Weapons of Mass Destruction and the United States

How many times has a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) been used against the United States of America? It's an important, if trick, question. Basically, members of the Bush administration, the neoconservatives, or neocons, believed that the traditional means of preventing the use of WMDs by terrorists or rogue states, detterence and containment, wouldn't work. Unless Ameriva was free to strike first, or pre-empt, Amefica would be hit. The 9/11 attack was used as an argument to pr-empt in Iraq. Containment of Saddam was breaking down. Unless America attacked, pre- emptied, Saddam would use his WDMs against us.

   Lest you think much has changed, the policies written in 2002 and later extended, are being used to argue for new classes of weapons. America's WDMs are getting old and new ones are needed, as well as new classes if weapons never fielded before.

   As for the trick question, we should all remember that America is the only country to ever use WMDs: the two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagisaki. 

1979 - 35 years ago!

In 1979 I was a college senior, getting ready to graduate and study medicine. Things were a little different in those days. I didn't own a TV, so I didn't follow the news as closely as I might have. Yet, one of the defining moments for me was coming back from class and viewing the wreckage of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission at Dessert 1. I remember thinking "Can't America do any better?" I would vote the next year for Reagan, and for years I would believe that things were getting better. Only in hindsight - 35 years of it now - can I see that Carter was right, Reagan was wrong, and that the terrible crises we are in today stem from decisions, poor ones, made at that time. My entire college career was marked by the economic and energy shocks of the late 1970's. Both winters of 1976-77 and 1977-78 (my Freshman and Sophomore years) were severe. The University of Notre Dame had its own energy plant burning coal, and in both winters, ran its coal reserves down very low. In January 1978, a sever blizzard closed the school for 2 weeks (it had never closed for more than one day for weather before). Students were dorm-bound. The snow drifted to the third floor and higher. I remember walking to other dorms: you exited on the first floor, then climbed "stairs" in the drifts and walked on pathways that were even with the third floor until you reached your destination, where you took the "stairs" back to ground level. One student was injured when he jumped off the 4th floor roof of his dorm and landed on a bicycle rack buried in the snow. Notre Dame had a basketball scheduled with the University of Maryland midway through the blizzard. Since the game was televised (and paid) the University contracted the City of South Bend to make special snow plow jobs of the city airport and roads to get the Maryland basketball team in for the game. The game was thrown open to the entire student body free to give them something to do. Set against the unusual weather, President Carter's goals for energy self-sufficiency seemed important, although his calls for cutting back seemed to counter-progressive. Driving 55 and turning the thermostat down sounded quaint. But his earlier plans were nothing compared to his speech of July 15, 1979. Dubbed the "Malaise" speech, (a word that never appeared in the speech), Carter identified the crisis' cause not on an external enemy but on American's themselves. The crisis was due to American materialism, self-indulgence and consumption, and a failure to find meaning therein. A crisis of values among the people. Carter spoke of a "system of government that seems incapable of action", of "a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful self interests". The common good was lost: "You see every extreme position defended to the past vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another." Finally, Carter indicated that America was at a turning point: "There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that path lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility." The alternative - a course consistent with our past traditions, lead to the restoration of American values. The problem was never-ending consumption, the desire for more. The alternative, living according to our permanent values, meant living within our means. How we dealt with energy, would determine the type of freedom that would prevail in America. Carter outlined a plan to decrease, and eventually end, our dependence on foreign oil. His plan, though, would require sacrifice, and effort. I personally didn't hear the speech. I do remember the reaction, and the "malaise" label. And I remember Reagan, and his "morning in America". I also remember his promise that the problem with our lack of energy was a lack of domestic drilling and production. Reagan insisted that we could not insist on doing with less. 1979-80 played out as a backdrop to my finishing and graduating. Then in the spring of 1980 came the failed Iranian Hostage rescue, and my personal crisis with American military power. I went on to vote for Reagan; practically everyone else did to. He promised a great future. It's interesting to look back now and see how his promises turned out. He promised to restore economic order in government spending: "You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why, then, should we thing collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation?" The average Carter deficit was $54.5 billion annually. During the Reagan years, average deficits grew to $210.6 billion, on average over his two terms. Federal spending doubled from $590.9 billion in 1980 to $1.14 trillion in 1989. The federal bureaucracy grew by 5% under Reagan. Most of all, I remember Reagan as a great sales man. He learned that as an actor turned spokesman for GE. He sold Americans what they wanted: self-indulgence and consumption. The Reagan revolution was not a conservative revolution at all. It was a revolution for American invulnerability and global supremacy. His support for SDI, "Star Wars", made the Soviet Union paranoid for good reason. Its basis was to make American invulnerable to any kind of retribution. This would allow America to demand anything necessary for its "survival", specifically, foreign oil. The Global War on Terror (GWOT), and especially the war in Iraq, had little to do with terrorism and everything to do with access to Iraqi light, sweet crude. Despite Reagan's assertion that America's energy shortage was the work of Washington preventing domestic production, and despite the fact that Alaskan oil discoveries where brought to market as gast as geologically possible, American oil production peaked in 1972 at about 9.7BB per day. Even today, with the shale revolution and "fracking", production is "back" only to 7BB per day. Imports peaked in 2005 at 10 BB per day, and fallen to 7 BB per day. The question I have come to ask myself is this: I know that we American's are not aggressors. I know that we maintain our military supremacy to deter and defend against aggression. The question is, what do Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and Syria believe? And since the military maxim is to look at your enemies capabilities, not intentions, does it matter? Looking back to Carter's questioning American consumption, especially with regards to oil, the choice was summarized well in a slightly different regards by Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, after 9/11. "We have two choices, Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter." So, instead of choosing conservation, higher mileage standards, alternative energy sources, decreased consumption, and trying to live within our domestic oil production, or living with what oil we could import from friendly sources, America chose to pursue global hegemony, so that we could pursue getting oil from the entire world, despite making the world change the way they live. Since Russia has enormous amounts of oil and gas, it is any wonder that they alone have been able to resist our demands for oil, no doubt due to their remaining stocks of nuclear weapons? No doubt why Iran continues in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It seems the only way to resist America.

