*DOING* Something. Government Need Not Apply.

In light of the most recent mass shootings in the United States (El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio) I posted on social media a lament that these shootings will pass without anyone really doing anything to prevent future incidents.

I had a good conversation with a Facebook friend about gun control, which most equate with “doing something” in these instances.

But then I got to thinking: Gun control might possibly “solve” a portion of the problem, but as people who want guns can still very likely get them illegally or legally, gun control, to me, seems like putting a concrete cap on a volcano as it’s in the act of erupting.

Let’s look at a CNN story on the Dayton, Ohio, shooting as an example.

The story says the gunman “took a deep interest in violence.”

He kept a “hit list” of people he wanted to kill or rape, including the names of “female students who . . . turned him down for dates.”

He was a member of a “pornogrind” band that sang “extremely graphic, violent lyrics.”

Authorities searching his home “found writings that expressed an interest in killing people.”

His Twitter feed was littered with “extreme left-wing and anti-police posts, as well as tweets supporting Antifa,” including one retweet that read “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die.”

The gunman “often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.”

He also enjoyed guns, shooting guns, and teaching others to shoot.

It’s important that this last statement not be taken in a vacuum.

I have family members, friends, and neighbors who enjoy guns, shooting guns, and teaching others to shoot. What they don’t have in common with this particular gunman – and with a lot of similar mass shooters – is that long list of other negative behavior, warnings, cries for help, whatever you choose to call them. I just came back from a week at Island Park Scout Camp, where Scouts can learn to shoot .22 rifles and are taught by people who enjoy guns, shooting guns, and teaching others to shoot.

Do I think that people should have access to high-caliber rifles and ammunition drums capable of letting them shoot 41 bullets in less than 30 seconds? Signs point to no, if I were to use a Magic 8 Ball. But I can’[t compute the fact that every person who enjoys guns, shooting guns, and teaching others to shoot is going to take such weaponry and turn them on family or the general populace.

The other indicators just aren’t in place.

It’s hard to pour concrete on a volcano that’s blowing up. Or does little to stop a volcano that’s about to blow.

Who saw these indicators in this poor soul’s life and did nothing, or laughed them off as harmless? O figured it wasn’t their business, or that singing pornographic and violent lyrics is just a game, just who he is, or protected speech?  Who lets a friend keep ongoing “hit lists,” when that person knows that friend also enjoyed simulated killings of others, or had harbored suicidal thoughts? Who laughed at Walmart when they said they’d take down displays promoting violent video games, but allow gun sales to continue? (No mention whether they’ll still sell the violent video games, a band-aid being a band-aid.)

Hell, I don’t like it if my kids are playing Minecraft and are killing each other in that little world. They brought something more violent into the house, I’d probably pop a blood vessel.

I don’t know if this guy was getting the mental health care he needed. Maybe he was getting it in spades. But I have to conclude, given the current evidence, that little was being done, that these thoughts and actions were a deep subset of who this young man is, and that all along the line while there may have been people caring and concerned for him, there were also many who look at what he did and did nothing.

That’s the kind of “doing something” I’d like to advocate. Help the hurting before he becomes harmful.

And maybe this is a stupid argument.

But we panic when nations suddenly reveal they are nuclear powers but do little or only lip service when those same nations are showing signs of developing nuclear weapons technology. It’s hypocritical to act surprised when they’ve suddenly got The Bomb.



I hope I’m wrong about this guy. Maybe gun control would have lessened the toll. Or maybe not. Maybe he needed a lot more love and care and attention before he decided to pick up something that far many more use as a harmless hobby and say, “Today, I use this to kill people.”

So what am I doing?

I’m watching my own sons. I’m involved in Scouting, where we work to instill values of friendship, honesty, and virtue, no matter how much the world may snigger or point out that I’m “in cahoots” with an organization that is being nearly litigated to death over allegations of sexual abuse. I’m involved in my church, in a nation where the church of which I’m a member is still regarded as a cult, or too controlling, or misogynistic, or out of touch, led by old men, teaching outdated dogma preached by a charlatan and a neat little Hebrew guy who may not even exist. I’m trying to pay attention to what my kids are doing and saying online, who their friends are, so I can be that jerk of a parent to pull the plug on behaviors or friendships that may be leading my own onto dark paths.

