Don't send me email at work.

I'll admit to having a bias against using email ever since the company I work for was bought out by a large corporation, and our perfectly useful, secure imap server was replaced by an Exchange server that we have to run Windows inside a sandboxed VM in order to access it. (Unintended consequences strike again. Thanks, Sarbanes–Oxley.)

I'm not kidding.

Before the merger, to read my email, I fired up my client and read my email.

After the merger, to read my email, I:

• establish a VPN connection to the local office, using my "local" credentials (local ldap id/password)
• run remote desktop software to access a virtual machine running Windows 7 inside the office network
• establish a VPN connection to the corporate office, using my corporate credentials (secure token + pin)
• launch Outlook (as a contractor, I must use the full client, not Outlook Web Access) and sign in with my corporate ldap id/password, which are not synced with the local account.

On top of that, I probably have violated some policy just by posting this.

Any relationship between this byzantine process and batteries catching fire on airplanes is purely coincidental.

Last night, I dreamed of trains. Specifically, I dreamed that I was walking next to trains and train tracks.  Then I ducked to get under some branches, and someone tried to take my wallet, so I stabbed them with my pliers.

It's clear that my dreams are telling me to move to Portland. Or something else.

Sports reporters and Clearing logs

I met my wife on the Internet. I have had several significant friendships with people that I've only known or primarily known online. Two of my best friends are people I met via the Internet. Over the past years, I've had several friends that I've known only online pass away.

I have encountered people who obscure their identities in their online relationships. Some did so openly, acknowledging that their online persona was something that they intended to keep distinct from their "real life." Others did so in a fashion that could be considered subterfuge and misrepresentation.

At times, I have struggled with how to discuss my online friends with friends and family members. In particular, when talking to a person who has stated negative opinions about "online dating", Second Life (where I met my wife, for what it's worth,) or online friendships, I have on occasion allowed a misconception about the nature of my relationship to stand, or been less than forthcoming about it. For example, at least once in the past I've said that my wife and I were introduced by mutual friends; this is true, from my perspective, but it leaves out some facts: that our "meeting" was online, and that those "friends" were (with one exception) people I only knew online at the time.

A while back, sports reporters started telling us a story. They told the story that they wanted to hear, because it was a good story: the rising football star who lost both his grandmother and his leukemia-stricken girlfriend on the same day. It was a great story. It drove up ratings on TV and rankings on the web. It wasn't true, exactly. The girlfriend part, at least.

The staff at Notre Dame, to their credit, view Te'o as a victim. It's troubling that so many sports journalists are willing to pile on accusations that he was somehow a party to the deception. It's especially disingenuous because so many of them were in a position to investigate the alleged girlfriend as the various stories played out over the season, and none of them did. Nobody checked Stanford's student lists. Nobody looked for a death certificate. Nobody checked hospital records. Nobody did anything. Why not? Isn't that what journalism school is supposed to teach you? What does it say about the state of journalism when nobody bothers to verify a major news story about a Heisman candidate?

Considering the way online relationships have impacted my life, I am extremely sympathetic with Manti Te'o's situation. From what I have been able to read about it so far, he was naive, and he was victimized. Only he knows for sure, but absent any conclusive evidence, we should give him the benefit of the doubt.

Fisking Huckabee on the Bath MI Disaster

A post from Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate and late Conservative rock star, is making the rounds on Facebook:

Michael Tremoglie on the Italian website, Academia Res Publica, offers some food for thought about the Sandy Hook school shooting. He writes that the worst school killing in history wasn’t committed by a disaffected teenager, didn’t involve a gun, and happened before there was violent entertainment and before God was taken out of schools. In 1927 in Bath, Michigan, a middle-aged farmer blew up a schoolhouse, then detonated a car bomb. He killed 38 kids and six adults, and nobody ever figured out why.

Tremoglie notes that the only scholarly study of mass school killings was published by an Ohio sociology professor in 2007. It found that there is no holistic approach to investigating school killings, where interdisciplinary experts examine every possible angle and share their knowledge. Instead, different groups quickly seize on the tragedy to advance whatever angle they already believe. Liberals blame lax gun control laws. Conservatives blame violent media. Mental health groups say it shows the need for more funding. And so on. The study suggested that until we start investigating these tragedies the way we do other disasters, where experts from many different fields work together to discover the truth, we may never learn what really causes them or how to prevent them from happening again.

So much of this is untrue, it's pathetic.

