America has already started detaining and arresting people for the obviously suspicious act of moving a pressure cooker from one location to another.

I feel safer already.

I suppose the real question is when will we finally come to our senses and outlaw doing science in pressure cookers?

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Illicit Transfer of Cookery

Chris suggests that these people (supposedly 29 percent of Americans) would be too busy getting ready to avoid or run from such a rebellion if they really believed it was coming soon. And I see his point. There are, after all, currently more than a million refugees fleeing Syria’s rebellion.

I’m certainly not in that 29 percent who thinks we will need (or be in) an armed rebellion any time soon (or, indeed, in my lifetime), but I would be one who would take up arms if needed rather than try to hide from the rebellion. Maybe that’s just my age talking. Rebellions tend to involve the young and the old. Those in the middle often have too much to lose.

Hmm, I guess that makes me quite selfish. I’d be pushing the rebellion along, dragging the young with me, who don’t realize the value of their own lives, while putting everyone else who doesn’t want to be involved in mortal danger. All for my high-minded ideals.

And if we win, the surviving young would build statues to assholes like me.

Yeah, that sounds nice. Just be sure to get my beard right.

Seriously, though, that’s my point. I’ve always supported the Second Amendment on the principle that, someday, citizens may need it to defend themselves from the government. I don’t own a gun, nor do I want to own a gun. In case you didn’t know, those things are dangerous!

Still, if the situation arose where I thought we needed to rebel against our government, that danger is a useful trait.

Yet in every rebellion I’ve ever studied, the vast majority of the population just wants to get away, or simply survive. It’s a small minority of the people actually fighting on either side of such a conflict. Most are just like Chris Hallquist, simply looking for a way to lay low until the conflict blows over one way or another.

Studying the American Revolution has made me realize how few people carried the population along towards war and how they used questionable morality and ethics to do so. Nelson Mandela, on the other hand, turned away from violent rebellion and successfully overthrew a well established and armed government using peaceful methods.

Is defending the Second Amendment just the selfish act of a minority of old assholes like me with grand notions of a just armed rebellion? Have I now lost so much of my libertarian ideals that I can’t even muster the strength to defend the Second Amendment anymore?

Come on. The readers on this site should be able to reason some sense back into me. Give it a shot. Or maybe I just need to dig out some of the Heinlein books I read too often as a kid. I just have to avoid picking up that copy of Forever War from the same box.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship!

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at The name’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but everybody calls me Psycho.

Most of the people discussing this issue seem to have little to no understanding of this technology, so I’m going to try to clear things up a little from the technical perspective and explain how this is a very poor tracking system at best.

The ID cards in question contain an RFID chip, which is an acronym for Radio Frequency ID. There are several different flavors of RFID, and most people have interacted with it in one of several forms for many years now. The most common use over recent decades has been for product theft detection using a simple passive one-bit RFID circuit.

OK, I’ll try to explain what a “passive one-bit RFID circuit” actually is. First let’s cover the “RFID” part.

It’s a simple (yet ingenious) electronic circuit which has a couple of capabilities. At a minimum an RFID chip must have circuitry to store some information in binary format (zeros and ones or possibly just a single “on/off” state), and contain a two-way radio of some kind, including an antenna.

There are active and passive RFID systems. An active RFID uses some sort of power source directly attached to the circuit (such as a battery) to power the circuitry. A passive RFID contains no local power source. Instead it uses the energy in the radio waves coming from the radio transceiver in the reader. That’s the ingenious part in my opinion. As you can imagine, that’s a very tiny amount of power to work with, so passive systems have extremely limited range.  The range of such passive systems can be from a few inches to several yards depending upon the size of the receiving antenna in the reader and the sensitivity of the receiving radio and its ability to discern signal from noise. But it’s mainly all about the size of the receiving antenna.

That’s why there is a large pair of antennae not too far apart near the exit doors of stores which use passive RFID systems for theft control. If the circuit is in an on state, the RFID circuit responds telling the alarm to sound. The circuit can be switched to an off state using the pad on the checkout counter.

By adding to the complexity (and cost) of the circuit, you can store and transmit more than just an on/off state. The more you store and transmit, the more complexity, so most systems just store enough binary information for a short unique ID number.

Most people use an active RFID system when traveling on tollways. The transceiver stuck to your windshield is an active RFID system. Because it uses a battery, it has a much longer range (dozens of yards when combined with large antennae around the toll plazas). That RFID contains a unique ID number which the tollway authority uses to associate with your car and payment information in a database.

Anyone who has been issued a company ID card with and RFID chip used as a key is familiar with the type of chip used in the school district. It’s a passive system (no battery in the card) and the range primarily depends upon the size of the antenna in the reader. If it’s a small antenna (like the one in the block next to the door you need to unlock), you need to get the card very close for the system to work. That’s why you need to do the Backwards Door Jump to get your card to work while it’s still in your back pocket. It stores an ID number which the database associates with your credentials (such as which doors you should be able to unlock).

If you increase the size of the antenna, you can get the system to work at longer ranges (in the several feet to several yard range before the size of the antenna becomes ridiculous).

So, what does this mean to our school children?

