Even though I have never built a bomb (ignore all the people that keep asking me for help building one) I know a little about them. Tam gets the sarcasm right and now I'm going to fill in a few technical details for you clueless types:

• Hollywood does not do reality. Putting the time remaining until detonation in large numbers on a bomb is a Hollywood gimmick to increase tension in the story.
• Lights do not serve any purpose on a bomb other than to draw attention to it.
• If someone's intent is to hurt people or property drawing attention to the bomb is probably counter productive.
• Conventional explosives can only directly injury and kill via three different mechanism:
  • High speed projectiles, usually metal, that have been accelerated by the explosion
  • Overpressure which ruptures the lungs of the victims. You must be very close and sheltered from the high speed projectiles for this to matter
  • Acceleration of the victim. The various body parts are accelerated at different rates and the victim is torn apart or the victim can be thrown into an object that hasn't been accelerated; i.e. they are thrown against a concrete wall
• Bombs can cause indirect injuries such as the structural failure of a bridge, building, dam, dangerous chemical container, or starting fires (non-trivial but possible). Falling glass from the building above you is a big one to be concerned about.
• Surprisingly small amounts, fractions of a pound, of properly placed explosives can do amazing things to structures without the explosion hurting people just a few feet, even inches, away.
• Surprisingly large amounts (hundreds of pounds) of improperly placed explosives can do virtually nothing to structures and people who are relatively close by.
• Hollywood does not do reality. There are no safe ways to disarm bombs in general. Anything you can come up with I (or any other competent electrical engineer) can defeat such that either my bomb will detonate when I want it to or you make a bigger explosion than mine in order to destroy my bomb.
• Hollywood does not do reality. Fireballs are not an inherent part of explosives. It takes additional effort to create a fireball.  I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to make them (see also this page). It takes a lot of fuel to get something very interesting. The picture below used two pounds of explosives and four gallons of gasoline and I was clearly safe less than 50 feet away.

If you see something suspicious there are two things that are important; 1) How large is it? 2) What is it's placement?

Here are the evacuation distances based on the size of a bomb. Those are worst case distances based in part over the concern of broken glass from the windows between you and the bomb and on the buildings above the sidewalks. A few licorice string sized objects properly placed would be more effective in taking out a bridge than a car fully loaded with explosives driving across the top.

If the placement is very near some important structure such as a bridge or fuel tank one should be more suspicious than if it is in the middle of the Safeway parking lot.

Blinking lights on a flat panel attached to non-interesting structures are either not a bomb or evidence of a very stupid bomber. In either case it's not something to shut down a city's transportation about. Stupid bombers, with the exception of suicide bombers which aren't bombers but bomb delivery vehicles, are very rare because Darwin is very severe in his thinning of that herd. I just wish Darwin would thin the herd of stupid politicians as severely.

Sometimes people ask me if maybe I'm a little paranoid with all the guns and training and concern about the loss of our constitutional guaranteed freedoms. I point out that the guarantee isn't worth the paper it's written on without a means of enforcement. Which is what the guns and training is about--a last ditch enforcement mechanism. I can see where someone could make a case that I'm being paranoid but I think I can make a pretty good case that there are politicians that really are out to, and have, destroy our freedoms.

But no matter how good a case you make against me it doesn't compare to this type of stuff:

Huffman Aviation, a front for FBI Division 5 and British Intelligence, have hired two known assassins, Robert Cain and Joe Kelso to put together a team that will target outspoken American citizens.

Of course it gets worse. Huffman Aviation is a stooge company with financial links to Keathing 5 bank dick Senator John McCain and Hillary (noted Republican gay-in-the-closet) Clinton Rodenhurst. Cindy McCain has large financial interests in Huffman Aviation.

P.S. Current CIA operative Harvey Hemmett has testified to Congressional investigations that he was part of the government team along with Israeli Mossad who trained Mohamed Atta at the Venice, Florida flight school...

...

Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not even an official member of the Israeli government, is blackmailing Bushfraud vis a vis using Bush's homosexual sex and financial fraud, election fraud, criminal fraud, telling Bush either you do this in Iraq and Iran or else.

