Somalia

The previous post, Tripoli, has generated some questions, both via email and via comment. Additionally I’ve gotten a number of questions in a private military forum, where Tripoli was reposted (without permission initially, but I believe we now have that squared away. Folks, please, if you’re going to repost my work, either give me credit and a link, or ask me via email first, otherwise I have to get all soggy and hard to light. Thanks).

Anyway, it seems I should have been more clear.

A number of folks asked if I was advocating opening a third war in Somalia, and a) if so, are you fucking nuts? Or b) if not, what exactly are you proposing with your wild talk of military action, pirates, and dead men?

Fair enough.

Allow me to expand:

Short answer: No, I am not proposing that the US declare war on or in Somalia – though I do think that something needs to be done there, sooner rather than later. But, I am strongly in favor of doing something forceful about the pirates now, up to and including blowing them the hell out of the water as a first option. Thank you and good night.

Longer answer:

First: a question, do you, Jim, approve of how Obama handled this situation?

Answer: Huh?

Folks, the President didn’t handle this situation. He did what any good CINC does, he deferred to his advisors, i.e. the people who are experts and professionals in this area – the Joint Chiefs including the Chief of Naval Operations, the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, and so on – then he issued the proper orders and delegated all decisions to the on-scene commander by saying publically, “I have authorized the use of deadly force.” This is a code, sort of. As an order it is completely unnecessary, the use of deadly force was already authorized, as it always is when American lives are in danger. This is what we in the military do. This is our job. This is why we exist, of course deadly force is authorized, it is always authorized. It was authorized the minute Captain Castellano of USS Bainbridge received orders sending his ship into harm’s way. We operate under standing rules of engagement and a concept called command by negation. If the president had said, Whoa! Slow down, Rambo. I hereby order you to unload your weapons and under no circumstance are you to use harsh language - well that would be an actual order and command by negation (it would also mean that you’re under United Nations control and you’re about to get slaughtered, but I digress). By saying, “I authorize the use of deadly force,” what the president was actually saying to the on-scene commander was this, “I’ve got your back, do what you need to do, everybody else shut the fuck up.” You may not understand this, but the military certainly does. And this is precisely what the President should have done. It’s not strictly necessary, but it is a whole lot easier to do your job when the Chain of Command backs you all the way to the top. Cuts down on mid level flunkies getting involved.

So, yeah, I do approve of President Obama’s “handling” of the situation – he did precisely what he should have. He turned it over to the experts and got on about his business. This wasn’t the only crisis last week, other Americans were in danger too.

Second: Somalia.

It’s not our problem.

It’s not. Somalia is one of many, many trouble spots around the world. We can’t fix them. No, really, we can’t.

Folks, it never works.

OK, it usually never works – Military intervention in Panama and Grenada and maybe one or two two other piddly places excepted. But then there’s Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, The Congo, Liberia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, El Salvador and right down to Iraq and especially Afghanistan – and we could do this all day. It doesn’t work. It never works. We spend shitloads of money. We send food. We send blankets. We send soldiers. We die. But people who are hell bent on tearing themselves apart are going to do so until there is nothing left but corpses and scorched earth and either one serious motherfucker of a warlord takes over and ends the war, or one side manages to kill every goddamned body on the other side. Period. You can piss and moan and cry and plead and pray and wish in one hand and shit in the other, but that is how it is.

We’ve been to Somalia.

And we didn’t have the stomach for it, just like Lebanon.

So we got out.

We can’t go back, the American pubic won’t stand for it right now. Two miserable wars in progress and the memory of dead Blackhawk pilots being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Folks, it ain’t happening – even if it is the correct, ultimate, and moral thing to do. We didn’t make this mess (Oh, yes, it could be argued that we made it worse, but we didn’t make it in the first place. The Somalis themselves did that). And to be frank, nobody gives an Ebola infested fuck about Africa, there is no support for going in. None. Sorry, but there it is.

Fixing Somalia is an exercise in nation building. That’s the United Nation’s job. They suck at it, for a large number of reasons, not the least of which is that in order to fix Somalia you’re going to have to conquer and pacify it first, i.e. you’re going to have to kill a lot of people and then you’re going to have to stick around for a good long time. Good luck and don’t forget to write.

So, now we have to live with the consequences. Piracy is one of those consequences.

Third: Piracy.

This is our responsibility.

At least as far as protecting American interests goes. That includes protecting American flagged vessels which the Navy is legally and honor bound to do, and American interests – which are in our best, er, interest (example, though you may not realize it, piracy in this part of the world has a direct impact on world oil prices – this affects all Americans - even those who live in hippy communes at one with nature and don’t use gasoline … or soap. What affects Americans, affects the rest of the world, especially places like, oh, China).

What I am strongly advocating is that the Navy be assigned to fulfill its primary charter, i.e. ensure America's unrestricted and safe assess to the sea lanes. This is the Navy’s first and foremost responsibility as a military force, it is why it exists in the first place. This why you pay for it.

A couple of points first:

- The Navy spends way too much time doing the Coast Guard's job vis a vis the Goddamned endless "War on Drugs." There is at least two major combatants, cruisers or destroyers, in the south eastern Pacific right now, chasing drug smugglers. There are at least three more in the Caribbean, and another in the Atlantic. Along with dozens of aircraft and ground assets and thousands of military personnel. That mission accomplishes nothing, it is an endless unwinnable feel good public relations boondoggle and has almost zero impact on the drug trade. Turn it over to the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security and send the Navy assets to the Horn of Africa – they shouldn’t be doing law enforcement anyway, and they especially shouldn’t be working for those morons in the DEA.

- UN Sanctions. The Navy spends way too much time supporting UN Sanctions. Don't get me wrong, supporting UN sanctions is fine - providing you've got the time and assets and nothing else to do, but it's not our primary responsibility. Protecting US interests and citizens on the high seas is. First, foremost, and always.

- We're robbing Peter to pay Paul, we're building hi-tech ships with no missions and decommissioning ships like Ticonderoga, Yorktown, Valley Forge, Vincennes, Gates, and the FFG's in order to pay for it. Those five cruisers and the FFG's were only halfway through their service life and were more than suited to the mission of protecting US shipping. Perfectly suited in fact, since Frigates were specifically designed as convoy escorts and in fact were initially designated as "Destroyer Escorts." But in typical Pentagon logic, because those ships didn't have Vertical Launcher capability and couldn't fire the latest generation of missiles (both AAW and Cruise) they were worthless (and more importantly they didn’t keep Congressional constituents employed). And yet, there is no need whatsoever for advanced anti-air capability in 99% of the force projection situations we face at the moment - like pirates, or the anti-drug mission, or force projection in places like East Timor. Not every ship needs to be an advanced weapon platform capable of engaging the Mythical Soviet Union that Could Have Been If Only It Didn't Collapse Fifteen Years Ago and Become Our Ally. We don't need either SM3 satellite shoot down capability or Tactical Tomahawk capability to take out a couple of assholes in a plastic skiff. What we need are cheap fast light patrol craft, exactly like the FFG. Strip away the sonar dome, and take the AAW missile systems off and gut the ASW torpedo bay and load them up for littoral combat. Simple, cheap, quick and the taxpayer gets the benefit of having already paid for it.

Of course, that's not how it works. Congress will bitch about hi-tech, hideously expensive weapons – but what they are really complaining about are hi-tech, hideously expensive weapons built in somebody else’s district. Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, Moderates – it doesn’t matter – they all talk about fiscal responsibility and then run right out to spend billions on whatever they think the military needs.

Let me give you an example: USS Bainbridge is an Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer, which is one of the most advanced weapons systems in the world. You need to take down a hundred inbound targets, she's your ship. New to fire a salvo of Tomahawks fifteen hundred miles inland? She can do it. Need to run down a couple of dicks in a plastic skiff? You're screwed. It's like killing a gnat with a atomic bomb.

The problem is that the DoD, Pentagon, and Congress are obsessed with Bigger, Shinier, Faster, high-tech Pie In the Sky. These are the people who think flying a billion dollar invisible bomber on a 36 hour round trip mission against a country that doesn't even have an air defense system is a good idea and we need more of it! I suspect that these men are the ones who buy Viagra in bulk lots from Mexico.

Bottom line. We have time tested tactics for dealing with pirates. We have everything we need. We don't need anything new.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Until the pirate problem is eradicated, convoy American and allied shipping in the east Indian ocean. Dispatch a CG and a couple of FFG's (Or stripped down FF’s) or PC's to escort and patrol. Just as we did in the gulf during the Tanker war. The Navy already has tactics and procedures for this, so do the merchant carriers. Put the plan into action. If you can get international assets to assist, fine, do so.