I’m being an asshole, matter of fact, in beating back the worldly influences that would get my kids, my neighbors’ kids, into those other habits and indicators that show up on the Dayton killer’s list. I’m the narc who watches the Scout trailers stored at the church, ready to call the cops when I see kids hanging out there, dealing in drugs.

I’m the meanie calling out my sons when they’re caught looking at naughty pictures on the Internet. The jerk reminding our daughter that boyfriends are great, but not perfect.

I hope the Dayton shooter has such influences in his life. I’m sure they’re hurting now. But all indicators are he sure could have used a hell of  lot more controlling, fusspotting assholes in his life than what he got.

Nixon [whispers] and Obama [back to loud] and Surveillance

There’s a new video out there by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others urging commoners to get very, very upset about warrantless surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency that, at first reading, left me very confused.

“We’ve seen this before,” says Daniel Ellensberg, whistleblower from the Rand Corporation who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Then, yes, we get to see Tricky Dick, in glorious black and white, cued along with sinister music.

And that’s it. More black-and-whites of the left’s favorite punching bag. But no context. Just the assumption that since the left regards Nixon as a villain, the EFF’s audience for this video – and just might who that be but perhaps the youngsters who will swallow it all without bothering to look for any historical context  – will know what connection Nixon has to warrantless surveillance. (Meanwhile, no sinister photos, black and white or otherwise, of Barack Obama, the current president currently presiding over the current surveillance dragnet we’re supposed to be upset about.)

Here’s where I say: Don’t get me wrong. Nixon was, in many ways, a villain. His administration’s prosecution of Ellensberg and its attempted prohibition on publication of the Pentagon Papers were wrong. That he was impeached and resigned over the subsequent Watergate investigation, in which paid White House spies tried to bug the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters is justified.

But making Nixon the sole identified villain in warrantless surveillance is, at the foundation of the argument, wrong. To make the accusation fair, we ought to be seeing black and white photos of Messrs. George W. Bush and Obama, along with their own creepy music, right alongside those of Tricky Dick. Leaving them out of the video effectively gives them a pass and fails to connect today’s younger audience, to whom Nixon is a historical figure they may have read about in the textbooks, with current administration abuses and rationalizations for continued abuse.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which has led to current surveillance abuses, started first during the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama administration came into being as a result of Nixon’s abuses of the Fourth Amendment as his administration pursued enemies using government entities (abuses also proved against Nixon predecessors Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy). The act was sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (featured in the EFF video) in 1977 and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the act has been amended and/or extended a few times. And abused many times, including by the White House’s Current Occupant.

But, of course, what was done by Bush and what is being done by Obama is all for our own good, you see:

Once a critic of President George W. Bush’s hawkish policies, Mr. Obama was ready with an explanation for why he has preserved and extended some of them when a reporter asked him at the health care event if he could assure Americans that the government was not building a database of their personal information. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

But he argued that “modest encroachments on privacy” were “worth us doing” to protect the country, and he said that Congress and the courts had authorized those programs.

A National Security Agency telephone surveillance program collects phone numbers and the duration of calls, not the content, he said. An Internet surveillance program targets foreigners living abroad, not Americans, he added.

“There are some trade-offs involved,” Mr. Obama said. “I came with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly.” In the end, he concluded that “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

That makes me feel all warm inside. “Nobody is listening to [our] telephone calls,” Obama says. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

My, my, my. Are we supposed to believe that? If it were Nixon saying, it, no way. But apparently, as far as the EFF and its supporters are concerned, President Obama gets a pass as long as we’ve got Dick Nixon to kick around. So, EFF, and Ellensberg, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Wil Wheaton, as you deliver proper umbrage over the surveillance state, be sure you’re not protecting anyone. Not even your bestest of best buddies.

What Nixon did was terrible. What has continued in the name of warrantless surveillance today is unpardonable (Hear that, Gerald Ford?). Leaving Bush and Obama out of the picture is like condemning the common cold without talking about the Spanish Flu.

We have this today from Georg Mascolo and Ben Scott at Slate.com:

[W]e’re left to confront was may be [Edward Snowden’s] most dismaying revelation: That basic expectation of private communications on the Internet is now commonly seen a fiction.