...

Sandy Berger not only took NATO nuclear codes but he was involved with a Mossad team in Thailand transferring nuclear triggers and other sensitive nuclear information on NATO with the help of Adnan Khashoggi disguising these uranium and nuclear materials as textiles sending through China to Israel. Treason of the highest proportion.

Financing Sandy Berger was Marc Rich, the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate fixer.

Attorney General Gonzales is covering all of this up for the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate.

It was then Vice President Al Gore, Jr. who tried to have Marc Rich arrested in 1993 and was prevented from doing so by the Israeli Mossad and the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate that then dumped Vince Foster in the park that was working with Ambassador Leo Wanta, former FBI Director William Sessions and General Vernon Walters.

Bush plans to use Azerbaijan air bases to attack Iran possibly as early as this Wednesday...

I think someone forgot to take their meds.

It's an excuse to party. Or at least that is what Robert Sandler suggests as he comments about the Mayor's conference on combating "illegal guns":

The mayor noted the additional "problems" more police would bring to the city. More police, for instance, would mean more arrests for an already grievously overcrowded prison system. This is already burdening the city with costs it can't afford in addition to more court costs for prosecuting the criminals.
Which means the mayor is not against crime or criminals. He does not want a safer city. He wants to save money. The easy way to do that is with another gun law-- which he will not enforce.
Or perhaps, it's something completely different. An Anti-gun Summit is a good excuse to get away from doing the jobs the 140 mayors were hired to do--and party!

It's sounds as plausible as anything else to me. It's certainly not about making people safer.

Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.

Robert Burton
[I have no idea what Burton was thinking of but it makes me think of socialists and gun control advocates.--Joe]

James and I finished up the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise last night. James has been harping about the "space tourists" nearly throughout the entire series. On Monday when we watched In a Mirror Darkly: Part 1 and In a Mirror Darkly: Part 2 James changed his tune and gushed, "Best episodes of the series!" and "Hoshi rocks!" He even wanted to watch the opening credits and listen to the theme music a second time.

Going through the episodes a second time with the commentary it was kinda fun to watch Hoshi carefully and see the hints of her scheming, in addition to her bed hopping, throughout the two part story.

And then there's the satisfaction of getting rid of the rodents in the process. Via Say Uncle and Ninth Stage:

Initial reports are a little ambiguous but if the Wikipedia entry is to be believed I don't have reason to faint as I was initially inclined (violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a very big deal in my world view).

Still, it is perhaps as big a deal as electronics. And since Maxwell's Demon is very much like the very first electronic device, the diode, the analogy works pretty well. If the analogy holds, as things scale, then the analog of the integrated circuit will be mind boggling let alone the analog of the multi-core, multi-CPU, desktop computer.

I would say that what is dangerous about this situation is not the fact of having a nuclear bomb. Having one, or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous.

Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?

It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Teheran would be razed.

French President Jacques Chirac
In an interview on January 31, 2007 with Le Nouvel Observateur, The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune.
[If the device could only be delivered by air and all the probable recipients of said device were 99+% sure it wouldn't arrive intact then I might actually welcome Iran launching such a device for the very reason that it would give Israel (and others) a immediate reason to get into the glass making business. But that's not how it would work out. If Iran builds or acquires one or more bombs they will make sure the odds of successful delivery are relatively good. It could arrive by land, air, or sea. And it will be Jews, Christians, and "The Great Satan" who will have to first deal with a great excess of glass. Therefore, logically, Iran must not be allowed to build such a device. Our country doesn't have the political will (until after the first one or two glass making exercises occur) to ensure that so I hope Israel does have the political will. My expectation however is that Iran will get to throw the first punch and we will then throw the next 20 or so. As usual, by failing to act early more lives will be lost on both sides.--Joe]

You've heard that freedom isn't free in the context of our military defending our freedom but there are other instances where this is also true. Zendo Deb points this out in her post Deacons for Defense and Justice:

The Deacons for Defense and Justice did not plead to be given their rights. They did not beg to be taken seriously. They made sure they were taken seriously. They took action and fought for their rights, and they defended themselves, their families and their communities from oppression and violence.

