(From Joe Katzman).
A Fire Captain’s Eulogy

When a friend dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love. When a brother dies we grieve for the future without him. His endless possibilities. If your brother doesn’t die of old age you might never accept the parting. When a comrade dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love, we grieve the future without them. We are also proud. Proud to have known a good man, a better man than ourselves. We respect the need for him to leave, to rest.
Some people equate camaraderie with being jovial. It is anything but. Camaraderie is sharing hardship. It is shouts and commands, bruises and cuts. It’s a sore back and lungs that burn from exertion. It’s heat on your neck and a pit in your stomach. It’s a grimy handshake and a hug on wet shoulders when we’re safe. It’s not being asleep when it’s your turn on watch. It is trust, it is respect, it is acting honorably.

Nothing I can say compares. Why aren’t you reading the original?

It’s Eric and Dawn‘s birthday. Happy returns of the day, fellas. May you share a hundred more.

National ID isn’t popular in Japan…Japan in an Uproar as ‘Big Brother’ Computer File Kicks In.

(via Andrew Edwards, with whom I need to have a chat with re guns…)
Andrea Dworkin and suicide bombing.
I don’t want to copy the whole thing, and no single quote does it justice.

Catching up on my blogging, I read Ted Barlow, who comments on and takes me back to Diane E., who comments on Mickey Kaus. The subject??
George W’s 10% partnership interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team, and Kaus’ defense of it, which is hammered on by Ted and Diane.
Sadly, this is a case of Too Little Knowledge on their part. Here’s the deal; I’ve spent the last year trying (unsuccessfully so far, but I’m not done yet) to raise a bunch of $$ to start a business. Here’s how these deals work: there is a division of ownership between capital – the folks putting up the green – and labor – me and the rest of the management team (actually, to connect to an earlier discussion with Kevin R., there is a further division with ‘intellectual property’, with the folks (me, in this case) who came up with the idea getting an additional share).
What the management team and founders get is called various things, but a ‘promoted interest’ is typical. It is a percentage of ownership in the company that we get, not in the form of options, but typically in the form of outright grants. It is very typical for the promoted interest to be subordinate to the investor’s capital and a defined return … essentially they ‘loan’ the money, secured only by the ‘value’ of the company, so they get their cash out and some interest rate. Then they share the income and value, withthe ‘labor’ side getting their for the work they did in putting the deal together and in advancing the interests of the company.
This is absolutely a generic prototype for buying a business, and anyone who is in business could tell you so. Bush wasn’t ‘gifted’ with his 10%, he earned it just like Jeff Bezos did.
Now why they chose Bush as the promoter, what other financial relationships the investors may have had with him, his dad, or his later campaigns, I can’t speak to, because I don’t know. There may be oodles of sleaze buried in there waiting to be discovered. There probably is.
But if our team attacks him on this point, we’re going to look really damn silly. Let’s avoid that, OK?

In this month’s The Atlantic (not yet online) a brilliant article about 4G security in the form of an interview with Bruce Schneier.

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

In other words, they need to be flexible, adaptive, and decentralized. Sound familiar? He then goes on to criticize the current plans as exactly the opposite.

“Okay, somebody steals your thumbprint,” Schneier says. “Because we’ve centralized all the functions, the thief can tap your credit, open your medical records, start your car, any mumber of things. Now what do you do? With a credit card, the bank can issue you a new card with a new number. But this is your thumb – you can’t get a new one.”
The consequences of identity fraud might be offset if biometric licenses and visas helped prevent terrorism. Yet smart cards would not have stopped the terrorists who attached the World Trade center and the Pentagon. According to the FBI, all the hijackers seem to have been who they said they were; their intentions, not their identities, were the issue. Each entered the country with a valid visa, and each had a photo ID in his real name (some obtained their ID’s fraudulently, but the fakes correctly identified them). “What problem is being solved here?” Schneier asks. (my emphasis)

And so do I. He goes on:

“The trick to remember is that technology can’t save you,” Schneier says. “we know this in our own lives. We realize there’s no magic anti-burglary dust that we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don’t provide much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people.”

That’s 4th Generation security. It’s built around attentive, empowered people.

One of the things I do in the Real World is try and manage “problem” projects – projects that are failing or otherwise in trouble – in technology and some other areas. (Editor’s note: I’m looking for a project in Southern California right now, and if anyone hears of one, drop me a note at armed-at-armedliberal.com) One thing I tell my team members at the beginning is this:

The only thing I want to hear when you’re messed up is this: “I messed up. Here’s what I did, here’s what happened, here’s how we need to fix it.” I don’t want to hear how the SA caused it, or you had bad docs, or anything else except in the context of how you messed up and what we need to do to a) fix it right now; and b) make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I do this, because on thing that always happens in troubled projects is blamestorming, in which everyone spends all their time figuring out how it wasn’t really their fault.
I find admitting fault a liberating experience, and when I learned to admit my own faults in projects it was a major step in my maturation professionally and personally.
That’s why the current furor over the Time Magazine article on the current and last Administration’s terrible track record on terror is making me mental.
As long as the Democratic and Republican (I’m looking for a link, will have one in a bit) operatives spend all their energy spinning this so that it looks like the other side caused it, we’ll never get out of this. As far as I’m concerned, every one of these fools ought to be flipping burgers as far away from the levers of power as possible, right now.
Let’s make it clear: The Clinton administration had a chance to do something about Al-Quieda, and failed to take the opportunity. The Bush Administration had a chance before 9/11 and failed to take the opportunity. All I want to hear from these people and their handlers is this: “I messed up. Here’s what I did, here’s what happened, here’s how we need to fix it.”
Otherwise, shut the f**k up. I’m not interested in hearing it.

