I'm Going Commando

On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber", attempted to bring down American Airlines Flight 63 by igniting some Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) smuggled aboard in the heel of his shoe.


Since this incident, every airline passenger boarding a flight in the U.S. has been required to take off their shoes and have them screened.

On Christmas Day, 2009, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the "Crotch Bomber", attempted to bring down Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit by igniting some Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) smuggled aboard in his nasty ass underwear.





I'm never flying again.

I don't need a TSA puke trying to divine some meaning from the pattern of the skid marks in my silk boxers!

If I'm forced fly, I'm going commando!

David Goldman Wins His 5 Year Custody Battle

Yay.

David Goldman finally won his 5 year battle to bring his son home from Brazil.

That's a good thing, right?

BACKGROUND: The following is the first paragraph from David Goldman's own website:

"I married Bruna Bianchi Carneiro Ribeiro in Eatontown, New Jersey, USA, on December 17, 1999. We had a son, Sean Goldman, born in Red Bank, NJ on May 25, 2000. On June 16, 2004, I drove Bruna, Sean and Bruna's parents to Newark Airport for a planned 2-week vacation to her parent's home in Brazil. Bruna arrived in Brazil and called me that day to tell me our marriage was over, she and Sean were not returning to the US, and if I ever wanted contact with my son again, I would have to sign custody over to her. I have never signed any papers granting Bruna custody of our son, Sean."

RED FLAG! This tells me that Sean's mother, David's wife, had a premeditated plan to take her son and run away from David. The very first thing she did when she arrived in Brazil was to call him and tell him it's over, she's keeping her son, and his only option was to sign over custody.

There is something going on here. Sometime between December, 1999 and June, 2004, his wife decided she needed to take her son and runaway.

More from his web site:

"Although Bruna and I were still legally married in the United States, Bruna obtained a divorce in the eyes of Brazil (without my presence or knowledge). It is my understanding that Bruna became pregnant and remarried in Brazil...On August 22, 2008, Bruna tragically passed away during childbirth."

Thus began an epic 5 year, intercontinental custody battle that got played out on morning TV shows with David Goldman playing the victim of a vast latin-american conspiracy to keep him away from his son.

Today, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in David Goldman's favor. He gets to bring his son home to America. It's a Hallmark card. It's an Oxygen network mini-series. A wronged but loving father fights for his son and wins.

We're all verklempt!

But let's take a step back and look at this with some objectivity. I've blogged about this before.

Bruna, David's wife and Sean's mother, apparently felt like she needed to take her son and run away to the protection of her family in Brazil.

Why? We don't know. But if you felt like you needed to take your son and run away to your home country to be surrounded by your family and separated from your ex by two continents and many countries, don't you think you would have a good reason?

When Bruna took Sean to Brazil, Sean was only 3 years old.

Question: How much of your life from birth to 3 years old do you remember?

Answer: NONE!

Sean is now 9 years old! All he remembers is growing up in Brazil.

All of the people he has formed emotional attachments to are in Brazil. The only family he knows, is in Brazil.

He has gone to Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade in Brazil. Every friendship he has ever formed is in Brazil.

If David Goldman REALLY had the best interest of his son at heart, he would have spent the past 5 years working on reaching some sort of accommodation with Sean's Brazilian family that would allow him to be a part of Sean's life.

But no. For whatever selfish reasons are motivating him, David Goldman has insisted on yanking his son Sean from the only life his son has ever known, and pulling him in to a foreign environment where he has no friends, no family and no cultural affiliation.

I'm a parent.

As a parent, it is my duty to put the welfare of my child above any desires, agendas or priorities I may have for my own life.

I don't think David Goldman is doing this.

I think that for 5 years he has been OBSESSED with getting his son back at all costs. I don't know what his motivation was. Revenge against his ex for leaving him and marrying someone else, revenge against her family for honoring her wishes, I have no idea.

But I don't think he ever gave any consideration to the idea that uprooting his son from the only life that he has ever known might be detrimental to his son.

I have never understood this sort of vindictive, territorial, possessive custody battle.

Parental needs and egos should ALWAYS fall way behind the best interests of the children.