This ties in well with the book I just finished reading, Negros with Guns which Ry (I borrowed the book from him) suggested be required reading in school. I agree.

The basics of the lesson to be learned is that thugs and tyrants don't give up power and thuggery just because you ask nicely or because the legislature or the United Nations says they should. They do it because of the threat, or in worst case the actual use, of force. I've said this before but it's worth saying again:

Inalienable rights are not asked or pleaded for.  They are demanded and taken, by force if necessary.

Washingtonians are not stupid. We are aware that gun laws have failed miserably wherever they have been tried. Anyone who knows how to visit the FBI Web site can tell you that the most dangerous places in the United States often are the places with the strictest gun laws. Gun laws overseas have been no more successful. Asking the Legislature to give us more is a colossal waste of time and an insult to our intelligence.

As Say Uncle points out:

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Kevin and Zendo Deb contribute their thoughts on this article too.

I've been pushing the similarities between the gay rights movement and the gun rights movement for some time now and trying to get some cross pollination (so to speak). I even have gotten some attention from the press for my efforts:

Gays take up self defense; Organization teaches safety, protection with handguns (Lewiston Morning Tribune)
Pink Pistols chapter begun in Moscow to protect gays (AP version of the above story)
Pistol-packing proponents of gun-owner tolerance (Seattle Times editorial)

I believe putting guns into the hands of lesbian, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc. (LGBTs) is a very powerful meme. In addition to helping save lives that tend to be at higher risk (from "gay-bashing") here's what it does for us:

• It helps fracture the alliance between anti-gun bigots and the Democrats (or between the LGBTs and the Democrats--whichever way you want to look at it)
• It gets guns in the hands of more voters (and the LGBT community tends to be more politically active than the straight population) who are motivated to keep them and carry them
• It helps fracture the stereotype of gun owners as being rednecked, racist, gay hating, KKK types

We need to encourage this alliance as much as possible. And the alliance we have now is a fragile one. It only takes one jerk to undo a lot of work and we need to police our own to maintain this alliance. 

The anti-gun bigot that runs the so-called Freedom State Alliance website paid my blog a visit today:

Host name: adsl-75-34-22-226.dsl.chcgil.sbcglobal.net
Date: 1/31/2007
Time (UTC): 20:32:29
IP Address: 75.34.22.226
Page: /2006/10/26/Imitation+Is+The+Sincerest+Form+Of+Flattery.aspx
Referral: http://www.freedomstatesalliance.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
User agent: Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US;+rv:1.8.1.1)+Gecko/20061204+Firefox/2.0.0.1

It's nice to know he stops by every once in a while.

Our daughter Kim called me today. She was having a really rough day. She and her fiancée were having problem with the bank and problems with their van which caused cascading failures in other aspects her life. I could hear it in her voice before the first word was out of her mouth. I asked what was wrong and as she started explaining she started crying. A few seconds later I closed the door to my office and started crying with her.

She is 20 years old and hundreds of miles away and although I was able to help solve some of her problems more than anything I wanted to hold her on my lap and rock her just like she was two years old and had skinned a knee or had some other minor injury. I suppose those feelings will still be there when she is 40 and I'm in my 70's.

"Mission"

Translation: To stay alive when "scumbags" threaten your life.

From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson
[As a private citizen your job is not to capture, punish, wound, or execute the scumbag. Your job is to make sure you and any innocent life you have taken responsibility for come out of the encounter in the best possible condition. Keep in mind the encounter is not just the few seconds or minutes in which you are face to face with the scumbag but can extend for years into the future including future encounters with the same scumbag (it is an ex-boyfriend that wants you dead?) with civil as well as criminal trials--which may have you as the defendant. When you are in "the situation" you will likely only have fractions of seconds to think about your decisions so you will need to think about what sort conditions will warrant what sort of actions. It's going to be a rare case that you will want to restrain from pulling the trigger when the scumbag is at contact distance with a knife in hand and rare that you will want to pull the trigger when he is 20 feet away and running away. But there are exceptions and the time to think about those exceptions is long before you get into that situation.