1b) Arm the merchantmen - the shipping companies need to take some responsibility for their own defense, just as any business does by hiring guards and putting up a fence. Now there are definite issues here, you can’t just give the Merchant crews guns and drop them off at the pier. First the insurance companies would have a cow. Second, the union would have another cow, sideways. Third, the merchant seamen aren’t Marines and didn’t sign up for armed combat and I don’t blame them for being reluctant to get involved in armed conflict. I wouldn’t want to either. But, just as companies hire armed guards on land, they can do so at sea. There are any number of security outfits that can supply maritime security personnel, which can embark each ship in the transit zone and then transfer to other ships as necessary. It’s important to understand that I’m only talking about four or five man teams, not an army. And that’s all that’s necessary, the pirates are not coming alongside in 300 man sloops of war with cutlass and grapple, they are four teenaged dicks with rusty AK47's in a plastic skiff. Six maritime security guys with decent small-arms could hold a pirate assault off. Especially if the Merchant crew is assisting with a couple of 3" fire hoses and the main DC pump (trust me here, try to climb up a grapple line with a 400psi stream of 3” water from a main fire hose pounding on your noggin, really not happening, the advantage is with the defenders. Always). Combine that with some standard ship security modifications like security doors on the pilothouse, engine, and rudder rooms with a couple of safe rooms for the crew and you can hold them off until the Navy helos show up and vaporize the bastards with the minigun – and the cost of carrying the security bubbas and making the modifications would be offset by lowered insurance rates.

2) Form up a task force, built around an LCC which acts as homebase, air field, and command and control. Break a couple of Aries class hydrofoils out of mothballs, or fast Patrol Coastals, or better yet a couple of USCG 210 fast cutters and whatever international support as is provided. Load up the LCC with a couple of assault helos and UAV's and Marines - then go hunting. Basic policy as follows, heave to and prepare to be boarded, or get blown out of the fucking water. Period. You get one level 3 query, one level 1 warning, 1 shot across the bow, and then as many HSMST salvos as it takes to turn you into a smoking hole in the water. Thanks and come again. Trust me on this, the Navy is very, very good at this.

2b) you can base this task force out of Mombassa, Kenya. That's Kenya's contribution to their own security. They get to pay for the fleet support in return for protection. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait can contribute the fuel, since it’s their tankers we’ll be protecting. Everything else is just window dressing. The ships involved come from the standard West Pac/Gulf rotation. You detach them for a month from Gulf Duty and let them go chase pirate, they’ll love it. Gulf duty sucks. Killing pirates rocks.

Optional Steps:

3) Give the pirates two weeks to free all prisoners and vessels. Then storm the harbor with a full assault force and take those ships at gun point. Whatever it takes. Give the countries who own those vessels the opportunity to participate under our Aegis - this is not a UN operation, but it could be a NATO mission - or to pay the ransom before the assault, their choice. But when time is up, it's up. Each country could retake its own vessel, and we provide support and protection while they do it – that way if the hostages onboard die, it’s the respective country’s look out. While the assault is going on, use airpower, manned or unmanned, and special forces to take out every single boat that looks like it could be used for piracy in the harbor, i.e. every plastic hulled skiff with a rack of outboards. Fishing trawlers and such aren’t fast enough to catch a freighter or outrun the Navy, they get to live and be used to feed people. Unless we catch them later engaged in piracy, in which case they get blown the hell up. We don’t set foot on land.

4) Then clear Somali waters and impose an absolutely strict blockade. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. No aid, no relief, no help, no nothing. Somalia wants help, they can form a government, liquidate the pirates by whatever means they deem proper and petition the UN for aid after the country is secure.

Have a fine Navy day.

Tripoli

At the US Naval Academy, in the green grassy square between Truxtun and Decatur Roads and the Preble and Leahy Halls stands a slowly crumbling monument to six dead men and a long forgotten war.

It is the Tripoli Monument and it is the oldest military memorial in the United States.

Originally known simply as the Naval Monument, it was carved from fine white Carrara marble quarried in Tuscany and sculpted by master stone mason, Giovanni Macali, in Livorno, Italy.

In 1806 it was carried to the United States in the hold of USS Constitution.

The monument was first erected at the Washington Naval Yard on the Potomac in 1808. Then in 1831 it was moved to the west front of the US Capital Building and placed within a fountain – where the US Grant Memorial stands today. Finally, it was moved to its present location at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland where it has stood for the last 149 years.

Few outside of the US Navy remember or recognize the names inscribed upon the Tripoli memorial, Captain Richard Somers, Lieutenant James Caldwell, Lieutenant James Decatur, Lieutenant (acting) Henry Wadsworth, Lieutenant (acting) Joseph Israel, and Midshipman Thomas Dorsey. These Naval officers were killed in action during the First Barbary War which raged from 1801 to 1805. Also called the Barbary Coast War or the Tripoli War, this conflict is the source of the line “To the shores of Tripoli” in the US Marine Hymn, and is the impetus behind the formation of the US Navy and Marine Corps, and it was the United States first trial by fire as a new and independent nation.

In the late 1700’s through the early part of the 19th century, Corsairs raiding north out of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli into the Mediterranean captured foreign merchant vessels in thinly disguised acts of piracy and demanded tribute for unmolested passage. The great seafaring powers were mostly powerless against the pirates of the Barbary Coast, primarily because they were engaged against each other and had few assets to spare for pirate suppression, and so the great nations formed an uneasy agreement with the Corsairs. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy agreed to pay tribute to the quasi-independent Ottoman Sultanates of North Africa for more or less safe passage. The might of their navies backed those agreements up, as did the complex and often incomprehensible diplomacy of the European powers in North Africa.

Prior to 1776, the vessels of colonial America fell under the protection, more or less, of British treaties. After 1777 and throughout the revolution, American vessels were protected, again more or less, by France and their agreement with the Corsairs. But after independence, the United States became solely responsible for the protection of her vessels on the high seas. Unfortunately, the new nation had no Navy. The privateer force of the Revolutionary War was long decommissioned and would have been inadequate for the job even if it did still exist. Without a navy, the United States had only one option – tribute.

And so, for eight years, all during the presidency of George Washington, the United States paid tribute to the Barbary Pirates for unmolested passage. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were both sent to negotiate peace treaties in London in 1786. Tripoli’s Ambassador, one Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, laughed and told Jefferson that is was the duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave nonbelievers. Jefferson reported to Secretary of State John Jay and to President Washington that that to pay tribute to such brigands would only invite more tribute and encourage more attacks.

And he was right.

While in Congress the Federalists and the anit-Federalist (or in modern terms the Liberals and the Conservatives) argued over western expansion and the need, or lack there of, of a Navy, and taxation, and so on and so forth – the attacks against US shipping continued to increase, and the Sultanate of Tripoli demanded larger and larger tributes, until the size of the payoffs became unbearable. By 1800, tribute and ransom to the Barbary States amounted to over twenty percent of the US Budget.

In addition to attacks by the Corsairs, Britain had embarked on a program of impressment of US merchant seaman and harassment of American vessels on the high seas (eventually these actions and others would lead to the War of 1812) and it was glaringly obvious that America needed to defend her access to the sea lanes. Led by Jefferson (who was at odds with his own party) and supported by Washington and other founding fathers, the United Stated established the American Navy in 1794. They commissioned numerous smaller vessels and six large Frigates; the Constitution, the Congress, the President, the United States, the Constellation, and the Chesapeake. Those vessels, designed by Joshua Humphreys and built in Boston from American black and white oak, were unique in the world. They were not Ships of the Line, but were rather designed to fight independently and/or as the flagship of a squadron of smaller vessels. They were fast and powerful – today we would call them cruisers. They were considered to be some of finest warships in the world, and a tribute to American shipbuilding prowess and seamanship. Those vessels and the ones that followed distinguished themselves again and again, defeating far larger vessels and repeatedly winning the day against staggering odds. USS Constitution still floats in Boston Harbor today, the oldest and most distinguished warship on active duty anywhere in the world. Her sister, Constellation, rests in Baltimore.

When Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, the Bashir of Tripoli demanded $225,000 in tribute – an unbelievable fortune and punishment for Jefferson’s outspoken hatred of the pirates. Jefferson refused payment and Tripoli then declared war on the United States. And the First Barbary War broke out. Jefferson sent the new US Navy to the north coast of Africa and laid siege to the pirates. Led by Commodore Edward Preble, the US Navy systematically hunted down and destroyed the Corsair raiders. Over a period of two years, Preble forced the pirates from the ocean and back into the city states from whence they came. Then Preble laid siege to the cities. In the most famous incident, Naval hero Captain Stephen Decatur and a contingent of the very first US Marines sailed into Tripoli Harbor in a captured Corsair ketch renamed USS Intrepid, and retook the USS Philadelphia, which had been captured after running aground during an armed reconnaissance of Tripoli harbor. Decatur and the Marines stormed Philadelphia and took the ship without firing a shot. American ships then came alongside but Philadelphia could not be readied for sail in time. With cannon shot from the shore batteries falling all around them, Decatur and his Marines fired Philadelphia and burned her to keep her out of the Corsair’s hands. This single action of unbelievable skill and daring defines the very heart of the US Navy and Marine Corps today.

