Good bye to Papa Joe

Houston, TX - Joe Paterno, the 46 year veteran coach from Penn State, left this world last Sunday. It was a shock to those outside the family. People knew the coach was ill, but his demise was not expected this soon.

Papa Joe was assaulted in the media by righteous bastards with high sounding words about "moral duties." People felt Paterno owed more to the alleged juvenile victims of a sexual assault. Those very same people did not give so much as a nod to the fact that Paterno followed policy to the letter. Apparently the rules don't matter to them.

The cowardly trustees of Penn State University, hiding behind secret meetings and looking for scapegoats to throw under the bus fired the beloved coach. Just in case further proof was needed that none of these people have any measurable back bone what so ever, they fired him with a phone call. Not one of these trustees are worthy of the title.

Joe was sick at the end of his career. Fighting a lethal disease like cancer requires a strong will to live. You cannot help but wonder how much of Paterno's will was sapped by the unwarranted personal attacks on him. Having the remainder of what was to be his last season snatched away from him in the name of lining up sacrificial lambs almost certainly did not help that will.

Rest well Papa, you more then earned it.

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Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.
- Joe Paterno

The TSA crossed a line

Over the years in these pages I defended the TSA and their security measures taken in the wake of September 11th. I felt most of standards and procedures were reasonable based on the moronic twisted rules (No profiling for one) the TSA is forced to work under.

That was until I saw this video:

Ok, pulling off a T-shirt is not exactly a strip search. But it does not take away from what we are witnessing. Watch the pat down after the shirt comes off very carefully.

No one, and I do indeed mean NO ONE, would strip and touch my child in that manner on probable cause based solely on possession of an airline boarding pass. It doesn't matter that it was conducted there in public with two other TSA personnel looking on or out of the public eye. I assure you that would not have happened to my child.

Yes that is a battle I would lose. We are talking arrest, jail, bail, charges, fines and permanent records. But there are some lines even my government shall not cross. That video clearly shows agents of the TSA stepping way over that line. There are some things I simply will not sell out for. My children rate really high on that list.

There is no proof anywhere, no one has said anything to this effect, but it is my belief the "enhanced" pat downs are punishment for refusing to go through the new body scanners. My theory is TSA management believes if they make refusing the full body scan unpleasant enough, the vast majority of us will happily go through the full body scanner.

Enough is enough. It is time we as a country decide to grow up and start dealing with our security problems in a mature rational manner. Rational means politically correct words like "profiling" become irrelevant to security practices. That means a complete and total revamping of security systems and procedures (popularly known as Security Theater by some reading this) surrounding airports.

The United States should have followed the Israeli model from day one. The Israelis are under far greater threat then we are. (Were?) Most people don't even realize they are being screened when going through the Israeli process.

Check out this article on how Israel handles their airport security.

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"
The Toronto Star: The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother

I highly recommend reading the entire article. It is very clear and very eye opening.

As much as it pains me to admit this, the fact is our government beginning to cross some real lines here. We are not talking artificial tempests created in virtual teapots like Boing-Boing or the Daily Show here. This is not an urban myth like suggestions the government is tapping every cell phone call in the United States. This is hard evidence of a system gone nuts.

I find it impossible to believe that partially stripping and then groping that young man in front of the entire airport screening area audience is a reasonable security measure.

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"Goodbye commercial flying, hello No Fly List."
- Me after proofing this post.

More EPA wisdom for the good of all, of course.

Lenoir, TN - In yet another stroke of stunning consequences-be-damned thinking the EPA, acting under a directive from the idiots leading Congress, are going to increase the percentage of ethanol allowed in gasoline blends. The old line was 10%, the new line is 15%.

In a move that triggered immediate, furious controversy, the government said Wednesday that gasoline now may contain up to 15% ethanol — grain alcohol, usually from corn in the U.S. — instead of just 10%.

The Environmental Protection Agency ruling approves E15 only for 2007 model and newer cars and trucks. But EPA hinted it soon will include vehicles back to 2001. "Thorough testing has now shown that E15 does not harm" newer vehicles, EPA chief Lisa Jackson said.
USA Today: Ethanol content of gasoline can be 15%, up from 10% now

The EPA says that this blend is currently only legal in 2007 or newer cars. But how are they going to guarantee that fuel stays out of older cars in states that require ethanol blended gasoline? I think we are about out of nozzle sizes. We could go to the round peg in the square hole concept, but what about all those 2007 and newer vehicles already on the road? It will be even worse if they extend the standard retroactively to the 2001 models. (Wonder if we can get that "won't hurt newer cars" in writing…)

This new glitch in logical thinking will finish what "Cash For Clunkers" started. Older vehicles designed before the Gasahol craze with rubber based parts in the fuel system are already suffering some damage from the alcohol in the fuel. The 50% increase in ethanol will rapidly accelerate that damage. Those cars will either have to undergo costly repairs or they will scrapped.