When you are in a situation where there is no applicable ready made plan you need to keep your decision logic extremely simple. Hamilton, a professional self-defense instructor, captures the essence of that decision logic here. Concentrate on the mission and do only what is required to accomplish that mission. With days and weeks to think about it afterward you and others may come up with better things you could have done. If you do only those things that are relevant to that mission the results may not be optimal but they probably won't be that far off.--Joe]

Once I had all the log files organized and added the new ones I received from my web host I did a little more looking just for the fun of it. And right off the bat I found something that gave me the giggles. The main website investigator (probably Michael Sutherland) for PNNL used the machine "puck.pnl.gov" as he or she committed their felony. My search in a friend's 2005 log files resulted in this little gem:

Machine name: puck.pnl.gov 
Date: 6/22/2005 
Time (UTC): 20:18:50 
IP Address: 130.20.128.81  
Referral URL: http://www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGcres.jsp?id=IBdHb4UNDrsJ&su=http%3A//www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGweb.jsp%3Ffr%3D20%26searchfor%3Djoe+huffman+sorry%26ptnrS%3DZSzeb001%26st%3Dbar%26nsa%3D0&u=http%3A//www.kennedysailor.com/faq.htm&searchfor=joe+huffman+sorry

This visit took place early on the afternoon of June 22, 2005 about two and half weeks after I was fired. The funny part is the search string they used: "joe huffman sorry".

It's a little bit ambiguous what they were looking for. Were they to see if I said something about being sorry for my contribution to what had happened? Or were they sending me a subtle message that they were sorry?

I was never sorry for anything I did. I wasn't the one committing a felony. And if they were "sorry" that was a pretty sorry attempt at apologizing and it doesn't cut it. I'll believe they are sorry after they have spent a few months being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates to the guy with the most cigarettes.

This book, even though I hate the title, addresses one of my hot buttons:

One of the great myths of alternative medicine and the health food industry is that natural things are better than artificial or synthetic things because natural is natural and Mother Nature wouldn't want to hurt us. Wouldn't she just? Plants and animals have had many millions of years to evolve ways of protecting themselves against predators and competitors for resources. Humans have had about 100,000 years of hunting and gathering to evolve natural resistance and about 10,000 years of agriculture to breed out the nastiness, and these times are just not long enough to make much difference. We are surrounded by plants and animals which can do us great harm if we are not careful about what we eat, and also by a myriad of fungi which delight in making safe foods unsafe.

People, with great pride, will say something to effect of "It's all natural" as if that proves the goodness of something. To date my best response to this sort of idiot talk is, "Botulism is all natural too." But, being idiots, they will insist that even natural poisons are good too because that is how you control insect pests or some such thing. They just don't get it. If "all natural" poisons exist as well as "all natural" food/drink/shampoo/whatever then there must be a continuum. Hence by saying some food is "all natural" does give us any information about it's fitness for consumption.

I would like to suggest they have a nice meal of raw mad-cow brains, marinated in a salmonella broth, with rhubarb greens on the side, and washed down with oleander tea. But I'd be afraid they would actually do it and the police would arrest me on some charge like "engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed person".

Every once in a while I read a dead tree newspaper.  Someone wrote a letter to the editors of the Moscow/Pullman Daily News this last weekend that could not go unanswered.  I wont bore you with its contents, but you'll get a good idea of it by reading my response, submitted today to the same newspaper:

Dear Editors,

Regarding Mark Winstein's letter entitled "Lets Not be a Big Box Town" printed in last weekend's edition:  I will point out to your good and thoughtful readers that in Mr. Winstein's opinion, the last people who should be making decisions about land use are the actual land owners, the last people who should decide what is and what is not a "sustainable approach to the economy" are those who have their own capital at risk in a given venture, and by rights, the very last people on Earth who should decide where to shop are the shoppers themselves.

Apparently, there is a new field of study at the U of I, known as "Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values".  I might like to meet one of the Doctorate Professors in this new Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values Department.  However, between taking care of my family and minding my own business instead of advocating the use of force in minding other people's business, it would be hard for me to justify the time.

