Time For Another Nuclear Neophyte President?

Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a stroke on April 12, 1945, just a month before the end of World War II in Europe. At that time, the Pacific war was still being hard fought, and the Manhattan project was thought to provide the solution to victory in Japan in the form of an atomic bomb. Secrecy was so tight that Vice President Harry Truman knew nothing about the atomic bomb until he was sworn in as president. He did well, despite his deficiency in knowledge, didn't he?

It's of historical significance because the current front runner for President, Donald Trump, has a striking deficiency of knowledge surrounding nuclear weapons. Today (December 22, 2015) Trump is polling from 28% to 33% to 39% (Real Clear Politics; USA Today; http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/latest-polls-set-stage-unprecedented-circumstances). His next closest competitor, Ted Cruz, comes in at 18% to 24%.

So, who says Mr. Trump is not so up on SLBMs, ACMs, MIRVs, and other such goodies? Well, he did.

Last Tuesday night, during the last Republican debate of 2015, Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to indicate which leg of the nuclear triad he (Mr. Trump) would prioritize. Here is the question Mr. Hewitt asked:

"Mr. Trump, Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It's an executive order. It's a commander-in-chief decision.

"What's your priority among our nuclear triad?"

I am just going to point out that Hewitt gave Mr. Trump a summary of the triad (hint: three!) when he listed the three legs of the triad: B-52 (bombers), missles, and submarines. And also obvious was Hewitt's emphasis on the age of the components of the nuclear triad. So Mr. Trump's response?

"Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important."

"And one of the things that I'm frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you're going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important."

"But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out – if we didn't have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can't just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn't care. It was hand-to-hand combat."

"The biggest problem this world has today is not President Obama with global warming, which is inconceivable, this is what he's saying. The biggest problem we have is nuclear – nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That's in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now."

Hewitt wasn't satisfied with Mr. Trump's non-answer, so he sought clarification:

"Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Sen. Rubio after that and ask him."

And here is Mr. Trump's key point:

"I think – I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me."

O.K. Mr. Trump is convinced that the most important component of the nuclear triad is the devastation.

I must say that I do agree with some of what Mr. Trump said. Specifically:

...I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important."

The biggest problem we have is nuclear – nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That's in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now."

Amen, brother Trump! The single biggest problem we face is some maniac getting his hands on a nuclear weapon, or the codes for those weapons. Or some maniac that knows nothing about nuclear weapons.

Perhaps, during the 1940's, things were stable enough and the number of atomic weapons so small (three!) that we could afford to have our President learn about atomic weapons on the job. After all, pretty much everyone else was also learning about them. But now, I think, things have changed a bit. The potential for damage is a bit larger. I think that now we need a president that already knows about nuclear weapons, has already thought about foreign policy, and has been involved with protecting our country. There are very few requirements that the Federal Government must perform; protecting the people is one of them, and learning on the job is something best avoided now. It's no longer a century ago.

There is a sickness in the land...and it is time we studied it, to understand it, and treat it.

Three days ago there was another mass shooting in America, in San Bernardino, CA. It is too early to determine the cause of this shooting. It may never be known. But it is time to start solving the problem, so that the number and frequency of these shootings will decline, and one day, hopefully, stop.

There are at least two major world views surrounding guns. One involves gun freedom. One involves gun control. They are polarizing. But even across that large divide, there is at least the common belief that mass shootings are the work of the mentally ill, or terrorists.

Even with that commonality of belief, the U.S. does not perform research on gun violence. A lot of people are throwing around a bunch of assertions about mass shootings and mental illness with no basis. No one knows. Because the research isn't being done.

Here is the history: In 1996 the NRA accused the CDC of advocating gun control. So a Congressman stripped the CDC of $2.6M of funding, the exact amount of money the agency had funded research in gun violence the previous year. The money was returned, with language that stated “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” The CDC interpreted that language as not allowing them to do research on guns and health. And since then, none has been done.

The CDC is responsible for researching disease in America. If the CDC imposes a ban on research in America, then research isn't done. Careers are changed or not started on the basis of CDC funding policies.

After the Newtown Shooting, President Obama issued an executive order telling the CDC to get back to studying the causes of gun violence. And nothing has happened. In two years the CDC has issued an agenda of possible research but says they lack the dedicated funding to perform any research.¹

In my lifetime, I have owned four firearms. I have owned three handguns and one semi-automatic rifle. I will purchase more. But the idea that anyone or any organization that owns or advocates any tool should be able to prevent research on health issues that involve that tool is bizarre.

Should the Aerospace Industry Associate be able to prevent the CDC from performing research surrounding the use of an airplane to ram the World Trade Center? Should the American Postal Workers Union be able to prevent the CDC from performing research on Postal Workers going postal? Should the Automobile Manufacturers Association be able to prevent the CDC from doing research on auto deaths. Should the Cigarette manufacturers be able to prevent the CDC from doing research on cigarettes? Why the hell should the NRA be able to prevent the CDC from doing research on gun violence?

When a plane crashes we study the hell out of the accident. Why? So that it won't happen again. So that any systems or hardware or software can be made better. No one advocates banning airplanes because of a crash. Same thing with auto accidents. They happen all the time. And we study them thoroughly to improve the safety of cars, to make them better. Why do we treat the whole area of gun violence the same way? Why is the NRA so paranoid? We aren't even studying guns, per se.

Guns are different. Guns are in the Constitution. Guns are necessary to prevent government tyranny. Bullshit! Guns are a tool. The sooner we treat guns like any other tool with rights and responsibilities no different that cars or airplanes or chain saws is the day that we start doing research to understand how and why they are misused and abused just like any other man made tool

And the sooner we start treating the NRA like any other trade association with its own axes to grind like any other organization, instead of believing it is some mystical organization that will preserve our "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" the sooner we will get on with doing that ourselves, as we are guaranteed in the Constitution, rather than abdicating that duty to an organization that does no such thing.

^{1. Washington Post. Why the CDC still isn’t researching gun violence, despite the ban being lifted two years ago.↩}

The Term "Mass Shooting" Confuses Public: Jodi Upton in USA Today Friday December 4, 2015

Two days after the latest incident of someone using multiple weapons to shoot and kill multiple people, this time in San Bernardino, CA, Jodi Upton wrote an article on the last page of the 'A' section of USA today. Entitled 'The Term "Mass Shooting" Confuses Public' the article indicates that, because we don't have a common definition for a mass shooting, the public my be more concerned than they should be:

"... the problem is one of definitions, sometimes used sloppily and interchangeably. The result: a very confused, and possibly hyperventilating public."

The FBI and the Congressional Research Service use definitions approximately that of four or more people killed with a firearm, not including the killer. Using that definition, the San Bernardino shooting was the 22nd mass shooting of the year.

The Stanford Mass Shootings and the Mass Shooting Tracker use the definition of three or four (respectively) people shot, not necessarily killed, and that may include the killer. Using those definitions, the San Bernardino shooting was one of more than 300 this year.

That is a big difference, as Jodi Upton states. She goes on to state that the use of the headline "Mass Shooting" is misleading, because the public sees "mass shooting" and thinks four or more killed, where in reality, three or more may have only been shot, not killed. Therefore, by her evaluation, the public is necessarily overly concerned and being mislead.

What planet is she living on? For her to apply her journalistic credentials to decide what the public should be or not be concerned with is the epitome of bad journalism, and crosses over into value judgements and editorialization. Journalists are supposed to present the facts and let the public decide what is important. For decades journalists have used their credentials to shape the news, not report it, and Upton continues that long line of journalistic over reach.

She continues with the following:

"Mass killings -- by firearm or other means -- have not increased since 2006; they are consistently about two dozen a year."

Fine. I absolutely agree with her that we should adopt clear, commonly accepted definitions for these kinds of events. But did she read her own title? The term she claims is confusing was "Mass Shooting", not "Mass Killing".

I would be perfectly happy if she called to task her own journalistic cabal for trying to sell more papers by substituting "Mass Killing" for a mass shooting, but for her to claim that the public should't hyperventilate because there aren't more mass killings, just more mass shootings, is bizarre.