It does not take a social engineer, in depth surveys or the US census to tell us who drives the vast majority of older vehicles on the road today. Those are people that can least afford to replace them. A brief and highly unscientific survey among the servers here at the Cracker Barrel in Lenoir, TN reveals that 7 out of 11 drive vehicles from the 1990s. Only one drives a car that is newer then 2007.

This change in fuel blends eat a lot of tip money. Money most of these severs say they don't have.

For an administration that is supposed to be all about the little guy, they sure spend a lot of time screwing him.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. Hope you aren't too fond of that trusty old lawn mower. If it even runs on that mix, it will probably kill it in just a few tanks of the 15% blend.

-30-

As we all know, no crude oil refineries have been built in the United States since 1976. During that time, close to 100 ethanol refineries have been built.
- John Shimkus

One more launch…

Shuttle Discovery on Pad B with the press area flag in the foreground.

Kennedy Space Center - Several of the higher ups around here as well as people from ATK, the people that manufacture the solid fuel boosters for the space shuttle were talking with us yesterday and today. The cuts Obama made in the space program are going cost somewhere around 30,000 jobs if the stand as they are now. Those job loses will be spread out across Florida, Houston, Utah, Alabama and Louisiana.

This is talent and knowledge will be scattered not just across the country, but around the world. More then likely to countries that see the value in space flight. The brain drain and the time it will take to start the space program back up again if it closes down completely could set us back as much as 30 years in space flight development.

Nice stimulus package you got going there Mr. President, Madam Speaker and Leader Reid.

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"It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad."
- David R. Brower

Socialist Health Care: It's Done.

Clearwater, FL - Everyone reading this blog knows my feelings on Obama-care. There is no point wasting bandwidth with them now. The good side fought the good fight. But the dark side headed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid and President Barak Obama managed to pull it off in spite of opposition from the overwhelming majority of people in this country.

So today I'll leave you with someone else's thoughts from 200+ years ago.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

–author unknown (often mis-attributed to 18th century Scottish writer/lawyer, Alexander Tylter)

I guess 234 years wasn't a bad run.

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The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
- Michelle Obama

Great time for a debate

Yesterday, Washington DC was under 30+ inches of snow. Mother Nature is expected to deliver another 15 inches by the end of the day. Trees are down. Power is out. Flat roofs are collapsing. The city is paralyzed.

This would be a great time to hold a congressional debate on global warming.

-30-

The sky is not burning, and to claim that it is amounts to journalistic malpractice... the press only promotes the global warming alarmists and ignores or minimizes those of us who are skeptical.
Mark L. Campbell

Fines for not having health insurance? Oh Hell no!

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has an interesting idea to get universal health insurance coverage in the United States. He proposes fines on people that do not have health insurance. Read it for yourself.

The fines would be the stick to enforce a proposed requirement that all Americans get health insurance, much as auto coverage is now mandatory. The penalties would start at $750 a year for individuals, and $1,500 for families. Households making more than three times the federal poverty level - about $66,000 for a family of four - would face the maximum fines. For families, it would be $3,800, and for individuals, $950.

Baucus would offer carrots as well: tax credits to help pay premiums for households making up to three times the poverty level, and for small employers paying about average middle-class wages. People working for companies that offer coverage could avoid the fines by signing up.
The Associated Press: Fines proposed for going without health insurance

So lets see now…

We all know how well mandatory liability insurance on cars worked. 100% compliance and low prices across the board, right?

And if you lose your job and your insurance, big fine! Oh yeah, that's going to help. Just what every man and woman out of works needs is one more worry.

Do you think this policy will apply to illegal aliens too? It will be fun to watch Uncle Sam try to collect those fines. The feds will probably be at least as successful as the traffic courts and insurance companies that are chasing illegal aliens that have car accidents without the benefit of auto insurance.

Actually, to me it seems Sen. Baucus stumbled across a sure fire way to turn the tide of public opinion in favor of a government option. Think about it, if you are flat broke, unemployed and facing a yearly $1500 fine, a free ride from Uncle Sam suddenly looks really good.

Come on 2010, it is well past time to clean house.

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Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
- Voltaire

Microsoft is not my conscience

Recently while trying unsuccessfully to view a video on a blog it came up that I was using an older version of Windows Media player. It was suggested that I upgrade Windows Media Player to view the video, but I declined. The reason for this is simple. I can no longer trust Microsoft not to cripple my machine with some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). And I don't know enough about computers to roll back any damage Microsoft might do to my machine.

In a nut shell, DRM is software that restricts or prevents you from making digital copies of anything from music to videos to software to e-books. I do not agree with locking down a product that I legally purchase, especially when it restricts my Fair Use rights allowed under the law. However with the current moral standard that seems to be prevalent in today's society I can understand it.

However, Microsoft has taken DRM to an extreme. Starting with Vista (and it is rumored to be even earlier) Microsoft took it upon themselves to not only protect their own product, but to act as the copyright police over everything on the user's computer. For example, It appears that Microsoft doesn't believe there is any such thing as fair use for music or video files.