First of all, it’s not like a GPS tracker on your phone. The RFID chip has no clue where it is. The only way it can be used for tracking purposes is by setting up a series of readers and sorting through the data collected to find time stamps for when the chip passed near enough to a reader to communicate. In school I could see where you could place readers at every door to actually track students as they passed through them. If a student were, however, kidnapped, there would be no way to find them unless you managed to get within a few yards of them, and they still carried their ID card.

You wouldn’t even be able to ask the tollway system to look for them since they are only designed to work with the active RFID chips. You just couldn’t reasonably get a big enough antenna to be able to activate the passive chip and actually read the ID in a car passing at a high speed.

I haven’t found anywhere just how the system is being deployed at the schools in question, but I did see they implemented it so they could know when a student was in the building, but wasn’t recorded as being in attendance in a particular class for the purposes of getting federal money. (I guess they get money for the student being in the building no matter where the student is.) They don’t even need to track students within the building, so I suspect they didn’t go to the expense of setting up readers at every door to do so. Placing one at each entrance to the building would do the trick.

Secondly, the RFID chips contain no personal information themselves. If someone were to query that chip by using a portable reader, which they would need to do from a very close range (a few feet unless they carried around a huge antenna), they would simply get a number. To parlay that into a home address, for example, they would need to hack into the school database. Of course if someone did that, they would have every student’s home address and ID numbers. I’m not sure why anyone would first want to read the RFID or how that could be used by an Evil Person out to do evil to the student.

I suppose there could be some student hijinks by creating duplicate ID cards (you can order programmable RFID cards and the radios to read/program them for only a few hundred dollars), but I don’t see how a sexual predator, for example, could use RFIDs for tracking or identifying victims.

Do I like the idea of being tracked? No. I have often discussed the pros/cons of systems which can be combined to create tracking information (such as the tollway RFIDs) with my students. But that’s another topic for another time. I see no reasonable way such a system could be used to track students outside of the school.

For homework, I’d like you to think about the number of RFID chips you have. ID card from your employer? Library card? Tollway box in your car? Public transit card? Are you eager to have a Near Field Communication system in your next phone? (That’s just another RFID standard.)

Did you remember to add your car keys to that list? Most automotive keys have an RFID chip in them which your car talks to when you put it in the ignition. If you want to test that, wrap the top part of your key tightly in aluminum foil, sealing it as best you can around the base, then try to start your car.

I wonder if that student in Texas ever plans on owning a modern car…

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Hiding from Satan’s Radio

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Weyland-Yutani Startup?

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Disappointed!

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Exclusive WindySat Imagery!

The world is certainly a better place without Osama Bin Laden in it.

I would have preferred that Bin Laden had been captured and put on trial, but I suppose he had no intention of allowing that to happen. A capture and trial would have highlighted the difference between vendetta and justice. It also would have softened the inevitable images of Americans celebrating.

I feel satisfaction, not joy, at Bin Laden’s death. Crowds of Americans exalting in celebration over the death of an enemy is predictable, and even understandable, on some level. Despite this, all I can think of when seeing such displays is the footage of extremists around the world celebrating like fools the death of thousands on 9/11. I despised them for celebrating death.

It would have been nice to think that Americans were better than that, but I suppose a mob is a mob, no matter how enlightened the individuals.

Update: Damn. Now I can’t get that blasted song out of my head…

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead!

You are all sheeple because you can’t see something so obvious as this.

Now, where’s my goal-post shovel?

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at It’s a Fake!

The free market, combined with poorly written computer algorithms, means you might have to pay $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) for a book about flies at Amazon. Read all about it at Michael Eisen’s blog it is NOT junk.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Paper Books Becoming More Expensive

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

The culminating event of this weekend uprising was their leader Jesus himself rising from his grave to lead his army into the city of Jerusalem in an effort to rebuild their ancient temple which had previously been destroyed. The followers of the Great Zombie Jesus refer to him as the “Messiah” which is an ancient Hebrew word for “Great Warrior” and “King of Kings”. He was believed to be a direct descendant of a previous warrior, credited with leading great bloody battle campaigns, called David.

The army of zombies, lead by this messianic zombie warrior Jesus, was driven back by the valiant Roman soldiers protecting the good people of Jerusalem. The Zombie Temple was not restored, and no one has heard from Jesus and his zombie army since that fateful weekend in Jerusalem.

Zombie cults, however, don’t die out easily, as is evidenced by the many incarnations of Resident Evil. Despite the defeat of Zombie Jesus and his Army of Zombies, his followers kept the idea alive that someday, he would rise again, leading a new army of two hundred million to destroy not just Jerusalem, but one third of the entire human population. From the Book Revelations, chapter 9, verses 13-17:

Then the sixth angel sounded: And I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year, were released to kill a third of mankind. Now the number of the army of the horsemen was two hundred million; I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision: those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone.

The modern Zombie Worshipers of today are still hoping for this apocalypse, and pray for the day that the Great Zombie Jesus will wreak his vengeance upon the people of Earth. To this end, they practice a variety of strange rituals which are supposed to help bring this destruction about. It’s no surprise that one of these zombie rituals involves symbolic cannibalism, whereby they drink red wine and eat bread which they believe has been magically transformed into actual human blood and human flesh. If you sneak into one of their temples, you can actually see them stand in line, eager to rip into bits and pieces of what they believe to be the zombie leader Jesus.