Two months later Preble took his squadron into Tripoli harbor and fought a series of running battles to smash the remains of the Corsair fleet once and for all. At the vanguard of this action, USS Intrepid, now designated a Fire Ship and packed with explosives was sailed into the harbor under the command of Captain Richard Somers with a crew of two officers and ten enlisted volunteers. They intended to sail Intrepid straight into the enemy fleet, light the fuses, and escape in the ship’s boat – hopefully to be picked up by Preble’s fleet before the Corsairs could catch them. Something went wrong and Intrepid detonated early. Somers and his men were killed in the explosion. But the battle was won and the final nail in the Corsair’s coffin came when Marines under the command of General William Eaton and US Marine First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon and an army of mercenaries marched overland and took the pirate city of Dema at bayonet point. Then they turned to advance on Tripoli itself. Crushed between Preble’s iron blockade and O’Bannon’s advance, the Bashir sued for peace. A treaty was signed on June 10, 1805.

Acting Lieutenants (actually senior Midshipmen) Henry Wadsworth (Uncle of the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and Joseph Israel were with Captain Somers on USS Intrepid, and all three of them along with six men from USS Constitution (William Harrison, Robert Clark, Hugh McCormick, Jacob Williams, Peter Renner and Issac Downes) and four from USS Nautilus (James Simms, Thomas Tompline, James Harris and William Keith) are buried in an overgrown, weed infested lot beneath a crumbling stone monument in a small neglected park on the outskirts of Tripoli, Libya. The United States has petitioned Libya for their return for many, many years now – and so far has been refused.

Lt James Decatur (not to be confused with Captain Stephen Decatur) was killed while commanding one of USS Constitution’s gun boats, shot through the head.

Lt Caldwell and Midshipman Dorsey were killed when one of USS Syren’s gunboats was struck by canon shot and exploded.

In the end the pirates were driven back and Tripoli crushed, but the threat was far from vanquished. Another pirate war, the Second Barbary War, and the War of 1812 would follow before the world understood that the vessels of the United States of America and her allies were not to be molested. But at the end of those conflicts, they did understand – and any time that memory dimmed one had only to look upon the seas and the warships of the United States Navy standing watch there to be reminded of the penalty for attacking Americans.

And so it has stood for well over a century.

But once again our people are threatened by pirates operating from the coast of Africa. This time it’s the lawless coast of the Horn of Africa. I’ve been there, it is a terrible place. A place where life is expensive and death is cheap and no one is safe.

At first the pirates claimed to be protecting the sovereign coastal waters of Somalia against illicit fishing. It wasn’t long however, before those vigilantes discovered that piracy was far more lucrative than fisheries enforcement – and like the Corsairs of old, they were encouraged by their success and the astronomical tribute other nations were willing to pay to keep the sea lanes open and their vessels free. Like any human endeavor, if one person is successful, others will follow – and like greenhorns flocking en mass to the gold fields of the Klondike (or Warlords to the Blood Diamond trade, to use an analogy more specific to Africa), new pirates flooded the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. The lawless land of Somalia gives them refuge and a free hand. The warlords there, like the Bashirs of the Barbary Coast before them, take their tribute. And every ransom paid only encourages them more.

Piracy is not a problem in Somalia, it’s the national industry.

Make no mistake, there is nothing romantic about these pirates. They are lawless criminals, violent and ruthless men who have killed hundreds and looted billions and demand ever more every day. You only read about the big ships, the ones full of weapons or relief supplies. You rarely hear about the private yachts and the smaller ships sailing for the Suez Canal. These vessels disappear without a trace, their crews and passengers raped and murdered, their cargo stolen and sold openly in the markets of Yemen and Somalia, and vessels themselves liquidated on the black market.

These men are not freedom fighters. They are not enforcing the sovereignty of Somalia, there is no sovereign Somalia. They are not the duly appointed maritime security force of the Somalia government, there is no such thing and no such government. They are not the victims of racism or the model of democracy in action (though I agree that Somalia itself is the predicable result of decades, if not centuries, of failed foreign policy and proxy wars by nations the world over – however, this fact does in no way justify the actions of the pirates. Period. If you think so, you're simply rationalizing brigandage and anarchy to prove your point – and you can look up which logical fallacy that is on your own). They are most certainly not defending their country from the depredations of the West as reported by Al Jareeza, this is nothing more than a load of hogwash manufactured whole cloth. The actions of the pirates, and pirates they are and make no mistake, belie all of these idiotic notions. The fact that the pirates attempted to take the M/V Alabama, loaded with relief supplies for Kenya and operating well outside Somalia waters shows how utterly in error such nonsense statements are.

No, these men are nothing more than the Corsairs of old, reborn. They have found a lucrative and repeatable way of extorting enormous amounts of money from other nations – including their own people and fellow Africans. The money and assets they take benefit only a few and the most ruthless, and do nothing to relieve the festering horror that is Somalia. Indeed, the actions of the pirates and the warlords directly increase the isolation of Somalia, and reduce aid and relief to the region. These men are criminals of the worst kind, they prey on their own neighbors as well as maritime targets of opportunity.

This threat is expanding every day. The pirates raid further and further from their bases. They demand bigger and bigger ransoms. They have threatened to kill any and all French and American citizens (including relief workers) in retaliation for what they perceive as transgressions against what they increasingly see as their right to control the high seas. This threat against Americans is tantamount to a declaration of war, the same as the Bashir of Tripoli two centuries ago.

It’s not a matter of avoiding those areas. We cannot. Our vessels cannot. Any ship transiting the Suez Canal and the Horn of Africa, and increasingly anywhere in the western Indian Ocean is at risk. Those risks translate into massively increased insurance costs, fuel costs as vessels have to move faster and further to avoid capture and attack, and increased delays in shipping. These things have a direct impact on you, on fuels costs, on the costs of goods, on the safety of your fellow countrymen, and on the world economy.

Just as our ancestors before us, we are faced with two choices, pay tribute or fight.

Unlike our ancestors we have a powerful and fully capable Navy and Marine Corps who were born in just this sort of fire and are supremely aware of our legacy and history and would like nothing better than to hunt these bastards down and wipe them from the face of the Earth.

Make no mistake, folks, we cannot live in peace with these people, just as you could not live in peace with criminal gangs who break into your house to steal and rape and murder.

It is time to halt the shortsighted policies of the previous administration, stop decommissioning ships that were specifically designed for this mission – the FFG-7 Oliver Hazard Perry Class Frigates. Dozens of these ships have be decommissioned in recent years in favor of new, advanced, pie in the sky technology ships, designed to fight mythical hi-tech bogymen from the Cold War. This is a mistake. The FFG-7 is small, fast, relatively inexpensive to operate, capable of sustained endurance, and armed with a 3” main battery and capable of carrying two advanced combat helicopters. These ships are ideally suited to this mission, and we already have dozens of them. Strip out the anti-submarine weapons, and fill the resulting space with Marines. With a cruiser for command and control, the pirates won’t stand a chance.

And while we’re at it, now is the perfect opportunity to mend the fences trampled by the previous administration. It’s time to join forces with those nations who were once our traditional allies, such as France, and who are willing to stand up and fight.

No other American vessel should ever again fall into the hands of pirates.

No dime of American money should go to tribute or ransom.

However it’s managed, this threat must be exterminated now.

If you doubt me, stand before the Tripoli Monument and read those names again:

Captain Richard Somers

Lieutenant James Caldwell

Lieutenant James Decatur

Lieutenant (acting) Henry Wadsworth

Lieutenant (acting) Joseph Israel

Midshipman Thomas Dorsey

and all of the others who have given the ultimate sacrifice so that we may be free.

Followup post is here: Somalia

____________________________________________________________________

Update:

To those of you running Google searches about Teddy Roosevelt and Eden Pedicaris and the last of the Barbary pirates - that would be a really good example of why you shouldn't get your history from Hollywood. Don't get me wrong, John Milius' The Wind and the Lion is one of my very, very favorite movies ever, but it's a complete load of historical fiction.

Mostly.

There was an event called the Pedicaris Incident where an American citizen was kidnapped from his home in Morocco. Sort of. The man's name was actually Ion Pedicaris and he did became friends with the brigand and kidnapper Razuli - which is similar in broad strokes to the events of the movie. And Teddy did send the Atlantic squadron, and he did supposedly say, "This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!" - though it was at a fund raiser and not an official declaration of the government. But that's about all the movie got right. There was no military action, the situation was resolved through diplomacy, with the help of France and Spain - and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Barbary Wars.

On the other hand, Milius' "prequel to The Wind and the Lion, Roughriders, is much closer to historical accuracy and is also a damned fine movie. Highly recommended.

Go Navy!

SEALs 3: Pirates: big fat 0.

How would you like to be the pirate on USS Bainbridge? Suddenly everybody is pointing a gun except for you. Oh man, damnit! Don't you feel stupid? But, really, how did you think this was going to end?

Way to go, Navy. Well done.


Now, it's time to quit fucking around and do the job.

No more bullshit. No more discussion. No more UN meetings and memos and sanctions.

Deploy the fleet and clean these bastards out. We know where they are, we know how they operate, we know where they're based. International law regarding piracy on the high seas is clear and it is long past time to erradicate these lawless bastards like the vermin they are.