The bombing was the work of a "farmer." Well, EVERYONE in Bath, Michigan at the time was a "farmer." But the bomber was also the former school district treasurer, a person known for being difficult, impatient and violent. He was bitter over his loss in a recent school board election, and was also facing foreclosure, and his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He had stopped working his farm, tried to give his horses away to a neighbor. He planted the explosives months before the event, and blew his own house up.

Mike Huckabee can't figure out why Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath school building. I can't figure out why anyone should listen to Mike Huckabee about anything.

The FBI has a very clear set of profiles for mass killers. The problem isn't that we need more investigations. The problem, clearly, is that we've created a culture where there's a prevailing abhorrence of guns and gun owners, and where people are unprepared to protect themselves. We've seeded the landscape with "gun-free zones" that are nothing more than target-rich environments for potential shooters. Paradoxically, we've simultaneously conditioned a generation of disaffected young men into numbness regarding gun violence via video games and movies. And to top it off, we've created a media system that sensationalizes the relatively rare mass killing incidents while largely ignoring murder rates in poor and minority communities.

There have been 76 people killed in mass-shooting incidents within the past 10 years. There were more than 440 school-aged children killed in Chicago in the past year. I submit that if we want to do something to protect children, we would be further ahead forcibly relocating the population of the greater Chicago area than we will either by more gun control or by putting police in schools.

Thoughts on the Newtown Massacre

The "elephant in the room" in the discussion of recent mass-killing events is how existing gun regulation and cultural mores have created pockets where there are concentrated numbers of potential victims. Once a person has decided, for whatever unfathomable reason, to kill a bunch of people in a public spectacle, the obvious best places to do it are where they are most assured of not encountering armed resistance: schools, malls, theaters, or anyplace else with highly publicized bans on gun possession. These events decidedly do not occur at places where one encounters ordinary citizens with guns on their person: firing ranges, police stations, hunting clubs or gun shows. We have concentrated the most vulnerable members of our society in places where they can easily be victimized, and then systematically disarmed the people charged with protecting and defending them.

After pilots were targeted by the 9/11 terrorists, a number of airlines changed their policies to again allow pilots to carry side arms. Now we hear a cry for a police presence in schools. Well, we don't need armed guards in schools. We need to allow legitimate, responsible gun owners to carry their weapons in defense of themselves and their communities. That's what the Second Amendment is about. That's what we've spent the past 50 years systematically thwarting with gun regulations and enculturated squeamishness about gun ownership. Meanwhile, paradoxically, much of our popular culture glamorizes and cartoonifies gun violence in ways that, while not clearly causative of gun violence, certainly desensitize some of us to the horrific damage that guns can do.

20 children are dead because some decided to be evil and nobody was able to shoot back and stop him. A bitter harvest indeed.

Reflections on Retiring Politicians

If you want to know what's wrong with America, consider this: Only 1 out of 3 eligible voters bothered to vote in the last election.

Judging from the results, its pretty clear that a little over 1/6th of America thinks that the Tea Party is a racist elitist secession movement, thanks to the lies told by political hacks on MSNBC.

Meanwhile, a little less than 1/6th of America think Barack Obama is a closet-muslim communist straight out of the Manchurian Candidate who wants to radically change the social and political structure of the country, thanks to the lies told by the political hacks at FOX News.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, the guy who basically ran on a platform that the government should leave us alone and keep its hands off our stuff was able to draw only 1% of the vote.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the only person on either side of the political spectrum who had the guts to point out that the country is working with a fraudulent central banking system - and that the credit card bills from the past 25 years of military adventure expeditions are piling up for our children to pay, while the world continues to despise us despite our constant assertion that we are the good guys - just left town after been marginalized out of the political process for more than 30 years.

Meanwhile, his son is the only person in congress to stand athwart the stream of history and yell "stop" at the relentless erosion of civil liberties that the executive branch pursues in the euphemistic name of "homeland security." (Excuse me, but the Founders had a plan for "homeland security". It's called the Second Amendment.)

I don't know where people who think Gary Johnson and Ron Paul are onto something are supposed to go after the 2012 elections, but as soon as it becomes clear, we all better go there and forget about the one-party Republicrat Democan system, because as the stream of nonsense we're hearing from Barry and John and company about the "fiscal cliff" (by the way, what ever that is, we went over it a long time ago) isn't going to amount to a hill of beans when the rest of the world figures out that our money isn't worth the paper we high-speed print it on.

Obama's Foreign Policy: A Catalog of Successes

In this post, I will list all the ways that Obama administration has succeeded with respect to foreign policy.