Another disturbing ritual is the coloration of dead chicken embryos which are hidden all about by adults. Cult members think that these embryos will hatch into undead chickens, recreating the Great Jewish Zombie Uprising on a smaller scale. With chickens.

Undead chickens.

They send their children out to find and retrieve these dead embryos, counting them up. If the number of embryos retrieved is less than the number hidden, it’s proof that at least some undead chickens were hatched, and that the power of the zombie Jesus is still strong. Special clothing is often purchased just for these events.

Anthropologists believe this particular tradition was started when the zombie followers believed that rabbits were actually undead chickens. The rapid increase in the number of rabbits was credited to the hatching of the dead chicken embryos.

After the ritual of the Hidden Embryos, zombie worshipers usually hold a feast where they roast the largest short pig they can find, which is the closest they can legally get to roasting long pig and eating of their flesh. Since the quality isn’t as good, they make up for it in quantity, often roasting enough meat for several meals. Eventually, sated on short pig, they doze off dreaming of zombie uprisings.

The truly amazing thing is that, except when playing hide and seek with chicken embryos in the bushes, these cult members manage to fit in surprisingly well into modern society. Yes, it’s likely you may even know one of these cult members yourself! Perhaps you stood next to one in the grocery line. You may even work next to one without even realizing.

Just like the zombies they worship, zombie followers are harmless individually or even in small numbers. A small chainsaw, or a simple katana hiding behind a nearby drainpipe in your local shopping mall, will dispatch a few zombies, or zombie sympathizers, quickly and easily. They know this as well which is why you can safely have lunch with them in the cafeteria without being worried about their cannibalistic urges.

Zombie worshipers are only dangerous in large hordes. Once they are in large enough groups to form a voting bloc, they turn on you and try to eat the brains of your children. Fortunately for mankind, the cult, over the course of 2000 years, has split into smaller warring sects, limiting their ability to form into large hordes.

So, on this Easter Day in 2011, feel free to partake in some of these quaint customs of this unusual group. Maybe color and hide some embryos of your own, or steal some of the hidden embryos you find, throwing off the count of the zombie worshipers. Roast up a nice pig and stuff yourself to the gills (or whatever part of your throat is a remnant of when your ancestors had gills) and laze around for the afternoon.

Just make sure you keep an eye on how many zombie followers may be around you. The difference between a “group” and a “horde” is often not easy to discern. Have fun today, but remember to play it safe and always know where the nearest shopping mall is in your area.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Happy Easter!

To be blunt, people being tracked in their everyday lives is nothing particularly new. I’m happy that this has made a splash in the mass media since it’s a situation that has been increasing in prevalence without major notice until now. When I teach IT security, I always spend some time covering privacy issues as well, and have discussed tracking issues regularly for fifteen years now.

A common thought problem I would often give to my students is to plan a cross country road trip in such a way that they could not be tracked. Fifteen years ago this was an interesting problem that forced people to think about how they interacted with a variety of databases. Today, it’s a more difficult proposition to even accomplish.

Even before the advent of modern smart phones, people have been automatically tracked. When you use your debit or credit card, the bank has a primitive tracking record of your movements. The more you use it, the better the tracking. So, before leaving on a hypothetical un-tracked trip, you need to remember to leave these cards at home. You will need to work with cash. If you don’t want to tip your bank off to your trip, you need to collect the cash in advance, a little at a time. It may also be a good idea to give your cards to a trusted friend so there is local activity on them while you are away, electronically geo-tagging you to your home town.

You can’t just leave your smart phone at home; you will need to leave any cell phone behind. Cell phones have been tracked since the very first cell phone. Cell phones work by having the towers (and thus cell companies) track the phones. When you first turn on your phone, it sends a message out. Any nearby towers receive that signal, which then talk to a computer at the company. The tower with the strongest signal (as well as reasonably bandwidth, consistent signal, and other factors) will be granted sole authority over your phone. This process is periodically repeated in case you move. The cell company must always know which tower to direct a call through to get to your phone.

Ten years ago the cell companies swore to us on a stack of their own quarterly reports that this tracking data was not stored in any reasonably permanent way due to the amount of data and cost of storage. I haven’t heard much about this as the cost of storage has plummeted, but I was always leery of the argument since it was based upon no compression of data that is easily compressed anyway. After 9/11 there was a lot of discussion about phone companies not destroying data that had been previously been destroyed. The problem now, of course, is finding out what data is actually stored today since that information is considered national security.

The difference with a modern smart phone is the introduction of a GPS chip that can provide better accuracy of your location. Still, accuracy of tower-only location services has gotten so good that several years ago governments began requiring cell phone companies to upgrade all of their towers so they can triangulate your position (using signals from multiple towers) to better coordinate emergency response when you call 911. While this works great when you get into an accident and want the government to find you, but it also means you can be tracked at all times to a surprising level of accuracy.