Trying to Get Certified

I started a new job on July 28, 2014. I was hired as a Senior Consultant by Avalon Consulting LLC, a Plano, Texas company that specializes in Web Portals, NoSQL databases and Hadoop. My IT experience and skill set is fairly diverse. While I have been been involved with Hadoop installation, monitoring and development over the past 3 years and expected to start working with Hadoop, I have more than 10 years of experience as a relational database administrator (DBA), have worked on several NoSQL database implementations, and spent more than 5 years as a lead client-server developer. More recently, I worked as a VMware Virtualization Engineer and most recently was a Python Cloud Developer.

I only hold two certifications: I am a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) and I hold a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) Windows 7 Client Systems Administrator. The CISSP is an active certification, in that the examinations are regularly updated and maintaining the certification requires 120 hours of Continuing Education (CE) per 3-year cycle. The MCTS is no longer being maintained; Microsoft points candidates towards newer certificates in active technology. I was hired in June 2011 to work as a Contract VMware Virtualization Engineer for the US Army Medical Information Technology Center, contingent upon my earning an MCTS prior to my commencing work. I already held the CISSP which, along with the VMware skill set, was required to work in a secure position. The choice of subject area for the MCTS was left to me; I chose the Windows 7 Client Sysadmin based on my prospective manager's advice that it was the easiest to earn. I purchased the two Microsoft Press Self-Paced Training Kits that corresponded to the exam: 70-680 Configuring Windows 7 and 70-685 Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Technician and spent the next 3 weeks cramming on the 1500+ pages of material. I had used Windows 7, performed multiple installs, and, in general, had some familiarity with the product. However, there were a number of capabilities that I had had no opportunity to examine, not having been a Windows 7 Enterprise Support Technician previously. The self-paced training materials included several very-short practice tests of about 10 questions each. The certification exam itself was, I believe, 120 questions over 3 hours, if I remember correctly.

I did not pass the first try. In fact, the nature of the questions on the exam were very different from those in the practice exam. Not passing the first try was fairly distressing to me. I had always been a fairly "good" test taker. Great SATs, great MCATs, passed the National Medical Boards, Part I in a previous career, passed the CISSP. I had an employer that wanted me, the position had actually opened a month prior so they had tasks stacking up for me to perform. Well, exposure to the test told me how to re-study, and I passed a second try a week later.