Early beta testers of Vista were frustrated to find legally purchased and licensed software disabled due to a DRM hook in the operating system. A friend testing Vista on several machines in the graphics department at a major television network suffered the software lockout problems with high end software packages. Vista would not allow the software to run, even with the original CDs.

He was also running a beta test on the computer in his office. That afternoon he went to rip his latest music CD to MP3. Vista refused to do it. To get around that he installed a free CD Ripper called Audio Grabber. This time the Vista operating system intercepted the attempt and stopped it, displaying a dialog box stating he did not have a license to do that. All the machines under going beta testing in his division were back on XP Pro by the end of that day.

I am told that these problems were corrected with the general release of Vista. But the point is the code that did these tricks was in the operating system at one time. For all we know it may still be laying dormant in the operating system. Who is to say that Microsoft won't turn it back on sometime in the future.

Windows 7 turned up similar problems. An article in Slashdot discusses numerous DRM headaches including disabling legally installed software, allowing other software vendors internet access through firewalls regardless of user settings, degraded quality on audio/video inputs and locking the user out of the registry file on his own computer.

Microsoft publicly acknowledges anti-piracy measures in Windows 7, in theory placed there to improve the customer experience.

"Counterfeit software delivers a poor experience and impacts customer satisfaction with our products, particularly if users do not know that their software is non-genuine."

Williams gave the example of one piracy exploit that caused more than a million reported system crashes on machines running non-genuine Windows Vista before Microsoft was able to resolve it.

"Customers running genuine Windows Vista Service Pack 1 are protected from that experience. And there is an even simpler reason: if you pay for something, you want to know that you got what you paid for," he said.

PC Authority: Microsoft outlines Windows 7 anti-piracy measures

What a complete load of crap. Again, I can understand Microsoft wanting to protect their own product. But that is where the line of understanding ends. How does degrading quality when I want to rip my bought and paid for music improve my user experience and satisfaction with their product?

The point of this rant is that Microsoft is not my conscience. Nor is Microsoft a law enforcement agency, federal judge, or my mother. Microsoft is my software vendor, nothing more. Not only that, but their software is running on my computer. Note the emphasis on the word "my."

When I tell my computer to do something, it doesn't need to check with Redmond, WA first. You see that is my computer so what ever I tell it to do, right or wrong, is my decision and my decision alone. The boys and girls at Microsoft don't get any say in the matter. When Microsoft takes it upon themselves to interfere in that decision, they cross a line into a roll that I cannot live with.

Unless Microsoft can loose their delusions of Godhood, my next machine will not be running any version of Windows newer then XP Pro. In preparation for this possibility, I am already researching Apples and testing Linux on an older laptop computer. 

The decision is purely up to Microsoft: Mind their own business or lose mine.

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"I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change. "
- Tim O'Reilly

Everyone Hold Your Breath!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a move the boggles the mind declared carbon dioxide a public health hazard.

For those of you that slept through all your biology and chemistry classes, carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary gas we humans give off when we exhale. Carbon Dioxide is also the primary gas that most plants need to survive and in the course of that survival turn it back into oxygen for us. It strikes me as counter intuitive to want to cut back on a gas that is vital to plant life, may of which we humans and other animals eat.

President Obama and most liberals in Congress are faithful disciples of Al Gore's church of Global Warming. To be a disciple, you have to accept on faith the dogma of global warming while ignoring the hard science and historical data behind cyclic changes in temperature and the climate in general.

This action by the EPA is designed by the current government leaders to lend legitimacy to their church. Because most of our Federal representatives know which way the wind blows when it come to voters and their church, they left the dirty work to a unelected agency. An agency that has enormous power of industry, private property and the population in general.

Now those same legislators can throw up their hands in a "it's a bureaucracy, what are you going to do?" gesture. I can answer that question, they can pull the funding to enforce this non-sense. Do not let your representatives lie to you. They do in fact hold all the cards. If they pass legislation saying that no funds may be spent on enforcing the CO2 con game, then it will not happen.

But don't hold your breath. The Church of Global Warming is a front for a far broader agenda then dealing with a little hot air. The Church of Global Warming is merely an excuse to force elitist agenda down our throats. That agenda is made up of things like:

• Forcing us into smaller, more crash dangerous personal vehicles like Smart Cars.
• Furthering the envy based war on SUVs and large pickup trucks.
• Stopping or hindering power plant, refinery and heavy industry construction.
• Penalizing people with energy inefficient housing.
• Fighting clean coal power plants.
• Generating an all new source for government revenue. (Think cap-and-trade, carbon taxes and environmental impact fees.)

Why can't the EPA limit itself to real hazards like dihydrogen monoxide?

In the mean time, everyone hold their breath until you can get an emissions permit from the EPA.

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Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.
- Patrick Buchanan