So, you will need to stop your phone from even communicating with a cell tower even if it’s not a smart GPS-enabled phone. You can turn it off, but I never trust computers that have to monitor for a key press to be truly “off”. You can remove the battery (assuming that’s an easy thing to do). You could tightly wrap the phone in aluminum foil, then drop it in a Mylar bag. Or, I suppose, you could drop it in a river and walk away, which is probably the most satisfying way to stop a cell phone from tracking you.

Now, ready for your trip? Not quite yet.

Does your car have a tracking device and cell phone secretly stashed away behind a door panel? If it does, it may not mean you have an enemy agent in a black helicopter tracking your every move, it may just mean you have OnStar, or a similar system, installed by the auto manufacturer. That system is, basically, a tracking device attached to a cell phone integrated with your car’s computer system. You should be able to locate the fuse which powers that module and remove it, or, if you are really paranoid, dismantle the panel it’s mounted under and chuck it into the same river as your cell phone.

Now it’s time to plan your route, and this is where things get complex.

If you live in a major city, especially Chicago or London, it can be difficult to find a route out of town where your license plate will not be recorded as you pass through an intersection. Many early red-light cameras would only take pictures when triggered by sensors, yet simple observation shows that such sensors are often triggered even when no one is running a light, such as when people turn right on red, or go over a sensor when turning left. In addition to that, many intersections now have cameras that simply record all traffic flow at all times. You need to avoid all such intersections.

The camera problem is made worse by projects such as the Chicago OEMC initiative which links private cameras into the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications system for recording and monitoring. Even if you trust that your local 7-11 will destroy its security recordings, those same recordings may be saved by the government automatically.

On your trip toll roads, obviously, are a very bad idea. Even if you threw your toll authority Radio Frequency ID transceiver into the same river after your cell phone, cameras record every license plate passing through every toll plaza. By the way, if you ever want to prove your spouse was cheating on you, or they are a bad parent by working too late, you can subpoena their toll records for evidence.

Off the toll ways (and major expressways which may have traffic cameras, though the older systems don’t have the resolution for picking up license plates), you need to be careful about any city, town or county you pass through with cameras. They are now so prevalent, you most likely need to do scouting trips to find a clear route.

Once you have arrived, you may be able to walk around anonymously for now. If it’s in a big city, you can leave your car somewhere (Where? That’s another problem) and use taxis. At the moment you don’t really have to worry about automatic facial identification too much. While the technology is certainly impressive, unless someone has a good picture of your face and is specifically looking for you, such system won’t be a help. They can find matches for specific people, but, as of yet, can’t just identify all people passing in front of them.

One last piece of advice is to make sure you don’t use your supermarket loyalty card when buying an apple in your destination city. Of course loyalty cards are a whole new privacy problem in themselves.

Ready for the return trip or do you just want to follow your cell phone into the river?

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Track Me if you Can

$22 million went to Blue Origin, best known for its intricately detailed corporate logo (as well as its founder, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame) which has a creative vertical take-off and landing system which is very science-fictiony, called New Shepard, which they plan on ramping up from a sub-orbital launch vehicle into a full-scale orbital system.

$80 million goes to Sierra Nevada Corporation for their Dream Chaser vehicle, which is kind of a small space shuttle that doesn’t need a custom launch system.

$92.3 million is slated for Boeing, the company that a few short years ago was claiming that space transportation systems could never be privatized and could only work when on a cost-plus government contract. (To be fair, they blew a lot of money a decade or so ago when they did R&D on a system that never got off the ground, so management was understandable gun-shy.) They changed their mind when they found out they could get grants for developing a new system and saw that other companies were already taking the lead. They have an impressive 7-man crew capsule based on the concept of scaling up older, proven designs.

$75 million for SpaceX, which has been in the news a lot lately for their very cool and successful launches of their Falcon series of vehicles. Unlike the other firms, SpaceX is keeping their efforts very much in the public view, which is kid of gutsy. Brand new rocket systems fail on their debut launch 40% of the time, but the Falcon 9 had two successful launches in a row. That’s pretty exciting in itself. They plan on mating that to their Dragon 7-man capsule for a complete system. The other designs mentioned here will rely upon an existing launch system (such as a human-flight certified verson of the Atlas booster), but SpaceX is counting on having a totally new system which is engineered with efficiency and safety in mind from the start.

In September they plan on launching another Falcon 9 with test satellites which will approach the International Space Station, followed quickly a month later with their first actual cargo delivery to the station.

Notable in its absence is any money for the joint Liberty project from ATK (which makes the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters) and Arianespace which would have placed the European Ariane 5 booster on top of an extended Shuttle SRB. The basic idea there was to take two very proven technologies and marry them into a vehicle that could launch humans into orbit. I had been figuring them as a shoe-in for some of this second round of financing from NASA because of that. Maybe they can still get some private financing to keep this interesting project going. They plan on proceeding with development even without NASA money.

Overall I’m please that this part of the Augustine Commission’s plan is coming along. When the Shuttle Transportation System was conceived it was pitched as a “space truck” idea. The Shuttle was meant to have a fast turn-around, and be cheap to operate. In reality it was just too complex to accomplish such goals. The reason NASA had to try was that no one else in the world was capable of attempting such a system. Much has been learned operating the system, and the knowledge has been passed into the marketplace.

