Detour
When last I wrote, I was about to head home from Georgia. My normal route from Augusta takes me up Interstate 26 from Columbia, South Carolina through Spartanburg and then to Asheville, North Carolina. At that point I take I-40 across the Smoky Mountains to Knoxville and then up I-75 to Cincinnati.
I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention to the national news and wasn’t aware that a rock slide had closed Interstate 40 between Asheville and Knoxville a few weeks ago.
As soon as I got into North Carolina I started seeing signs that said that I-40 to Knoxville was closed. I stopped at a rest area and was advised of an alternate route that took me up I-26 to Johnson City and then back down south in Knoxville.
It added an extra hour to my journey but it was such a beautiful day in the mountains that I decided to take in the view from a roadside overlook. The sign said the climb up the side of the hill was only 800 feet with a 150 foot ascent which sounded easier than it was. But once on top, I was treated to a spectacular view – take a look at a few of the pictures I snapped while up there.
I got to Cincinnati a little later than planned but everything worked out well and today I’m back home in Indiana for a few days of family fun.
Tomorrow, we’ll be smoking the turkey!
Home
I’ve been in Georgia for the last eight weeks continuously and tomorrow it will finally be time to go home for a short break. It’s always nice to go home for the holidays and given my extended travel schedule this year, I’m more than ready to spend a chunk of time at home.
I’ll drive as far as Cincinnati tomorrow where I’ll meet Brenda who will have been kicking off the annual Christmas shopping in the Queen City. We’re planning dinner at the Montgomery Inn, home of the best ribs and dining environment that money can buy.
We will complete the two-hour drive home on Sunday morning and begin preparing for the big feast as all of the kids are coming in for Thanksgiving this year.
This is also that time of the year when my Web service comes due for renewal. I’ve been leasing the server that runs this site on an annual basis since 2002 and over these last few years, it’s been my routine to agonize for a few days over whether to keep it or not.
I can’t really explain the angst as I have always ended up renewing it.
I keep thinking that perhaps it will become something useful one of these days, whenever I finally leave the road life for good. Until then, I don’t have quite the time or energy to devote to site development and I want you to know that I appreciate you sticking around with me during this long drought despite the frequent lack of interesting content. I always imagine it being so much better than it is but there never seems enough time to make good on it.
Maybe next year?
Wow
The border and the wall
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. I’ve even come up with a few of my own to toss onto the large pile of the improbable. Here is one and in case you missed it, I posted one yesterday that dovetails pretty well with this one…
There is a healthy movement of folks in the United States who want something to be done about the problem of illegal immigrants and with good reason. We have no way of even knowing how many of them are here though some estimates conclude that there could be anywhere from 8 to 20 million. As strange as it seems, all a pregnant woman has to do is dump her placenta on our soil and her baby is granted instant American citizenship with all the rights and privileges that come with it. And whenever an illegal alien shows up at the emergency room of any US hospital, they must be treated – with the bill going to the citizens of that state.
Even so, we’re somewhat conflicted on the issue.
On the one hand, if a man desires to provide food for his children and give them a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs then he must work. And who among us would deny another human the chance to work hard and make a better life for themselves, even if it requires a trip north of the Rio Grande to do it? After all, that’s what America claims it is all about.
On the other hand the cost of this benevolence is straining our budgets to the breaking point.
No one has yet proffered a viable solution to this problem though there has been a lot of clamor about a security fence being built across a wide section of the border between Mexico and the United States. But that seems a little weird considering that it was Ronald Reagan who demanded that the Russians tear down the Berlin Wall in the name of freedom, while the children of those who voted for the Gipper are now loudly crying for the US to build its own wall.
And get this, the estimated cost for this fence project three years ago was $5 billion dollars an amount that is certain to triple by the time it’s done.
