Cheerful Curmudgeon

I love to start my day with an uplifting tidbit of news like this: Barack Obama is bringing all but 50,000 US troops home from Iraq at the end of this month.

US President Barack Obama has confirmed the end of all combat operations in Iraq by 31 August. Some 50,000 of 65,000 US troops currently in Iraq are set to remain until the end of 2011 to advise Iraqi forces and protect US interests.
<snip>
The remaining 50,000 troops will stay in the country in order to train Iraqi security forces, conduct counterterrorism operations and provide civilians with ongoing security, said Mr Obama.
[via BBC News - Obama confirms plan for US troop withdrawal from Iraq]

I am not naive enough to believe that none of our men and women will be injured or killed after the “end of all combat operations.” I am not concerned (for the moment) with whether or nor we “won” or “lost” this war or whether we should or should not have invaded in the first place.

As these vets come home, we should welcome them with gratitude and appreciation for doing their jobs bravely and well. Each one served our interests as expressed by our freely elected federal government.

I am optimistic enough, and I invite you to join me in this, to look forward to the end of 2011 when the last of our troops come home from Iraq. Beyond that, I look forward to the day (not too far off, I hope) when we are not involved in any wars anywhere.

St. Charles County, MO, will try to ban bicyclists from using some state highways, as reported in the Suburban Journals, Bill would ban bicycles from some highways in St. Charles County. How wrong can you get? In the year 2010, amidst all the hue and cry about poor health, obesity, and greenhouse gases from automobiles, Councilman Joe Brazil, R-District 2 is seriously  proposing that,

The bicyclists need to stay on the trails that were made for bikes and off the roads in southwest St. Charles County.

Why, Joe?

I get more complaints about this single issue than any other issue. The speed limit is 55 mph. You come around a corner and there are two bikes in your lane. You can’t pass them, and it becomes a hazard.

This sounds like an opportunity for education on sharing the road and respecting all persons’ rights to use the roads within the limits of the law. 55 mph is the speed limit; there are no minimum speeds on the proposed county roads. It is perfectly legal to drive a car or ride a motorcycle at 15-20 mph; so why ban bicycles? If you are in a car behind two bikes, or any kind of slow vehicle, I would hope that a polite toot of the horn or flash of the headlights would encourage the slower vehicle to move over and let you by.

We live in the 21st century, Joe. Segregation is “out.” Coexistence and cooperation are “in.” There is plenty of room for all of us here in St. Charles County. Won’t you join us?

If you live in St. Charles County, I encourage you to contact your council representative.

You may not be aware of some of the insanity which current copyright laws create in many countries, not just the United States. Here are two songs which you may think are free and clear but which are, in fact, copyrighted and subject to royalty payments:

Happy Birthday to You

The Chicago-based music publisher Clayton F. Summy Company, working with Jessica Hill, published and copyrighted “Happy Birthday” in 1935. Under the laws in effect at the time, the Hills’ copyright would have expired after one 28-year term and a renewal of similar length, falling into public domain by 1991. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term of copyright protection to 75 years from date of publication, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20 years, so under current law the copyright protection of “Happy Birthday” will remain intact until at least 2030. (from Snopes.com)

Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree

In February the [Australian] Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band [Men at Work] plagiarised part of [it's 1980s hit Down Under], which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later. Larrikin Music said the band stole the riff from the children’s song Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree which was written by Melbourne teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides jamboree in 1934…. Larrikin owns the rights to the song and had been seeking up to 60 per cent of Down Under’s profits as compensation. (from the Australian Broadcasting Company)

Y’all be careful out there. Just because it has been 75 years or more since that little ditty was written, doesn’t mean you can’t be ordered to pay royalties if you sing it or even just riff a few bars on your instrument.

If you are a US citizen then you are almost certainly the descendant of people to immigrated to the United States. As you consider your position on immigration reform, please look at the issue from at least two perspectives: How do immigrants affect you and your loved ones today, and, just as important, how would your ideal solution have affected your immigrant ancestors?

Immigration has always been contentious for us. My great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, came to the US from eastern Europe. I do not know their individual experiences but, as a group, eastern European immigrants were not well received in these United States. The immigrants were seen as dirty, poorly mannered, uneducated, and generally offensive to polite society. There was great debate about whether these kinds of people should be allowed to come to the US; how much it would cost the US citizens to house them, feed the, educate the, and transport them to cities away from the eastern seaboard. It does not matter what period of our history you examine; you will find that immigration was a contentious topic. Yet despite all that contention, most of us are here because of our forefathers’ compassion.

Hold that compassion dear. Use your heart and your mind to choose a “solution” to the immigration “problem” which serves you, your neighbors, your community, and future Americans.

P.S. Though you may consider me poorly mannered and generally offensive to polite society, I do bathe regularly and I am well educated. Two out of four ain’t bad.

Back in the Old Days, I had to pay for computer time on Michigan Terminal System (MTS) at the University of Michigan. It was a simple system: the more you used, the more you paid. MTS charged for CPU time, RAM used while your program was running, disk space used to store your files, I/O used to read and write your files, pages printed, cards read (yes, real punched cards!), and time logged into an interactive terminal. In one of those It-Makes-Me-Proud-To-Be-A-Taxpayer moments, the USPTO has granted a patent to Amazon for exactly the same system: USPTO Grants Bezos Patent On ’60s-Era Chargebacks.