The comparison used to support privatization of launch-to-orbit systems is that of the early days of aviation. To help spur the commercial aircraft industry, the US government guaranteed contracts in the form of air mail so that companies knew they would have a customer. In the same way, NASA is now guaranteeing future contracts to deliver supplies and crews to low Earth orbit.

I honestly think that private companies can now take up the reigns of operating a space trucking company. NASA can get back to focusing on what it is best at, which is doing things that have never been done before, like figuring out how to make CB radios work across interplanetary distances.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at It’s a Convoy!

As a kid I had a crush on Sarah Jane. Heck, I had a crush on her as an adult when I saw her again in the new Doctor Who series just a few years back. I understand an actress is not the character she plays, yet I can’t help feeling a loss even though I know little about Elisabeth Sladen. The character she portrayed was an intelligent, energetic and outgoing woman who could hold her own with various incarnations of The Doctor. It was hard not to admire her.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at A Sad Gray Day in Geek City

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at The Museum on the Moon

Discovery will go to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, which is certainly reasonable. They already have the Enterprise (named after the Starship Enterprise after a successful campaign by fans of the Star Trek series) which never went into space, but was used in landing and flight tests. Enterprise will now go to the Intrepid Museum in New York City.

Atlantis will go to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Endeavour is headed for the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

As I say, the NASM certainly must have one, but why put three shuttles on the east coast? The retired shuttles should be somewhat geographically distributed. While the proposal by Chicago’s Adler Planetarium was weak (focusing on the architecture of the new building rather than the display of the shuttle) the New York proposal wasn’t any better. Besides, if you are in New York and want to see a shuttle, a day trip to Virginia isn’t that difficult.

As for Florida, I must say I never saw that choice coming despite many who declared it to be obvious. The KSC is where you can go to watch the actual current space systems being launched. They don’t need to display the past systems as well. Houston would have been a more logical choice if NASA wanted to keep one shuttle for display at a NASA facility.

So, if you are stuck out anywhere in the middle of the country, you have to take a few days off and travel a significant distance if you want to see a real shuttle up close and in person.

OK, enough ranting about a topic of interest only to me and six other people in the world. Sorry…

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago Doesn’t Get a Space Shuttle

An inspiring quote attributed to Gagarin is:

“I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word–joy.”

For more information about what it must be like to orbit Earth, check out Ethan Siegel’s Orbiting Earth 101: What You’d See / What You’d Do.

Given the propaganda uses of both Soviet and American astronauts, many stories about Gagarin and quotes from him are apocryphal. I’m sure many are true as well. Either way, my favorite Gagarin quote is:

“I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”

It was a message from the hero of an officially atheist nation directed towards America which, at the time, was busy differentiating itself from the USSR by promoting Christianity as part of the Cold War. America had just added the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance seven years earlier in 1954, and adopted the official motto “In God We Trust” in 1956. That motto had first been placed on some American coinage to introduce the notion that God was on our side during the Civil War. Starting in 1957 all paper money started to printed with that motto as well.

Previous to that, our money and mottos tended to be remarkably deity-free, embracing the notion of a secular state. Benjamin Franklin supposedly designed our first penny with the motto “Mind Your Business” in it which was also used as the design for the Continental Dollar. The motto “We Are One” was also incorporated into the designs of money at that time, followed by “E pluribus unum” after ratification of the Constitution.

War, though, seems to breed insecurity and fear, which apparently sends Americans running to God. Laws are adopted in these times of war which otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed. The Americans of 1865 understood the Establishment Clause, yet chose to ignore it because they were afraid and insecure while the nation was at war and in peril. The rush to God became even more extreme in the 1950’s during the Cold War. States started forcing all children to openly pray to the Christian God. The official public school prayer in New York State was

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

Following those wars, however, we never seem to fully shed the unconstitutional trappings adopted in those times of crisis. The Cold War, after all, dragged on for 40 years. Americans couldn’t let their guards down for two generations. By the third generation after the start of the war few Americans remember that America didn’t always have a Christian government, but was, in fact, founded as a secular nation and operated as a secular nation (except in times of war).

We have now reached the point where the Supreme Court has decided that the phrase “In God We Trust” is secular and not religious. If that’s the case, perhaps we should change the motto of the United States of America to “In Gods We Trust”. That is, after all, a more accurate secular phrase. Somehow I’m guessing that the most religious people in the nation would complain about such a change the most. That alone should be enough to demonstrate that the phrase is indeed religious and then, maybe, we can get rid of it.

But that won’t happen because we are at war. It’s once again time for all fearful and insecure Americans to look to God to smite our enemies. Never mind that this Forever War will last longer than the Cold War; the people are afraid and need their God running the country, not mere mortals. The problem is that not every American has the same God or, indeed, any god at all.

If only some really smart people would have thought to create a secular government and constitution that protected all citizens by preventing the government from respecting the establishment of any religion while still allowing the practice of all religions in the nation. Our founding fathers must have been idiots if they couldn’t have come up with an idea like that. Maybe we should add an amendment to the US Constitution along those lines.