Surrendar and face the gallows, or be blown from the water. Period.

I have more than a bit of experience in this area and I'll have some detailed thoughts up on this tomorrow. In the meantime CW, who is also experienced in this subject, over on Refugees From the City has a couple of excellent posts up.

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

I don't know if this is a good thing or not, but I just want to point out that I'm secure enough in my own manhood to post it.



Yeah, Matey, how long can you last?

It's Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer

I mentioned this computer the other day.

The ancient Gateway 2000 tower I’ve had sitting in my basement for years now.

We bought this machine in 1992.

That’s right, seventeen years ago. I have a seventeen year old Gateway 2000. Seventeen years is prehistoric for a computer. Hell, seventeen years is longer than the earth has been around according to some Creationists, who claim that this computer isn’t really that old but only appears that way because Noah used it on the Ark to play Solitaire while he waited for the deluge to recede. Whole nations have risen and fallen and new worlds have been discovered around distant stars in the seventeen years since this machine booted up for the first time. Today, it’s like an archaeopteryx, some primitive hairy-feathered flightless bird from the Jurassic epoch, its bones prized from the soft stone beneath my house, given flesh again by teams of scientists, and set on display for small children to marvel at in fearful fascination, or as my son put it last night, “What’s this piece of crap doing in the middle of the floor?”

Why do I still have it? (Aside from its obvious intrinsic historical value, I mean)

Well, for a number of reasons, I guess. It was the first major purchase my wife and I made after we were married. It cost a hell of a lot of money back then. I’m reluctant to throw away technology (Somewhere in the back of my mind I have this nightmare vision of a ravaged Earth, humanity hunted and driven to the brink of extinction by terrifying alien robot invaders who have come from burnt out stars and destroyed our technology, crushed our armies, brushed aside our nuclear weapons, but their one weakness has been discovered and the government led by a post-Betty Ford Rehab Clinic former child actor turned radio shock jock who was then swept into the White House on a wave of popular support and became a beloved redheaded president has a plan – all they need an old 486/33 running DR-DOS and an 8-track streaming tape backup unit, a couple of SCSI II cables, and 75 baud acoustic modem. The fate of the world hangs in the balance, government agents knock on my door and demand access to my storeroom for the sake of humanity – and there I stand, “Oh, soooo sorry MIB Dudes, I just threw that shit out last week. Total bummer guys. I’m really sorry.” See? I’d feel pretty damned stupid for letting humanity down like that).

Plus it was a really great machine when I bought it.

In those days you got a copy of Byte or Computer Shopper and Gateway 2000 had these big multi-page color glossy adds right in the middle of the magazine. They listed a spread of machines with differing capabilities, usually sitting in a cow pasture surrounded by Holsteins. Then you called Gateway 2000 at their barn-like factory in Sioux City, South Dakota and ordered your machine. Customer service was uniformly excellent, knowledgeable, polite, friendly, and helpful. They walked you through the ordering process and the creation of your machine. Two weeks later, custom built, it arrived via UPS at your doorstep in a couple of black and white spotted boxes like a pair of enormous cubical cows.

I loved Gateway 2000 machines. They were just plain excellent. Massive, robust, built in America by Midwest cow farmers from the finest grains and greenest alfalfa sprouts and able to stem the tide of alien invasions – in 8-bit EGA color and tinny 4-bit sound.

Gateway 2000 itself was an outstanding company. Customer and quality orientated. Fast. Dependable. Excellent service. Cutting edge products.

The computer itself aged gracefully. Originally it came with an Intel 80486 processor clocked at 33MHz. 8 Megs of RAM and a 120Meg harddrive rounded out the package. It came with MS-DOS 3.21. I slicked the drive and installed Digital Research’s DR-DOS version 5, Word Perfect, and Borland’s Turbo Basic and Turbo Pascal. The machine did not come with a mouse. Mice were something those sissy Apple guys with the long hair and hygiene issues used. It went through many upgrades, eventually ending up as it is now with a AMD GreenTree Pentium 1 clone designed to run on a 486 Motherboard (after hardwired chipset upgrades – no such thing as flash firmware in the Jurassic), 16Megs of RAM, 8 parallel ports, 4 serial, 2 SCSI 1 and 2 SCSI II ports, an internal modem, a huge 4 gig drive, two 1x CDROMs, 8-bit VGA graphics and sound card running Windows 98b – and a Microsoft serial ball mouse. Hell the power supply alone could probably drive a fully loaded Greyhound bus at 14.4kbps down the information super highway.

Eventually, it just couldn’t be upgraded anymore and we went looking for a new machine. By then Gateway 2000 was just Gateway. The company itself had gone through a series of upgrades, and then the Dot Com bust, and had emerged much worse for wear. They’d moved from the Midwest to Silicon Valley – and quadrupled their operating and manufacturing costs. Gone was the great customer service, farmed out to overseas service centers. Gone too was the outstanding quality of their products, the manufacturing of which had also moved overseas using cheap labor and cheaper components. Gateway machines were far, far inferior to the original Gateway 2000’s. Like Sears and their Craftsman line of tools, Gateway declined steadily in quality, service, and innovation until they were a mere shell of their former glory. They tired to reboot several times using various methods, nothing worked. The company was finally bought out by Acer in 2007 and no longer exists for all practical purposes.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my storeroom (one of several actually) has steadily accumulated various carcasses of deceased computers over the years. The basement was filled with piles of antiquated and burned out technology that were mostly just taking up space. Now, we have a lot of room and a lot of storage space and it wasn’t really an issue. But a while back I decided to overhaul the attached garage, removing shelves and various other things in order to make room for the big emergency generator and its associated electrical transfer panel. A lot of things got moved to the basement. That’s when I realized that I have a lot of junk. And that’s when I realized it was time for some spring cleaning and a trip or two to the dump. Over the past week I’ve pulled out and stripped a half dozen computers, removing anything useful and anything that shouldn’t go in the landfill, like circuit cards – those will go to recycling. I’m boxing up the parts I’m keeping and I’m pretty proud of my self, what once filled an entire storeroom now fits in two small boxes. And the storerooms are clean, organized, and empty.

The very last piece of junk to be stripped is the Gateway 2000.

I went to pull it apart yesterday and then I wondered – does it still work?

It’s been at least eight, maybe nine, years since the last time I plugged it in. Hmmmm. I rooted around and came up with the keyboard and mouse (the keyboard is the old GW2000 Anykey Keyboard, still the best damned keyboard ever made – but it’s a DIN connector type, remember those?). The monster 19-inch Gateway 2000 CRT that came with the machine has long since died so I plugged in a small flatscreen and fired that sucker up.

It powered up, then bitched at me about the internal CMOS battery being dead. Really? I typed in the date, time, and fooled around until I remembered how to load the harddrive specifications. Then told it to boot the operating system.

Ninety seconds later it was fully up.

Amazing, seventeen years old, eight or nine years sitting in a dusty storeroom, full of dirt and dusty bunnies and who knows what else and it still runs like a top.

I briefly thought about seeing if I could get it to run Vista, but hey why spoil the moment, eh?

I also thought about hooking it into the phone lines, it still has the old CompuServe access numbers and BBS software and I wondered if I plugged it in would it connect me to 1995? I thought maybe I could send my younger self an email from the future - don't vote for Bush, Jim, also remember your wife's birthday is on the 15th, every year, and your keys are between the sofa cushions. Oh, and Blu-Ray wins out, don't buy that HD-DVD, Doofus - remember how that whole BetaMax thing worked out. Then I thought it probably wasn't a good idea to screw around with the space time continuum like that - plus I couldn't find a phone jack.

I let it run for a couple of hours, just to see if the ancient power supply would eventually smoke. But it hummed right along, steady and sounding like a gas turbine on an 747. Hell, even the fans purred along like they were made yesterday.

Eventually my wife complained that the machine was probably sucking up enough power to induce nuclear fusion with nothing really to show for it. I got the hint and powered the beast down for the last time.

Today it will get stripped and the chassis taken to the dump along with the rest of the storeroom debris and the last remnants of a once pioneering company will be gone forever.

It’s OK though, if the aliens do invade we can still execute the President’s plan using 486/33 emulation on our iMacs…

Cybersecurity 2009

In the Navy we used to have a lot of inspections.

Inspections, of course, aren’t unique to the Navy, they are a common occurrence in any branch of military service.

In the Navy we had uniform inspections, zone inspections, maintenance inspections, readiness inspections, equipment inspections, weapons inspections, security inspections, classified materials inspections, pre-deployment inspections, engineering inspections, fire and safety inspection, medical inspections, required publications inspections, and, well, hell, we had a lot of inspections.

Periodically, we’d also do something called a Health and Comfort inspection. A H&C is where senior NCO’s inspect the personal belongings of each junior member of the crew and the crew’s living quarters. The senior petty officers and the Chiefs would go through each crewman’s locker, both coffin and stand-up, their rack (a Sailor’s bunk area), and sometimes even require that a Sailor turn out his or her pockets. The senior Petty Officers were inspected by the Chiefs, the Chiefs by the Officers, the Officers by the Executive Officer and the XO by the Captain. (Generally, the Captain doesn’t get subjected to a H&C, rank hath its privileges after all – though if it became necessary that inspection would be conducted by the squadron Commodore.)

