Defiantone.com

To save you some of your valuable time I’ll paraphrase - I’m incredibly bored. The rest of this post will consist solely of me griping about it. Ok, get on your bike and go on your way.

I rely on work to make me feel happy. When we have weather that keeps the planes grounded, as we have the last few days, there is little work to keep me occupied. As a result, I am no longer a happy camper. On a normal day people see me as a grumpy, cynical, curmudgeon. On a day that is filled with work they see me as a cynical wise ass. Last night I spent a few hours re-parking trailers - oh the joys! Most people have not had the opportunity of backing a trailer and if they do score a chance it probably does not have any steering system (campers, semi trailers etc). These are incredibly easy to park - incredibly easy. I could park one right up your… fill in the blank. We fight a different beast because we park trailers with a front steering system - much like the wagon that was always hooked to the tractor when I was a kid. They are extremely heavy and often need to be parked in gravel - deep gravel. This can make the job quite interesting. If you don’t get enough speed you’re bound to get bogged down and all progress will stop. We used to have a 4 wheel drive tug but its been out of commission for a while so we’ve been stuck with the real wheel drive model - it doesn’t help me finish my quest. Moving trailers has been the highlight of my night. The rest of the time I sat around looking for something to do - I’m not in a reading mood and the internet has lost all of its luster.

If we were killing more terrorists/insurgents/whatever the pentagon calls them I would be much happier - solely because I would have something that would occupy my time. Writing this utterly pointless blog post gave me something to do for five minutes - and for that I am grateful. Unfortunately, my creativity is at a low at the moment so you’re only going to get a drawn out version of I’m bored

I hope that cured your boredom for 26 seconds - if not - welcome to the club

Check out this article about the fault line that is in the pacific northwest - somehow it reminds me of this - whats your take?

I’ve had extra time to scour the internet for interesting articles - here’s what I’ve found in the last few days

A college educated man experimented to see if he could rise from the ashes with only $25 in his pocket. His goal: to get a job, a car, an apartment, and put some money in the bank before the end of the year without using any of his connections. He succeeded - read his story

America may never become energy dependent unless we make a drastic change in the way we educate our young and the way we value everything in our society - read on

The author believes that we are accepting ignorance and that we are systematically dumbing ourselves down because - its just too hard. Its a fascinating read and ties into a book I am reading about globalization.

Stanford conducted a study on voting patterns based upon how people associate with a candidate - based upon the candidates appearance vs. their own. Great stuff - a summary is available here and you can read the full text at Stanford.edu

We’ve been fighting the war on terror since 2001 and we have still not captured or killed our number one target. Many believe that he is hiding in the mountains nearing the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. We have tried to make strikes in Pakistan in the past but have faced stiff opposition when seeking approval - this time we didn’t ask for permission and we found that there were no complaints made in the end. Hmmm… who would have thought - read on at MSNBC.

CNN fired a producer, Chez Pazienza, for writing on a personal blog - he was not writing about his life experiences while never mentioning his employer. Its a fascinating read about corporate politics - read on

Free thought and liberty

All Americans are afforded the same protections under the constitution and the bill of rights regardless of what background they might come from. Our nation is great because we are a melting pot of people from many different nations with different backgrounds, opinions, and religions. Many Americans believe that no matter what, we should all be treated the same. Some people think that if I converted to Islam that I should have my security clearance revoked and that I should be put under a terror watch list. Americans are watching other Americans solely based upon the color of their skin and their religion.

In the mid-1800’s the United States was a divided nation as we fought in a brutal struggle for the rights of everyone despite their background or skin color. Hundreds of thousands died in this struggle in an effort to treat everyone equally. Despite the great loss of life America still did not treat everyone equally. America went through a large civil rights struggle for the equality of African Americans during the early to mid 20th century in an effort to even everything out. They wanted the right to be treated as an equal irregardless of how they might look. Today I think that we are still fighting the same battle but the participants are different. In the past month the president signed a law that allowed him and the secretary of defense to indefinitely hold anyone if they are suspected of terrorism. In a nutshell, they suspended the right of habeas corpus. The American civil liberties union immediately began to fight this new legislation as it was in violation of the rights spelled out in one of our nations greatest documents, the bill of rights.

Today I received an email from… someone that advocated the idea of spamming the ACLU with mail to adversely affect their mission: to protect the freedom of all Americans. First off, this is an illegal act. Second, this is one of the most foolish ideas I have heard of in a long time. Why in the world would we want to fight an organization that is fighting for all of our rights. Sure, the status quo in America is that we don’t care who we jail or whose rights we violate to stop terrorism but I know that I wouldn’t want to be one of those individuals who was illegally detained.