In the Goldman case, the best interests of Sean Goldman would appear to be to leave him in the only environment he has ever known, with the only family he has ever bonded with, and the only friends he has ever made.

I think David Goldman is a selfish, vindictive douche who is using his son as an emotional weapon against he ex-wife's family.

If he truly cared about his son, he wouldn't be spending so much time and energy to fuck up his son's life.

My Unicorn is Listless and my Rainbow is Faded

OK, I'll fess up. I was an annoyingly vocal Obama supporter before the election.

But I'm disappointed.

I don't like the Obama health care reform bill.

Don't get me wrong! I still support President Obama and I think the health care bill is a step forward. It's just a very, very small step forward that is incredibly complicated and full of pork and compromises.

The best thing about it is the ultimate elimination of the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. That's huge.

But my biggest complaint is that the reform isn't big enough, isn't bold enough and doesn't go far enough.

Here is what I wanted to see.

Cherry pick the best benefits and features of the 36 health care systems in the world that are ranked above us by the World Health Organization, roll them into 1 single provider/single payer system, get the 60 votes, pass the fucking bill and be done with it.

Then they could tell the Republicans to choke on a fucking dick knowing that they had actually solved the problem once and for all instead of compromising themselves into an impotent, bureaucratic clusterfuck.

Here's the fucking deal.

People worry that a "public option" would drive private insurance companies out of business and force everyone into the government run system because premiums would be less.

GOOD! About fucking time!

They worry that the quality of care would decrease because the payments to health care providers under a public option would be less than the cost of the procedures.

There are a couple of bullshit assumptions here.

The first assumption is that the cost of health care procedures is fixed and fair. It precludes the idea that doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies charge WAY THE FUCK MORE than they should be charging for those procedures!

Doctors are rich. Pharmaceutical companies are OBSCENELY rich. How many not-for-profit, charitable hospitals exist in your community? If you have any at all, I bet you can count them on one finger.

The health care industry in this country is INSANELY profitable. Even the insurance companies who pay for the bulk of the health care are INSANELY profitable. They are all in cahoots (technical term) with each other. That's why they can afford so many lobbyists.

Let's be clear. The American model of health care is built around making doctors, surgeons, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurance companies filthy rich from the pain, suffering and terminal illnesses of you, me and your family. They make the most money when your back is against the wall of mortality and you have no choice but to find a way to pay or die.

I think a public option would force insurance companies to pay less in order to compete, which would force providers to charge less, which would reduce profits for the health care vultures.

Maybe the cost of health care would be driven back down to reality.

I should not be able to grow wealthy by driving you into bankruptcy because you got sick.

Think about the last time you were in the hospital.

Who did you see most often?

Who exhibited more concern and care for you?

Who fed you, gave you meds, brought you blankets and pillows, fed you ice chips and generally made you comfortable and cared for you?

It wasn't your primary care physician, your surgeon, your surgeon's pharmaceutical rep, your pharmaceutical company's lobbyist, or the CEO and Board of Directors of the Hospital.

It was your nurse.

Nurses bust their asses working long shifts for little pay.

Nurses have a different motivation than the rest of the industry. They know they will work long, hard hours. They know they will be inserting catheters, changing diapers, emptying bed pans, giving showers and tolerating INCREDIBLY WHINY ABUSE from pussified patients like you and me.

But they are willing to put up with all of that because they genuinely care, they have empathy and they aren't looking to get rich. They just want to do what they love and earn a decent living.

With absolutely no research to back my claim, I believe we could reduce health care costs in this country by 80% if doctors, surgeons, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies had the same work ethic and motivation as nurses.

I want my care givers compensation to be based on the quality of care they provided, not the amount of revenue they generated.

Fix it.

The Sad, Luddite Provenance and Ultimate Redemption and Liberation of a Proud GPS Unit

My dad and step-mom are in their 80's. The last car they bought came with a free On-Star subscription as standard equipment for 1 year.


They loved it and I felt good knowing they had it.

But after that first year, they had to pay to keep it and looked around for a cheaper alternative.

They wound up dropping about $100.00 for a Garmin Quest.