Now I want to propose an entirely new concept-- one that Winstein may not have ever considered:  Maybe we could advocate the protection of other people's rights (even if we dislike them).  It might be interesting if people could make their own decisions in what I will call a "Free Society" (I might enjoy entertaining the Dean of a "Free Market Solutions to World Problems" College).  I understand that this is a new and terrifying proposal (for some) but it may be worth considering, given that if our neighbors have the Right to Choose, perchance it would follow that we too would be afforded the same right at some stage.

For anyone who's been held captive in a North Korean prison camp for the last ten years:  "Big Box" means Wall Mart.

I'm going to be using the term, "Free Market Solutions" more often in the future, most especially because no one ever seems to think in those terms.  The Left, naturally, always views a free market as the problem rather than any sort of solution to anything, and naturally, they couldn't be more wrong if they tried.

Vi Ry and Reason. A 80 year old man was shot and killed by undercover police after he told them to leave his property. He brandished a gun and they shot and killed him. Witnesses say the officers never told him they were undercover. What would the law do if it had been real drug dealers that had shot and killed him? Would they be prosecuted? Almost for certain. Assuming the witnesses are correct, what law says the police are held to a different and lower standard? Will they be held to the same standard as any other person that did the same thing?

Don't count on it. The police are out of control and a good portion of the reason is because of the war on some recreational drugs. It's time the legislature declared victory and gave it up.

Update: More info on the case (thanks to Steph for the link):

Police are now conceding that Singletary was completely innocent. The Jacksonville sheriff describes him in this article as an "honest citizen trying to do good."

Which means that two undercover officers trespassed onto Singletary's property. They then invited criminals onto his property to engage in criminal activity with them. Mr. Singletary, recognizing the trespassers as drug dealers, then properly demanded they leave. He brought a gun along to defend himself, not an unreasonable action, given the circumstances. For this, he was shot to death.

These police officers should be treated exactly the same as any other private citizen who shot to death a private citizen under similar circumstances. I.e. trespassing while engaging in a transaction involving illegal drugs. "The kings men" do not have special, unwritten privileges that places them above the law--both legal and moral law.

This guy is totally incomprehensible to me:

Progressives can close this gun gap and make significant inroads with gun owners by staking out an aggressive position on guns that reflects both the majority view of gun owners and non-gun owners, and responsible policy positions to keep America safe.

This moderate view supports the Second Amendment, new laws like those designed to close the gun show loophole, and the strenuous enforcement of existing gun laws.

...

• By a margin of 92-7%, voters support improving the background check system to make instant checks faster and more accurate (90-9% among gun owners). 
• By a margin of 90-9%, voters support closing the gun show loophole (85-13% among gun owners, and 83-16% among those who have attended gun shows!).
• By a margin of 77-21%, voters support renewing the assault weapons ban (66- 32% among gun owners).

Moreover, for every one of these proposed laws, voters overwhelmingly believe that a progressive can support each measure and still be a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.

If this is "strong support" for the 2nd Amendment I'd hate to see what opposition to the 2nd Amendment would be. Of course he doesn't say actually say they are supporters of the 2nd Amendment. He just says voters will believe it.

It reminds me of the first "User Friendly" software came out in the late 80's. The software vendors had a bunch of labels made up that said, "User Friendly!" and slapped them on all the boxes in the warehouses. The great majority of the people weren't fooled then and we shouldn't be fooled by this shyster either.

Update: I've been asked where the survey data is. What survey showed such numbers? I don't know anything more about this particular survey that what is on the website I linked to. What I do know is that almost for certain the questions asked were carefully chosen to give the desired results. For more details on how this is done please see the, very technical and scientific, article Sorry, Wrong Number; Why Media Polls on Gun Control are so Often Unreliable (scroll down or do a search on the page).

The headline reads (from Canada so don't get excited about this being in the U.S.), "Conservatives still looking at lifetime gun licence Despite college shooting". You never read a headline or even something in the text along the order of "Socialists and facists still pushing gun control despite it's failure to reduce crime every time it has been tried." Just One Question you bigots. Just answer my one question and then tell me again why you want to take our guns.