Perhaps she should go interview the families of the people who were just shot, not killed, and tell them they should feel better, because their loved ones weren't killed. Perhaps she should hang up her journalistic creds and become another Republican candidate and tell the public not to worry, because the "Mass Shootings" aren't "Mass Killings". I should point out that her article ran directly under a graphic showing a map of the US with dots for the killings since Newtown, with the title "Hundreds Killed In Shootings Since Newtown".

BTW, her article quotes a Criminology professor, James Alan Fox, who states "That definition of four or more shot, rarely translates to four or more killed. One-third of these 'mass shootings' result in no fatalities, and only 5% are mass killings. However, this scary one-a-day statistic is rolled out whenever there is a large-scale mass killing, allowing unsophisticated readers to make the wrong connection."

So maybe that's the real target of the article: all those unsophisticated readers out there who don't have the sophistication to parse english and understand the difference between "shooting" and "killing". We need experts of the like of Fox and Upton to take the facts and spoon feed them to us in language so simple as to prevent us from possibly making a mistake in interpretation. And who will tell us when to be worried or not.

Please! Spare me from such experts!

PhD-itis

If you have never heard of this disease, I'm not surprised. PhD-itis is also known as Doctor's Disease. Simply put, it's the delusion that many graduates of doctoral programs catch once they become a noted expert in their chosen field that they are then experts at every field they choose to undertake. Expert surgeons with no business training try to run corporations. Internists undertake real estate ventures. Neurosurgeons believe they can be President.

More than anything else, it is a disease of arrogance and hubris. Arrogance in their belief that they are brilliant at everything. Hubris in their feelings of superiority.

Career politicians have a specialized form of this disease. They equate their mastery of one particular speciality, election campaigns, as mastery of all details of life. You see this today, November 2015, after the Paris attacks, as a host of Federal Congressmen and State Governors, issue calls for the halt of the Syrian Refugee resettlement program. They take one isolated piece of data, the fact that a stolen passport was found at the site of one of the Paris attacks, an ISIS propaganda video claiming that ISIS would sneak attackers in with refugees, and a complete lack of any knowledge about the existing Syrian Refugee vetting process, and issue proclamations about the Syrian Refugees harboring ISIS spies. It is way too early to know if finding a stolen Syrian passport is really indicative of an ISIS spy having been smuggled in with the refugees. It is also way to early to determine if ISIS really has the capability to smuggle attackers in with the refugees. And how can Congress people, much less than state governors, really determine that the vetting process is not adequate? Have any of them even looked at the process?

I am so sick and tired of politicians who can't think past their ideologies. I'm tired of a person like Paul Ryan, an expert at Tax Policy, suddenly deciding he's now not only a foreign policy expert but also an expert at vetting refugees for national security risk. A great example of PhD-itis!

This syndrome allows individuals to practice their xenophobias and hate and religious and social dogmas under the guise of knowledge and expertise that they just don't have.

Why in the world should politicians be able to set the medical standards for a medical procedure? Why should a physician tell the business world how to run a medical insurance company?

We have had a few renaissance men and women, but are they the rule or the exception?

A Raise Thank Goodness!

I got a raise!

I was bummed out last summer. First, I was hit by my dentist with a proposal for $18k in dental work. Then, my audiologist told me I needed new hearing aids at $8k. In addition, I had several prospective clients that fell through, so I was temporarily "on the bench". While I was still being paid, the lady I was dating did not take any of those as an indicator that I was a good provider, and dumped me. She said that all the men in her life had had money problems, and she didn't want that any more.

I found an inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics online. Crank in income and year and adjust that to the current. I found out that my current 2015 salary was almost identical in purchasing power to my starting salary in IT in 1985. No wonder I was having problems paying my bills. I wasn't getting anywhere!

My phone rings off the hook all the time from recruiters, which I ignore, generally. From 2010 through 2014 I was doing contracting work, and I was constantly looking for new contracts, so my resume seems to be everywhere. And there are a number of recruiters that will see that one keyword they are looking for and want to plug you in somewhere. So normally I don;t bother. But in September I decided to talk to one, and I wound up interviewing with another consulting firm. I finished the interviews and then things went on hold as they waited for their client to approve a Hadoop project.

I am very lucky to be in an area of IT that is booming. Big Data in general and Hadoop in particular (along with NoSQL and Enterprise Search) are doing well, and there is a known skills shortage in those areas. It is a major limiting factor in the implementation plans of a number of companies. That's what is keeping my busy in consulting, as regular employees of the company try to ramp up their skills. SO I have seen a good deal of interest.

Finally the consulting firm made me a very generous offer: A 45% base pay increase, a smaller bonus (10% vs. 17.5%), a management title, Solutions Applications Architect Senior Manager vs. Senior Consultant, and a lot less travel.

I was very conflicted. When I joined my current company, I intended it to be my last position. It's a small firm, less than 100. I know the Senior management; the CEO went to Notre Dame (he was a couple of years behind me). I didn't want to leave, and I didn't want to start over.

So I called the CEO and outlined my salary concerns. We had a good talk, and I verified that my company wanted to keep me. They countered with nice incentives, and I was happy to be able to stay. Not quite as good as the new offer, but the company is superior, and the raise will help my financial situation.

It won't get me that lady back, but I no longer want her. It's tough to find out someone cares more about your wallet than you, but better sooner than later. There's 7 billion people in the world and half of them are women. Plenty of fish in the ocean!

Turn Over Collecting IRS Back Taxes to Private Debt Collectors?

I really can't believe the shit that Republicans in Congress come up with sometimes. The latest really blows my mind.

While the Republican Presidential Candidates are talking about radically modifying the tax code and even eliminating the IRS, the Republicans in Congress have added a provision to the Highway Bill which would requirethe IRS to turn over its back tax collection duties to private debt collectors. You know, those people that call you up at all hours of the day and night, send you threatening mail and email, and, in general, harass you unmercifully when some company decides you owe them money. Since they do so on a contingency basis, they have a considerable interest in extracting anything they can out of you for their cut. Imagine just how excited those people would be to get to collect (and take a cut of) the big sums that some people owe in back taxes.

The private debt collection industry generates the most complaints to the Federal Trade Commission of any industry. Now, as part of the Highway Bill, Congressional Republicans want to sic them on individual Americans, many who are just struggling to get by, thanks to the Great Recession, the hollowing out of the middle class, Income Inequality, and all of the other economic forces making it hard to get by.

And what about all those big corporations that don;t pay any income tax? What about the pharmaceutical companies that do research in the U.S. but then transfer the intellectual property to Ireland so they can book all the profits their instead of here in the U.S.? What about the Silicone Valley tech giants that register their search patents overseas to do the same? The ones that are begging for another one-time exclusion so they can pull all those overseas funds back home tax free. Why aren't the Congressional Republicans sending private debt collectors their way? Why are they so insistent on cracking down on taxpayers?

For that matter, just how far can you trust the Republicans that profess, on one hand, to make things fairer and simpler with their flat taxes and simplified tax codes and IRS abolishment? Could it be that what they really want is to abolish the IRS, a government function (collecting government taxes seems to me like a government function) and replace it with a for profit business? One more case of privatization?

I'm sure the next step is for some Republican to suggest that we privatize the whole Federal Government. Why not? Let's have a for profit (mercenary) military. Let's have a business take over our hydrogen bombs. Let some other company (Marriott?) "optimize" the use of our National Parks. Yield management at Yellowstone!!!

Come on! Some things just aren't meant to be turned over to business. There are some things Government needs to do. Stop with the whole "Government is the problem" kick.

You Believe in Less Government and Less Regulation? Here are the Consequences

Americans believe in capitalism and the free market economic system. The Republican Party is in ascendency, and a whole host of presidential candidates are scrambling to be the one to cut the most government and rescind the most regulations. So let's look at one small system that has some regulation, and see what the consequences could be if we removed what little regulation there is.

In August of 2003, power lines in Ohio, sagging due to high voltage and high temperatures, brushed against trees and failed. Hot summer, common occurrence, recoverable, right? Except in this case, attempts to reroute around the failure, coupled with additional segments of power lines grounding out in the same fashion, also failed. This led to a domino-style failure (cascade) that ended with over 50 million people in 8 states and southern Canada being without power for two days in the hot August weather. Eleven people died and the costs to restore power were $6 billion. Failure analysis by the Department of Energy (one of those agencies to be abolished), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Canada's Department of Natural Resources showed that company after company (the electricity grid is a composite structure run by many private companies) had "failed to adhere to industry's standards". Why? Because there was no government mandate to do so. Simply put, the concept that businesses will do what is necessary to prevent a failure or to do what's right even when not required by government is fallacious.

