battleship, some other man made the aerial torpedo to sink it.

My favorite rememberance of the attack on Pearl Harbor is an account of the actions of the people of San Francisco on the day of the attack:

...As word spread in San Francisco, thousands gathered at the Ocean Beach to gaze into the Pacific in disbelief. Minelaying in the Bay began at 11 a.m., less than one hour after the attack. (From The San Francisco War Chronology.)

Yes boys and girls, adult men and women of 1941 went to the edge of the Pacific as if to look out across the ocean towards Hawaii, so as to see if they could themselves witness the rising smoke from a far off place called "Pearl Harbor". It must’ve been a sight to see all those people staring out with dread, all not knowing what would come over the horizon the next day. It's a nice visual metaphor for all of us as we make our way through life.

(Yes, as a matter of fact I do find it ironic that this was the week in the calendar that the increasingly anti-American State Department decided to release its National Intelligence Estimate that says that "Iran is not a threat". I hold it and the people who wrote it in total contempt.)

Posted @ December 07, 2007 07:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Well, that was fun

I didn't even get to finish my last week of vacation before I was dragged into some unpleasant business. Long story short, lots of meetings with lawyers, lots of travel and indignity of indignities, I was almost required to buy a suit.

Almost.

So, I'm back from all that,back from vacation and not-vacation-but-not-work-either and I'm back where the weather wont kill you.

Oh, and Tippi Hendren has a real problem with animals. Of course it makes you ask the eternal question of whats scarrier about Tippi Hendren, her performance in Marnie, the Birds or that she is Melanie Griffiths mother?

Posted @ December 05, 2007 09:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)