Global Warming

After 32 years on this planet, I am still amazed at the level of ignorance that educated adults can exhibit. There is absolutely zero uncertainty within the scientific community that the average global temperature is on the rise. The polar ice cap is absolutely melting. Seasonal arctic sea ice is disappearing earlier and earlier each year. Animal habitats, breeding, and migratory patterns have been impacted. Swamps that turned to perma-frost a million years ago are thawing out and turning back into swamps. These things are facts. Yet, still, I actually heard a friend say this week "it snowed in Houston this year, how can there be global warming?"

Good point. I'll just tell all those climate scientists to find new careers. They've been studying trends over millions of years of course, using that silly "scientific method." How can all that research any analysis possibly stack up against your brilliant observation that it snowed, in one city, on one day. Got any insights on the US economy based on your own bank account? Any thoughts on the Chinese based on the guy who delivered your sesame chicken last week?

While it is true that there is still some room for debate on the causes of global warming, it just seems intuitive to me that human activity must be a contributor. Coal fired power plants, millions of vehicles burning hydrocarbons, massive agriculture and forestry production, a "hole" in the ozone layer, smog in every major city - how can this not be impacting our environment? The idea that the Earth is doing this to itself as part of some "natural" process that just happens to coincide with the industrial revolution is ridiculous. This isn't all being caused by volcanoes or some gradual warming because we're still emerging from the last ice age. Yes, Al Gore and a few scientists have misled people. The other 95% of the scientific community has not.

Here is a graph published just last week. If you don't see a trend here, I can't help you.

It's snowing

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting my blog here. Here's a brief update on what's been happening in my life since September.

October, of course, is racing season at Keeneland. As usual, we had a steady stream of friends and family come visit to wager on the ponies. Keeneland started publishing its race meet statistics online, and I created a database to analyze them. Sounds geeky, and it is. I also won my first Superfecta with the trends I identified, so I'm geeky all the way to the teller window. The trends, by the way, were quite surprising. You want to bet on horses that have run a race within the past 4-6 weeks at a distance that is within 1 furlong of today's race. You want the last race to be on an all-weather surface or on the turf, and horses that start in the #3 starting position do well at Keeneland. Certain jockeys also do better with certain lengths of race and some are better at helping a horse transition between different surfaces.

October also marked another month of working from home for me. These past few months I've been working on a project that involves moving a client's computers into HP data centers. This client has computers currently at data centers in Dublin, Sacramento CA, Calgary, Pune India, Tuscon AZ, and a bunch of other locations I can't remember. Rather than flying around to all these places, I get to setup conference calls between the people in those places and the guys who are putting together the plan for how to orchestrate the actual "move" of computers. This task is as tedious and boring as you might imagine, with the added nuisance of dealing with people in 5 time zones ranging from 10.5 hours ahead of me to 3 hours behind me.

HP, my employer, bought 3-Com corporation in November, and closed the legal transaction of absorbing EDS Americas employees (including myself) into HP. They re-named the business unit to HP Enterprise Services (it was formerly called the Technical Solutions Group - whatever that meant). After working for HP for over a year now, I am happy to report that it is indeed a considerable improvement over the old EDS days. The culture at HP is much more performance oriented and fast paced, both of which I like. Now that they own EDS and 3-Com, they're also about the most well rounded technology firm in the world. We sell computers, printers, servers, monitors, networking equipment, tons of software, and pretty much any kind of service associated with information technology.

In other news, I studied for the GMAT, took it, did better than I had hoped, applied to Indiana University and was accepted. I start my MBA at the Kelley school of business in February, and I'm very excited. If anyone reading this has $50,000 they'd like to donate to the cause, call me.

We hosted Thanksgiving in November. This was a good time, and it's always fun when we can get both sides of the family together. We were able to do this for the Lexington Fest-of-Ales back in September as well. Over 40 breweries were represented, and the event was a huge success. I am certain they will bring it back next year. 2010 will be a big year for Kentucky, since we'll be the first place outside of Europe to hose the World Equestrian Games. I'm excited about this because it means lots of French people will come to Lexington and have no choice but to speak English. There will also be a big music festival at Churchill Downs next summer similar to the Jazz Fest they put on in New Orleans (same organizers).

More political rants coming shortly.