And we instinctively know that. The concept that a company or a business, when competing with other businesses, will voluntary assume costs to meet safety standards when not required by government is ludicrous. What chemical company will clean up its pollution if not required to, but will instead dump it in the river and let everyone else deal with the problem. Economists call that externalities. We know that that is true because countless rivers and the Great Lakes were in serious trouble prior to such governmental regulations as the Clean Water Act. Yet we are giving serious attention to presidential candidates who want to rescind or cut that particular piece of legislation.

In the case of the electric grid, minimal requirements were put in place for companies to meet standards to prevent another major grid failure. But companies have not done the same to prevent a cyber attack. Why? One factor is that the only entities that are really good at monitoring and fighting cyber attacks are in the government, and the government (read DoD) is prevented from collecting information about cyber attacks from private business.

Another factor is the deregulation of the electricity industry. Twenty years ago, the industry was made up of a few bug companies that owned the whole cycle, from generation to distribution (the grid) to market delivery. Thanks to deregulation, the industry is characterized by separate companies producing the power, distributing the power, and delivering the power. No entity has responsibility for the whole job, from production to delivery. So there is no vested interest in the generator or the deliverer to protect the distributor and the grid.

Now you have a bunch of small or medium-sized companies taking parts of the system. And the costs for cyber protection become a greater part of each companies fixed costs. And what is the industry model for everything now? Mean and lean. Cut costs. Protect shareholder values. That translates to poor to no cyber protection. Especially when the model is voluntary cooperation.

And what is the risk? Here's the risk:

We are a nation that is ever more dependent on just-in-time delivery for everything, from food to drugs to medical information to healthcare. A nation that is totally dependent on the Internet for people to do their jobs, schedule their appointments, navigate their cars, conduct their love affairs. A nation that is dependent on electricity for heating, cooling, cooking, and a million other needs. A cyber attack that caused the failure of the grid for six months would totally destroy our nation. It would result in the death of 8-9 of every 10 people in the United States.

If you think that is unduly alarmist, I refer you to the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. You can debate the risk from EMP but the results to the US from the loss of the grid would be the same, whether from EMP or from cyberattack. Total disruption of society, complete loss of law and order, rampant death and destruction.

Consider this: US cities have at most two weeks of food for purchase. Without electricity, the fuel in underground tanks at the gas station isn't going to be pumped to your car. The diesel isn't going to be pumped into the semi, so they won't be able to deliver any more food.

All this, because what we really want is to get rid of government regulation, stick to laissez-faire capitalism, and trust the companies to voluntarily do what is necessary to protect us. Really?

Lets Talk About Fascism

Fascism, you ask? For heaven sakes, why? Didn't we eradicate fascism during World War II? Didn't that die with Mussolini's black shirts and Hitler's goose stepping SS?

Well, maybe. How would you know if fascism was still alive? Could you pick out the signs?

Every form of government has been researched and studies by someone. All we have to do is google fascism and look for a study. Surely someone has boiled fascism down to the essentials! And here they are: Fourteen characteristics of fascism:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -- Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -- Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to 'look the other way' or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -- The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military -- Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism -- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and antigay legislation and national policy.
6. Controlled Mass Media -- Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or through sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -- Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -- Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -- Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses, and even forego civil liberties, in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions, and who use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections -- Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against (or even the assassination of) opposition candidates, the use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and the manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. ¹

OK. Great!

Nationalism, flags. Like an amendment to make it illegal to burn the flag?

Disdain for human rights. Torture, summary executions, long incarceration of prisoners?

Enemies/scapegoats. Perhaps muslims?

Supremacy of the military. Didn't I hear the other night about how much we needed to expand military spending? And Rand Paul was creamed for talking about sensible military spending.

Rampant sexism. Male-dominated governments. Rigid traditional gender roles. Opposition to abortion. Thank heavens, not in America!

Controlled mass media. Censorship in wartime. The pentagon never does that! And we know that we have a free and open media here. Even if it is all owned by 6 companies.

Obsession with National Security. Fear as a motivational tool. Maybe after 9/11, but we got rid of the Neo-cons, right?

Religion and Government are intertwined. Hey, we've got separation of church and state. It says so, in the Constitution! Apologies to Dr. Carson.

Corporate Power is protected. Yeah, we make it hard on the corporations, with our high corporate taxes. Didn't I hear a bunch of proposals to cut, or even abolish our corporate tax structure?

Labor power is suppressed. Hey, we still have unions! I know, because I always hear about how they are destroying the marketplace. Scott Walker said so!

Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. Well, if you include scientists in their (maybe they are intellectuals) then I guess, maybe.

Obsession with crime and punishment. Not America. We only incarcerate those that need it. And thereby incarcerate more people than any other nation, even Russia!

Rampant cronyism and corruption. They don't call it crony capitalism for nothing!

Fraudulent elections. The use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries. Voter ID laws. Gerrymandering.

Now I'm not saying that America is a fascist state, or that Republicans or fascists, or even that the Republican party is a fascist party. I'm thinking, though, that the argument "It can't happen here!" is only so good as the people who can recognize the signs and MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN HERE. Because a recent poll showed that 34% of americans thought that the first amendment goes too far in guaranteeing free speech.² With a third of americans thinking like that, pretty soon we'll be voting all of our rights away.

^{1. Dr. Lawrence Britt Free Inquiry magazine, Spring 2003.↩}

^{2. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/34-say-first-amendment-goes-too-far.↩}

What Government Do You Want to Cut?

As a commenter said, more eloquently than me,

What government do you want to eliminate? I'm guessing they mean the government that works to keep planes from falling out of the sky or into each other, the government that works to provide a free education to all school-age children, the government that keeps melamine out of our food, the government that protects you from losing all your money if your bank fails, the government that connects our cities with freeways, the government that provides healthcare access to millions, the government that keeps parks and libraries open and free to all, the government that prevents utilities from charging you whatever they want, the government that stopped rivers from catching on fire and made smog alerts rare, the government that keeps food stores from labeling a 3 pound sack of onions as 5 pounds, the government that checks the quality of the water running in your pipes and the government that makes sure that when you flush your toilet, it doesn't just flow into the nearby lake, the government that helps make most places in this country safe enough to where you don't have to carry your gun to the grocery store in order to get back home alive, and the government that completes millions of other tasks every single day so that you can wind up with the discretionary time to sit around and wonder, on the government-created internet, likely using government-generated power on a government-regulated grid, in a building that was likely inspected by government inspectors to meet government safety standards, what the government does for you. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's that government they were referring to.

I couldn't have said it better.

Mate: Become the Man Women Want - A Book Reveiw

If you are a single man you may have been interested in the many books available that promise you more and better dates, more and better relationships, more and better sex. Many fall into two common genres: The Pickup Books by the members of the Pickup Artist Community (PUA) or the Woman Tells All (WTA) books. PUA books are bullshit and manipulative, and will leave you angrier than you started. The WTA books are simplistic - they are typically by one woman who claims to be letting you in on the secrets of the female mind. Well unless the author is Sybil, all she is telling you is about her mind. (And if she is Sybil, you don't want to know about hers!)

Mate, written by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller, is far broader, deeper, and wiser. Tucker Max is an author and humorist who's books about his adolescent drinking and sex binges were written as humor, not as how-to. Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist from Stanford. Together they have written a book that gives solid advice on relationships for men of all ages and situations.

For those of you not familiar with your writer, I am a 57 year old single man living in the Austin area. I have been married and divorced twice, the first for 22 years and the second for 2 years. I have been single for 2 years and dating for 9 months. I received a BS in Chemistry (the physical kind not the relationship kind - drat) from Notre Dame and then studied medicine at the UTHSC San Antonio for 3 years before deciding on a consulting career in IT as a security architect. Having a technical background, I tend to favor and appreciate books that approach relationships from a medical, psychological, evolutionary basis.