I mentioned this to someone yesterday and they mentioned that the ACLU is notorious for fighting only certain things and not all rights violations. In particular, they often fight not for the right to have religion but to remove it from a particular venue. In some cases, I can agree with this rational because we need to separate church from state. Why? Islam is nearly inseparable from most of the nations where the majority of people are of the Islamic faith. When this happens, only the faith of the majority is promoted and the others.. well, a Christian in Indonesia could get murdered and nobody would care. If the shoe was on the other foot and it was an individual of the Islamic faith the matter would be rigorously investigated.

Now that I’ve beat this to death… lets move on to the next topic today

Voting along party lines is foolish

Most politicians in America campaign on the party policy alone rather than their individual beliefs and ideas. We, as Americans, who live in greatest nation on earth, should elect people who think for themselves. When was the last time we voted on abortion in America? Do you think that the legislative body would subject themselves to a vote that would splinter the voting population in half. Lets face it, if there was a political climate change, as there is now, these people wouldn’t be elected the next time around. To make a campaign on polarizing material would be dangerous… the republican party joined together and supported GW’s decision to send Americans into Iraq. It will take years to figure out if the loss of life was worth setting them free. The crazy part is that they don’t care about what we’ve done over there… they just want us dead and gone.

Ok… whats the deal with this? well, I got an email yesterday telling people to vote on party lines citing the following reasons… time to tear them all apart

1. The economy. More than 6.6 million jobs have been created since 8/03. 4.1 annual growth is superior to all major industrialized nations. Dow hits new records. Productivity is up. Real after tax income has grown by 15% since 2001. Like VP Chaney would say…”What more do you want?” The tax cuts proposed by Bush and the R-Congress can take a bow.

More than anything else, the federal interest rates affect how our economy grows or shrinks. One man, who was put into that office by GW (and reagan before that), is responsible for that. Were you aware that 720,000 of the jobs created were government jobs? Creating a bigger government is not an effective way to reduce taxes and lower costs. Smaller governments are more efficient and cost less money.

Oh yeah, my data from Sept 06 says only 3 million jobs were created…. hmmm… fudging numbers somewhere?

Clinton took the jobless rate from 7.5% to 4% during his two terms in office. The GW took the jobless rate from 4% to 6.6% to 4.4%…. we’re almost back to where we started. He didn’t do anything legendary… he just got us back to where we started out in the first place.

You’ve also got to take into account that our nation now has over 300 million people… more people means more jobs.

want to know more check it out at senate.gov

2. The Patriot act. The much discussed civil liberty abuses have just not materialized. It has permitted the CIA and FBI to cooperate.

There has been no mention of civil rights abuses because all of the cases are handled in a seperate court that is out of the publics view. I am not aware of any… nor could I find any but the potential is just too great. Rewrite the legislation and give us something better. There IS a way to do it without infringing on citizens rights. The CIA and FBI have continually proven that although they can communicate they often do not communicate.

3. The ABM Treaty has been cancelled permitting us to work on missile defense. Is anyone but Nancy Pelosi sorry?

The fear mongers want us to spend billions on a missile defense system that does not work. They’ve already spent billions on the system and it doesn’t work… hey, I’ve got an idea. Give me your money and I’ll flush it down the toilet for you.

4. Immigration. The Republican Congress has gotten the first serious immigration restriction law passed in years.

If I was to look at the voting record I found that democrats and republicans worked on the reform together… you can’t take the credit for everything. Whats next? taking the credit for the sun rising every morning?

5. There has not been another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. Who would have predicted that on 9/12?

You got me here… there also haven’t been any more flying spaghetti monsters attacking our cities…. this is the most asinine statement out of all of them… yes, voting republican stopped the terrorists… oh wait 2819 americans died on 9/11 and 2828 american soldiers have died so far in Iraq… yep, we really showed them (I just want out troops back… soon)

6. Libya has surrendered its nuclear program.

Hmm… years of economic pressure or they saw republicans and gave up…. duh!

7. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear smuggling network has been rolled up.

Can you really attribute this to one party alone? No

8. John Roberts and Sam Alito sit on the Supreme Court.

I’ll give you this one…

9. The Demos that do not want to close Gitmo altogether want to give all its inmates the full panoply of rights Americans enjoy in criminal procedures.