But they couldn't figure out how to operate it, became frustrated, and decided to just pony up the On-Star subscription fees. They don't have to read a manual and operate a device. They just push a button in their car and tell the robot what they want. It works better for them.

Consequently, they viewed the Garmin unit as functionally defective and offered it free to any family member who wanted it.

My little brother beat me to the punch. Fucker.

Today, we had our family Christmas function at my brother's house in North Kansas City. The subject of the GPS unit came up and my brother confessed that he, too, had become frustrated trying to make it work and had given up. Not only was he not using it, he couldn't even find it. He had to enlist the help of his live-in girlfriend who, like all women everywhere, know exactly where everything is. She fetched it up from the basement, still in it's sad little box.

After a cursory examination of the unit and the documentation, I decide it is my technological duty to rescue this unit from my Luddite sibling.

Within an hour of having it home, I have purged it of failed routing attempt baggage, established a new HOME, and reprogrammed the Welcome Screen to read "Welcome Aboard, Commander."

Oh yeah!

In fact just to start this human/AI relationship off on the right foot, I'm doing a little conditioning.

I'm letting the unit program my way to work tomorrow. But guess what? I ain't taking that fucking way to work tomorrow! OH SNAP! Can you say "Recalculating?" Learn to think on the fly, my little GPS bitch! 'Cause that's just how I roll!

Why Go To Space?

I got into a bit of a pissing contest last night with one of my twitter buddies over the old, old, subject of "Why spend all of that money sending stuff into space when we have big problems to solve right here on Earth?"

I'll try to keep this as short as I can, so will skip over exploration, discovery, expansion and practical everyday benefits we all reap from the existing space infrastructure such as GPS devices, weather monitoring, communications, etc. Your daily life is greatly impacted by "stuff in space".

But I want to concentrate on how we can solve some of these "big problems" by putting even more stuff into space.

LIMITLESS GREEN ENERGY

There is limitless free energy all around you. The sun supplies more energy than we could ever consume. The problem with harnessing solar energy on Earth is our atmosphere. But in space, the sunlight is unrelentingly constant and powerful. Satellites can collect the solar energy and convert it to electricity using huge photovoltaic arrays. The electricity can be beamed back to earth as microwaves. Receiving antennas on Earth would convert the microwaves into electricity and feed it directly into the grid.


This doesn't require any new technology. We can do this today. In fact, Pacific Gas & Electric has teamed with start up Solaren to do just exactly that. This is real. This is now.

LIMITLESS MINERAL RESOURCES

Humans have an insatiable need for stuff in the ground. We do an incredible amount of harm to the environment by mining and processing raw materials into buildings and cars and soda pop cans and labia piercings.

From HowStuffWorks.com:

"John S. Lewis, author of the space mining book Mining the Sky, has said that an asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would have a mass of about two billion tons. There are perhaps one million asteroids of this size in the solar system. One of these asteroids, according to Lewis, would contain 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of metal cobalt and 7,500 tons of platinum. The platinum alone would have a value of more than $150 billion!"

A robotic space tug could coral one of these asteroids and nudge it into Earth orbit at a safe distance. The ore could be mined and processed in situ using solar power. Any waste products stay in space. The refined minerals could simply be dropped into the atmosphere on trajectories that would land them in unpopulated ares to be retrieved.

We can't quite do this today, but we could do it pretty fucking soon. It's just a matter of engineering and fabrication.

I'll save the lunar Helium-3 discussion for another time. I'll just say this. It's why everyone is rushing to get back to the moon.

From Wired:

"At the Fusion Technology Institute, Kulcinski's team has produced small-scale helium-3 fusion reactions in the basketball-sized fusion device. The reactor produced one milliwatt of power on a continuous basis.

While still theoretical, nuclear fusion is touted as a safer, more sustainable way to generate nuclear energy: Fusion plants produce much less radioactive waste, especially if powered by helium-3. But experts say commercial-sized fusion reactors are at least 50 years away.

The isotope is extremely rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. Some experts estimate there a millions of tons in lunar soil -- and that a single Space-Shuttle load would power the entire United States for a year.