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord Acton
[PNNL has a problem with this. They have defied every Freedom of Information Act request I have made--in some cases blatantly lying say, "No such document exists." when I created the documents and knew they must still exist. Someday someone will punish them for their illegal acts. When that happens I, and many others, will be there helping to make sure that punishment makes up for all the times they got away with it.--Joe] 

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

William O. Douglas
[A similar thing can be said of guns. The type of gun that was used for a terrible crime yesterday may be used to save many lives the next. The government that protects you one day may next year send you to the gulags--unless you and your kind own and know how to use guns.--Joe]

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them...

Thomas Jefferson
1816
Letter to Van der Kemp
[Although Jefferson wasn't referring to gun control it certainly applies. Keep that in mind when people in high crime rate areas with oppressive gun laws insist others in low crime rate areas enact more gun control with the claim such gun control will reduce the crime rates in the area of the first person. I'm thinking of a certain set of mayors here that should be laughed all the way back to some tiny closet in their respective offices ashamed to show their faces until they have been booted from office, dragged out to the street, and given a swift boot to send them on their way to the dustbin of history.--Joe]

...each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less.

U.S. Department of Justice
Departmental Ethics Office
Justice Management Division
[If they are required to have a loyalty to the Constitution then how do they get away with working for agencies such as the ATF that are enforcing blatantly unconstitutional laws? Oh, that's right, the constitution and law doesn't apply to them unless they want it to.--Joe]

Via Say Uncle we get this bit of ATF humor. Here is a teaser:

It has come to our attention that an opposable thumb commonly located on a person’s hand can be used in conjunction with a semi-automatic firearm, when placed in a belt loop, can cause said semi-automatic firearm to fire at a higher rate of fire than we originally intended for it to be allowed to fire at.

What happened here was that once machine guns were heavily restricted the ATF had to define what a machine gun was. Human creative being what it is the freedom loving "gun nuts" kept coming up with inventions that bypassed the definitions the ATF came up with. Just recently the ATF went almost absurd in their definition and some smart-ass took it to the logical conclusion. I actually have some sympathy for the ATF in this case. They didn't write the law they are just trying to make sense of it and give us definitions they can enforce to. It's the bigoted politicians that are at fault. Even if all the existing ATF people people did the right thing (most of them should find legitimate jobs) there would be others more than willing to take their place. We need to destroy them at their root--the politicians that encourage them by giving them laws, money, and guns.

It's fairly easy to define a crime when there is a victim. It can be done in terms of the actual injury. Was there more than $1000 of property stolen? Was the victim permanently injured? But try and define an "assault weapon" or a machine gun, prostitution, or recreational drugs (enumeration is possible but creative chemists come up with things not on the list) and they run into problems.

Laughter and humiliation may be the best weapon we have against these anti-gun bigoted politicians and their hired thugs. Let 'em have it with both barrels.

I’m not procrastinating, I still have 25 minutes.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
[Xenia was working on a Government worksheet before school that she thought was due the next period that had a question about Microsoft lawsuits. A friend of mine testified in one of the lawsuits and she was hoping I could give her a quick brain dump and she'd be, essentially, done. She was wrong. She had all of winter break to work on it and I told her to go do her own research as best she could with the available time. It turned out the assignment wasn't due until the next day but it would have served her right if had been just 25 minutes and she wasted two of those minutes talking to me.--Joe]

There is one very well known guaranteed cure for smoking--death. However another one has just been discovered--brain injury:

Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit, effectively erasing the most stubborn of addictions. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, “forgot the urge to smoke.”

This is great news. We may be able to find or create a drug or other means to "flip the switch" and help people from implementing the "universal cure".

I find this very ironic--I always figured you must have had a dysfunctional brain to start smoking in the first place.

Search engines are a wonderful thing. I'm sure the felons at PNNL thought they were great and wonderful as they went searching for information on me (see for example the use of Google on this day).