All of these tech companies that offer certification exams also offer training classes, and they are, of course, the "preferred" method of preparation. I have known people that attended training classes paid for by their companies as a cost of business. I have known people that paid their own way. I completed a year as a VMware Engineer, and my contract was renewed. However, I very much wanted to become VMware Certified, and one hard requirement to sit for the VMware Certification exam was to attend (and, of course, pay for) the appropriate training class. My manager had promised to send me once my contract was renewed, but was unable to keep that promise when his manager decided that training dollars could not be spent on contractors, and the three slots were filled with individuals that were not performing VMware Engineering tasks. I thought of paying for my own slot, but the $2999 for the class plus the travel costs (~$1600) plus the wages lost (I was an hourly contractor) was just too much for my wallet. So the Army lost a VMware Engineer, and I moved to Austin to work as a Python System Security developer.

Fast forward a couple of years. Tomorrow I sit for a Hadoop System Administration exam, one of two I need to start doing real work for my company. The past 3 weeks studying have been déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. Sitting on overhead in a consulting firm is just like for an attorney. You make money for the company by billing hours to clients, not to overhead. I am less than enamored with this certification process. The company that offers the Hadoop distribution that I am testing on has outsourced the training classes to a handful of companies around the world, and also outsourced the testing process. Between the three entities, it has been difficult to get a feel for the type of questions on the exam. (Some would argue that is good for the testing process; that it encourages the student to study harder.) Perhaps they want to sell more class slots. I do know that I could pass their competitor's corresponding exam, as their competitor offers more practice questions. Undoubtedly, this is merely a reflection of my own insecurities and frustrations over not being able to quickly test out and get to work. not to mention the fact that I don't have the $2999 in my pocket to pay my own way to the class, which they "almost guarantee" will help you pass. Perhaps I should just stop writing, get a good nights sleep, and then do well. So I will!

On Doctor's Syndrome

When I was in medical school, decades ago, I recognized a syndrome I will call Doctor's syndrome. I call it that because I noticed it among MDs, but I have come to see over the course of my life that it is a more common syndrome associated with highly learned individuals, many who receive doctorate degrees of one sort of the other. And since there is a real hierarchy in the snobbery of individuals with doctorate degrees (as evidenced by one of my professor's who, upon learning I was attending medical school instead of graduate school in chemistry, remarked "Oh, so you want to be a real doctor, not just a PhD" in a not so kind voice), I continue to call it Doctor's syndrome, although a lot of economists seem to be afflicted. Doctor's syndrome works like this. An individual goes through a long, difficult period of training in one particular field. It is associated with a deal of hazing, put-downs, trials and tribulations, in short, an initiation. Eventually, mastery of some portion of the field is noted and acknowledged, and the individual practices according to the master of that sub-portion of that field. Somewhere, there comes the delusion that, because the individual is at the top of their game in their area, they are now capable of solving the problems of every field. Because a guy (and they always were men) could take out an inflamed appendix or solve a case of gonorrhea, they must be capable of running a business. Or solve political problems. But it really seems to reach its ultimate in the real of economists. I pick on economists because they have always seem to equate their mastery of a soft, observational-based area of study with that of the physical sciences, with the attendant rush to use mathematics to "prove" their theories. Anyway, individuals with learning, and mastery, of the field of economic behavior, are allowed to comment and set policy on areas, such as energy policy, that they really have no business being involved with. Imagine calling your MD to get advice on buying an electric car versus sticking with a plain old gas vehicle. Or calling your power plant operator to get advice on treatment for your lymphoma. Or calling an economist to help you with (or, I should say, when) we might run out of cheap oil. My point is this: now that I am out of the medical profession, and instead practice on computer systems, I have an obligation to tell you I can't take out your appendix. As a CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional), I practice under a code of ethics that says that, that I will only do work that I have knowledge and training and expertise, and will tell my clients when they should seek expert opinion on any other area of mastery. Don't any of these other guys operate under a code of ethics?