The View From North Central Idaho

Since my posting nearly a week ago there has been speculation I was fired because of my blog or it's content.  Technically I'm sure that is not true or at least it is a very small component of the official internal record.  The blog was used to find sufficient cause to investigate other things.  At least one item was ultimately found, which I knew was wrong when I did it and admitted to it when asked about it, which was sufficient cause according to company policy to terminate my employment .  That item was allowing my wife and daughter to browse the web using the company laptop.  I suspect there were other things which they believed to be wrong, but in fact were not, which were also used to justify their actions.  I probably will never know because they did not and probably will not ever allow those items to be examined and refuted.  But it doesn't matter because it only takes one step “over the line“.

A full report from my viewpoint, about what happened, the lessons learned, and how you can protect yourself will probably be released sometime next week.  Please keep your speculation to a minimum until then.

The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson Papers
334 (C.J.Boyd, Ed., 1950)

Perhaps the most accurate conclusion one can reach with any confidence is that the core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist / republican / federalism one: Its central object is to arm 'We the People' so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes -- not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons -- a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges or immunities of United States citizens protected by §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action.

Laurence Tribe
American Constitutional Law
From The Smallest Minority

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke
(1729-97)
Irish philosopher, statesman.

I just got a call from [deleted--for reasons of security].  They are going to do a phone interview with me at 13:00 today.

Update: It seemed to go well for the most part.  The worst of it was I had not used some of the programming language they were interested in such as SmallTalk and Visual Basic and of course they asked why I was leaving my previous job.  I was blunt--“I was fired“.  That was early in the interview and I did well on all the rest of it.

Barb's brother has a son, Jason Scott who is in Iraq now.  He was trained as a tank commander but they are doing patrols in Humvee north of Bagdad.  I'd much rather he was in his tank than a Humvee but you do the job you have to do. 

It's kind of a local-people/human-interest story.  It's nice to hear about him and hear his voice.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

Robert Heinlein

There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or in the scientific sense. The needs of the State are the sole determining factor. What may be necessary today need not be so tomorrow. This is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decision dictated by existing circumstances. Therefore, I may - nay - must - change or repudiate under changed conditions tomorrow what I consider correct today.

Adolph Hitler
Rauschning
The Voice of Destruction, pp. 223
[The discovery of the relevence of this quote to present day politicians and others will be left as an exercise for the reader.]

The American Government is premised on the theory that if the mind of man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy must be placed beyond the reach of government.

William O. Douglas
Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court
April 17, 1939 to November 12, 1975

They did an “investigation” starting with my web site Boomershoot.org, then this blog and other web sites of mine, asked me a few questions along the way, suspended me without pay effective May 30th, then announced the results of their “investigation” yesterday--”You are being terminated.”  When I asked for the details of what I did wrong or an opportunity to dispute the findings of their “investigation“ I was told, “That discussion wouldn't be productive.“

I turned down a job in Moscow just two weeks ago and now they have hired someone else.

Most annoying.

People are scared of people like you Joe.

Barbara Scott
June 3, 2005
Talking to her husband Joe Huffman regarding his blog.