If you’re using WordPress, bbPress, or BuddyPress for your bloggage, you’re going to have to change your password.

Hackers: can’t live with them, can’t string them up from a bell tower with their own entrails.

My hometown of Minot, North Dakota is about to have its worst flooding ever.  The Souris River is going to flood the city after raising several feet since Saturday.  At the moment, the city leaders are building secondary dikes to try to safeguard critical infrastructure when the main levees inevitably collapse.  Thousands are being evacuated and hundreds of homes will be destroyed.

On the other extreme, my old duty station of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, is preparing to evacuate because of the Monument fire. Several areas around the post have already been emptied, and the National Guard has been called out to provide security while a great multitude of firefighters tries to direct the fire around Sierra Vista and Fort Huachuca.  The Observer has some great pictures of the area and a good report on what’s been going on.  Lots of places I used to enjoy hiking in have been charred, and I’m pretty sure my old neighborhood south of post is gone.

One home is being washed away, and another is in danger of burning to the ground.  I’m hoping my worst fears come to nothing.  Please keep those who are being hurt by these two disasters in your thoughts.

Starting in 2012, packs of cigarettes sold in the United States will begin featuring pictures of tracheotomies, corpses, and women smoking while holding a baby.  This is done in an effort to wring a few more people into the ex-smoker bucket.

Smoking rates have dropped considerably over the past few decades, but the curve has flattened.  This is another effort by the government to try to get people to stop doing what they want with their own bodies in the name of “for your own good” public policy.

But let’s face it.  If you live in the United States and don’t know that consuming tobacco is bad for you, you’re either a deaf-mute or you’ve been ignoring print media, television, billboards, and warnings on the cigarette packs themselves for over a generation.

Graphic pictures of diseased lungs and such may drop the smoking rate a few percentage points, but it won’t be a sustained reduction, and after this it would appear that the FDA has shot its bolt.  Once you’ve raised taxes, stigmatized smoking, and put gross pictures on tobacco packaging, what more can you do?  Prohibition won’t work.  Think crack addicts are violent?  Make it nigh unto impossible for a 3 pack a day smoker to get their fix and watch our cities burn.

What I see happening is a marginal decrease in the number of new smokers for a few years, and then the curve will either re-flatten or lose ground as the shock value wears off.  And I see a lot of smokers trying to collect one of each of these graphic packs.  Pokemon meets Marlboro.

This is the FDA version of gun control. It’s what you do instead of something constructive.

The TSA actually found something!  Normally, I’d say that they couldn’t catch a cold, but they caught someone who tried to bring a derringer and bullets onto the plane.

Of course, it appears that this was found with an old fashioned baggage x-ray.  It wasn’t the porn-o-tron body scanner, enhanced patdowns/colorectal exams, or any of the other stuff that has been put into airport security over the past decade.  It was just a TSA guy, watching a monitor, looking at what was in someone’s carry-on.

So, chalk one up to 1970’s airport security technology!

OK, I’m probably way off on this, but something’s making the back of my neck tingle about three things in the news over the past few days:

• A Muslim Marine reservist was arrested in Washington DC with a fake bomb and a notebook full of things about the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
• An illegal immigrant from Guyana stole an identity and worked as a flight attendant.
• Intelligence gathered when an Al Qaeda leader in Somalia was killed indicates that an attack on London ala Mumbai is either in the planning or preparation stage.

I’m probably just seeing a pattern in chaos, but the methodology of Al Qaeda in the past has been to do a few soft probes to watch our reaction, make a plan adapted to our reaction, make dry runs to see if our preventive measures can be penetrated, and then to drop the hammer.   These things look like plans, probes, and dry runs to me.

What do you all think?  Do these and similar incidents mean the same to you guys or am I just being paranoid?

In England, a group of young men were being initiated into rugby and soccer teams, so they got drunk, dressed up like fighter pilots, got on a bus, and “performed lewd sex acts while on the vehicle”.


You know, I’ve been through some initiation rites.  I went through Scouts, which was rife with ceremony.  I have four small scars on my chest where the pins from my sergeant’s stripes were pushed through my uniform to make “blood rank”.  Heck, you could say that the entire time I spent in basic training was one long hazing session that coincidentally made some semblance of a soldier out of me.