And Mate does so in spades. Mate takes a 5 step approach to mating success. And from a scientific perspective, that is what dating, male-female relationships, and sex are all about, mating. As a single male, going out to hunt babes is exactly what males of all species have been doing for millions of years. Mate helps you understand how and why things happen the way they do so that you can shape your self, your appearance and your behavior for the best possible mating outcome. Mate explains the five principles of mating success:

• Making Decisions With Science (Not Bias)
• Account For The Woman's Perspective
• Own Your Attractiveness
• Be Honest (With Yourself And Others
• Play To Win-Win

The book then translates those five principles of mating success into a five step program:

1. Get Your Head Straight
2. Develop Attractive Traits
3. Display Attractive Proofs
4. Go Where The Women Are
5. Take Action

Some parts of the book were a complete eye opener for me. For example, in the section on the Second Principle of Mating Success: Account For The Woman's Perspective, the book gives both evolutionary and modern treatment of:

• why women evolved to have certain sexual concerns and preferences, given how prehistoric mating evolved;
• why women feel anxious and vulnerable to sexual harassment, stalking, rape, STDs, unwanted pregnancies and slut-shaming;
• why women seek different sexual experiences and relationships under different conditions with different guys, from hookups to boyfriends to husbands;
• why women value some key attractive traits in men, such as physical health, mental health, intelligence, willpower, kindness and protectiveness;
• why women value some key proofs of mate value in men, such as social success, material success, aesthetic style and romantic commitment;
• where women go to meet men, and how the supply and demand market works in these mating markets.

The authors do a great job of trying to help men understand why women behave the way they do in the mating market. And that is just Principle Number 2 of the 5 Mating Principles, and the mating principles make up the introduction. The 5 Steps make up chapters 1 through 21 of the book.

Chapter 17: Meeting The Woman You Want talks about where to go to meet women. And the authors start off with Bars and Clubs. Why? The standard place that men think they should be able to go to pick up women is a bar. And the authors explain why that is the worst place possible for men and women to meet. Women feel anxious and vulnerable about being molested. What do bars offer men? A set of drunken, sexually frustrated men, some looking for a fight, in a crowded, chaotic, noisy environment and a bunch of women, some irritable, some tipsy, anxious about being hit on by frustrated men and ready to reject them in a public display. And from the female perspective, women value their physical safety, the power of female choice, and social safety. What does a bar offer them? A dark, exposed environment with few places to hide; little protection from stalking or harassment; a jostling crowd of male strangers, many looking for hookups, with a bunch of female rivals and acquaintances to compete with who are watching who goes home with home to take note of and gossip about.

The idea that bars are great places for men and women to meet goes against all principles of human biology and psychology.

Chapter 15: Find the Right Mating Market lays out a methodology to determine the best mating market for you using OkCupid. That means country, city, neighborhood, school, job, etc. While you might not think about moving, might not be able to move, it might help you figure out your priorities. It will at least show you your options. And the chapter does a great job of explaining the mating market in terms of economic theory.

I heartily recommend Mate. It is, by far, the best dating book I have ever read for men. It will help men of all ages, from college to retirees. And the style is vastly humorous, without the science becoming overly technical. Unlike many dating books, this one covers all the bases and in depth in every one.

Latest Polls - September 27, 2015

I will preface this post with the following statement: "We the people would be much better off if the Presidential election process was greatly reduced in length. The current process lasting much more than one year is theater at best and is a great waste of time and money that results in the paralysis of work towards solving the problems of our country, which are massive and many."

And with that aside, here are the latest charts from Huffington Post Pollster:

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. After all, it's just theater.

What Kind of Leader is Carly Fiorina?

Like many other Americans (some 27 million) I watched the second Republican Presidential debate. Carly Fiorina received a great deal of coverage for her replies to Donald Trump as well as her methodical and businesslike responses. Afterward she saw a rise in her poll numbers. So what kind of leader is Carly Fiorina?

One answer to that question lies in the proceedings of the Deleware trial of Hewlett vs. HP. The son's of one of HP's founders, who sat on the board of HP, attempted to block the acquisition of Compaq which Fiorina pushed through HP. Fiorina noticed that Deutsche Bank (DB) had voted to oppose the acquisition and also had an investment banking relationship with HP. series of calls and a voicemail came out in which Firoina instructed her CFO to "bring Deutsche Bank over the line" and in which she mentioned the possibility of "doing something extraordinary" if the vote went the wrong way.¹

She next told DB that the vote "was of great importance to their ongoing relationship." The result was that DB switched its 17 million votes in favor of the merger which ultimately passed by less than 2% with the DB switch accounting for the two percent margin. Fiorina maintained that she was misinterpreted and she intended to place no undue pressure on DB. The consensus of opinion did not agree with that characterization.

And perhaps some would want a President that strong-arms other countries into agreement in the same manner she strong-armed DB into agreeing to the merger with Compaq. Fiorina continues to maintain that that merger was a positive one for HP, despite many in the business community (certainly including Donald Trump) who think that the merger was a bad one for HP. Certainly she has never been willing to consider the possibility of an error in pushing the merger.

I would much rather have a leader that works towards compromise with other nations. In certain cases, for example, dealing with totalitarianism or a crazed leader, no compromise is possible. But we are trying to move beyond strong-arm tactics and using war as a go-to for getting what we want. I think Carly Fiorina's record shows she has not.

^{1. Money For Nothing How CEOs and Boards are Bankrupting America. John Gillespie and David Zweig. 2011, First Free Press, New York.↩}

Corporate Personhood: Just Speech, or Full Citizenship?

I am going to start this post off with a caveat: I am not an attorney, so anything I say has no basis in legal theory or practice. Nevertheless, our country was formed by individuals, not attorneys, for the people, nor for attorneys.

I am not particularly in agreement with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United that corporations, being citizens, have free speech rights. But it seems to me that if corporations have the rights of citizens they should also have the responsibilities of citizens. A human citizen has the right to free speech, but if that free speech causes harm, through slander or incitement to riot, he is then subject to civil and criminal penalties, if applicable. The same should be true of corporations. If a corporation has the right to speak on political matters, for example, that corporation should be subject to civil and criminal penalties for engaging in civil or criminal behavior.

The problem, or course, is that you can't send the corporation to jail like you can a human citizen. As a result, our justice department seems to be enamored with assessing monetary penalties for criminal behavior, which the corporation simple plans for and pays as a cost of doing business and which does not act as a deterrent to future bad behavior. Only if the bad behavior results in real damage to the bottom line, say by a user boycott or a drop in sales, does corporate behavior change. It used to be that corporate executives were held accountable. More than 1000 Savings and Loan executive went to jail as a result of the S&L crisis, but no executives have been jailed as a result of the 2008 Bank Crisis, and probably none ever will. The monetary penalties from the 2008 Crisis were nothing compared to the incentives that caused the banks to engage in the behavior that caused the crisis, so we are primed for it to occur again.

Right now we are watching the unfolding story of Volkswagen. In both the U.S. and Germany it has come to light that Volkswagen deliberately programmed software controls to fake compliance with emissions limits during testing but to cut out and not comply during normal driving. The President of Volkswagen just made a statement about the company not tolerating such behavior. Obviously it did tolerate that behavior, because it did program its vehicles to perform in that fashion. This is reminiscent of the cigarette companies knowing about the dangers of cigarette smoking or Johnson & Johnson knowingly marketing Risperdal which caused gynecomastia in males. As long as there is economic incentive to engage in immoral and or illegal behavior some corporations and businesses will do so.

The simple answer is corporate jail. A corporation that breaks the law should be jailed for a period of time, during which it could not engage in business. We have the concept of probation and parole, where individuals are restricted in their rights, instead of incarceration. A corporation could enter probation, where its behavior was scrutinized and any resumption of illegal behavior would result in the full penalty, corporate incarceration, or legal loss of charter, be applied.

No doubt the reaction will be: What about the jobs lost? What about the economic damage? Well, we deal with the same issues when a human citizen breaks the law. Corporations are "bigger citizens" in the sense that their behavior are larger. Well, that's the point. When corporations break the law, the impacts are bigger. Therefore, it is important that their behavior stay legal.