In an H&C inspection what we’re looking for is contraband. Drugs and alcohol, unauthorized weapons, hazardous materials, stolen property, health concerns, and like that. Sometimes a Health and Comfort inspection is announced in advance, but most times an H&C is conducted as a surprise inspection. All H&C’s turn up something. When I was an instructor at the Naval Technical Training Center in Pensacola, the command ordered an H&C of the student barracks for the first time in years (the Navy was undergoing a major post-Tailhook overhaul at the time). The pile of illicit booze stacked up in the courtyard was taller than my head and twenty feet in diameter. The pile of weapons was almost as big. The pile of sex toys and pornography was equally impressive (Contrary to popular belief, pornography is not permitted in Navy barracks, especially post Tailhook). The biggest pile of all was the heap of unauthorized electronics, everything from electric razors to computers to TVs and game stations and especially hot plates and coffee makers. It’s not that you can’t have such things in a Navy barracks room, it’s that they have to be electrically certified first by the Electrical Safety Officer or one of his flunkies. You bring your electronic device to the electronic shop during the approved hours, and a tech inspects the device (grounding check, cord in good repair, no exposed wires, etc) and slaps a certification sticker on it, or tells you that you either need to get it fixed or toss it in the dumpster as a safety hazard. In addition, any equipment involved in food preparation has to be inspected by medical – your coffee pot for example, or your microwave oven. Shore commands vary in their enforcement of the the electrical safety program, but ships are fanatical about it. And, just for the record, during a ship’s Admin inspection, the Electrical Safety Inspection program gets inspected.

We inspected people, specifically their bodies. There’s an old saying in the military, Your soul may belong to God, but your ass belongs to Uncle Sam. We checked that haircuts and mustaches and ear hair were within regulations. We checked that fingernails were clipped, and, in the case of woman, painted in an approved color. Medical and dental checkups were mandatory. In the military, you don’t have the option of avoiding the dentist, or your yearly prostate finger wave, or your annual pap smear, or your Anthrax inoculation, or wandering around with a case of the crabs. You want a tattoo, you need permission (though this is rarely enforced outside of special forces and special programs where identifying personal marks can have an impact on your career). Piecings are also strictly controlled, and you can get into serious trouble for it. (sometimes in a hysterically funny fashion. I once saw a young maintenance tech grab his crotch, start screaming like an axe murder victim, and dance around spastically while looking for all the world like he was trying to yank his own reproductive organ off through his coveralls. Seems the gold rings he recently had placed in his scrotal piercings where picking up excesses RF radiation from a high power amplifier that he had gundecked the safety procedures on – right before switching it on for a full power test. Exactly like a spoon in a microwave, those gold rings got hot, fast. Really hot. (Actually a good thing, because the metal heated first, alerting us to the problem and causing an immediate manual shutdown of the amplifier before the microwave energy could bake us. From then on we referred to that as the “Electromagnetic Ball Detector.” Yeah, that kid didn’t last long in my unit. Trust me. Failure to replace a shield, then forcing the safety switch so the amp would power up anyway is a level of stupid that almost defies comprehension. There’s a reason why you remove all rings and metal object from your person when working on such equipment, and strict rules and inspections to ensure compliance with procedure).

Basically, in the Navy we inspected everything – including personal communication. There is no such thing as private communications on a US military facility – especially shipboard. All incoming and outgoing email is scanned, usually electronically but sometimes by a real live human censor, for sensitive information. I happen to know a former Navy Captain who was masted before the Admiral and forced to retire his commission under other than honorable circumstance for displaying the bad sense to discuss the extramarital affair he was having - with a junior enlisted man’s wife while his own wife lay dying in the hospital from cancer no less - via shipboard email and chat. Every phone call from a US government facility is subject to monitoring, every one. This includes cell phone communications. There’s a big sign outside the gate of every US military and government facility that specifically calls out US Code, Title 10 and that by entering the base or facility you implicitly consent to monitoring and inspection. Period and no exceptions.

And you know what? Those inspections and monitoring work, for the most part. Despite the sometimes incredible dangers inherent in the military, we have a lot less accidents, per capita, than most civilians. Those intrusive, privacy violating, Health and Comfort inspections save lives and demonstrably increase the safety of the majority. Those electrical safety inspections have prevented countless fires – and in the confines of a ship or a crowded barracks those fires could have killed or injured hundreds and cost the taxpayer billions. Those mandatory medical and dental inspections have saved countless lives and improved the health and safety of millions of military personal. Those phone calls we monitor? Not a month goes by that we don’t catch somebody divulging classified information, usually accidentally. Those mistakes can cost lives and again billions, and have.

Now, show of hands, how many of you would like to live like that?

Really? Why not?

If you’re following the rules, regulations, and laws – why wouldn’t you want to live under a system that significantly increases your health, safety, and security?

Close inspection of military personal, their equipment, their communications, their health, and personal effects can be demonstrated to have significantly increased safety, security, readiness, wellbeing, and saved the taxpayer untold billions. I think that it could be demonstrated that if we decided to ditch the Constitution and subject every American and other resident of this country to the same type of inspection and monitoring, the general safety of citizenry would be significantly increased. Seriously, how many deaths would be prevented each year if the fire department conducted a bi-annual inspection of your house? Checking that you’ve replaced your smoke detector batteries and aren’t storing your gas cans next to the water heater? Maybe we should make it mandatory that you get all of your electrical appliances checked by a tech down at the local town hall, how many electrical fires would be prevented as a result? Ask yourself how many cases of food poisoning could be avoided by having the health department come in once a month and check to make sure you are properly cleaning out those nasty leftovers in the fridge and scrubbing your counters once in a while. How about those medicine cabinets? How many of you have expired or excess medicine that should have been thrown out long ago, just waiting for your kids to decide they look like fun? Hell, here in Alaska, you can’t buy cold medicine off the shelf, you’ve got to get it from the pharmacist behind the counter. Supposedly this keeps the kids from turning Sudafed into a recreational drug, but once you bring it home there’s nothing to keep it out of your little coke dealer’s hands. You wouldn’t have that problem if the BATF came through once a month and made sure you were storing your medicine securely. What about Schedule 1 drugs? How many of you are sure you don’t have illegal drugs in your house? Are you sure that your kids, or their friends, or that asshole from the office who came to your party last week, didn’t bring some in? Don’t you want to know for sure? BATF should bring along a couple of drug dogs on their monthly visit. Now I know no Stonekettle Station regular would have illegal downloads, but many people have copies of movies or music they didn’t pay for. That’s a crime. They’re stealing money from the entertainment industry and that costs all of us. Why shouldn’t the recording industry enforcers have the right to inspect your computer periodically? How many people fudge on their taxes? How about home businesses, are they complying with all the laws? Even when nobody is looking? Maybe the IRS should perform surprise audits of every citizen on a periodic basis – seriously here, isn’t that in the public interest? How about our kids? Sexting, you know what that is? You should, it’s the hula-hoop fad of the new millennium. It’s when you send naked pictures of yourself or others from your camera phone via video texting. How many of your kids are doing this? A hell of lot, actually, according to recent figures, and wouldn’t you want to know if it was happening in your house? If your kid is underage, it’s child pornography. It could also be solicitation of a minor. It could be public indecency. Hell it falls under a lot of statutes. Now, if people knew that NSA was monitoring every picture sent across the web, with serious consequences for those involved, wouldn’t that cut down on a heinous crime? How about those people you hear about who keep dead relatives around for years, stuffed in the freezer, or mummified in a back bedroom? Periodic H&C of every dwelling in America would keep that kind of insanity from happening.

I could go on here, but then I’d just start getting silly.

But in all honesty people are generally bastard flavored bastards with bastard filling and little bastard sprinkles on top. Even well intentioned people break laws in their own home or when they think people aren’t watching. They speed. They do unsafe things. They do stupid things. They do ignorant things. They eat fatty foods. They drink themselves blind. They beat their kids and their spouses and their dogs. And it costs us all. It costs us in public safety, public health, national security, national income, taxes, and a wide variety of other things. Now, we can never prevent all of this. We can never be 100% safe, or secure, or efficient – but we could do a hell of a lot better.

So how come we don’t?

How come you people would rather live with significantly increased risk instead of significantly increased security, safety, and efficiency?

Hey, don’t look at me – I was in the military for twenty years and I don’t want to live like that either.

It’s about freedom, isn’t it?

And it’s about liberty.

It’s about the ideals that America was founded on.

You Goddamned right it is.

Which brings us to The Cybersecurity Act of 2009, unveiled yesterday by Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in a show of bipartisan stupidity. Basically, if enacted, this law would explicitly give the President power to shut down all domestic Internet traffic.

Sound alarmist? Go read the draft, I’ll wait.

Basically, the Cybersecurity Act would give the president the authority to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of National Security.” The definition of “Cybersecurity Emergency,” “Critical network,” and “National Security” would be left up to the president.