It’s nice to see a clear instance where government can be so cleanly bought and sold, and where our interests as citizens can be shelved by those with the cash and clout to buy better access. Check out Last week’s L.A. Times story: Free Tax E-Filing System Defeated. See, the government can’t offer a useful service for free, because it would compete with people who make money offering that service. So instead of differentiating or improving their service, or acknowledging that certain things change (buggy whips, typewriters, travel agencies), you hire lobbyists; Joseph Schumpeter is grinning hugely.

In California, where Intuit Inc. has led the industry’s effort by hiring lobbyists and making targeted campaign contributions, the private companies have successfully scuttled the Franchise Tax Board’s plans to offer a free, state-run Web site in which a computer does a taxpayer’s arithmetic.
An industry-supported bill that would ban an interactive state-sponsored electronic tax filing system is scheduled to be heard before a Senate committee Wednesday.
At both the federal and state levels, the tax agencies say they are simply trying to give people a quicker, easier way to file with the government and eliminate long lines at the post office before midnight on April 15.
Makers of tax preparation software call the government effort unwarranted competition.

If I get time later today, I’ll look up Intuit and H & R Block’s donations to CA politicians and put them up here.

Everyone on my Blogroll seems all put out by Bill Simon’s latest bout of idiocy.
Ann Salisbury is waiting to see me and go “I told you so!”
Bob Morris is digging up jokes.
Look, it’s simple.
It’s Daddy’s Money. Why be careful with it? He never has been before.
I just have one key question. If I vote Green, do I have to buy Birkenstocks?

Dawson (why, dammit, why do I always think of ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ when I hear that name?? Actually, why do I think of ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ when I hear most things?) throws a little chin music my way over my Ann Coulter comment.
His points, as I read them early this morning:
1. She probably said what she said, and there’s nothing new here. I’m pretty new to this whole Ann Coulter thing – remember that we don’t have TV – so the comments are new to me, anyway.
2. He dings me for printing my email to her website. I intended to do two things in doing so, and I probably should have said something about them when I put them up: a) having hammered her for saying something, at least do her the courtesy of asking if she really said it in the only way I know how; and b) try in my own tiny 200-unique-visitor-a-day manner to put some pressure on someone to either have her back or repudiate the clear meaning of the quote.
3. He justifiably dings me for sending it to the webmaster, and expecting some kind of response. OK, where else should I have sent it? I mean, again, at least I’m trying to confirm it!
4. He dings me for not knowing her oevre. He’s right. At some point I’ll try and read her book…it’s just that what with moving, unpacking, looking for work, getting a kid off to college, etc. etc. time is a little thin. I promise that by the end of the year, I’ll have read the book and commented.
5. He appears to support her in what she appears to have said. Here we go pretty far off the rails, and I’ll enlarge below.
My personal position on abortion is pretty complex. Up to my late 20’s, I was firmly on the ‘women’s right to choose/get the oppressive state out of my uterus’ side of things. I’d paid for one or two abortions, and had a mild twinge about it, but it wasn’t a big deal to me. The moral stance was clear.
Then we (ex and I) decided to have a kid, and soon were pregnant. I clearly remember walking into the doctor’s office and seeing the first sonogram (we have the video somewhere) of Biggest Guy in utero. It was a transcendent moment, second only to the moment he crowned and I saw him for the first time.
As we walked out of the office, we were both contemplative. I turned to her and said, “You know, this whole abortion thing is far more complex than I ever thought.” And to this day I agree that it is.
I’m still on the side of some limited right to choose on the part of women. I agree that it should be secure, safe, and most of all, rare. I’m less dogmatic about it.
I am dogmatic, however, about threatening and shooting people.
It’s real simple: the right to personally take up arms and act violently toward another person has to be reserved for a case where you are personally under threat of harm, or when any reasonable person would agree it is appropriate.
If I were armed, and a 7-11 was being violently held up as I drove into the lot, I’d retreat to a position of safety, get on the phone, and be a good witness. If the robber(s) saw and attacked me, we’d have a different kind of discussion.
No one is personally threatening the clinic killers. There exists a spectrum of opinion on whether abortion is murder; this suggests that they need to work the process, not rifle bolts.
John Brown was a psychotic nutjob. His impact on history was questionable, regardless of his place in song. Clinic murderers are nutjobs as well, and the right-to-life movement tarnishes itself by harboring, aiding, and tolerating people like that.
Is my position on that clear?
On a more conciliatory note, I also enjoy Dawson’s site, and I’m flattered as hell that he said this about me: Armed Liberal, who I honestly enjoy reading and find to be, not only a good writer, as in a damn fine wordsmith but also a rational, articulate person….
Let’s find some stuff we can agree on and go do it. Meanwhile, let’s go eat some BBQ…