Thats right, we don’t want to lock people up and throw away the key without trial because other nations watch what we do. If we abuse human rights why shouldn’t everyone else do it. We should at least give these guys and chance and if they are innocent… let em go, they didn’t do anything. It also doesn’t help that negativity is associated with the prison in the international community. One of the only reasons we have it is because its not located in America and we can pretty much do whatever we want to the prisoners.

10. Demos believe in immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If this happens the US will face a stinging defeat on the war against terror. According to Osama bin Laden, and those who share his views, we are militarily strong but psychologically and spiritually weak. Like it or not - and no one likes it - we cannot leave Iraq now without utterly and decisively validating this analysis.

Or maybe he says things like this to keep is embroiled in a war that we might not be able to win. He’s taunting us, this is what he does. I don’t want to loose either but if they outlook predicts no chance of winning… why stay? Lets get some guys together and find out what we need to win it… and win it. If we don’t change anything we don’t have a chance.

11. Demos would like to eliminate the terrorist surveillance program.

I can’t verify this one

12. If Demos achieve the majority in the House, Barney Frank will chair the Financial Services Committee, Henry Waxman the Government Reform Committee and Alcee Hastings the Intelligence Committee.

The three individuals are tools… but, we should get rid of them instead of voting for a republican… there have quite a few people in the past year that are involved in scandals, this time around most of them are republican…. lets keep the good people and get rid of the bad ones regardless of political party affiliation…

13. Demos believe the proper response to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test isface-to-face talks. That’s what the Clinton Administration did for years.

For six years the bush administration has done no better… neither made any progress

What I’m trying to say is this, give me a list of facts and I can counter almost all of them as I’ve done here. Vote for the right person, don’t vote for someone based on party affiliation alone… its a bad idea.

Comments? please let me know your opinion

I’m sure you’ve all been watching the news and have seen that the war on terror is not progressing as swimmingly as some would like. In the past week we’ve seen the extremely right wing Fox News tear into Former President Clinton in an interview on his actions to thwart Al Qaida when he was in office. Quite simply, he didn’t have the political ammo to get the job done though he did have the planning to take care of him. Lets face it, he did all that he could and I guess in some ways GW is doing all that he can. Fox News shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone… its all crap

We’ve also seen a report come from some of our intelligence agencies that states that the war on terror and the war in iraq are only helping to stir jihadism to greater levels. We’ve got a problem with what we’ve done to strike back and we need to change our course. To continue on this path and expect different results could be disastrous to the American people and the rest of the world. I still think we need to get the Iraqi people to some level of stability but after that we need to spend billions (as much as we spent on the Iraq war or more) on humanitarian efforts to help redeem our image. Our image, unfortunately, is all that we have in the eyes of the Muslim world and its not doing all that well right now. I don’t know how long it will take if we can ever make any positive impact but we need to let these people know that we accept their religious beliefs but we need to stop extremism as its it detrimental to everyone involved.

Thats about it for now

On the 5th Anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in US history Americans were asked if we are more safe than we were before the attacks. I was surprised to find that 42% of people felt that we are more safe than we were before the attacks. For reference, two years ago Americans were asked the same question and only 41% though we were more safe than before the attacks. I’ve talked to others about it before and I still believe that we are under a false illusion of security. We have given up much for the illusion that things are actually better off than they were before. We now face a long and intrusive searches before we are allowed to board airplanes. Many of the things they search for are not a physical threat but rather a threat that is percieved by others (think of the liquid explosives threat that is really not a threat at all). Sure, I can agree with searching for guns and knives but banning items like fingernail clippers and water is simply ludicrous.

I’d rather not give up anything else because I don’t think I would really be living if I was constantly worried about security and was willing to give up more freedom to be “more safe.” I think that if America was educated (properly) on the threats that we face that we could be a more vigilent and productive nation. It would take all of us to look out for eachother without leading to hysteria to do it. Our government may believe that its not possible so thats probably why they created the wholly ineffective Dept of Homeland Security.

On a related note, don’t forget about what happened to those people that died 5 years ago, but don’t let that loss let the government legislate away your freedoms.

Want to read more on this? Check out the original editiorial at MSNBC

For the past year politicians, civilians, and members of the military have fought over the best course of action in Iraq. Many have said that to set a deadline to pull out would lead to disastrous consequences in that country and in the region. Others are staunch supporters of a deadline to hand over power to the citizens of that nation and remove our troops.