Oops, I forgot about the Forever War.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Yuri Gagarin and the War on Terror

The number of people (and legislators) over-reacting to this incident, however seems to have reached an intensity I haven’t seen before. I’m hoping it will die down without any further stupid actions, but, baring another nuclear meltdown somewhere soon, I’m concerned it will not.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here about free speech, so I’ll skip the lessons about the Heckler’s Veto and importance of protecting unpopular speech beyond simply reaffirming that popular speech rarely needs protection in a democracy.

One element in this story that seems to have been neglected in the rush to ban such speech is that the original demonstrations over the Qur’an in Afghanistan were small and peaceful; similar to the kinds of protests I see in Chicago over immigration policies. The trigger that seems to have set off the violence and killings is President Hamid Karzai deciding to use the Qur’an burning in a speech of his as a political tool. It seems he wanted to show how much he cares about some of the fundamentalists in his country.

The reaction to that was, apparently, the Taliban deciding to cash in politically as well, and they joined one of the peaceful marches, broke off from the main group, and committed pre-meditated murderous acts. Their motive was, almost certainly, a political reaction to Karzai’s stumping.

The incident in Afghanistan seems to have been far more about politics than religion.

Now we cut to the reaction in America. Senator Reid would like to start Congressional hearings to look into ways he can protect people in other nations by banning speech in America. Senator Graham would like to invoke wartime powers (in our Forever War) to directly ban speech which could “inspire the enemy”. When can I expect politicians to start accusing each other of being soft on book burnings?

The reaction in America seems to be far more about politics than religion.

Let’s pretend, however, that this really is all about religion and free expression. There seem to be a few different arguments out in the community about why this type of speech should be banned. They all seem flawed. The problem is that I’m not a Constitutional scholar, and may have some very wrong ideas about free speech, so I’ll go over some of the common arguments I’ve been seeing and present my understanding of them even though I may be wrong. If anyone knows better, please enlighten me in the comments.

The most common argument I see is that America “restricts” speech anyway all the time, so we don’t really have free speech, so why are you complaining about just one more restriction in the name of saving lives? The basic problem with this argument is that there is a difference between restricting speech and banning speech. As far as I can tell (not being a Constitutional Scholar) is that America only outright bans one type of speech, regardless of time or place. You cannot directly incite violence. Period.

Some commentators have latched onto this idea and simply accuse Jones of incitement and proceed to call for banning of such speech on the same grounds. I consider this to be a most insidious and worrisome argument. If Congress were to ban speech by broadening the definition of incitement, we could run head first into the problems of the Heckler’s Veto, but I fear it would be used simply to ban speech the majority considers unpopular. I truly fear the majority in a democracy, for they can be more difficult to overthrow than a dictator.

Beyond incitement, though, I can’t think of any other speech that is outright banned in America. There is a variety of restrictions, but not a banning of speech beyond incitement. I suppose libel would be the speech with the most restrictions that is not outright banned. Even so, as I understand it, there are situations where libel is allowed, or perhaps isn’t legally called libel in America. I know it’s nearly impossible to stop someone from knowingly lying about a public figure, such as a celebrity or politician. I wonder if this blog is enough for me to be considered a “public figure”. I imagine there are legal debates going on right now about how that definition is changing in the new media.

Another form of speech that seems to be cited as heavily restricted is when conspiring to commit a crime. In this case it is not the speech that is illegal but the conspiracy. From what I have read, the speech is the evidence used to prove conspiracy. The situation and intent is all important here as Rod Blagojevich has been trying to prove. If you say the words in jest, they are not evidence of a conspiracy.

That leaves the various “time and place” restrictions. The thought experiment generally cited is the classic “yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater”. The speech “Fire!” is not banned in America. The time and place of that speech makes creating the ensuing dangerous panic illegal.*

The other time and place restrictions such as getting your bullhorn out at 3:00 am in front of a hospital are, just like the “yelling fire” example, not banning speech, but placing reasonable restrictions on speech. The same speech is allowed in most places at most times. Saying you want to restrict burning holy books just like America restricts people from yelling “fire” is not at all the same. You can yell “Fire!” outside of the theater, or even inside when the theater is not crowded. Banning book burnings is not a time and place restriction.

In conclusion, let me reiterate a point I’ve made before. It’s just a friggin’ book! It’s paper, ink and some binding material. The words and ideas within cannot be destroyed by burning a copy of a book. I once suggested the correct reaction to such situations was to burn the holy books of as many religions as possible all at once to demonstrate this fact as well as show that it’s not just about religious penis envy.

I now realize, however, that’s so 20th century. We should instead organize a mass deletion of holy e-books. I want to not just delete them, however, since I know that all of the words will still exist. We need to destroy those magnetic bits so they can’t be reconstructed. On PC’s it will be easy to download software to overwrite that Bible with random electronic signals, utterly destroying that copy forever. In other e-book devices you may need to erase that Qur’an then upload new, larger books in its place, then delete that and repeat enough times to make the original words vanish into digital oblivion.

Buddhavacana, Norse eddas, the Four Books of Confucianism, the Book of Enoch, the Tabula Cortonensis and many, many more. Let’s get digital copies and erase them en masse! Mash those Holy Ones and Zeros together with such a fury that even the NSA couldn’t put them back in any semblance of order. Grab your old book reader loaded with all these texts and turn on that giant electro magnet you built years ago but never had a use for! Listen to that glorious buzz as the memory chips are hopelessly cleansed of Bronze Age rituals and misogynistic rules!