Change of venue

I have decided to move my political ramblings back to my blog. I think my friends are getting tired of seeing all that stuff on facebook. This disappoints me, because I like to think of my friends as more politically savvy than most, but in reality I understand that 1) not many people share the interest in politics that I do, 2) people have good reason to believe that their views on the issues are irrelevant because the morons in Washington have to please more than just the electorate these days and 3) everyone is busy these days, and following current events is just not a high priority for some people.

Today's note is quite simple. This is a great article from Evan Handler. Yes, it's on the wacky liberal Huffington post. Get over it. I found it via Google news, which means bazillions of internet users (that's a technical term) found it interesting enough that some computer program flagged it as "popular."

In it, he points out exactly why Joe Wilson is a moron. Joe's "you lie" comment was a specific response to Obama's claim that health care reform will not benefit illegal "aliens." Sure enough, as I've said all along, if you READ THE @#$% BILL, it's right there in black in white.

"H.R. 3200: Sec 246 NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States."

Sounds like a specific exclusion to me. If you're an illegal alien, you can't get federal dollars to pay for your the health insurance we're about to mandate that everyone carry. Simple enough? Specific enough? I think so.

South Carolina

I'd like to take a quick review of South Carolina politics this year.

1) Republican Governor Mark Sanford hikes the Appalachian trail to Argentina, where he happened to run into his mistress.
2) Republican Senator Jim DeMint says “If we’re able to stop Obama on this [health care] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Nice.
3) Republican Congressman Joe Wilson calls the President a liar.
4) Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pulls an [Mythbuster] Adam Savage in describing the President's speech to Congress this week, going for the "I reject your reality and substitute my own" approach. Graham hit the press with repeated claims that Obama was "combative" and showed "little sign of compromise." Really?

If anyone reading this is a resident of South Carolina, could you please see that the Palmetto state puts some brighter people in office? Otherwise, we may need to take away your electoral votes. Thanks.

Something that should concern us all

There was a news story that came out today which did not receive much press, but yet it's the kind of new story that should be front page news. This story is related to a court case brought against our government by a US citizen.

This citizen, let's call him Dave, a married man with two children,
was arrested at a Dulles International Airport ticket counter.
He was handcuffed, taken to the airport’s police substation,
and interrogated. Over the next sixteen days, he was confined
in high security cells lit twenty-four hours a day in Virginia,
Oklahoma, and then Idaho, during which he was strip
searched on multiple occasions. Each time Dave was transferred
to a different facility, he was handcuffed and shackled
about his wrists, legs, and waist. He was eventually released
from custody by court order, on the conditions that he live
with his wife and in-laws in Nevada, limit his travel to
Nevada and three other states, surrender his travel documents,
regularly report to a probation officer, and consent to home
visits throughout the period of supervision. Dave was NEVER charged with a crime.

By the time Dave's confinement and supervision ended, fifteen months
after his arrest, he had been fired from his job as an
employee of a government contractor because he was denied
a security clearance due to his arrest, and had separated from
his wife. He has been unable to obtain steady employment
since his arrest.

Dave was arrested under the Federal "material witness" statute. This law allows our government to arrest people that are important to some criminal investigation they are conducting. The Feds were investigating another guy, we'll call him Steve, for some crimes. The Feds told a judge that Dave had important information related to Steve's crimes, that Dave was a flight risk, and therefore Dave needed to be arrested. This pretense that the Feds used is only valid IF they could not get Dave to voluntarily testify against Steve. The judge signed a warrant, and the Feds nabbed Dave at the airport.

There are a lot of problems with this scenario, but the biggest one is that Dave was never called to testify against Steve. Dave was harassed, held for over 2 weeks, never charged with anything, and the Feds never "used" Dave as a material witness against Steve, which was their ENTIRE justification for arresting Dave in the first place. Arguably, Dave lost his wife and his job as a result of being harassed by our government. Dave is a bit irritated.

Dave wants to sue a bunch of people, including John Ashcroft, because Ashcroft was the Attorney General whose office was leading the investigation against Steve. Dave argues, in part, that the Feds never intended to use him as a witness against Steve, that they knew Dave was not a flight risk, and that the only reason they really arrested him was because they wanted to investigate Dave himself. John Ashcroft asked a Federal court to dismiss the charges against him specifically, claiming that because he was a federal official he is immune from any and all civil charges that Dave wishes to file.