I Voted For Ronald Reagan

A long time ago, right here on this planet, I was a college freshman. Coming back from class, I clustered around the TV set with my room mate to witness the spectacle of burned out helicopters in the Iranian desert. The first thought that came to my mind was: "Is that how weak my country has become?" I was a college senior, and it had been an eventful four years. An ongoing energy crisis had shaken the country, leading to a recession, gas lines, and stagflation. Two different years, my school had canceled classes, something that had never happened since its founding in 1842, and we had nearly been sent home, because the coal supply to run the University power plant ran so low.

It seemed to be a shaky time in American History, and I came from a family of New Deal Democrats. I chose to break with family tradition, and voted for Reagan. Now, looking back, I can see that I made a grave error.

Reagan's pronouncement: "Government isn't the solution, it is the problem" is how it is remembered. But the correct quote is "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem." And he was referring to a specific economic crisis that occurred at one point in time. But Reagan was a front man for a movement that practiced complete free market economics, the Chicago school. And that WAS the problem.

The Chicago School can be summed up by one name, Milton Freedman, and by one principle, absolute deregulation. Freedman defected from New Deal Keynesian economics, which believed that in the absence of government regulation businesses would practice predatory capitalism. He convinced Ronald Reagan, who put those practices into place and help start the long stint of deregulation that lead to the 2008 financial crisis.

I voted for Ronald Reagan, because I thought he would make our country strong. It is ironic, since in his westerns, the people of the lawless towns were preyed upon until a strong man on a white horse rode in to bring some law and order. Yet Reagan rode into Washington to remove the law and order. It was a clear case of mistaking a flawed system, a government with problems, and discarding it for a worse solution.

And has anything changed? Seven years after the financial crisis, our economy is still considered too fragile to allow normal economic practices to take place. The Federal Reserve continues to keep interest rates at zero to keep the economy on life support. The EU is doing the same, because they are still suffering from the excess debt that was sold to them by an American financial system that is no longer of making real, valued products, only paper instruments like collateralized debt obligations.

And we Americans delude ourselves into thinking we are free, that we live in a free nation. Since ten percent of the population owns ninety percent of the wealth, and the vast majority must work to pay their debts, we are hardly a nation of freemen.

Tax and Spend vs. Tax Cuts and Trickle Down

In the Social Sciences, it's pretty hard to run an experiment like the physical sciences. When I was in the chemistry lab, I could hold all the variables constant save one, perhaps changing from one stereoisomer to another or increasing the concentration of the reactants or adding an enzyme. In the social sciences, that is, in the real world, there are so many variables involved, and indeed, the ethics of dealing with people, makes it very difficult to control the factors involved to really call it an experiment. Nevertheless, social scientists, economists and politicians are experimenting all the time and telling us how the world should operate.

That's why I think it's so interesting to look at what's going on in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In case you have forgotten what they look like, I've included a map:

They are right next door and share a common border, so they share a common environment. Both states shared a common heritage of a century of midwestern progressive politics. But in 2010, Scott Walker was elected Governor in Wisconsin, and started down a road of Conservatism that has delighted the Republican party and led to his presidential run in the 2016 race. It has also led to Wisconsin's slide to 44th in job growth¹ amongst the 50 states.

In Minnesota, right next door, Mark Dayton has been pursuing the kind of tax and spend policies that Republicans love to pan, a la The Donald, but it has been leading to job growth in Minnesota's favor. Dayton is the great-grandson of the founder of the department store which became Target, and was coined a "failed" single term senator, and came home to run the state to the left.

In the two states, you have the two parties, operating to their respective core beliefs. On the right, Wisconsin, starve the government, cut-taxes, cut government job, restrict workers rights, bolster business options, restrict labor bargaining. On the left, Minnesota, raised the minimum wage, increased taxes on the top 2% of wage earners, increased expenditures for education and infrastructure, and funding for state level of the Affordable Care Act.

There is one difference between the two: Dayton isn't going anywhere. He has no ambition for higher office. Walker, of course, has his sights on the oval office; more than that, his hat's in the ring. He's already stomped on Wisconsin. Now he wants to walk all over the whole country.

Interestingly enough, republicans in Wisconsin are starting to rebel. The budget shortfall is starting to worry them, and they are balking at any more tax cuts. Walker is still pushing, and is dead set against raising taxes or fees. How low can you go?

^{1. Daily Beast Article 07.10.15 "Scott Walker Gets Schooled By His Neighbor" ↩}

Let's Hear It For Honesty!

There's a great new article in the September issue of The Atlantic Magazine entitled The New Science of Bad Science. There has been a surge of retractions and a wave of examinations of published findings. The Atlantic article cites study after study, including the Andrew Wakefield study linking Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine to Autism, which is the poster child for the anti-vaccination crowd (think Jenny McCarty).

There are many reasons why retractions are on the rise. New software can scan the data and model whether the data fits an expected distribution. Plagiarism-detecting software is more commonly used by journals, prior to publication. A number of researchers have been trying to replicate findings - with disastrous results. In 2012, a team at Amgen tried to reproduce 53 landmark cancer studies, and could replicate just 6 (11%). A news report in Nature attempting to reproduce the findings of 100 psychology papers has managed to replicate the results of only 39 of them (39%) - the results are still under peer review, where they may or may not be accepted or retracted.

And while we are talking honesty, let's hear it for the Republicans, and their attempt to rewrite the story of the Iraq war. Every Republican candidate, with the exception of Rand Paul, is in a hurry to put American boots on the ground in Iraq to battle ISIS, and it all stems from the fallacious notion that the surge won the Iraq war and that Obama's withdrawal of US troops caused ISIS. It is erroneous, dishonest, fallacious. It is also very appealing to voters, who simply don't know history. It is also appealing to the media, which makes no attempt to do fact checking. It has happened before.

There was a rumor started by Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, that Congress cut of all aid to South Vietnam and that this was the cause of their defeat in 1975. "Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975." In the late 1970s, the legend - and it was a legend; Congress reduced, but never cut off funding to South Vietnam - spurred the hawkish revival that helped to elect Ronald Reagan. In 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role for republican candidates.

The legend of the surge is this era's equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam

On Being Engaged

I realize that English is a non-context free grammar, so I will try to be clear what I mean by engaged through the context of my post.

I saw I Will See You In My Dreams this past Friday. If you haven't seen it, Blyth Danner does a great job and Sam Elliot gets a cameo also. The story line is Carol (Blyth Danner) is a songstress/widow living in LA 20 years after the death of her husband. She is completely satisfied with her daily routine of breakfast, paper, bridge, golf, dinner, sleep, until the death of her dog and the appearance of a mouse shake up her world. She enlists the pool man (Martin Starr) in a failed attempt to find the rodent, but it turns out that the pool boy has musical yearnings of his own. Suddenly, the urgings of the pool man to go out for karaoke, the appearance of Bill (Sam Elliot), a new retire, and the return of Carol's daughter (Malin Akerman), force Carol's re-engagement with the world, with song, and with romance.

Many times we decide that life is too painful to live outside our comfort zone. We have a circle of friends that keep us comfortable, that make us feel safe. Maybe we had a parent that got angry with us when we were young, or didn't hold us when we were crying. So we grew up feeling scared to commit, afraid to become engaged, afraid to depend on others. Or maybe we had that one perfect partner and life took them away from us, and now we are afraid of trying again, afraid that, like Carol, if we try again with Bill, he will also get taken away. Because nothing in life comes with a guarantee.

But of course in trying to seek a guarantee of forever, which we will never get, because none of us live for forever, we give up the beauty of today.

There are all sorts of what ifs that keep us from becoming engaged. Too Young, too old, too fat, too thin, too rich, too poor, too smart, too dumb. When I applied to Notre Dame as a Freshman, we had to submit a photograph with our application. When we arrived, there was a book waiting for us with a summary of our high school "careers". It was supposed to help us "network". Everyone called it the dog book. Such is the cruelty of young people. But that same cruelty is ingrained in our psyche, and leads to the regular dishonesty rampant in online dating today. So who would want to become engaged, all things considered.

For those of you who don't want to pay the tenspot to find out what happens to Carol, or wait for Netflix, I'll tell you that I hope to be like Carol, shocked out of my complacency, taking a chance on engagement, taking a chance on romance, and finding someone, even if it only lasts a few moments (yup, Bill dies too), getting another dog, singing again, getting back out in the world, getting out of my comfort zone, and taking care of...me. Becoming engaged again.