NASA plans to have a permanent moon base by 2024, but America is not the only nation with plans for a moon base. China, India, the European Space Agency, and at least one Russian corporation, Energia, have visions of building manned lunar bases post-2020."

I had to chuckle at the "50 years" projection. The standard response when asked when we will achieve sustainable fusion reaction is "It's about 50 years out. Always has been, always will be."

But there are a whole lot of people spending a whole lot of money to get to the moon and stake a claim. This is serious Gold Rush stuff.

Lawyer Up, Bitches!

Let's take a trip in Mister Peabody's Wayback Machine. Set the dial all the way back to April of 2007, the ass-covering death throes of the Bush Administration.

Story Highlights
• NEW: White House spokeswoman says 5 million official e-mails may be missing
• White House admits it should have kept e-mails on private GOP system
• Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee doubts e-mails are deleted
• Committee investigating whether U.S. attorneys' firings were politically motivated

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Millions of White House e-mails may be missing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.

"I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost," Perino told reporters.

The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top presidential advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National Committee e-mail that the White House said later disappeared.

The latest comments were a response to a new report from a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleging that over a two-year period official White House e-mail traffic for hundreds of days has vanished -- in possible violation of the federal Presidential Records Act. (Watch CREW's comments on the missing messages )

"This story is really now a two-part issue," CREW's Melanie Sloan told CNN. "First there's the use of the RNC e-mail server that's inappropriate by White House officials and secondly we've also learned that there were between March of 2003 and October of 2005 apparently over 5 million e-mail that were not preserved and these are e-mail on the regular White House server."

E-mails sought by special prosecutor also missing

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, disclosed last year that some White House e-mails in 2003 were not saved as standard procedure dictated.

In a January 23, 2006, letter to the defense team of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald wrote: "We advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

Democrats charge this raises questions about whether the public has gotten the full story on everything from the CIA leak case to the fired U.S. attorneys controversy.

"The biggest problem here is really that here is a White House that is deliberately violating an existing statute that requires them to preserve all records," said Sloan. "And we have significant evidence now both from the RNC e-mail and the White House e-mail that are missing that the White House was using every means possible to avoid complying with the law."

Well guess what motherfuckers? Floor the flux capacitor and Return to the Future!

Millions of Bush administration e-mails recovered

Washington (CNN) -- Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.

The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been "mislabeled and effectively lost," according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public

The e-mail controversy dates back to the Bush administration's 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive sued over the issue in 2007, arguing the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved.

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

"They never made an effort to restore them," she said."

The Bushies must have been using a Faith Based File Deletion system. They probably had a bunch of hand-holding Fundies in the server farm praying "please, Dear Baby Jeebus, make this shit go away".

Fucking idiots.

I can't wait to see what presidential historians and ambitious prosecutors can mine from this data.

There WILL be some fuckers going to prison.



Lawyer up, bitches!

Amazing Artist

I don't know anything about art. Other than my own photography, I only own one piece of original art.

I certainly don't have the artistic skills or knowledge to be able to critique works of art and tell what's good and what's bad about them.

But like most people, I know what I like. To be honest, I'm unimpressed by most of the stuff that passes for art.

"Hmmm. So this side of the canvas is all black, the other side is all white, and there is a red, squiggly thing in the middle. Interesting. And you went to art school for how many years?"

I hardly ever see a work of art that gets a "Wow!" out of me.

The work of Pamela Sue Doty really blew me away.

I just spent a couple of hours exploring her web site. I was amazed. I can honestly say I liked everything I saw, and that never happens.

There were a couple of pieces that really hit me hard.

One is called "Death by Pressing" which she describes as "A vanita describing the unseen emotional weight that can slowly bring about the death of imagination". It's a very haunting work that touched me deeply.

[NOTE: Out of respect for the artist, I decided not to copy some of the images from her site to display in this post. You should visit her site to see what I'm talking about.]

But the one that took my breath away is called "Light Weave". It's difficult to describe. As I said before, I don't have the training or vocabulary to critique art. But I can tell you what I like about this piece. It's almost as if "Light Weave" isn't the work of art. Rather, it's an object through which art occurs. It's very dynamic and what you see depends on the angle of the light and the texture of the surface. I can imagine being mesmerized by it under different lighting conditions. How would it look at sunrise, or sunset, or during a lightning filled thunderstorm?