What the world needs now is a Holy E-Book Demolition Party! Can you still book Comiskey Park?

*By the way, I think it’s time for the scholars to update that thought experiment. Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater today would, most likely, just result in a head full of popcorn and getting yelled at to sit down and shut up. The fire codes are so good (not saying they couldn’t be improved at all) that most people would no longer be panicked by such a statement barring secondary indications of a conflagration such as smoke and a fire alarm going off. Perhaps we can use “Yelling ‘Muslim!’ in a crowded Tea Party Convention”.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Burning Books is So 20th Century

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at My Civic Duty to Intervene

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Police State Security Meets Puritan Morality

The real reason for the no-knock warrant is, in the case of drug raids, that it takes the place of an investigation. The raid is the investigation and all of the evidence needed for the trial will be gathered as a result of the raid. It’s much easier and more efficient to just act on any tips you get and immediately raid the house to see if there was any truth to the tip. You can’t phone the dangerous criminals asking them to come out since that gives them time to flush the evidence down the toilet. Since there was no investigation other than the raid, you need to go in guns blazing so the suspect doesn’t have time to get rid of the only evidence the police will get. Lazy, because it replaces a complex investigation of allegations, dangerous, because the situation becomes chaotic and unpredictable, and stupid because there are better ways to deal with the situation.

What, however, is the reason for no-knock gambling warrants? Last week, in South Carolina, a raid on a two-bit poker game went bad and two people were shot. From the sound of it, this happens regularly. The reason for the warrent is obvious; the police want to sieze the money (in the case cited the police netted about $2,500! Woo Hoo!). But why the no-knock warrant? Were the suspects going to flush the poker machines and chips down the toilet?

Maybe I need to give this some more thought. Right now the only reason I can think for such an action is that the police just get a kick out of conducting no-knock raids, playing John Rambo, pretending to be a Green Beret. I’m genunily open to other suggestions here. It’s not to keep officers safe, and it’s obviously not to keep suspects safe. If anyone else has some experience here, please do enlighten me.

(Hat tip: Ed Brayton)

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at No-Knock Warrants for Gambling

“I will tell you this: using those techniques saved lives. My job was to protect America. And I did.”

We really need to make it more clear when we hire a president just what the job description is. Maybe we need to publish it in the want ads of various newspapers around the country before we accept any applications. Right at the top should be the oath they will be expected to take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I can understand when the newly hired president recites that oath that maybe they would forget the details. After all, inauguration day is a big event and they have parties to go to all afternoon and evening. You get a little drunk and wake up the next morning unable to remember everything you did or said the previous day.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Bush Was Confused About Job Description

Ballot Initiative 300 would require the city to set up an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission, stocked with Ph.D. scientists, to “ensure the health, safety and cultural awareness of Denver residents” when it comes to future contact “with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles.”

Jeff Peckman (no relation to Walter Peck, as far as I know), who is the mastermind behind the initiative considers this to be a jobs program. Once the aliens (who he is sure have been visiting Earth for some time already) know they are welcome in Denver, they will show themselves and all of the great engineers and scientists of the world will come to the city so they can start to work out how the alien technologies function. Why is Denver the best location for this ambassadorial effort? According to Mr. Peckman:

The city is perched a mile above sea level, so why wouldn’t travelers from a distant galaxy stop here first?

They face an impassioned opposition led by Bryan Bonner, who dismisses the unidentified-flying-object buffs as delusional if not outright frauds.

One thing about Mr. Bonner: He spends his spare time crawling through spooky spaces, deploying remote digital thermometers, seismographs, infrared cameras, electromagnetic field detectors and Nerf balls in pursuit of evidence of the paranormal. He is, in short, a ghost hunter.

And he has rallied his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society to fight Initiative 300 as an embarrassment to science–and to Denver.

Yes. The voice of reason and sanity is coming from ghost hunters who spend their time, when not fighting the alien hunters (the people looking for ET, not the Minuteman Project people, that is), taking pictures of EMF fields and trying to create lens distortions in their out-of-focus photos. The basic premise of their argument is that hunting for UFOs is obviously stupid while ghost hunting is obviously smart.

Mr. Bonner, the ghost hunter, is fighting back with his own website asserting that “Peckman and his ‘little green people’ are not representative of the people of Denver.”

“Little green people,” Mr. Peckman responds with outrage, is a “racial slur.”

You just can’t make up stuff like this.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Illegal Aliens to be Welcomed in Denver

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Scholarship for a Nerd

Though Weis never identified Meuris and Vanna by name to the news media, he published their names in an internal communication sent to others in the Police Department, said their attorney, Daniel Herbert.

How is an investigation of officers to take place if no one is allowed to mention their names in any internal communications? This would be a laughable, frivolous suit if it weren’t for the message being sent by the officers.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago Police Hold City Hostage

A woman in her 60s was injured this morning after she was struck by a Chicago police vehicle in the Albany Park neighborhood, officials said.