But no-one ever asked me to dress up as Goose and scare the little old ladies on public transportation.  And to be perfectly honest, if Drill Sergeant Hill had told me to put on a flight suit and dry hump my battle buddy on a bus, I might have found a way to be sent home.  


Guys, if any group wants you to do things that you wouldn’t do in front of your grandmother in order to join said group, find another group.  No matter if it’s a sports team, military organization, religion, sewing circle, reading club, or Cub Scout den.  Your self respect is more important than having your teeth knocked out in a scrum.

Excavation of a site in Mexico has revealed a statue of an athlete that dates to over 1000 years ago.  No word yet on the subject of the statue’s NCAA status, but if he went to Ohio State, I understand they have pre-printed forms for the investigation.   If he went to Kentucky, some of the alumni might have a little something for him, as long as he’s related in some way to Richie Farmer.  If he played for Boise State, then at least we know why the statue was buried.  The NCAA can’t have that little school having something to crow about, now can they?

Well, it’s been 3 years since I started letting the voices in my head fill up these blog pages.  Almost 1350 posts, and almost 1300 comments in 3 years isn’t too shabby.  I have no idea how many people have been here since I started this in 2008, but the number of daily visits is slowly but steadily climbing, so I must be doing something right. Or you all are stopping in to see what the freak is up to. Either way, I’m having a good time.

Since I started doing this, I’ve moved one kid out of the house, continued at my day job, and somehow stayed sane.  BooBoo is now a little bruiser that is running us ragged, Girlie Bear is about to become a teenage girl, Little Bear starts high school at the end of the summer.  Irish Woman has been through 4 companies but kept the same job.

I’ve met a lot of really good people through this blog and the GBC, and I’ve even met a few in the real world.  I’ve become friends with people from the other side of the globe, and I’ve gained a lot of new perspectives from reading y’all’s work.

For all that, and for putting up with my rants, ramblings, whines, and especially my bad jokes, thank you.

That’s my formula for fixing this particular problem.

“It’s really hard to rest assured at night to not think you’ve got a snake in your bed with you or going to step on one when you get up,”

No kidding?  Excuse me while I have an all over body shiver.

Yeah, garter snakes are harmless, and I’m sure this house doesn’t have a mouse problem. 

But I wouldn’t touch this property until the house had been gassed, burned to the ground, checked for an old Indian burial ground, and rebuilt.

Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?

The Supreme Court today made a pretty interesting ruling in regards to where federal power ends and the power of the states begins.  The Justices specifically mentioned that an international treaty should not be the basis for restricting a citizen’s rights:

But the Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, said Bond “has standing to challenge the federal statute on grounds that the measure interferes with the powers reserved to states. … (A lawyer appointed to defend the law, once the administration withdrew) contends that for Bond to argue the national government has interfered with state sovereignty in violation of the 10th Amendment is to assert only a state’s legal rights and interests. But in arguing that the government has acted in excess of the authority that federalism defines, Bond seeks to vindicate her own constitutional interests.”
Kennedy said, “The statute … was enacted to comply with a treaty; but (Bond) contends that, at least in the present instance, the treaty cannot be the source of congressional power to regulate or prohibit her conduct.”

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m sure that someone with a lot more knowledge of the law and how this decision will be interpreted and applied has more insight into this.  But to me this says that the Supreme Court unanimously believes in a distinct limit on the federal government’s power under the 10th Amendment.  It also limits how a treaty can be used against us.

There’s been a lot of talk about how the 10th Amendment is dead, and for sure it’s not as robust as it could be.  But a unanimous decision, including justices appointed by the current administration, just affirmed that there is still some life in the old girl.  That could have a lot of ramifications.

Also, there’s been a lot of shouting about the U.N. treaty on small arms and how it could be used as a back door to force through gun control legislation.  The Supreme Court seems to have shot that down before it became a problem.  If a law based on an international treaty for chemical weapons can’t be used against someone who chemically burns someone, then it would seem to me that an international treaty that restricts the private ownership, shipment, and sale of firearms could not be used as the basis for gun control laws that curtail our 2nd Amendment rights.

I’m looking forward to seeing analysis from someone who knows what they’re talking about, and to see how this is applied.