Now, what does that have to do with the introduction to this post? Well, see, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would also allow the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data” concerning critical networks “without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” Yep. Basically what that means is that the SoC can monitor or access any data on any private, commercial, or public network without regard to privacy laws providing he’s doing it for national security reasons – as he defines it – no warrant, no oversight, no regard for existing laws. In effect this bills creates a new domestic intelligence organ under the Department of Commerce. Now, since the DoC has neither the assets nor the expertise for such things, they’ll need to find somebody who has both unlimited assets and the requisite knowledge in the area of domestic monitoring. Those folks are up on MD32, just off the Baltimore Washington Parkway. Ask yourself just how closely you’d like to have the Department of Commerce and the Pentagon intertwined.

Rockafeller said yesterday, "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs—from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records—the list goes on."

Snowe agreed, and went further saying, "if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber-Katrina."

Now here’s a funny little aside, all those Conservatives who were so gung-ho about the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act, which made it legal for the Bush Administration to spy on Americans at home and without warrants, are all screaming bloody murder about how President Obama wants to snoop through their computers. One wonders if they’d be so opposed if Bush and Cheney were still in the White House. Pretty damned ironic, if you ask me, especially since they’ve already given Obama the power to shut down or intrude into their computer systems. Oh, yes, that’s right folks, The Homeland Security Act gives the president wide ranging and direct control over critical national infrastructure – and guess what the Internet is?

Those powers are detailed in Presidential Decision Directives 63, Executive Orders 13228 and 13231, the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, and the National Infrastructure Plan.

Basically, conservatives, you already gave Obama permission to cut off your access and look through you computer files. Forgive me while I enjoy a mocking chuckle at your expense.

This bill really doesn’t give the president any new power at all, though it does shift power from the Department of Defense to the Department of Commerce to a certain extent. In reality, of course, it will simply expand the power of both departments and simply bypass Constitutional protections for all Americans.

This bill has nothing to do with the current or past occupant of the Oval Office, but it’s very likely to have a great deal to do with future occupants.

Far from protecting the rights and securities of Americans, this bill is about power. It’s about protecting and expanding the power of government. This bill is about government to the people, not of, by, and for the people. Conservatives who pushed through bills that gave unfettered power to the last president are suddenly finding out what a sharp two edged sword that power is, now that it can be turned against them and not just the liberals they despise so badly. Allow this bill to become law, you give not only this president, but all who follow him even more unchecked power… and one day your children are very likely to have a President who becomes Emperor during a period of extended and unending crises. Sound crazy? Sound alarmist and paranoid and conspiracy theorist? You should do some reading into how Republics die.

Will this president abuse his power as the last one did? I don’t know. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, there are few truisms more true than that. Our founding fathers knew it, and they designed this country to deliberately limit the powers of the president. Any president. All presidents. Conservative presidents. Liberal presidents. All presidents. And not just the president, this bill gives nearly unlimited power to the Commerce Department. Power that they’ve never had. Power that they have no experience managing or controlling. The National Security Agency under the Department of Defense has been doing this since 1952, under strict guidelines put in place after numerous abuses – and still abuses occur. I have to wonder how the DoC will protect the rights of Americans, how they’ll keep their own people from abusing the unlimited information and power they will suddenly have access to when they can reach into private and commercial networks without regard for the law. The potential for abuse is simply staggering and of an order of magnitude beyond anything that has gone before. Our world, our nation, our lives are inside those machines. Everything, banking information, production, prototyping, travel, mental and physical health records, finance, investment, ideas, thoughts, designs, communications, worldview, access to maps, navigation, services, opinions, news, what you buy, what you eat, your location every time you swipe a credit card or dial a phone, who you talk to, and more. Much, much more. Everything is in there. Believe me folks, I know, I used to do this for a living. Right now, it takes a court order to pry into a majority of this information. The Electronic Privacy Act protects your 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendment rights in the online world – this bill would gut that protection and make a sham of the very rights those of us in the military gave up in order to protect.

We’ve traveled down the wrong road for eight years now. We’ve given up our freedoms, we’ve made our president a king in all but name – all because we have repeatedly allowed shortsighted and foolish leaders to frighten us with meaningless made up bogymen like “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” “islamofascism,” “emboldened purveyors of false populism” - and now we have a new word, Cyber-Katrina. Yet another meaningless and undefined threat used to frighten the populace into acquiesce.

It’s long past time to return to the vision of our founders. It’s long past time to stand up and demand the inalienable rights we as Americans are guaranteed under the Constitution.

There are dangers in the online world, there are national security threats, but this bill will do absolutely nothing to protect us from them. And will in fact go one more step towards destroying the very things that make the United States a nation of free people.

I strongly urge you to write your congressmen and demand that this bill be substantially revised to fully and clearly protect the Constitutional rights of all Americans, limit its scope and power, and require full adherence to 200 years of US Constitutional law – or better yet be thrown out altogether, let it die a silent death in committee.

Talk About Your Proverbial Coincidence

Did you feel that?

It hasn't posted to the Alaska Earthquake Center site yet, but we just had a good shake here. I felt two good seismic jolts, about twenty seconds apart with tremors between and a long rolling set of temblors after the second shock for a good thirty seconds.

A couple of things fell off the shelves and it shook the house hard enough for me to get up and stand in the nearest doorjamb - which in retrospect wasn't the smartest thing to do, since the nearest doorjamb to my desk is the double French doors between the den and the sunroom. The sunroom being walled in very large glass windows thirty feet high and which I watched flex and shake for a good minute.
_____________________________________

Just posted to the Alaska Earthquake site. I knew it had to be fairly good sized and close due to the sharpness of the jolts.

Right on both accounts.

It was 4.69 in magnitude and right the inlet below my house. Epicenter was less than 24 miles away.

_______________________________________________________________

I just, and I mean just, got back from the insurance office, where I was discussing our various policies, including earthquake insurance and the increasing thereof to cover a number of improvements we’ve made around here in recent years.

School House Rock

I'm off to an appointment in town. Back in a bit.

In the meantime, learn how a bill becomes a law. Too bad we swapped out School House Rock for Sponge Bob, eh?

Always Double Check the Number, Just Saying

Actual transcript of the phone call I just had:



Ring!
Me: Hello?
Woman with sexy voice: Hey. Whatchadoing?
Me: Um... (I look at the phone to determine caller ID. I don't know this person)
Woman with sexy voice: I was thinking [hum the dirty parts mmmm mmmmm mmmm whips and chains and four great danes mmmm mmmm mmmmm crisco mmmm rubber chicken mmm socket wrench mmmm mmmm and mount the handle bars on the headboard and ride ride ride mmmm] when you get home.
Me: Say, just out of curiosity, who is this?
Woman, voice suddenly not so sexy: Uh. Uh. Who is this?
Me: I'm Jim Wright.
Woman: Oh, uh, well. You sound just like my husband!
Me: He sounds like a lucky guy.
Woman in small voice: Is he there?
Me: I don't think so (having no idea at all who her husband might be)
Woman: You mean I dialed the wrong number?
Me: Sure seems that way.
Woman: I'm sorry.
Me: No I sort of enjoyed it.
Woman: Thank you. Goodbye.
Me: Thanks for calling.

Evolution – From the HP Deskjet Model 1 to the Photosmart C7280 All-in-One

We bought a new printer last weekend.

And it got me thinking about a few things.

One, just how much I need to clean out the basement storeroom, or as I like to call it, the Stonekettle Station Hall Of Computing and Dust Bunnies,

and two, just how much technology has changed since I bought my first computer and printer.

Now by “first computer” I mean first professional business machine, not the Commodore VIC20 and C64 I first bought - though as I recall, the printer I bought with those machines was actually a pretty serious piece of hardware in all its cutting edge 9-pin dot matrix glory, and if I remember right it actually cost more than both the Vic and the C64 combined.

No, the first professional machine I owned was an IBM PC XT Model 5160 bought through the government employees purchase program in 1985. The thing cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars. That price did NOT include color graphics (that’s how you knew it was a professional business machine, not a toy. Business machines were monochrome), a hard drive (though it did come with two 5.25 dual sided floppy drives – remember when you had to specify the difference between single sided and dual sided? And dual sided cost extra? How about double sided, double density disks? No? Punks) or a printer.

I eventually ended up with some cheap 9-pin dot matrix printer. I don’t remember the manufacturer, or much about it other than it sounded like yards of ripping cloth when it printed. It was hideously slow, as befitting its state of the art serial cord interface. You had to program the serial port directly, and map it to the DOS drivers manually using pipes and redirects in the DOS CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT boot up files. It printed in kind of a faded purple color, and the ribbons were impossible to get in Spain were I lived at the time. Oh, and it was tractor fed from a big box of fanfold paper.

