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October 27, 2003:
Get the Goat:
The feds have bravely captured the college student who put the
boxes of material on the Southwest airplanes. Actually, he sent
them an e-mail telling them he had done it. He got what I often
get from government bureaucrats when I try to communicate with
them. He got a response from an automatic program called an auto-responder.
These programs always promise follow up, but it never happens.
The auto-response is all we ever get. It's like an answering
machine that no one ever bothers to check.
Are we surprised that it took them five weeks to find just
part of the stuff after he told them it was there. To hear the
prosecutor talk, we would think they had captured the most evil
man in the universe. What this brave American patriot did is
perform a service. He brought to the attention of the whole world
the huge holes in what the feds call airport security. As a reward
for that, they intend to make him the goat. He brought their
attention to the fact that they are incompetent, so they will
do their best to destroy him.
It is still to be determine whether they will do anything
to fix what this kid exposed. I seriously doubt if they will.
This will be the classic bureaucrat's response to being caught.
First, redirect attention by smearing the whistle blower, then
cover it up and forget it. They charged the kid with a felony.
If they make that stick, we should charge Ridge with fraud for
taking money under false pretenses.
Counterfeit Beans:
This could be called the bean caper. The Michigan growers are
up in arms. It seems some unscrupulous person has substituted
foreign grown beans for Michigan grow navy beans and sold them
as authentic Michigan beans. This is serious stuff. In Michigan,
it ranks up there with major securities fraud. After all, everyone
knows Michigan is full of beans. Beans you see, are a major cash
crop and a source of great state pride. How dare people pretend
that beans grown elsewhere could be anywhere near as good.
Iraq:
Two or three of our kids get killed every day. They are sitting
ducks. No one seems to have a way out. We are now suffering the
consequences of a shoot from the hip, might makes right foreign
policy. We are reaping the harvest of stubborn stupidity.
Florida:
The Florida legislature has given Jeb Bush permission to emotionally
torture a man by force feeding his dead wife and keeping her
body alive, probably forever. Jeb is as insensitive and stupid
as his brother. The Florida legislature is a gang of primitive
religious fundamentalist savages, no different than any Muslim
fundamentalist.
I Despise Rumsfeld:
I really do, however, I am suddenly called upon to defend him
and condemn his adversary. It seems he wrote and distributed
a memo which discussed our foreign policy situation. It was a
memo directed to high level staff members intended to serve as
a focus of discussion for that group. Someone leaked that internal
memo. The media, of course, made much more of it than was really
there.
In my opinion, that deliberate leak of discussion material
constitutes treason. Whoever did that acted against the security
interests of the United States. They should be brought to justice,
even Ashcroft style justice would serve in this case. If our
cabinet members cannot fearlessly communicate their thoughts
and concerns within a closed forum how can they discuss and solve
problems in their activities? Of course, they cannot. They will
be afraid to say anything negative. They will be afraid to ask
questions.
A Similar Incident:
I have a real sense of the outrage Rumsfeld must feel. I recall
a similar personal incident from my days at FOMOCO. I was part
of a Friday lunch group. Believe it or not we often discussed
work related problems in that informal forum. Some of that discussion
involved opinions on what management should and should not do.
It turned out that one of the participants in that group was
a rat. One day he reported back to management, everything that
was said within that group. Of course, our manager could not
sit on that. He let me know that he knew what I had said. With
some prompting, he even told me who the rat was. Only a person
who has been betrayed like that can understand my sense of outrage.
I never forgot that, and I never forgave that person, nor did
anyone else. He became, for all of us, a pariah. Rats are rats
and they should be exterminated wherever we find them.
Spam:
I have written about this several times. Now the fools in our
Senate are talking about an anti-spam bill. They have laid out
a completely unworkable solution. It is unworkable because it
is unenforceable. I still offer the same plan. It's simple. Make
it profitable for Internet Service Providers (ISP)s to stop spam.
Then we will quickly find out how easy it is for the ISPs to
do it. Make a law that requires them to tax any outgoing e-mail
that exceeds 50 messages per week. 50 messages is plenty for
normal people. Of the tax, the ISP keeps half and half goes to
the government to support education. It really is simple, which
means the government will never do it.
Now We Know:
Walmart has been underpricing all of their competitors. They
came close to putting K-mart out of business. Now we know how
they did it. They got caught employing illegal aliens at slave
labor wages. Are we surprised?
Halliburton:
Some of Shenee's old friends got a no bid contract to supply
gasoline to Iraq at about 50% over competitive market prices.
Are we surprised? It does not matter who is in and who is out,
things don't change much in government from decade to decade.
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