No More Mister Nice Guy

I meet with a great bunch of guys on Saturday morning. We sit around for a couple of hours and discuss issues of relevance, and this week we were discussing the book No More Mr. Nice Guys by Robert Glover PhD. These guys don't pul any punches, cause one pointed out to me, about my latest encounter, that, yes, I had compromised in an attempt for short term gains, but now it was time to accept what ever gains I had achieved, be a man about it and move on. We all have a tendency to dwell in the past rather than set our sites on the future.

I realized that I had been living my life as the "Mr. Nice Guy" and seeking my love and affection through the affirmation of those around me rather than through my own self needs and wants. I was always told not to be selfish, to be self-less. I am now at 57, realizing that I have lived my life, worrying what others think and letting others' opinions of me matter and not worrying about what my own opinion of myself matter to me.

I have had 57 years worth of relationships oriented towards other's needs. It's about time to have some time oriented towards my own.

Generative Design - Visualize, Program, and Create with Processing

Every once in a while along comes some one or some thing exceptional. You have heard that expression: The sum is greater than the total of the parts.

Generative Design is such a book. It starts with the cover diagram which is a graphic of many colored bands, each of which represents a section of a book page and uses the section's colors, which have also been sorted by grade. The back cover of the book features a tag cloud. Processing is the open source visual design language and IDE by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, and this book, and the downloadable examples, including cover.pde, will certainly inspire.

The books approach is interesting. There are six introductory sections on how to use the book. Then there are thirty five project selections from the world of art and architecture. Then there are six complex methods that teach processing. Finally there is an appendix, which is a reflexion, a summary of the authors thoughts about the changing processes that a generative design has to offer.

The publisher is Princeton Architectural Press. The website is http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/. The works range from architecture to typography to illustration to computer science to data science to art.

The book can provide a complete programming course in the processing language and IDE. Starting from the beginning:

one can progress all the way to complicated data structures

and force directed layouts:

While Hadoop, R and Python are the usual staples of the data scientist, and processing is the more the province of the artist, information is information and a tool is a tool. The job is to help the user to understand, and anything that can get the point across is an aid to the job. Processing can join Hadoop, R, Python, D3, ggplot, matplotlib, and a whole host of others. Generative Design is a real aid to helping to use processing in the design process.

Why Nukes?

Today is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the most recent, and we certainly hope, the last atomic bombing of a city. It was only the second time a city had been subject to the effects of uncontrolled nuclear fission, and it was a factor in the end of World War II, the most destructive, but not the most costly, war in the history of mankind. I have had a number of people ask me about my fascination with nukes. So it is perhaps an appropriate date to set down the reasons why I have such interest is what many feel is an esoteric area.

Nukes are the most destructive tool in man's tool belt of weapons. We tend to think of the big bad three: NBC, nuclear, biological and chemical, but of the three, nuclear weapons remain by far the most deadly and destructive of them all. Biological weapons tend to be difficult to control and deliver. Chemical weapons are awful in their effects, but are point weapons. Nukes are big and bad. Even the smallest of nukes creates a big bang. The biggest? Well, physics has yet to create the biggest, because with thermonuclear devices, there is no limit. Russia's Tsar Bomba (Царь-бомба; "Tsar of bombs", or AN602) was 50MT (210PJ), and was only half of the weapon's potential yield, since allowing the device to achieve it's theoretical yield of 100MT would have destroyed the aircraft delivering the bomb and contaminated populated Russian (then Soviet) territory. For comparison purposes, that one detonation in 1961 was roughly equivalent to 1400 times the power of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, 10 times the power of all the weapons detonated during World War II, 1/4 the power of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, or about 10% of all the nuclear detonations to date. Man is slipping up on Mother Nature in destructiveness.

My undergraduate degree was in chemistry and I was especially interested in physical organic chemistry. Quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, nuclear reactions, all are a continuum of the way the Universe works at the atomic level. A hydrogen bomb is the sun on earth in a microsecond. The fact that man plays God or Mother Nature to tap elemental forces is the fascination, I suppose.

The online dating service OkCupid has hundreds of questions they ask you to answer for comparison purposes. I am probably in the vast minority of the people that answer the question "Would a nuclear war be interesting?" in the affirmative. Of course, I qualify that by saying "Only in the theoretical sense, since in practice the results would probably be the end of civilization".

The science fiction writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote an end of the world novel "Lucifer's Hammer" in which an asteroid hits the earth. In it, as the asteroid approaches, a documentary filmmaker does man in the street interviews and discovers that people want the asteroid to hit, want civilization to be destroyed. They are bored with their lives, tired of their dead-end jobs, tired of having to sleep with the boss, whatever. Of course, once the end occurs, once the grocery stores are gone and the police are gone and electricity is gone they realize exactly what they lost.

Most people don't realize what they have in modern society. Most people don't appreciate the technology they have. Most people don't know and don't care how an iPhone is made or how it works. And because they don't know and don't care, they don't appreciate how fragile their world is. Nor do they appreciate how quickly things could slip out of control.

Since it has been 70 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki most of the victims are gone. Most of the participants are gone. Most of the people that want to end the use of these weapons are gone. The gang of four, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Schultz, who came out so courageously in favor of ending our reliance on nuclear weapons are no longer on a position of influence. The desire for change that won Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 when he called for the elimination of nuclear weapons is gone, and now both the U.S. and Russia are instead looking at new nuclear weapons to solve the new competition taking place in Eastern Europe. China is modernizing its forces as the U.S. completes its Pivot and faces up as China focuses on the South China Sea. North Korea successfully tested a three stage ballistic missile and launched a satellite into orbit, which is the successful test for an ICBM.

So it looks like the Nuke Race is back on, and in a newer, deadlier fashion. No longer a two party race, now it is a many headed hydra.

About the Supreme Court

One of my favorite pieces of post-apocalyptic science fiction is Alas Babylonby Pat Frank. Set in the late 1950s, the novel's hero is Randy Bragg, a mid-30s attorney coasting through life in Florida with a middlin' law practice, a young new romance and a failed political career who must lead his community to survival after a U.S.-Soviet missile exchange. In a flashback to his failed run for state Representative Randy is faced with the question: "How do you stand on the Supreme Court?" At that time, of course, the issue was whether segregation would end whether blacks and whites would get equal access to American rights.

Today, I would like to think that issue is settled, at least on a legal basis. We have a black president, and one of the top ten Republican hopefuls, Ben Carson, is black. Yet we have several equally controversial disagreements in the country, and division amongst the Supreme Court Justices. We have Americans still wondering where they stand on the Supreme Court.

Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) was a 9-0 decision. Loving vs. Virginia, the case that found race-based bans to marriage was also 9-0. That is a symbol of one difference in politics and affairs 50 years ago: consensus. Americans have always had differences of opinion, sometimes very extreme. But it seems that in the past there was a greater emphasis on trying to form consensus and to work together. Since the late 1970's there has been an approach by some in politics to foment dissent rather than to work together. Lewis Powell advocated this approach to American businesses in his letter to the American Chamber of Commerce in 1971. Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove both did so in politics. And the conservative justices, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito on the Supreme Court have taken this approach also.

I find it incredibly irritating that these people insist on regulating everyone's behavior to their standards, as if their way is the only way. There is no aspect of "live and let live" or coexistence to them. I get that you might not want your wife or daughter to have an abortion. So, lock them up and take away the key, but why should you every other woman from that which they wish. You don't like your gay son or lesbian daughter's choice: so go ahead and try to de-program them or whatever. But why you want to make every other gay or lesbian unhappy? You don't want your money to fund abortions. Go ahead and get Congress to defund Planned Parenthood's abortions, but defunding their women's health care (non-abortion) measures is just mean.

Reading the dissenting comments to ObergefellI was struck by that meanness. And perhaps a touch of hysteria. Could that be because the opinions are turning against them? For example, the number of Americans approving of same-sex marriage has gone from 35% in 2001 to 55% in 2015 (statistics and charts from the Pew Center for Religion and Public Life):

Only among Conservatives and older-generations are there majorities opposing same-sex marriage:

Maybe age is the key. Just wait for the dinosaurs to die off. Too bad for the pain they caused.