It's very, very cool.

One of the things that really hit me was her versatility. Most artists seem to do one thing really well. They paint, or they sculpt, or whatever.

But there doesn't seem to be anything that this artist doesn't excel at. If you appreciate art, I encourage you to visit her website and have a look around.

The Importance of Lunar Water

Last month I tried to post about how the recent discovery of water on the moon is "kind of a big deal". But I got distracted by the shiny object of sloppy reporting. I promised to come back to the subject later. So here we go.

The first thing to understand about water is that it's very fucking heavy. If you have ever been stuck changing the bottle on the water cooler at work you know what I'm talking about.

A permanent Lunar Base will need a water supply. Shipping large supplies of fresh water to the lunar surface aboard rockets would be ridiculously expensive. True, NASA has some pretty sophisticated urine recycling technology, but that is just a conservation issue. You can't piss what you don't drink. A Lunar Base needs fresh water.

But the significance of finding water on the moon goes way beyond thirsty astronauts not having to drink their own pee.


Turns out, there is a lot you can do with water.

Of course, one of those things is the irrigation of plants. Studies were done using simulated lunar regolith and it was determined that all you needed to do was add a bit of carbon and nitrogen and you could grow plants in it. You also need water. Now we've found water. So it will be possible for astronauts to take seeds, carbon and nitrogen with them and they can plant lunar gardens to grow their own food.

Speaking of plants, they remove carbon dioxide (what we exhale) from the air and they produce oxygen (what we inhale). So having water on the moon and being able to grow plants is a natural, non-mechanical way of scrubbing the breathing air of carbon dioxide.

Speaking of oxygen, you may remember from high school chemistry class that water is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. You may also remember that by passing an electric current through water, you can separate it into its constituent components. Hydrogen. Oxygen. The process is called electrolysis.


That's all well and good, but where are you going to get electricity on the moon? Same place they get it on the International Space Station. From solar power.


Let me back step a moment.

The crater in which the frozen water was found is at the moon's south pole. It was chosen because a deep crater at either pole never sees sunlight. It is permanently dark and cold. However, the peaks around the edges of some of those craters never see any shade. They are permanently bathed in sunshine. A perfect location for a photovoltaic array to convert that sunlight into electricity and transport it to the bottom of the crater.



So Step 1 would be to land an unmanned, autonomous photovoltaic power generator and get it going.

Step 2 is to land an unmanned, autonomous lunar soil processor to use the power from the photovoltaic array to extract the water and separate it into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and put them into cryogenic storage tanks.

Liquid hydrogen needs to be pressurized and chilled to −423.17 °F. Liquid oxygen requires pressurization and a temperature of −321 °F. That's pretty fucking cold! On earth, it takes a lot of sophisticated equipment to generate temperatures that cold and maintain them.

Guess what the ambient temperature is at the bottom of those polar lunar craters? Right around −400 °F.

So let's recap.

An automated power generation station and an automated lunar soil processing plant have harvested water from the lunar regolith and separated it into cryogenic storage tanks of hydrogen and oxygen.

So what?

I'll tell you so what. Before you even send astronauts to the moon, you know that there is already a supply of hydrogen and oxygen waiting for them that they don't have to take with them.

Not only does the oxygen give them air to breathe, but there are a couple of different ways you can recombine the hydrogen and oxygen which can be pretty useful for a lunar base.

You can recombine the hydrogen and oxygen explosively in the form of rocket fuel for the return trip home. This is fuel that doesn't have to be launched from earth and carried with you. It's already there waiting for you at the lunar gas station. This is huge!


You can also recombine the hydrogen and oxygen peacefully through a polymer electrolyte membrane and generate electricity in a fuel cell.


Guess what the byproduct is from generating electricity by recombining hydrogen and oxygen? That's right. Water. Which can again be used for drinking and irrigation.

Water is one of two valuable resources to be found on the moon.

The other even more valuable resource is Helium-3.

More on that another time.