Neither the computer or the printer lasted for very long. I sold them both and bought a Zenith Z-248, again through the government employees purchase program. Now the Zenith was a beast. I had learned a lot about personal computers by then and knew I wanted the biggest and most powerful machine I could get. The Zenith was that in spades. 80286 processor, with 80287 math coprocessor, one whole Meg of RAM, and (joy!) an internal 20Meg hard drive (20 whole megabytes, I couldn’t conceive of ever using up all that storage space – today I have a camera that takes digital pictures in TIFF format that wouldn’t fit a single image on that drive and my cell phone has 8 Gigabytes of internal storage).

Now, what printer should I get? What I really wanted was one those new HP Laser Printers – but they were about eight grand and were the size of a mini-fridge (This being a huge improvement over their commercial predecessors which cost literally tens of thousands and were the size of a mini-van). No way I could afford something like that on Navy petty officer’s pay, even with my re-enlistment bonus. But in 1987 Hewlett Packard had just come out with something they called the Deskjet, based on ink jet technology. Ink jet had been around in one form or another since the late 50’s, but it was never a commercially viable technology until the mid-1980’s. Jerry Pournelle reviewed one and gave it a big thumbs up in Byte magazine. Supposedly I could get professional quality for a lot less money in a much smaller package – and if I remember correctly, HP advertised Laser quality for under a $1000 in Computer Shopper. That I could do, and I bought one of the first models made by mail order (I was living in Iceland at the time and I’m pretty sure it was the only Deskjet on the island at the time). It was a great printer, fast, really fast at 4 whole pages per minute (seriously this was a step up from dot-matrix) due to its fancy Centronics (parallel) interface, and there was a disk with included DOS and Windows drivers. It was quiet. It printed crisp clear text, better than anything I was using at work. About the only drawback was that the ink tended to smear if your hands were damp, and it ran right off the page if you got it wet.

That Z-248 and its odd DEC-like backplane architecture went through many upgrades and lasted longer than any computer I’ve had before or since. But eventually it was replaced by a Gateway 2000 486/33. Which was the first tower cased machine I ever owned, with room for endless drive bays and expansion. That’s it on the far left in the picture below.

In addition to the six expansion bays in the front, there are twelve more rear-facing and internally. Honestly I don’t remember what size drive it came with, but there are now at least four drives in there (for a total of well, well under a gig. I think it was around 500megs, but I can’t remember). It sounded like a jet taxiing for take off when it was fully booted up. It was also the first computer we bought that came with a fancy new 3.5 Floppy drive - not the one you can see, that was an upgrade to a "mini" drive after the original "full sized" drive died. And if you look carefully you’ll see a tape backup unit, added later along with two CD-ROM drives. This was also the first computer that I used to access the new online world, first through BBS’s, then CompuServe, and then the Internet, using an external modem cable to the serial port – 9600baud, then 14.4Kbs, then 56.6. Wow! (show of hands, how many of you know what a serial port is? How many of you have ever used one?)

The HP Deskjet? Well, that was still chugging along and nothing better had come out.

Eventually the 486 was upgraded with a new mother board and a Pentium 1, and I bought a new HP Deskjet II.

Tubby, the grey cat there, is on top of the Gateway’s replacement, a Pentium II HP XL. The machine served us well for a very long time. We bought an upgraded HP Deskjet 550C to go with it, and for the first time could print in color. The problem was that the 550C was slow. Horribly slow. And by then laser printers had actually become affordable – so we went looking for one and came away with that Brother MFC-8600 Professional multifunction machine sitting in the rack directly behind the cat. At the time, it was one of the few printers that utilized the, then, new USB interface standard. It prints 40 pages a minute (compared to 6 for the Deskjet it replaced) and can scan 30 pages a minute in black and white. And that beast is still hands down the best computer purchase I’ve ever made. The Brother MFC-8600 is fast, quiet, and utterly reliable. It’s an excellent fax machine and standalone copier. It holds two reams of paper and prints absolutely crisp text and pictures in black and white. The integrated scanner is only grey scale though and it can’t scan odd sized documents. But it has lasted us since 1999 and it’s still going strong, and it has outlasted both the HP a310 and a350 computers (stacked one on top the other on the right hand side of the above picture) that replaced the XL – and it’s currently plugged into the HP-6800 series Pentium IV machine that I’m typing on and that you can just see on the far right of the picture.

Along the way, we’ve had a bunch of other cheaper printers, a Cannon Pixma and a couple of HP Photojets for printing pictures. And I’ve still got an old Okidata wide carriage dot matrix printer somewhere around here and a couple of boxes of fanfold, tractor feed paper (you know, just in case I need to print Pascal code from the 1980’s). But the Brother MFC-8600 has been our workhorse for over a decade now.

The problem is that the Brother is getting old, it still works great, but there’s no driver for Vista – so I can only use it to print, the rest of its capabilities are of very limited utility. And while we’re on the subject of Vista and drivers, my old HP flatbed scanner, which has given us great service, is no longer supported and Vista can’t talk to it at all*.

Now before you get all spun up and start making suggestions, understand something here. I like Vista (Don’t even look surprised. How long have you people been reading this blog? You know I’m not right in the head.) Vista works for me. Yes, it has some weird drawbacks, especially in a corporate or commercial setting, but for it works for me. I like it and I don’t want to use anything else. I’m not saying you have to like it. Got it? Good. Great, let’s move on then.

So, we were looking for a new printer and/or scanner.

I’m a big fan of multifunction machines. My desktop real estate is limited and I wanted something that would do everything I needed in one compact package. I wanted a color printer and one that would print hi-res photos and that had multiple paper trays, one for regular bond paper and one for photo paper (I need to print photos for use in the shop. I can’t use a computer out there, the dusty environment and power spikes from the heavy duty equipment would kill a power supply very quickly). I also wanted a network machine – one, because I’m tired of hanging printers off of my work machines, and two because a printer wired to a computer means the printer needs to be within about seven feet of the supporting machine which limits my office arrangement. This irritates me. I didn’t spend twenty years risking my ass in defense of truth, justice, and the America Way so that imperialistic USB cord manufactures could dictate my office layout. Screw them.

Last weekend we picked up an HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One professional multifunction machine. Like the Brother MFC, it’s a printer, fax, copier, and scanner. Unlike the Brother it’s a color printer, an inkjet, and it’s also a network machine – both wired and wireless.

First, it’s glossy. It has this kind of retro, 1950’s kitchen appliance look to it. I like that. Personal computing equipment has been in our homes for two decades now, and most of it still looks like something built by a defense contractor. In the last couple of years HP has began building glossily beautiful cases for their equipment and I like that.

It’s solid. The thing weighs a ton, a hell of a lot more than you’d expect for its size. It’s well built, nothing flimsy here.

It’s intelligently laid out. All controls are on the front or top. I hate devices that have controls and indicators hidden around back or on the sides. The only things that should be located on the back of the machine are the cords. Period. The power switch belongs on the front and it should be a big damned button that is clearly marked. I want all the toggles and tabs and flipper jobbers for clearing paper jams accessible without hunting and without having to move the machine. I want the paper tray, both load and finish, and scanner/copier feed trays on the front or on top where I can get to them even if I rack-mount the printer. Ditto for the toner cartridges. The C7280 meets all of those requirements and then some. HP put a high resolution color graphics display on the machine, it’s small but it’s bright and it’s mounted on a pivot so you can see it clearly any position. I like that touch a lot. The controls are clearly marked and grouped according to function and the important ones light up in function specific context. I like this feature too, a lot.

Network set up is easy. Unbox the printer. Pull off the packing tape. Open the front panel, load the six ink cartridges. Plug it in. Push the power button. Then you get three connection options, USB direct to machine, wired network to your network router/hub, or 802.11 wireless network or Bluetooth. I selected wireless setup from the display control panel, entered my network encryption keys and the C7280 connected seamlessly to my wireless network. For good measure I tried it via wired connection via standard CAT5 Ethernet cable as well, since I had a cable handy. Both methods worked just fine for connecting the C7280 to the network and the printer appeared instantly on Vista’s network map.

You need to install the HP Solutions software for each computer in the network. On the first machine I selected “Advanced” installation and ended up using the default settings at each selection point along the way. For the other half dozen machines in the network I just clicked “Express” install and let the HP software run the process. Both worked just fine. The software package is a big installation though and takes 20-30 minutes depending on your software and hardware configuration. There were repeated dire warnings that the software might not be able to connect to the printer due to firewall and network security programs running on my various machines, but I had no problems connecting to the C7280 under either AVG or Norton security systems using both Vista and XP. The software connected immediately to the printer, asked me to print a test picture, and opened HP’s Solution Center software.

I like the Solution Center software. It’s simple, laid out intelligently, and tells me what I need to know at a glance. It gives me complete access to all of the C7280’s functions and status, an to HP’s support site. Help is built in, but I haven’t needed it. I glanced through the online manual, it looks intelligently organized and complete to my cursory glance.

I particularly like the scanner functionality. I can scan up to 50 pages from the top mounted sheet feeder, or individual odd sized documents from the glass. Documents can be scanned into all the usual formats, including excellent OCR RTF, but they can also be scanned directly into multi-paged, searchable PDF format. Now, I normally hate PDF, especially as an on-line format, but for certain things I think it is the best solution – say like scanning contracts and documents for the archives. Prior to the HP Solution center, we scanned documents in graphics format, then converted them to non-searchable PDF if they contained tables and graphics, or scanned them via OCR into RTF and then converted that into searchable PDF for text. With the C7280 and Solutions Center I can create searchable PDF documents of any size directly from the scanner.

