Phone interview

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I had a phone interview this morning with a software company.  It seemed to go very well.  My skills in the area they need help with are a bit rusty but I know I could do the job.  They said they are having trouble finding qualified people so my guess is that I’m in the running for at least a little while.  I probably won’t hear back from them for at least a week and then from there even if things went perfectly it would be at least several more weeks before I could actually start work. 

Xenia, Xenia’s John, and James were really excited about the job possibility and not just that it’s a job but because what I would be doing in this job (details after it is decided one way or the other).  Barb is less enthusiastic because it is out of state.  I share Barb’s concern on that issue but it is the number one company I would like to develop software for.  That makes up for a lot.

Quote of the day–Sidney Hook

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Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive.

Sidney Hook
American Philosopher

Awesome letter to Kevin

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Kevin, over at The Smallest Minority, received a letter from one of his readers today.  I read it a little while ago.  A contributing factor is that I’m really tired right now but I started crying when I got to this part:

My dad, however, was a survivor of Auschwitz. My grandparents were murdered there. And it is now a cliche, but it’s true, the ‘average’ Jew could not defend themselves. So that got me to thinkin…and then seeing how it starts to look like America could end up like many S. American countries, with gated communities and barbed wire or broken glass up on the walls of the compounds…and I used to think this was the siren song of the Cassandras, but New Orleans showed that ain’t necessarily true…well, all this speaks of the need to have some protection.

This is the part that has to make Kevin really puff up in justifiable pride:

You’ve helped me understand a great deal of things I otherwise might not have. I had a lifetime bias against guns…still won’t say I like ’em, but that’s that cultural bias I mentioned, and having one for self-defense is not the same as enjoying killing.

Although it scares some people he should now understand my post Why Boomershoot?  And although many people think I’m paranoid for my Jews in the Attic Test I doubt he is one of them.

He’s looking for someone in the St. Louis area to take him shooting for the first time.  I would go and supply an assortment of firearms and the ammunition if someone wants to cover my travel expenses.  I’m a certified NRA instructor, I’m a high class B IPSC shooter, I do pretty good with a long range rifle, and further credentials are here.

Thanks for sharing Kevin.  That was really great.

Update: I have a pledge to cover the air travel with excess frequent flyer miles.  If I could get a little bit more to cover a couple nights in a cheap motel I’ll cover my meals.

Update2: I now have pledges to cover all my expenses.  Now it just depends on if Kevin’s reader wants to accept or not.

You would think they would know better

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Via a pointer from Mindless Bit Spew. The Dutch are planning to open a “cradle to grave” electronic file on every child.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Dutch government plans to open an electronic file on every child at birth as a tool to spot and protect the troubled kids of the future.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database — including health, education, family and police records — the health ministry said Tuesday.

As a privacy safeguard, no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file. But organizations can raise “red flags” in the dossier to caution other agencies about problems, ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer said.

The intention is to protect troubled children, Brouwer said. Until now, schools and police have been unable to communicate with each other about truancy records and criminality, which are often linked.

“Child protection services will say, ‘Hey, there’s a warning flag from the police. There’s another one from school. There’s another one from the doctor,” Brouwer said. “Something must be going on and it’s time to call the parents in for a meeting.”

Every child will get a Citizens Service Number, making it easier to keep track of children with problems even when their families move, said Secretary of Health Clemence Ross.

“Safety, guidance, education and supervision are incredibly important for the development of children,” Ross said.

All Dutch births are currently registered with local authorities.

Doesn’t it always seem to be “for the children”?  It has often been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I claim it is paved with the skulls of the tens of millions of people, including children, who died at the hands of their own governments intent on doing good at any cost.

It must be the Dutch forgot about the little incident back in the late ’30s and ’40s when those type of records were found to be quite useful–when tracking down all the people with “Jewish blood”.  And how is that “privacy safeguard” enforced?  Is there anything that can’t be changed by a simple act of the lawmakers?  As I said in the context of a U.S. Universal Biometric Identification the safeguards that I would require to be put in place in order to believe the contents of the database would not abused would cause the most enthusiastic Auschwitz guard to cringe at my creativity in punishment methods, violate numerous protections of the Bill of Rights, and probably inspire several additions to it.  And, I now add, enforceable by any person anywhere on the planet that has a reasonable suspicion there was abuse of that database.

Quote of the day–Bertrand Russell

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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.

Bertrand Russell

Rocks and explosives video

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My video digitizer is not working right. The audio is messed up.  But here is the video anyway.  At least you can see the big clouds of dirt.  There was one attempt that failed to detonate when we didn’t have a “detonator target” on top of the main charge and I tried to shoot into the top portion of the milk jugs.  Also, I think there was one blast on the first rock we didn’t video tape.

RockBlasting20050913.wmv (1.59 MB)

See also Little rocks from big rocks and explosives.