But search engines are double edged swords. For example doing a Google search for Battelle fraud (Battelle is the contractor that manages Pacific Northwest National Laboratory--PNNL) yielded these pages (E835 and E836) in the Congressional Record:

• Dr. Laul is a nuclear chemist and a nuclear engineer, with a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He spent 15 years at Hanford working on nuclear waste and environmental cleanup problems, analyzing whether that site was suitable for permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste.

• Dr. Laul is also a whistleblower, and a friend of the taxpayers, who put his career on the line when he blew the whistle on fraud and mismanagement by Batelle, Inc., a DOE contractor. Five days after disclosing that Batelle inappropriately and illegally used equipment paid for by the Government, Batelle fired Dr. Laul, saying he had improperly disposed of a hazardous waste--a violation DOE later said Batelle used as an excuse to lay him off and silence him.

• After losing his job, Dr. Laul brought a False Claims Act suit against Batelle and won, resulting in Batelle reimbursing DOE $330,000. Today I submit for the Record an article describing the case and reporting on Dr. Laul's vindication, and thank him for the important and honest work he did on behalf of this country. Dr. Laul lost his job because he had the nerve to stand up for what was right.

You might say that's all well and good for the taxpayers. But if you read further you might have cause to change your mind about that:

U.S. government investigators agreed that scientist Jagdish C. Laul was fired for turning in his managers for fraud.

A federal appeals court agreed Laul could sue the Hanford contractor for whom he worked for wrongful termination.

The government made the contractor, Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pay back $330,000 for double-billing lab equipment--and even recommended Battelle managers be criminally prosecuted for fraud.

But who picked up the $750,000 tab for defending Battelle against Laul's lawsuit?

U.S. taxpayers.

Laul's case is the most recent example of a system that allows private nuclear contractors to rack up huge legal bills fighting whistleblowers--even when the contractor's in the wrong.

Battelle settled with Laul in January to head off a federal jury trial in Spokane.

The cost of his case to taxpayers includes the $250,000 settlement paid to Laul; $400,000 in legal fees to Battelle's outside law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine of Seattle; and about $100,000 in legal work and other Battelle costs to fight Laul.

If Laul had won at trial, taxpayers would have paid that bill, too. That's because of a Cold War agreement in which the U.S. government promised to pay all legal costs of its nuclear weapons contractors when they agreed to run the government's weapons plants.

The agreement, called indemnification, is still in effect today. It applies to Battelle, which works on Hanford cleanup and other government nuclear programs.

Isn't that nice? Battelle paid $330,000 for the fraud which sounds like was the amount they had illegally charged the government to begin with. And the Federal government has to pay all the legal costs of Battelle's defense. So... assuming Battelle decides to engage in some illegal activity to increase their bottom line the worst case scenario is that Battelle comes out even in the end because the Feds are required to pay the legal bills. Best case is they get away with it.

In my case the Feds will, assuming I win, pay Battelle's legal bill and any settlement I get from them. Battelle is held financially harmless by the Federal government. Just so you know. Perhaps your congress critters would like to know that as well.

Continuing the search engine exploration... So what happens if we do a search for Battelle whistleblower? That was interesting... We end up with this story which with a little more searching results in this and digging a little deeper yielded this (UT-B means the partnership between the University of Tennessee and Battelle that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL]):

In my settlement, I made sure that DOE and UT-B explicitly agreed that I had won the case. There were two reasons for this. One was that I did not want UT-B to be able to claim that I "dropped the case" or any such thing. But the other was that back in 1995 at PNNL, following a settlement in which Battelle paid their fired former employee J. C. Laul a sizeable amount for a whistleblower case that Laul was very likely to win if it had played out to the last act (legally speaking), PNNL head and later ORNL head Madia characterized the payout as "a straightforward business decision with the best interest of the US taxpayer in mind". But as a Government Accountability Project lawyer pointed out, Battelle spent over $400,000 of taxpayer money defending against Laul's whistleblower action, plus the $330,000 it had to return to the government for the fraudulent action that Laul (accurately) reported. Madia stated that the message of the settlement was "Don't sue us [Battelle]", but of course the true message was "We will get away with whatever we can".