Now you’re free to buy that nonsense if you like (you certainly are going to pay for it), but I’ll tell you my theory on the illegal alien conspiracy that’s playing out right here in the good old USA…
Despite what even the most conservative politician says, there is absolutely no political will to reduce the number of illegal workers in this country. That’s because big business owns the politicians and those businesses love having that huge pool of cheap labor.
Far and away the vast majority of illegal aliens are here working and if that work went away, so would they.
If the government were really intent on ending this problem, it would be as simple as passing a federal law that declared that if any business were caught using illegal workers, all of the officers of that corporation, including its entire board of directors would be sent to prison at hard labor for 50 years without the possibility of parole. Businesses couldn’t use the excuse that they didn’t know – it’s their job to know who the people are who work for them. Make it a law with deadly serious consequences for everyone at the top and enforce it and believe me, they would find a way to ferret out the illegal workers in short order.
Within 30 days of passing that law the unending stream of people walking south across the border would be visible from space.
But this isn’t going to happen because like I said, business doesn’t want it to happen.
This puts politicians in a tight spot since there’s a populist groundswell of voters who want something done about it, but the fat cats lining their pockets like the status quo.
What to do? The first rule in Washington is when in doubt, spend money.
And that’s precisely how we got a multi-billion dollar fence project.
This gives the politicians cover by being able to publically rant and rave about the illegal aliens and show voters in their district how conservative and tough they are. They’re pretending to be bad-asses who are going to stop this un-holy flow of illegal workers “stealing our jobs” by building a big fence to keep them out.
Of course it’s difficult to see how 700 miles of fence across a 2000 mile border is going to completely stop all traffic across it. It might make the border crossing a little less convenient, but it won’t stop the flow.
So while Billy Joe Jim-Bob is praising Jesus on Sunday for having a congressman with the testes to stand up to them liberals and build a fence to keep the illegal’s out, their congressman is taking a suitcase full of cash from some Texas Homebuilders Association to ensure that there will be a plentiful supply of two-dollar an hour labor to slap up the drywall and roofing tiles necessary to keep building cheap homes in the asteroid belt suburbs that surround Houston and Dallas.
And there’s more…
If the lobbyists money weren’t enough to keep that cheap labor flowing, there’s always the added benefit that while Social Security and Medicare taxes are withheld from illegal workers paychecks, they aren’t ever eligible to receive it. That has got to be why the Feds don’t bust these businesses to begin with, it’s helping to prop up social security.
I mean, wouldn’t you think it would send up some flags in Washington when FICA withholding payments are made to a fictitious social security number? Or when payment from hundreds of different workers are made to the same real number? Of course not, this is “free” money for Uncle Sam and the businesses gets away with cheap labor plus are free to violate every safe labor law that they want because if a worker gets hurt, being here illegally and not speaking English makes it practically impossible for him to sue the employer.
It’s a win-win situation for everyone … except those angry white guys who want this crap stopped.
And they’re going to be happy as clams just as soon as they get their fence finished.
Brilliant!
Another healthcare conspiracy theory
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. I’ve even come up with a few of my own to toss onto the large pile of the improbable. Here is one and tomorrow I’ll offer up another that dovetails perfectly with this one…
If you think that the death panel conspiracy is a recent invention cooked up by Sarah Palin, then you’ve lived a terribly sheltered life. Theories about the many plots and plans of government to exterminate all but the most desirable of its people is at least as old as religion and possibly older. That the nation is in the midst of a healthcare debate simply made it convenient to dust off the old theory and give it some new life and followers.
All really good conspiracy theories have just enough facts tossed into them to make it seem plausible and since humans are dot-connecting primates, we do it without even thinking about it.
If the government were to take over health care for everyone then there is no denying that it would be a budget issue. And whenever budgets are squeezed those in charge look for ways to cut the budget. If you connect those dots then it seems to make sense that a million dollar medical procedure for a 95 year-old person might not be fiscally prudent. And from there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to a panel of government officials standing like Caesar over Grandma and giving her the down-turned thumb that sends her to her grave.