There used to be an expression "Reasonable men can disagree reasonably." Reading some of the dissenting opinions, I didn't find a shred of reasonableness. One begets the other.

Seeking My Better Half

In past times a man might introduce his partner, generally his wife, as "My Better Half". I haven't heard that introduction in quite a while, and I started to think about it. There is a school of thought that to be manly a man should do his thing and not apologize. That's BS. Men, as well as women, are imperfect, and make mistakes all the time. A true man recognizes when he is in error, corrects the mistakes, apologizes for any harm and moves on. Now the man who isn't confidant of what he is and what he does and makes apologies for his every action is another story. But recognizing your faults and correcting them is a sign of a true man.

And in my mind, a man with a partner that helps him correct his faults, works with him toward common goals, supports him in his dreams, is the kind of partner a true man wishes to find. We have bought into the notion of codependency and individuality to such an extent that we miss the real value and need for a pair of human beings to form a partnership that is complementary in nature and in which the real human needs of intimacy, sharing, love, warmth, passion, touch, sensuality are recognized, shared, and met. In wanting to avoid the pairing of two needy people, we are in danger of missing the ideal of two adults, responsible for their own needs, forming a bond and helping each other.

That brings to mind that other descriptor, "helpmate". Who doesn't want a little help from time to time? And a partner who sees your needs, accepts them, fulfills them, and gives you the gift of being able to fulfill theirs in turn?

I have known some awesome couples. Couples that seemed to read each others minds. Couples that shared great life goals. Couples that moved in concert with one another. There is an old saying in the military: "Any man can make colonel. It takes a great wife to make general." (Of course today, everything can be reversed for the woman in today's military.) Setting aside the images of a wife wearing her husband's rank, or of the woman subsuming her life to her husband's career, the saying speaks to recognizing one's situation, setting goals, and achieving them through the help of one's partner. None of this "Me an island" stuff. Doesn't everyone need and want a little assistance?

Loving Factually

I have been married twice and divorced twice. While I don't intend to marry again I am looking to find a partner for my last loving commited relationship. Third time's the charm, right? But things run in threes.  Mutually exclusive sayings. 

Regardless, this time around I am hoping to bring some wisdom and maturity to the process. After 57 years of living I would hope that I could manage a modicum of the two. I read the book Love Factually by Duana C. Welch (hereafter LF) which offers considerable insight into the mating process. In fact, its science based approach has considerable appeal to a techie-type like me.

LF stresses the importance of determining exactly what you want in a partner, what "must haves" and "like-to-haves" you desire. Of course, remaining aware of your thought processes and emotions is critical so that you can decide if the current candidate is worth continued consideration. LF places an emphasis on positive affirmation of necessary and desirable characteristics as opposed to a laundry list of deal breakers, but I know there will always be some things that are flat-out "no goes".

I started LF right about the start of the end of my latest relationship so I didn't get a chance to apply what I learned to that one. In my work, which consists of short-term consulting engagements, I perform a post-mortem and write up a project report, so I applied the same plus my budding list of requirements to an analysis ex post facto, and I got some valuable insights.

Incidentally, I have always believed the saying that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so any process that can save me from my insanity is highly desirable.

I also find that the postmortem analysis pulls things out of my subconscious, where I have relegated or pushed them. Sometimes they got pushed there because they were undesirable or painful. Some things I didn't get at the time, and my subconscious seems to ruminate on them for later digestion.

My last relationship hit a speed bump over money. What relationship doesn't? (I bet even The Donald has had issues with Ivana, Marla and Melanie.) Jane (names have been changed to protect the innocent) and I both determined that we were somewhat old-fashioned about dating customs, with the man paying the way, etc. etc. So when I was hit unexpectedly with $25k of medical bills and needed to conserve due to a short-term cash crunch, Jane was not happy. She told me that her past relationships had been with guys that had money problems and she thought she was past that, and didn't want to deal with that. Fair enough, she was keeping track of her must-haves and wants.

What I was ignoring was my own need for a partner that was not money-centric. Now we should bring into consideration the biologic drives of men and women. Both men and women seek mates that can produce children and perpetuate the species. Men look (really look, as opposed to seek) for a woman that is attractive and has that 0.7 waist/hip ratio as markers of fertility, and women look for money, status, and behavior that are symbols of a good procreator. So resources, and the desire to share, are things that women seek to determine a good mate. Bottom line though is I want a partner that appreciates the totality of me, and wants to spend time with me, as opposed to someone that appreciates my money, and wants me for what I can do.

And I ignored that. For example, Jane had problems with her living room TV/stereo. Nice setup, but her receiver wasn't passing though HDMI to the speakers, so her TV only played through its own speakers. So, I went with her to Fry's and Best Buy and redid her system twice, for two different receivers, to get it right. I have had numerous AV setups and I like electronics and computer hardware (I'm not just a SW geek) so it was fun. But towards the end, there was some issue with the last setup, and Jane said to me "I want to take you to brunch, and then you can fix the speaker balance". The idea that she felt she needed to buy my services was so unappealing that I pushed it back into my subconscious. But it was a marker of the extent that money was THE thing in the relationship. She felt she had to buy my service.

As I said, I was hit with a $25k bill, and so I told Jane that weekend I wanted to stay in that weekend, and not go out. I got back a text message that read: "I liked the Bob I first met. I don't think I like this Bob so much." HUH? Two days later, a conversation about money and finances led to the statement that Jane had pretty much only had relationships with guys with money problems. Well, maybe. But maybe that was just a rationalization.

Jane once remarked that her ex-husband was really cheap. I wonder if she was confusing lack of resources with lack of sharing of those resources?

When I first met Jane face-to-face, it was after correspondence on Match.com, where she had listed her age at 58 (I was 56 at the time). A couple of hours in to the conversation, she told me that she was really 64, and she shaved the 8 years because otherwise no one would contact her. Another item I pushed into the subconscious to ruminate over.

I am not beating up Jane here. After 50, everyone should relax and do what they want. Everyone is an adult, is responsible to themselves, and can do what they want. I am beating up myself, for not staying true to myself. I believe that honesty and openness are very important to a lasting relationship. So why did I ignore one of my key requirements? I let my guard down. I got tired, and I got lonely. It is hard.

The bottom line is that it takes some real effort to keep your emotions in check and your intellect engaged so that you can keep looking to make sure your "laundry list" is met and that you don't sail by the deal breakers. My philosophy is that every relationship has problems and frequently. The degree of commitment and the desire to work on the relationship is what determines if the relationship will last. A strong friendship, common goals, communication, all those good things are prerequisites to forming a relationship in which there is commitment and desire to maintain the relationship.

Well, time to head out on another date! Kona Grill, no less. ;-)

Mr. Robot

I have a confession to make: In the recent past, I didn't own a TV. From November 2013 to August 2013 I did without and didn't miss it. When I was hired by Avalon Consulting LLC, the man who hired me, the CEO of Avalon, also graduated from Notre Dame. I decided I better buy a TV so that I could follow and discuss the football season. From there, Netflix was ordered, and eventually, TWC.

Still, though, I have resisted taking up any series on the TV. Between the travel I do for work and the general low quality of programming available I really didn't feel like there was any good reason to take up a series. I guess that appeared odd to some; I was dating a lady with a number of "regular" shows and to her I appeared quite odd.

The start of the USA Series Mr. Robot caught me though. That's not surprising since the series subjects, hacking, and IT security are all components of my specialty as a Hadoop Security consultant. There are plenty of other subjects in the series that strike a cord: Mega corporations dominating the economy, fantasies of a simpler lifestyle, the hacker lifestyle.

Evil Corp, the dominating corporate entity responsible for all the world's ills and the death of Elliot's and Angela's Fathers, is almost too perfectly evil, especially since the face of Evil Corp is Tyrell Wellick, the CTO-wannabe who gets passed over. Between scenes of Tyrell taking out his frustrations by beating a homeless man and his plotting corporate intrigue with his pregnant wife (while he plays his S&M games with her), we can't help conclude that Evil Corp must be evil to have such a deviant vying for a C-Level position.