Today, an appeals court told John Ashcroft that he is not immune from being sued by Dave. In the opinion written by the court, they characterize Ashcroft's actions as "repugnant to the Constitution." The judges who issued this decision were all appointed by Republican Presidents. You can read a good summary of the decision here. If you read the full opinion (here), you'll see exactly how far Ashcroft and the FBI "bent" the material witness statute to serve their own interests in the aftermath of September 11th.

Sure, if you're not Arab you probably don't have to worry about being falsely detained, but that's not the point. The Constitution is supposed to protect all of us, especially in times of national crisis. Dave was a US citizen, our government violated his Constitutional rights, they knew it, and they should be held accountable for their actions. That's one of the things that makes this the best country on the planet - no one is above the law.

This American Life

OK, "This American Life" is actually the title of a (great) radio show from WBEZ up in Chicago, but the topics they cover are the topics we all deal with every day - what it's like to live in America in 2009. I've been on the bench this week (in-between projects), and I've been reflecting a lot about the state of affairs in this patch of land we call the United States of America. Here's what I've noticed:

1) There are still a lot of people in this country who think that Barack Obama is crazier and more powerful than any President in American history. When I say "a lot" of people, I not just talking about your typical right wing nuts here. There are people who think that his Hawaiian birth certificate is not real so he's not a citizen. The NRA has successfully convinced its members that he's going to take their guns. He's a socialist, a Marxist, a racist and/or a communist, depending on which Fox News anchor you prefer. He's just like Hitler. Or Stalin. He wrote the current health care reform legislation himself (Congress just thinks they wrote it). He wants to kill all our grandparents, he's going to "ration" access to doctors, put all private insurance companies out of business, and put the government in charge of setting the course of treatment for anyone and everyone who ever gets sick. Apparently he's the most powerful and evil American President ever.

Seriously? This guy was democratically elected. If you didn't vote for him, you're in the minority (of the electorate, anyway). Also, he's an American President - doesn't anyone remember their US Government class? Presidents don't make laws. Well, I guess there was the Bush approach (make laws in secret and then ask your own lawyers to convince you that what you're doing is legal), but let's hope he was just an exceptional case. Get a grip people. Are these the same people who think we faked the moon landing and there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll?

Observation #2 - A job in America just ain't what it used to be.
I know a lot of people who hate their jobs. I know an equal number of people who have no sense of loyalty to their employer because they firmly believe they could be laid off any given day of the week. Our pensions are gone. We get barely any vacation, and we live in a work culture where we feel guilty using what little vacation we have. Our 401k funds, which were never designed to be our sole source of retirement money, are no longer getting matching contributions from our employers. Many baby boomers lost their butts in the stock market anyway.

Most of my friends who work for publicly traded companies are fed up with the "we're having a good year but we're issuing a mandatory furlough. We're still paying bonuses to the executives though" memos. We make fun of the Europeans for their labor unions, and for good reason, but a little job security and collective bargaining sounds pretty good these days.

Observation #3 - "Real" news is no longer important to Americans
There's not much to say about this one. Listen to 60 seconds of the BBC World Service and you'll get more news than you would get from watching 60 hours of CNN.

Back on the Bench

Here I sit in my lovely home office, killing time on a conference call. I think conference calls are almost worse than an in-person status meeting, especially in terms of the frequency with which they are abused/over-used. My own theory is that such meetings/calls are generally held for the benefit of just one person. In my own experience it's often true that the one person in question is holding the meeting or call simply because they are too lazy to do the leg work necessary to gather the information they need. Come on people! We're all busy these days. We're all working for companies that have laid off half the work force and expect the rest of us to absorb the additional work load. Don't ask me to join a call unless you need me to - how hard is that? I could be playing Mafia Wars or Rock Band or something.

Hopefully, this time on the bench will be short-lived. There has been talk of projects in New Jersey, Alaska, Montreal, and Cincinnati. Hopefully one of those will come through for us. Connecticut was nice, but I can't say I really miss the place. Frank's Navy stories and the beers at Old Heidelberg were really the highlights of that project.

Things in Lexington are actually going really well this summer. Ella is selling houses left and right. We've been going out with our friends to new restaurants as part of this "Lexington Dining Club" we started. I've finally been able to work on my golf game, which sorely needed some help. I've successfully convinced Ella that golf is a sport we can enjoy together - hopefully that proves true.