Also, per Mascolo and Scott, those foreign governments raising proper umbrage over US surveillance, are you prepared to come clean with the kinds of snooping y’all are doing? (Hear that, Germany and Brazil?) Glass houses, and all, folks. Glass houses.

Mascolo and Scott conclude their screed by saying this, and I echo what they say: “[J]ust as President Obama has declared his intention to end the war on terror, he should also take a strong interest in lending an effort to reset his policies on surveillance to restore the balance between security and liberty – and in so doing, restore some of the trust the Internet has lost.”

Please Release Me

I’m old school. I remember seeing my first JibJab video after waiting for nearly 30 minutes for it to download – I was on dialup at the time. So I know what waiting is for. I know why they included “web” in World Wide Web.

Heck, I remember when they called the internet the World Wide Web.Nothat we’ve got high-speed internet, I’ve got a lot more time for stuff, including adjusting the onion I have hanging on my belt – hey, that was they style at the time.

But I hate the tether.





The idea that every little app I have on my Kindle Fire has to be constantly connected to the internetty-thingy for some reason or other.

I say nay, nay.

Some things I can understand why we need the tether, Mandrake. But childrens’ games, Mandrake? Childrens’ games. Do we really need the tether for that? We don’t, of course. But of course the developers do. Just in case during these games we get so tired of the limits placed on us that we break down and buy our way through these games.

Not me, bub. Homey don’t play that. Though Homey does come up with a lot of pop culture references to explain why he does or does not do things.

I’ve got an app, for instance, put out by Audubon to help me identify birds. It thoughtfully includes videos, sound clips, photos, etc. Unless I’m, you know, actually out in the wild, far away from the dock, ahoy, without a wi-fi connection. Then those extras aren’t available to me, so I’m left dumbfounded (I’m used to that) staring up at the bird that just shat on my Kindle because the bird-identifying app is virtually useless without a wi-fi connection.

I’ve got another app on wilderness survival that – yessir – has to be tethered to the internet for full functionality. Yes, I could pay for the ten-peso version that’s untethered. But I don’t want to; it’s in the same repo room as my floor. So I’m stuck here walking around in the pipes because I don’t want to be tethered. Though it might still prove useful in a wilderness survival situation; once the app works I know it’s on wi-fi, and if I keep wandering in a direction that shows the wi-fi signal getting stronger, that’ll likely get me to civilization.

Maybe I’ll just go back to trying to get my rocker to fit on my suburban porch. That’s more my speed.



Extreme Watchfulness

As I read the concluding chapters to Richard Rhodes' "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb," the discussion of the internal and external struggles between atomic weapons researchers, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Strategic Air Command started sounding vaguely familiar. I thought for a while it was merely because I work in the nuclear industry (on the cleanup side) and have just heard this kind of discussion and language over and over again. That didn't seem quite right. Then I figured it was because of the other books I've read on the subject, and my interest in general in this time period between the end of World War II and the 1980s.

Then I realized that, too, was wrong. It all sounded familiar because of this:

Rhodes quotes Gen. Thomas Power, second head of SAC, as saying the following over open communication lines as SAC ratcheted itself up from DefCon 3 to DefCon 2 as the Cuban Missie Crisis unfolded:

This is General Power speaking. I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness for the situation the nation faces. We are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies and I feel that we are well prepared. I expect each of you to maintain strict security and use calm judgment during this tense period. Our plans are well prepared and are being executed smoothly . . .  Review your plans for further action to insure that there will be no mistakes or confusion . . .

Yeah, that's Gen. Jack D. Ripper speaking.

Reading this book -- particularly its concluding chapters -- helped me to understand better the paranoia of the 1950s and on into the 60s, as the United States and Russia faced off in the tensest period of the Cold War. Any student of Dr. Strangelove, then, would be well-served to read this book in order to gain that understanding as well. Hearing all of this firsthand, knowing it's not Hollywood embellishment or from the mind of the likes of Terry Southern or Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler help to bring the gravity of the situation home.

It amazed me to think how pell-mell humanity rushes into things as complicated as nuclear weaponry without really thinking things through. There for a whole, for example, the AEC had control of nuclear weapons and would only release them to the military when the president ordered. Military minds eventually wore down on that logic to the point the military had the weapons but could not fire them without direct order from the president or without special codes to release the weapons. Soon it evolved past that, where only the trust of the officers in charge kept missiles from being launched on accident or against orders. An instance at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana showed, as the installers worked to get the first weaponized thermonuclear bombs prepped for readiness, that corners were cut past safety systems so that anyone with just one of the four required keys could launch the missiles.