Then of course there is the role of Elliot, the security engineer that is coopted by fsociety. Elliot, with his social anxiety disorder, is the poster child of the lone geek, the one that can't relate, can't communicate, and remains forever isolated and lonely. I have to admit that I feel affinity for Elliot. As an only child in a neighborhood without children, I felt some of those fears. We watch from show to show to see if Elliot can ever surmount his isolation, the way all of us must if we are to have any connection or relations with other humans.

Sam Esmail, the series creator and Executive Producer, does a great job of isolating Elliot further be ensuring that he loses the one person he becomes close to, Shayla. And we are left to decide if we should accept Elliot's rational, that he helps the people that he hacks, or held him accountable for the wrong he does in the act of hacking. For Elliot's argument might be Jesuitical, but would we accept a Jesuit doing the hacking?

What Does It Take To Be A Success?

Ours is a quick-fix, get rich quick, one-shot success society. We go the doctor and demand a cure. We want instant success. We think we can buy a lottery ticket and become a millionaire. Is it any wonder we're not happy?

A couple of months ago I got to see a jazz-funk guitarist here in Austin that I had been following online for a couple of years. He mostly tours in the midwest, and finally got to Austin. He played on a Friday night at 10:30 to the grand total of 12 people. I loved the show, but it got me wondering about how hard it would be to tour, night after night, living in cheap motels and playing my gig in front of but a double handful of people.

Think of that star quarterback. The one that started playing football at 5. Or the basketball player drafted into the pros. Maybe dribbling since 6? Two a days in the hot summer, j.v. practice at 5:30 a.m. Practice year 'round for years. Success is so sweet because it is earned.

I am a Hadoop security consultant. I am happy to consultant to Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. Right now, Hadoop is hot. Companies big and small are adopting Hadoop because they need to be able to process their data to stay or become competitive. The two biggest barriers to Enterprise adoption of Hadoop are a lack of personnel with Hadoop skills and concerns about securing Hadoop implementation. Is it any wonder that a Hadoop security consultant would be in demand?

The route that brought me to where I am today started in 1999 when I left the USAA insurance company and started my own company. I wanted to architect clusters, harnessing multiple computers in a distributed network that would work together on problems too big for a single computer. I designed and built clusters for the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed, among others. Contracts lead to other contracts. Originally an IBM mainframe programmer, I had to teach myself Unix, C++, security, Python, MySQL, Linux, among others.

Then, in 2008, I was in an automobile accident and suffered major injuries. I spent 2008 in rehab and couldn't work, and my business was shuttered.

It took me until 2010 before I worked again, and I had to start over. I had to re-certify in security. I taught myself Hadoop. I worked for a year as a Virtualization Engineer and gained DevOps experience on a global network. I moved to Austin in 2012 to work as a Python security developer. I worked for a year developing system monitoring software for Hadoop. Finally in 2013 I was hired as a field engineer to install Hadoop on data appliances. But 2 months into that job and the contract was eliminated. So I had to move laterally and work as a Cloud developer. Finally, one year ago, I was hired to do Hadoop consulting.

I have 30 years of IT experience. For most of those years, I have been successful at my work, but it has taken me 15 years of work to get where I am today, doing exactly what I want to do. How many people are doing exactly what they want to do?

I used to have this discussion with my Mom. "Bob, most people don't get to do what they want. They do what they have to to survive." "But mom, maybe if they would want more, they would work more to do what they want." I am so grateful that I am able to do what desire to do, and I thank my mom, my teachers, God and the Great Pumpkin for making me see long ago that if I just continued to work for what I wanted that I could get it.

Now, where do I buy that lottery ticket?

Hiroshima and Austin - 70 Years and Counting

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb on a populated city - Hiroshima. Since the end of the cold war, nukes have tended to recede from our consciousness, Iran and North Korea not withstanding. With Russia and China modernizing their delivery systems, Iran pursuing the capability to produce a device (and surviving the Stuxnet induced centrifuge self-destruction) and the continued proliferation of secrets to non-nuclear states and entities (Al Quida was pursuing enriched materials; surely ISIS is too) I thought it might be a good moment to think about where all this activity leads - the destruction of human lives.

Many strategic thinkers tend to divorce themselves from the end result of their plans. To them, the end result of building and owning nuclear weapons is to influence other players, bend opponents to their will, deter that which is not wanted. And while I accept that 70 years have passed since the last use of a nuclear weapon, I wonder if that is due to the horribleness of the weapons themselves and the loss of life they induced or if it was due to other factors that no longer apply. Let us not forget that at the end of World War II most of the world was damaged, if not destroyed, and that there was one superpower that had the predominate economy and the vast majority of the modern tools of warfare - America. The United States was able to export its type of economy, influence military affairs, settle the majority of trade transactions with its reserve currency, in short shelter the free world. America did a god job of financing the rebuilding of Europe through the Marshall plan (and gained a huge amount of business through the mandates to use the credits with American businesses). So did we prevent WW III and a nuclear exchange through the stick (i.e. avoidance of destruction) or through the carrot (i.e. the acceptance and pursuit of prosperity and economic growth).

Fast forward to today, when the memory of the bombings are not so fresh. We are 25 years post-cold war. We are once again competing with Russia in Eastern Europe. We are competing in China in the South China Sea. We are trying to bottle up North Korea. We are trying to negotiate with Iran. All of those actors are using nukes (or the threat of nukes) as bargaining chips. Russia and China are modernizing. Have we forgotten what these weapons can do?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock is at 3 minutes to Midnight. It was at 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 when the cold war was officially declared over and Russia and the U.S. started making deep cuts to their arsenals. A number of factors are considered in setting the Doomsday Clock (the Doomsday Dashboard), but one thing struck me: Russia has 12 metric tons of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) and 2 metric tons of Plutonium (Pu) and the U.S. has 8 metric tons of HEU and 1 metric ton of Pu. The Hiroshima bomb (15kt yield) used about 144 pounds of HEU. A modern U.S. warhead, such as the W-87 that sits atop our remaining Minuteman III missiles, uses about 12 pounds of Pu (and some HEU as a pusher). So the U.S. and Russia combined have enough nuclear material for, well lots of weapons. The U.S. has had 27 incidents of stolen nuclear material, 14 incidents of lost nuclear material and 8 incidents of "delivery failure".

So perhaps we are not so worried about nukes as we were 70 years ago, just after we used them, when Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the Trinity project, the first test detonation in New Mexico in 1945, declared "Now we are all sons of bitches". So I decided, as a reminder, to post images of Alex Wellersteins' Nukemap, configured for my hometown, Austin, as a touchstone. Something to remember.

Since it is unlikely (although not impossible - think the TV series Jericho) that the U.S. will nuke itself, I chose as a warhead the 800kt warhead atop Russia's latest missile, the RT-2PM2 (SS-27) Topol-M (Sickle-M) road mobile strategic weapon that Russia is modernizing on. I chose as ground zero the UT Tower.

It turns out that it wouldn't be so bad. 300k deaths in an 800k city. If you were getting out of a cab at Bergstrom airport, you would be right on the line between 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Out near Pflugerville, where I live, you would probably be ok. Of course, if you were a UT student, you would be toast, literally. Downtown Austin wouldn't stand a chance, crushed under a 20 psi overpressure that would crush a person's lungs. West Lake Hills - all dead. Barton Creek, well, I hope you have on more than a bathing suit because you are going home (if you have one left) with 2nd degree burns on your exposed side.

For a little different look, this is from Alex Wellerstien's Nukemap3D simulation. Again, 800kt Russian nuke atop the UT Tower. This time, we managed to escape from Bergstrom in an airplane. We are about 15 miles south, at 30,000 feet, looking back over our shoulder. The city looks dark, because the mushroom cloud is hanging over the area. You can see Bergstom off to the right. I-35 is exiting the picture to the lower left towards San Antonio, which, with Joint Base San Antonio, the Army Burn Facility at Ft. Sam, Randolph, Lackland, etc. undoubtably got at least one too. It's so dark under the mushroom cloud, you can't make out details of the city, but you can see Lake Travis in the upper left.

And lest we become too complacent with conventional weapons, here is a nice little map comparing the effects of our firebombing of Japan (conventional) with the comparable cities of the U.S.

There is a good reason we haven't had a nuclear bombing in 70 years. The two at Hiroshima and Nagasaki scared the shit out of everyone alive at that time. With most of those people no longer around, are we ready for another one?