Leaving Iraq before they are stable enough to handle the task at hand would be disastrous. We might as well throw an infant into a tornado, their odds of surviving the backlash of our actions is small… minute… 10,000 to 1. I have no doubt in my mind that if we left the country before some form of stability was achieved that a civil war would break out. If you’ve watched the video in my previous post, and I hope you have, you’d understand that the problem here is the Islamic faith. There are millions in the world that believe that Mohammed is the one and only prophet. They believe that their only chance in salvation is through their faith in God and Islam. I respect their right to believe in whatever they may… but, they don’t mantain that mutual respect. Many believe that they must eliminate the infidels… (its odd, I have only seen the term infidels used when in relation to faith… hmmm).. other parts of the Quran state things that contrast this (sorry.. I’ve got no quotes, watch the video)

The other option is, as our President would say, “Stay the course.” We will continue to maintain a strong military presense in the country as long as there is a need for us. We will continue to train and help equip their defence forces until they can handle the fight on their own. We will not give up on them and we will accept that any American death is necessary to the continued security of the region. I’m not a fan of this plan, but, I think its our best option. In some ways, I wish we could set a deadline that we really don’t plan to stick with… who knows, maybe this would light a fire under their ass to get things straight. They might be sitting on their laurels knowing full well that they don’t have to put in 100% because we’ll always pick up the slack when they can’t do the job.

Its a terrible idea… but, its no better than the other two options we’ve been given so far

On slightly related news, McCain, the Senator from Arizona (not the company that makes chips… british chips, not american crisps (or chips… err… whatever….)) is gathering the support and advice of the people required to run for president. Good, this guy is somebody that I can and would trust. We are currently involved in a conflict… why a conflict? American civilians haven’t lost their lives (well aside from the stupid few that thought peace and love would make the insurgents NOT chop off their heads). An individual that has served with his life on the line is more likely to make the better choice when it comes to the welfare of US servicemembers. He has the ability to put himself in their shoes… lets face it, he has been there and he has been through worse than most of us could imagine. So… unless someone else blows him out of the water, I’m going for McCain in 2008.

Sure, I may not agree with the list of policies. Have you noticed that during political elections we make our choices based upon a list of 5-10 hot topics. You’ve seen it before

1. Terrorism
2. Abortion
3. Civil Rights
4. Welfare
5. Foreign Policy

These viewpoints give us a glimpse into how an individual may make policy but it won’t tell us about how they would react to a situation that is out of the normal. We had the opportunity to see a president under great stress after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, after the WTC attacks, or during the civil rights movement. These are situations that suddenly create a situation that needs an immediate resolution. Most of these things could have been prevented if we had listened to the right individuals… but, we didn’t. I have a feeling, sure its in my gut, that presented with a situation like this that McCain would make the right choice. GW has been hit or miss with his choices. I completely stand behind the choice to go to Afghanistan and wreck the place… the choice to wreck Iraq… well, I’m not a fan.

Ok then… thats all for now

I’ve talked about this ad nauseum with others… in fact I’ve talked about it to such a degree that nobody around me wants to hear it anymore. I think that we are perfectly safe (statistically) and that any security measures we have only present the illusion of security. Look at all of the things that we must go through in order to be safe at an airport.

They’ve got

1. Cameras
2. Baggage Scanners
3. Security Checkpoints
4. More security checkpoints
5. Passport control/immigration
6. Restrictions on the items allowed
7. Security people… with GUNS!

Thats only physical security, think about all of the background checks on all of the employees. The FAA is constantly making sure that the airlines are in compliance with all of the safety aspects of air travel (the board of directors ensures this too as nobody wants to fly on an airline that has a habit of landing prematurely).

The list and the measures used in an effort to keep us safe from disaster is huge and I could continue ad nauseum… dang, I seem to love using that term today.

The only thing that they are unable to keep us safe from is fear of disaster. This fear is perpetuated by the media, government, and security firms. They want us to be afraid so that we will willingly comply with any security measure that they might throw our way. They want us to submit to any and all security searches. They want to sell us newer, better smelling, nicer looking, more invasive, and costly security equipment. Recently, they banned all liquids on aircraft in the US and UK… the question some people (chemical engineers and anyone with a knowledge of chemicals) had to ask is why….

It turns out, in order to make the magical explosives that can be combined to bring down an aircraft is a difficult task… in fact, you would need to bring along a chemistry set… I have a feeling this WON’T make it through security. Read more over at the The Register (yes, its reputable)

We don’t need stinkin words!

Well, nothing much to write but I’ve found more strange and humourous videos

enjoi!

First off… Terrorism

Second, Ted Turner goes nuts as Captain Planet!