So what our search engines report for us with just a little looking is that Battelle has a history of making stuff up and firing people. I was telling Barb this new information and she said, "You would think they would learn." Well yes, but there wasn't much to learn and it's a different lesson than the one we want them to learn. They have learned they can commit criminal acts and the worst that will happen is they come out even in the end--guaranteed by the contract they have with the Federal government. There are more amazingly great terms in their contract that I'll save for another day. I wouldn't want you to burst a vessel from a blood pressure spike.

Here are some of the lessons being taught to Battelle. This is right after being dinged for the first fraud case I mentioned above:

Battelle is expecting to receive an "outstanding" rating for fiscal year 1999 from the Department of Energy for its performance in operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

The rating is to become final and be announced in late December.

Last year, Battelle also received an outstanding rating. Even though its 1998 score fell just barely shy of the number needed for the top rating, DOE awarded the outstanding rating because of Battelle's strong efforts in key areas.

This year, Battelle expects to be well above the minimum score needed for an outstanding rating, based in part on the lab's self-assessment, outgoing lab Director Bill Madia said Wednesday during a meeting with the Tri-City Herald editorial board.

The real problem here is that Battelle/PNNL has no incentive to be responsible for their actions. It's like a child that gets in trouble at school and the parents intervene in such a way the child is totally protected from any punishment. There is no downside for their misbehavior--there is only upside. That's one of the ways criminals are created. After sufficient criminal activity they eventually get caught and then they go to prison. Which is has been my end goal from the beginning in then case. The PNNL felons need to spend some time being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates bidding the most cigarettes for a few years and perhaps then the behavior of their previous co-workers will improve.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Battelle has other "skeletons in it's closet" that are most likely to come tumbling out soon. I don't have enough details to really be comfortable in talking about it even if I was at liberty to discuss it. I have been assured that I will be among the first to know when the details become public.

I'll keep you posted.

Update: A reader pointed out one of my links was broken. That is fixed now.

Also worthy of update is another source that is more readable and has the potential to be less biased is the actual ruling of the DOE in Westbrook's case:

There is evidence in the record that suggests that the RIF sheets, which contained the objective information on which the termination selections were to be made, were not given serious attention, and were drawn up to favor a pre-selected individual. I have reviewed the criteria set out on the RIF sheets and find troubling inaccuracies and manipulation.

...

In my view, the Company’s use of this criterion [transferability of skills] to assess whether an employee is flexible enough to “satisfy” or “get along with” customers is so strained that it suggests a manipulation of the system to reach a predetermined result. .... That leads me to believe its use was an afterthought, one designed to downgrade Westbrook and target her for termination. As such, it detracts from Battelle’s position that the RIF was performed impartially with respect to Westbrook.

I received an email from my lawyer today about my lawsuit against Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:

We do have service on Battelle. It was served on 1/22/07.

Whoo hooo!! Full speed ahead!

Of course that is in "legal time" rather than in "Internet time" like what I'm used to.

I also received a phone call yesterday from someone that heard about my case. They had lots of interesting information about other illegal activities Battelle has been involved with. He is sufficiently upset about it that he is taking it up with some government officials. I shared what I could with him. I'm not sure his information will be that useful to me but I hope to soon be posting some of it here or on my PNNL.info website. He claims some pretty egregious and illegal stuff.

It's not too surprising I guess. I did have a guy at the lab tell me and another fairly new employee, "See this badge? This means the law doesn't apply to us." That same "fairly new employee" recently sent me email saying, "I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab" and "I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail."

The guy I received a phone call from had first called over two weeks ago. I put him in touch with "fairly new employee" and that contributed to the update yesterday about his plans to talk to the GAO, Congressional oversight committees, and the DOJ in the near future.

I have some hints that my previous plans to avoid getting former co-workers involved may not be possible. Now might be a good time for some of my friends that still work there to get new jobs (hint, hint). Things will be much more comfortable for them if they don't have to worry about getting fired for reporting information that is embarrassing to Battelle after being deposed. Also I've been hearing rumors of business being a little tight for them right now. If certain government agencies become displeased with all the illegal activities Battelle has been engaged in then business could get much worse soon.