Another gun rights activist resource

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I’ve seen this done before but never quite as well done as this site: Myths About Gun Control.  But of course I’m a geek and like lots of notes and references.

Quote of the day–Jeff Cooper

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More than two thousand years ago Aristotle opined that most of the human race has essentially the soul of a slave. A recent Associated Press poll recorded that fifty-four percent of those questioned seemed willing to trade liberty for security. The sad fact is that one cannot trade the one for the other. You can surrender your liberty, but what you get in turn is never a significant increase in your security. There are those in Israel who feel that they would like to trade “land for peace.” That will not work either.

Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 3, No. 7
16 May 1995

Little rocks from big rocks and explosives

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The complete collection of pictures for this adventure is here.  Below is just a sample.

I got up about 6:00 this morning, took Xenia to her drivers ed class by 7:00 and was on my way to the farm.  A little after 10:00 I had all my gear gathered up from the Taj Mahal and met my brothers at the house.  We went to a field they had been removing rocks from for several days.  There were two rocks that couldn’t be dug out with the equipment they had.  Below is rock number one from the “back side”:

Rock number one from the “front side”:

The rock appeared to be directly connected to the earth’s crust.  It also poked just above the surface of the dirt (prior to their digging with the back hoe and cat).  We put one of my improvised shaped charges on top of it and got back 93 yards to shoot it.  Here is a picture of the charge all ready for detonation by rifle fire:

The results were disappointing.  It removed a small “cap” off the right side and showed just a hint of a crack basically down the middle.  But not enough to brag about much.  We hit it again in the same spot with the same type of charge.  The crack got a little wider.  We tried a different approach.  A “water hammer”:

The detonating target for my rifle is on top.  In the middle is about two pounds of HE in a thin rectangle.  On the bottom is about two pounds of water in a thin rectangle.  The thought was that the HE would accelerate the water into the crack and force it open further.  The results were, again, disappointing:

We came back after lunch with more explosives and tried two milk jugs (about 10 pounds of HE) with rocks and water around the sides to help confine the charge.  This yielded a significant break in the top side of the rock which we easily exploited with a large bar:

We put about five pounds of HE under this rock and another five pounds on top of that but still in the crack.  Around that we packed dirt and water jugs:

This pulverized it:

We went on to Rock two.  Having learned our lesson we packed about 20 pounds of HE in the side of it next to the bedrock and put dirt and water jugs all around it.  It took four of the 4″ square detonator targets stacked on top of each other to reach a height we could see it from our shooting position:

I’ve never set off a 20 pound boomer before.  In fact the 10 pound boomers a little earlier were a new record for me.  We got back what seemed to be a reasonable distance which according to the laser range finder was 127 yards.  I fired and clods of dirt (sure glad we didn’t put rocks around it!) landed behind us and off to the side of us.  It had the desired effect on the rock however:

Video was taken as well.  I’ll get that digitized and up before long.

Quote of the day–James Bovard

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Gun bans don’t ban guns; rather, they only ban citizens from legally defending themselves with guns.

James Bovard
Lost Rights
ISBN 0-312-12333-7
Copyright 1994, 1995

Mouse regrows limbs and internal organs

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From the Sunday Times (London):

SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals

…

The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate.

The discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine.

Details of the research will be presented next week at a scientific conference on ageing, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, at Cambridge University. Ellen Heber-Katz, professor of immunology at the Wistar Institute, an American biomedical research centre, says that the ability of mice at her laboratory to regenerate appears to be controlled by about a dozen genes.

She is still researching their exact functions, but it seems almost certain that humans have comparable genes.

…

The researchers suspect that the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring the animals’ survival rate. The mice are, however, only 18 months old and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach conclusions.

The implications are mind-boggling.

Other articles on the same topic from:

Blunt instrument number five

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I just pushed the “Send” button on another FOIA request to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  This one will probably cause some people to mess their pants and perhaps lose their jobs.  And that’s even if I don’t lift a finger from now on.  The unfortunate part is that the people most directly in the path of this particular “instrument” are the one’s least responsible.  It could cost PNNL a lot of money to deal with the implications of this.  And that doesn’t count the embarrassment, loss of confidence, and potential loss of business they will suffer with their customers.  Their best course of action at this point is to give up protecting the people that committed the felonies in the process of terminating my employment at PNNL.  Things will be much more pleasant for everyone, except the felons, if they “see the light”.

I checked on the status of two of the other “blunt instruments” (there are five total now) that are working their way toward them.  I don’t have anything to report yet although I expected I something before now.  This latest one I will be able to report on in no more than two weeks.

Does this give you a clue?

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Israeli turned over the land they captured in ’67.  The dust hadn’t even settled from their exit when:

Palestinians surged triumphantly into demolished Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip early today, torching empty synagogues and firing shots into the air, as the last Israeli soldiers withdrew after 38 years of occupation.