Printing, including, color printing is fast, for a jet printer, about 33PPM. The C7280 also has double sided printing capability, though the rear mounted duplexer is a little loud. Not obnoxiously so, but it's distracting. Color photo printing is a little slow, depending on the quality of the photo and your printer settings, but the results are spectacular – better than any home printer I’ve ever seen and better than most commercial photo printers. The colors are fantastic. And speaking of color, there are six printer cartridges in the C7280, black, yellow, light blue, dark blue, pink, and magenta. The Solution Center or the printer display tells you the status of each cartridge and you only replace the colors you need instead of the whole damned toner cartridge like you have to on most color printers. The ink dries instantly and permanently, gone are the early days of smeared printouts.

The C7280 incorporates universal card readers and camera interfaces. You can select, edit, and print photos directly from the front panel or from the Solution Center. The card readers also function as a network drive and storage device and can be accessed from any computer in the network seamlessly. I like this feature a lot. I can pop a card in one of the reader slots and instantly share the pictures or data with every machine on the net without effort.

Faxing works as you’d expect – i.e. just fine, including hi-res color faxing to color fax capable machines.

If there’s anything I don’t like about it, it’s that the main feed tray lacks capacity. It only holds about 100 sheets compared to the full ream of heavy bond paper I can load in the Brother, two reams if you include the second paper tray. I wish the paper tray was larger, or there was an option to purchase an extended capacity tray.

I’ve been playing with the C7280 for a week now and overall I have to say that at $299.00 it is a bargain and a hell of a good machine.

I’ll move the C7280 into the printer rack later today, replacing the old hardwired Canon photo printer. I’m going to keep the Brother 8600 as a laser printer and as the fax machine for now (mostly because I’m too lazy to crawl under the desk and move the phone lines). The Canon will be moved to the basement storage room to join the ever growing pile of antiquated hardware and boxes of long outdated software (Hey, shove off. You mark my words, some day the the Smithsonian is going to make me an offer. Or someday the government will need an old 7-track Honeywell tape drive to read the CIA data files from the Kennedy Assassination and I’ll be ready. You’ll thank me then, you wait and see).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a SCSI II cable.

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*Note: There is one thing that does irritate me a bit. My old HP 3570c color flatbed scanner. One of the reasons I’ve kept that thing around is because it has an attached Transparent Materials Adapter for scanning film negatives and slides. Vista will recognize the scanner and load its generic Microsoft driver, which gives me basic scanner capability but does NOT recognize the TMA. HP announced a while back that they would not be updating the 3500 series drivers for Vista – i.e. buy a new scanner. Now the 3570c is old, but it works great, it takes legal sized documents, and I really, really hate giving up the TMA function.

Then, when I loaded the Solution Center software, it immediately recognized the HP 3570c including the TMA. And it works just fine.

Sure that’s great. Really, but why couldn’t I download that software directly from HP? Hell, I would have paid for it, something reasonable, I don’t expect HP to support outdated software gratis in perpetuity, but seriously here HP, what the hell?

Let's Start this Week out Right

shall we?

Latest From the Lathe, Aurora

Hey, it’s Friday, have some artwork.

This my latest piece, an Alaska Birch heartwood bowl, Aurora #108.

The wood comes from here in south central Alaska. Harvested last year and allowed to dry outside for several months.  Blanks were then cut cross-grain per my usual technique, and the bowl was then green turned to finish.  Once completed, the bowl sat in the drying cabinet until it reached about 8% moisture content – this took about two months. The shape of the dried bowl changed very little from the original green turned piece.

Once dry, the bowl was then sculpted using a variety of techniques and buffed to a polished finish.

Then I tried a new technique I’ve been working on. 

I won’t tell you how I did it, but the carved filigree was filled in with crushed semi-precious stone and copper flake suspended in a clear matrix.  Because the filigree goes all the way through the bowl walls, the jewel-like inlays are lit from within and change color with the light and viewing angle.  In the bottom pictures the inlay appears white due to overexposure (because I took the pictures with my small Pentax pocket camera rather than the big Sony professional model). But in the close-up you can see the jewel-like inlay in more detail.

The idea here is to invoke images of Alaska, the birch forests, the Aurora Borealis, and the gold, silver, and copper hidden in the earth and rivers.

 

 

This piece was an interesting project.

This is the first time I’ve pulled all of the things that I do together into one piece, including green turning, carving and sculpting, polishing, and finally the inlay technique.  It will serve a model for a whole series of similar pieces.

I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

From the WTF File

I buy good shoes, and especially good hiking boots.

One of the things you learn in the military pretty damned quick is that there is little as valuable or more important than quality footwear. Don’t skimp when it comes to boots. Seriously.

And that goes double for me. During an at sea boarding a couple of years ago, I managed to fracture four bones in my foot. Specifically my left instep. For various reasons that I’m not going to go into, it didn’t get casted up, I just kept the foot wrapped in a tightly laced boot and eventually it healed. Sort of. As you might imagine that type of stupidity has an associated cost. After I retired the VA X-rayed it, shrugged, and said, “Well, there’s not much we can do about it, now.”

So I get some percentage of disability for it, along with all the other damage the Navy did to my body over two decades, and I don’t think about it much.

But I buy damned good boots, especially hiking boots because otherwise I’d be crippled a lot of the time.

See this?

That’s the tongue of my expense leather Hi-TEC hiking boot. Notice the odd raggedy corners?

The tongue on the matching boot looks the same.

How did that happen?

What strange wear pattern do my boots experience that causes such odd damage?

Did you answer, this:

Somebody is going to get a beating.

Stupid cat.

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Crap, what were there? Ten, fifteen typos in this post? I'm suffering an allergy attack this morning and having a lot of trouble focusing my eyes, but damn, I didn't realize it was that bad. Urk. I think I fixed most of them.

Today's Music (Updated)

A discussion elsewhere reminded me of how much I enjoy Celtic music.

Especially the modern folk version of Celtic music.

Here's Loreena McKennitt and Santiago. The fiddle at the end is simply amazing.




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Celtic Music, I had no idea so many of you enjoyed this. I got email from a number of folks, some I've heard from before and some that were new to me, offering suggestions. Thanks folks.

Here's a few links, suggested by readers:


Doug Lamey and Cliff McGann from Boston. Both are members of The Boston Kiltics www.bostonkiltics.com



This is a group called Slainte, from the UK


Here's a link to a TED video of Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy


And Russell Hopper at the Irish World Music Academy:

This Week's Search Phrase

How Do I Speak in the Navy?

Like you got a pair.

Glad I could help clear this up.

The Return of Ted Stevens

The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge on Wednesday to throw out the corruption conviction of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens.

You’ll remember that last fall, during a heavily publicized reelection campaign, Stevens was found guilty of seven counts of lying on Senate disclosure forms and attempting to conceal more than $250,000 in gifts from his pals in the oil industry.

Steven alleged judicial and jury misconduct during the entire trial, and after his conviction vowed to appeal. He did. And yesterday that appeal paid off for Stevens when US Attorney General, Eric Holder, decided to “abandon” the case because federal prosecutors apparently withheld helpful evidence from the former Alaskan Senator’s lawyers.

Way to go, Justice Department.

Stevens had this to say about his abrupt vindication:

"I always knew that there would be a day when the cloud that surrounded me would be removed. That day has finally come. It is unfortunate that an election was affected by proceedings now recognized as unfair,"

Those of us here in The Great Land know Uncle Teddy isn’t the kind of guy to go quietly into the dark Alaskan night. But this morning he surprised even me when he filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Alaska alleging voter fraud and demanding that the recent senatorial election results be overturned and that he be reinstated as the US Senate’s longest serving Republican.

Alaska Governor Palin has not yet released a comment, but a spokesman for her office in Juneau said that the Governor had spoken to Stevens via phone and was reviewing the situation and that a reinstatement of Ted Stevens to the Democrat dominated US Senate would have to be carefully considered.

Alaskan Junior Senator, Mark Begich (D), could not be reached for comment.

US District Court Judge A. Foole, speaking from the steps in front of the 9th Circuit Court, said she had not seen the complaint but believed that Steven would have “a very good basis” for a possible reinstatement. She said she couldn’t comment further on an ongoing case and referred questions to Stevens’ legal representation, Steale & Lie.

Monday evening, workers at the Anchorage airport were seen re-installing the large “Ted Stevens International Airport” sign that had been removed following the Senator’s conviction last October. Calls to the airport Public relations office were met with a recording about volcanic ash fall closures and flight delays.

It’s going to be an interesting summer.

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The April Fools joke here is that only part of this post is an April Fools joke. It's up to you to figure out which part.

Speaking of which, Christ is it really April already?

Post Cards

Got a postcard yesterday from Kate. Pretty cool, huh?














Thanks, Kate.