I thought you couldn’t patent prior art? Clearly, I’m wrong.

I just read a shocking article in the paper about a newly available intoxicant. It starts on the front page and continues for almost the entirety of page A8. That’s a lot of words for our local rag. Here are a few quotes so you can understand why so many people are concerned:

The clerk at the… shop called it a “slow night” Thursday but a steady stream of customer filed in to purchase [it]…. During one hour, 16 people purchased [it].

and

One of the customers Thursday night was Jeff Jacobs, a 50-year-old former Chrysler worker from Afton.

and

[Tom Neer, St. Charles County Sheriff,] said some people report it gives them a high, while others say it makes them dizzy or gives them a headache. “I have a concern about the product if it is determined that it can alter a person’s senses,” Neer said. “You get someone using it behind the wheel and it impairs their driving. Certainly, I’m concerned about it.”

Sounds like alcohol, no?

The article continues:

State Rep. Ward Frans, R-151st District, sponsored a bill that would place [it] on the state’s list of controlled substances. Possession would become a felony, Franz said.

Well it sure can’t be alcohol if the state is about to outlaw it.

But what’s going on here? Someone comes up with a new intoxicant and our government’s response is to make it illegal. The effects sound just like alcohol, which is legal. Is our government protecting us from a dangerous drug or from the need to take personal responsibility for what we put into our bodies? Is our government shielding us from the responsibility for our actions, regardless of what we put into our bodies?

What are the criteria for deciding to create another law? When was the last time that anyone, anywhere examined those criteria and held a frank discussion on whether or not our society is well served by them?

Health care reform is about people, not money. Specifically, it is our opportunity to assure that all Americans have access to good health care, not just the lucky 4/5ths of us. If your mom came to you for help getting medical care, your first response would be, “How can we make that happen?” Your first response would not be, “Gee, all the options are too expensive so, sorry, but maybe next year.” Your mom and your neighbor and the person across town who you don’t know are all living, breathing human beings who deserve the same quality access to quality health care.

From LiveScience.com, U.S. Life Expectancy May Have Peaked:

A team led by Harvard’s Majid Ezzati published these findings today in the online medical journal PLoS Medicine. The analysis — the first to look at mortality trends county by county — is based on mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001.

…

[The team found that] life expectancy rates rose for most of Americans over the last four decades by about six years, from an average of about age 71 to age 77. Yet a sizeable portion of the population, mostly in rural regions, saw those modest gains level off and even reverse starting in the 1980s. This is in contrast to all other industrialized nations.

It is disturbing that our government has assured that all Americans have access to electricity and telephones and we are working hard on getting broadband internet access into every home but we do not assure that everybody gets good health care.

I have a proposal to reduce the cost of groceries very significantly, something which I think will be welcomed in this goofy economy. We will form grocery buying cooperatives, essentially grocery insurance programs, which will amortize the costs of groceries across all buyers, lowering the costs for all and protecting people from the “oh shit!” moments when they might need to buy extra-ordinary amounts of food, like for a wedding or bar mitzvah.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

This just in from the Alliance for Aviation Across America:

The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security recently released a report that dispels many of the myths about the security of general aviation.

In the report, DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner stated that “Although [TSA's Office of Intelligence] has identified potential threats, it has concluded that most [general aviation] aircraft are too light to inflict significant damage, and has not identified specific imminent threats from [general aviation] aircraft.”

Recognizing the great steps the aviation industry has already taken to keep our airports and airways safe, the Inspector General continued that “The current status of [general aviation] operations does not present a serious homeland security vulnerability requiring TSA to increase regulatory oversight of the industry.”

Click here to read the full story in GovExec.

Perhaps now DHS will stop treating small plane owners and pilots like we are inherently more dangerous than the people who own and drive trucks, minivans, and cars.

I am not surprised, but I am still dismayed, by the continued erosion of our personal privacy in the shadow of George W. Bush’s administration. The New York Times reports in E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress that the National Security Agency (NSA), as recently as early this year, is illegally collecting email from Americans:

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of OpenPGP-encrypted email. I gave up when I got tired of trying to push that rope uphill. Maybe it’s time to try again.

Did you know that, unless you encrypt your email, it is as easy to read as a note written on a postcard? Now before you say, “So what? I don’t care,” consider how you would feel if NSA wanted to listen to all of your phone calls or wanted to read all of your regular mail. I suspect that, even though you are a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide, you might object a tad to that invasion of your privacy.

I have published my PGP key on this web site (and it is in the popular key servers). Using this key, you can send encrypted messages to me and you can confirm that messages which I sign electronically actually were signed by me.

I sign and encrypt my email messages using EnigMail and GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) with Thunderbird, all highly reliable and free software. If you use something other than Thunderbird for your email (like Outlook or Eudora), here is a list of other mail user agent frontends. And if you use Gmail or any of the other email systems though a web browser, FireGPG is just the ticket.

Setting up the software is a little bit of work, but you will probably be done in less time than it would take you to drive to Office Depot and buy a box of envelopes. Once you have the software installed, you can encrypt an email message faster than you can lick and seal an envelope.