I can see some really hostility expressed by making the synagogues into barns, or a manure storage storage facility but even that would be considerably over the top in my “book”–and I’m an atheist.  Burning them to the ground is stupid, completely irrational, or an expression of blinding hatred.  As Clayton Cramer said in his post:

Can you imagine the upset if Israelis had torched mosques in the Occupied Terroritories? There is something unnerving about this–rather like Krystallnacht translated into Arabic.

I’m guessing it’s blind hatred.

In another article — regarding the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases:

Al-Sayyid: Most certainly. The entire world, from the US to the most distant country, acknowledges that if they had stoned the fornicators, and prevented abomination, things would have been much better.

No wonder they call it “The Religion of Peace.”  Anyone that disagrees with their view of morality is killed and things are peaceful again.

They give us no acceptable options but to destroy their extremist culture.

September Rifle Postal Match

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Analog Kid has the details of the next match on his website.  It has a rather appropriate theme–he calls it Looter Shooter.

Quote of the day–Adolf Hitler

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The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.

Adolph Hitler

Thank you Queen of the Sky

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My comment on a posting over at Diary of a (Fired) Flight Attendant was approved and the Queen herself looked at the PNNL info website (I could tell from the details in my log file that it was her).  The links I left in the comment should get some more traffic.  Plus the email I sent to a reporter might generator some more interest in the case.

More dooced stories in the news

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You have to register to read them but excerpts follow the links.

Philadelphia Daily News: Your blog could get you recruited – or fired

For businesses, blogs and other forms of personal Internet communication constitute a new frontier fraught with promise and peril. On the one hand, companies are scrambling to use them as a recruiting and marketing tool, and are encouraging some employees to blog. On the other, they are wondering how to deal with the damage that current and former employees and dissatisfied customers can do on the Web.

The result is a “mild level of social panic,” Rainie said.

“The lawyers and the marketers are, in many cases, at least in covert war with each other.”

Miami Herald: Delta employee fired for blogging sues airline

A former Delta Air Lines flight attendant who says she was fired weeks after she posted photos of herself in uniform on her Internet blog has filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the airline.

Ellen Simonetti, whose job was based in Atlanta but lives in Austin, Texas, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, saying that male colleagues with potentially insensitive material on their blogs have gone unpunished.

The case could plow fresh legal ground on whether a company can take action against an employee for operating a blog. Simonetti was featured in a recent People magazine article that mentioned workers who were fired for blog content.

I really don’t have much interest in suing PNNL.  It wasn’t PNNL, per say, that did me wrong.  It was the individuals that used false information, such as claims I used government computers to host personal websites, that are to blame.  In fact, I’ve had two lawyers tell me there were probably felonies committed.  The problem is that it’s difficult to get a prosecutor to take the case and a private attorney typically can’t prosecute for a crime, just take civil action.  I still have lots of things to try and just thought of a new one yesterday.  It’s a rather nasty thing to do and it will hurt the wrong people, as well as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their customers, but if they don’t turn over the files on the investigation under the Privacy Act Information Request (their denial is being appealed) I’ll use it.

Money spent on security

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As I’ve posted before I think most of the money the government spends on “security” is a stupid waste and it is a threat to our freedom (for example see Universal ID Card Fatal Flaws and Stop Intrusive Airport Screenings).  Schneier, my security expert hero, got another editorial published where he talks about the waste portion of things:

Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we’re going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.

And he tells us where the money should be spent:

Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things: intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.

…

Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.

This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up the command chain, and resources — people and supplies — that can be quickly deployed wherever they’re needed.

Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that includes the NSA and the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes the National Weather Service and the National Earthquake Information Center.

The problem is politicians are very short-sighted.  Far-sighted politicians have a near zero chance of getting elected.  Can you imagine someone running for Governor of Louisiana on a platform of shutting down New Orleans and letting the Mississippi reroute itself 100+ miles to the west?  It’s probably the right thing to do and would have saved thousands of lives.  If our Federal government had been limited to it’s proper duties as defined in the Constitution economics would have forced them to “do the right” thing anyway.  But the Feds ended up spending billions on the levees and flood control to fight a battle that we will cannot win.  The question is how many times will the people of New Orleans lose this battle before the U.S. taxpayers say, “It’s time to face reality.  Pack your things and leave.”

See also:

New Orleans may have to face reality 
Another shot at New Orleans
Now do you believe me?
New Orleans was most vulnerable major city to hurricanes
More levee info

Searching for survivors

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From the New York Times article New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes.  The caption is theirs not mine.


Police officers looking for survivors today in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

One has to wonder what they are going to do with the survivors when they find them.  See also this post of mine.

Quote of the day–Mohandas K. Gandhi

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An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869-1948), Indian political and spiritual leader.
Non-Violence in Peace and War, vol. 2, ch. 150 (1949).