In a nutshell, that is the notion of a death panel.
I have no way of knowing if such a thing is possible or would ever occur, but like everyone else I hope that we never have to find out as it seems too ghastly to imagine. But somehow lost in the discussion are a few very key points. Like the fact that if “Grandma” is older than 62 then she would be getting her health care from Medicare and possibly Medicaid. She wouldn’t be getting it from the proposed, government-run “public option”. While the folks at Fox News don’t seem to understand it, both Medicare and Medicaid are government run healthcare services and together with social security they make up the largest entitlement (by far) program in the nation. The federal and state budget for each is strained today and will very likely bust sometime in the next decade. What makes anyone think that one day these same budget problems won’t force Medicare and Medicaid to similarly set up a panel to decide whose Grandma gets the million dollar operation and who doesn’t?
It’s all government run healthcare no matter how you slice it or lie about it.
Now let me toss out what I believe is a much more likely conspiracy theory about healthcare.
Programs like Social Security and Medicare were dreamed up when this nation was much younger. Taking a few bucks from the paychecks of a large horde of workers to give to the small cloud of retirees was a pretty good scam. It made voters happy and there is no question that it improved the lives of millions. And the good news was that those benefits weren’t normally paid until the retiree reached 65 years of age, which was three years more than the typical lifespan of the American male in those days. In this government concocted scenario, the majority of people would work their entire life and pay into the system and then drop dead three years before being eligible to draw anything out.
It was a masterpiece of a revenue generating plan that allowed the government to plunder that enormous fund to pay for their little illegal wars, secret weapons programs, and who knows what all else. It would still be a great system to this very day except that now we live too long to make it work as it was conceived – we’ve become too healthy. For this giant Ponzi-scheme to continue we need a lot of people to die before they reach 65 years of age. And what better way to accomplish that than by making private health insurance the only game in town thereby making certain that millions of American’s will never be able to afford it.
And bonus – those who can’t afford healthcare are probably just non-productive eaters anyway.
The way this works is that the majority of us lead fairly healthy lives until we reach about 50 years of age when things begin to break down rather quickly. This works well for the government since it means we spend most of our lives paying into the system and then as we approach retirement age we begin to experience some physical failures that require attention. Health insurance premiums reflect this very thing. Just try and purchase your own private health insurance policy at age 55 when you have hypertension – you will have to pay thousands of dollars per month for crummy coverage and since most folks can’t afford to do that, they end up ignoring treatment and then dying long before they ever get a dime of their social security money back.
Bingo! The perfect prescription for an ailing entitlement program. The government wants a lot of us to die prematurely and the best way to accomplish that is to prevent us from getting health care by making it too expensive while at the same time allowing health insurance companies to set up their own kind of death panels to decide who gets coverage and who doesn’t.
What may be more evil than a plan to let people die by making healthcare too expensive is the way these truth-shifters have managed to wrap this steaming turd in Old Glory and call it free market capitalism. They oppose any changes in healthcare and have convinced conservatives that fixing healthcare is socialism. They’ve convinced old people to say patently absurd things like, “keep the government away from my Medicare” and they’ve convinced mindless believers that the US President is the anti-Christ.
We really must applaud the evil genius at work here. The truth-shifters have convinced a nation that any support for a change in the present healthcare system is anti-American, anti-God, and anti-Grandma. It’s another masterful government sham that, over the next 25 years, will cull about 100 million of us from receiving any old-age entitlements since we will go down to our early graves together.
The social security slush fund will be replenished by higher taxes and fewer recipients and the government can go back to regularly stealing from it to run their little wars and associated corruptive works.
Brilliant!
Light cocktail chatter
Helium, the gas found in children’s balloons and high-altitude amateur radio adventures is actually rare on Earth, but it’s the second most plentiful element in the universe after hydrogen. It’s so rare here in fact, that it was first found in the Sun, rather than the Earth.