The accident happened about 6:17 a.m. at the intersection of Kedzie and Montrose Avenues, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Darryl Baety.

The police vehicle was responding to a “high priority” call involving a sexual assault in progress, Baety said. Baety did not know if the vehicle’s emergency lights were activated.

The woman sustained lacerations and bruises to her head and was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Baety said.

The woman’s condition was not available.

Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Darryl Baety’s pants are on fire.

A sex offense 4546 Kedzie. 4546 Kedzie, at the McDonalds.

Caller says the police were out earlier for a male Hispanic who was naked and, uh, exposing himself out in front of the McDonalds.

The guy is back. He’s standing near the bushes on the side of the building, keeps coming back.

The caller, [caller’s name], would like to speak with you; says she can point him out.

A minute or so later the officer involved in the accident called in to report it and request an ambulance “ASAP”.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at How to Spin a Police Involved Accident

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at That’s a Lot of Candles

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Amateur Historians

Mark’s review of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine sounds interesting. I generally find finance and economics difficult to read about, but I may give the book a go.

From the sound of it, the author and I seem to have a couple of similar arguments about what is wrong with the efficient market. One premise I like to start with is that efficient markets require free and open knowledge of the marketplace. This is the reason corporations and, pretty much anything you can invest in, have reams of information regularly produced and distributed as mandated by the SEC.

In business school, intro finance courses spend most of their time explaining how to read all of these reports. (If they went beyond that, I must have fallen asleep by that point in the lectures.) In theory, this is what keeps everyone in the marketplace aware of what is going on, and allows the efficient market to work. I believe this system has been running into trouble for a couple of reasons.

One is touched upon in your description of what Lewis calls fraud. Even when it isn’t called fraud, fudging the numbers in quarterly and annual reports seems to be standard operating procedure these days. If you can’t hide the numbers anymore, just spin off a new corporation and hide the numbers there. Much of this seems to be legal, though I would still call it fraud. The purpose is to deceive investors and cloud the reality of the marketplace. You can’t do this forever, but people can become millionaires or billionaires in a very short time, so the deception doesn’t need to hold for too long. In this respect corporations, and to some extent the markets they are traded in, become like a game of musical chairs. The last investor standing loses. The last investor is often the one who thinks their investment is long term.

“Short term thinking” goes beyond simply not seeing that your investment isn’t good in the long run. Short term thinking can be a money-making trading strategy that investors can keep using in the long run. The concept of day trading is based upon catching (very) short term trends. Buy (or short) a stock in the morning, perhaps because you anticipate a reaction from a news item, then sell in the afternoon before the long term impacts can be digested by the market. This sort of very short term view, it seems to me, is starting to become more prevalent in the markets.

I don’t mean that there are more and more day traders, but that the entire market is now looking for shorter and shorter returns on investment. When you chat with traders and ask them about their long term investments, you often hear statements like “Sure this is long term. We may even keep it more than a year!” Technology, in particular computer networking, allows for the rapid dissemination of information and traders are treating every week, or even day, as if that were the day quarterly statements for an investment came out. The actual quarterly and annual reports are increasingly becoming nothing more than when you happen to update some of the numbers in your trading model instead of being an indicator of whether you want to keep the investment or not.

As the investment horizon is shortened, this way of thinking must start to become part of the corporate culture as well. After all, ultimately the management of a corporation is working for the investors as represented by the board of directors. Since wealthy individuals need to diversify their investments (to protect against the unpredictability mentioned by Lewis) very few individuals have controlling interest in any major corporation anymore. Large investment funds have replaced the individual and now have the influence to affect corporate management.

Something else I was taught in graduate business school, way back in the ancient mists of time, was that top corporate management was mainly supposed to concern itself with the far future of the firm. They were to think 10 to 20 years into the future, or even beyond. Wealthy individual investors in the past often shared this view and often hoped to maintain their investment for decades. This culture became so ingrained that business schools taught that top managers should shun any short term projects.

Do you think that there’s an investment fund out there today that is capable of thinking of a corporate investment beyond 1 year? Beyond 5 years? Probably not, and, under the free market, they are correct to focus on the short term. Any long term investment will wax and wane over time and anyone who is interested in becoming a millionaire this year will ask why the fund failed to sell before any drop and buy before any gain. The fund will only grow if they pursue a (winning) short term strategy, and the corporations will only get investment funds if they deliver on short term promises. The large-fund controlled board will hire management that can deliver. The market works, so to speak, just not the way that is best for the future.

So yes, I see the fraud (legal and illegal) as a major impediment to the efficient market, but I also see the market working against its own future by an obsessive (valid?) focus on short term returns and trades as enabled by modern computer networks and databases and encouraged by the efficient market itself.

I think we should become fund managers who get paid for transactions. You do have the windyinvestments.com domain reserved, right? The more transactions we make the more money we earn. We need to be sure to tell our clients to never hold onto an investment for more than a week or so…

Of course we probably don’t have the seed money for this. With the kind of money we could put together we wouldn’t be called fund managers, we would be called loan sharks. Charles Ponzzi had a way around that, but it’s only legal if you are deemed to big to fail by the government.

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Windy Investments

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Tea Party Ethos Up in Smoke