All that puts Gen. Ripper and Attack Wing Plan R in perspective, and not in a funny way that ends with a deleted pie fight, either.

Post-Partisan Energy Policy

A paper written by scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Breakthrough Institute calls out both Republicans and Democrats for uselessly stalling energy research and development in the United States and recommends shifting emphasis from subsidies that encourage deployment of additional current energy technologies from Fossil fuels to wind and solar power to research and development to help bring down costs and further encourage future innovation in energy development.

The paper is available here from the AEI, or here from the Breakthrough Institute here.

David Leonhardt, writing for the New York Times, has this to say of the study, and I certainly think it’s worth listening to:

But history shows that government-directed research can work. The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced.

“We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer. We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., which is a sponsor of the proposal with A.E.I. and Brookings. “When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere.”

One could go further to say that intense governmental interest in winning the Cold War helped spawn the planet’s space program via Apollo and research into nuclear physics through the Manhattan Project. The Marshall Plan at the end of World War II helped to reconstruct a continent.

The report begs the question: Why can’t we do the same kinds of things, on the same massive scale, with energy research and development today? Surely there is enough collective intelligence to find innovative ways to produce the energy we need, while at the same time reducing subsidies necessary to deploy that energy and the pollution some of that energy produces.

Oddly enough, Dr. Strangelove has the answer (start at about 1:50 and go to about 2:05):

To accomplish this, the paper calls for efforts:

to reduce ineffective, even wasteful energy research spending and more effectively utilize federal resources, America needs to create a national network of decentralized energy innovation institutes that can bring private sector, university, and government researchers together alongside investors (e.g., venture capitalists) and private sector customers to tackle big energy challenges, translate basic science insights into commercial innovation, and strengthen diverse regional clean tech clusters.

Such ideas aren’t farfetched. Offhand, I can think of two organizations that already fall into this category: The Energy Dynamics Laboratory, operated by Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and the Center for Advanced Energy Studies, operated by the Department of Energy at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The paper also calls for a compromise on nuclear power:

Long-time opponents of nuclear power must rethink their opposition given the potential for new nuclear plants to help solve several energy challenges – economic, environmental, health, and safety – at once. However, nuclear proponents must also recognize that America cannot bank everything on a single technology or design. A full portfolio of clean, affordable, and reliable energy technologies will be necessary to fully confront the nation’s energy challenges. The DOE and DOD should therefore have the budget to develop and procure all promising energy technologies, from advanced solar and geothermal to biofuels and batteries.

To pay for it, the paper calls for what it calls “a modest sum” of between $15 and $25 billion a year strictly for R&D – an effort tthat would pull DOE away from its current emphasis on cleaning up leftovers from the Cold War (a project I happen to work on currently) into living up to the energy part of the department’s name.

That money would come from:

• Eliminating current subsidies for wind, solar, ethanol and fossil fuel energy production
• Modestly increasing royalties charged to oil and gas companies, directing that money into new energy technology
• Fees on imported oil
• Implement an “energy modernization fee” on electricity sold in the US
• A $4 to $5 per ton charge on carbon emissions, wherever they may come from.

The paper goes on to say:

Any one of these funding sources could raise sufficient funds from within the energy sector itself without appreciably increasing energy prices or impacting American firms or consumers. Different approaches may be combined and tailored to different energy sectors, piece-by-piece, rather than seeking a one-size-fits-all approach.

This is, of course, where politics come back into the picture. Selling any kind of commodity price increase – whether through increased taxes on electricity to increased taxes on gasoline – will be a hard sell to many Americans. The oil and gas industry can be expected to lobby heavily against increasing royalties, while proponents of solar and wind power will lobby equally as hard to retain current subsidies. What’s going to have to happen, of course, is a paradigm shift in the way most Americans look at how they consume energy, whether it be in the form of gasoline for an SUV or produced by the wind. We’ll have to exchange short-term gains and pain for long-term benefits, and, increasingly, people in general – not just Americans – seem unwilling to do this. I, for one, am willing to give it a try.