In 1868 scientists analyzed light from the Sun through a prism. The deflected sunlight broke up into the usual rainbow of colors and spectral lines, but the scientists also detected faint spectral lines caused by a mysterious element never seen before.
They mistakenly thought it was a metal, whose names usually end in “ium”, like lithium and uranium.
They named this mystery metal after the Greek word for sun, “helios”. Finally in 1895, helium was found on Earth in uranium deposits, and scientists embarrassingly discovered that it was a gas, not a metal.
And thus, helium, first discovered in the Sun, was born as a misnomer.
Real risks from being real
I’ve always believed anonymity to be the root of all evil online. Weak and sniveling little men whose normal lot in life would be to have sand kicked in their face at the beach can become cyber-bullies in forums and mailing lists where they’re only known as “destructor259″.
But I may have been wrong…
As radio hams, many of us like to use our call sign as our online persona but let’s be honest, that’s not without some inherent risk. That FCC database where your call sign appears also includes your home address and with the help of Google mapping, anyone can come up with the necessary missile coordinates to launch an attack to within 30 meters of your home though a physical attack is probably the least of your worries.
Over the last few days there’s been another buzz swarm of Twitter account hacks. This has resulted in many users receiving direct messages from people that they think they trust, without realizing that those accounts have been compromised and turned into spam bots. Fortunately, most attacks like this are trivial and just the handiwork of some bored adolescent looking for a way to pass the day without any fresh air or exercise. This sort of thing is just a fact of life online and it will never go away because not everyone who plays online is savvy enough to protect themselves from even the simplest of attacks.
And no one is safe from the more seriously talented hacker.
The sad truth is that getting access to the Internet is easy; having even a modicum of technical aptitude to navigate safely is a little tougher which means that 95% of those online probably shouldn’t be, but that’s another matter altogether…
Now play this game with me. Let’s say that you’ve set up your shiny new Twitter account with your ham radio call sign as your user name, WXX9XXX and you begin to ‘Tweet’ and follow other users. This looks like an interesting distraction and before long you have posted hundreds of messages and over 300 people are now “following” you. A lot of those are also radio hams because, well, birds of a feather tend to stick together and sites like this one make finding other hams on Twitter easy.
And then one day your account is stolen and you’re no longer in control. Some nefarious pimple-faced kid can now send ‘Tweets’ as WXX9XXX and he wastes no time in spewing a bunch of racists comments, links to kiddie porn sites, and spam. Most of your ham radio followers are no more savvy than you and don’t realize that your account has been hacked – they just assume that you’re another pervert run amok.
Two years later and you’ve forgotten all about that bad online experience. No time for that now anyway, you’re more than a little curious why your boss has asked you to meet him at an offsite location to discuss something “important”; probably a promotion you think with a smile.
You arrive, a little nervous, and your boss breaks the ice by tossing a dossier across the table that includes Google search results from “your” Twitter postings made two years earlier. He wants to know how in the hell a pedophile and racist like you ever got a job at the Acme Fastener Company to begin with? He terminates you on the spot and as he walks out the door he takes a certain pleasure in letting you know that he has sent copies to the FBI … and your wife.
Seriously, do you really think it wise to play in these waters using an easily identifiable username like your ham radio call sign?
If you do, and you intend to use Twitter, then I’d suggest that you change your password weekly and flush your browser cache of everything, cookies too. Carefully consider if you really want to try out every single new Twitter application that comes down the pike. Twitter has no idea who these application developers are and neither do you. Only a lobotomized moron would willingly insert their username and password in a brand new Twitter application and just hope for the best. Same goes for these Web sites that want to host the photos that you ‘Tweet’ or that regurgitate your user stats in a pretty format … in exchange for your username and password.
Don’t let that be you.
Twitter will help Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher get their accounts back from a hacker ~ I have my doubts about how much they would be willing to help you…
