The Navy is really on the wrong track

I read and article today that I can't find right now, but it said that Congress has lost faith in the current navy leadership. The issues are a combination of policy and lack of forthrightness in budgeting. The real issue is the mismanagement of all aspects of defense policy and procurement. I am a Republican and am center-right, politically, but I really dislike what I have seen in recent weeks. I am a consultant and can read a company portal that continually has good defense-related articles from the defense websites. I have questions for some time the idea that building the stealth destroyers for billions of dollars each is a good idea. Why stealth destroyers? What is needed, instead, are good, seaworthy ship with advanced electronics and weapons. We don't need to hide ships from our Islamic enemies, especially Al Qaeda and the Iranians. YOu could argue that the Russians are now enemies and the Chinese are a threat, but that still does not justify building ships that cost too much and can't be produced in the needed numbers. There are a range of issues that concern me about the navy, from the building program to aircraft acquisitions. One good feature of a radical change in administration is that there are Democrats who believe in a strong defense and who have good ideas.

Bill Dyer on the Texas Supreme Court decision

When I heard that the Texas Supreme Court had sided with the appeals court, I hoped that Bill Dyer would comment on the case. I found that Bill has more to say. He says that the ruling is not as negative for the Texas Child Protective Services as it is being portrayed in the press.

The polygamist protectors and apologists

On the way home yesterday, on KRLD radio, I heard part of an interview with a lawyer who is on the polygamists defense team. She said that fears that the polygamists would flee Texas if they get their children back are unfounded. I don't believe it. The Dallas Morning News has more on the story. The polygamists have functioned in their enclave ("Yearning for Zion") for this long because of their apologists and protectors. It is unclear who all their protectors are, but they have them. Otherwise, they would have been shut down long ago. Leftists who are interested in bringing down the more conventional institution of marriage are at least apologists. Polygamy is somehow tied up with Gay Rights and Gay Marriage.

You know your claim is stupid when...

The bozos who are claiming that they are allergic to Wi-Fi are the latest in goof-ball leftist agitation. You know when you have gone to far when the gay, leftist, sysadmin cartoonist, J. D. Frazier ("Iliad"), says you are stupid. Today's User Friendly cartoon shows the talking, artificially intelligent computer saying that. (for some reason, he makes it impossible to link to a particular day's cartoon).

More thoughts on the news group mass extinction

I suspect that news providers that have described themselves as "uncensored" are uncensored no longer. The United States, in the present political and legal environment has been eroding what we thought were constitutional rights. The sad thing is that much of this comes from the far left, not just the fundamentalist Christians. I would guess, though, that the prime movers in causing news providers to drop news groups is the copyright enforcement threat, by way of lawsuits, and the full-court press by law enforcement. The same thing is happening in Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands. So, we end up bidding alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyrob a fond farewell. I am sure that there are other groups that I just not tested yet. We might as well be living in the People's Republic of China.

A recent mass-extinction of news groups

I was shocked that some old standby news groups that I had been following for a decade have vanished. I was going to check to see if there were new posts on the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyrob and found it was gone. Over the years, I had been looking at pictures from there and then deleting them. Now, it is no more. Do you suppose that Color Climax is on a tear, enforcing their copyright, so the news providers dropped the group for fear of litigation? In any case, it is gone. There is apparently no such thing, anymore, called "fair use". The damnable DMCA seems to have blown it away. Soon, the UseNet will be reduced to amateur groups and spam. It is already largely spam, but some of it is moderately interesting, except for being repeated so often!

Bill Dyer answers Eugene Volokh

Bill Dyer has an interesting blog post where he challenges Eugene Volokh's assessment of the appeals court ruling about the polygamist cult children (children of the "Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints" "sect" or "cult").

Eugene Volokh writes about the polygamists

A Texas appeals court ruled that the actions of the Texas Child Protective Services were unjustified today. Eugene Volokh writes about the situation at his blog. When my wife heard about the court ruling, she was appalled by it.

Wild fluctuations: what is the cause?

I continue to be baffled by the wild fluctuations in traffic, particularly on my Blogspot blogs. I just got an error that makes me think that "Blogger" is having ongoing issues, at least with some of the servers where some of my blogs reside. I have speculated that the positive spikes for an hour or two are what the traffic would be if there were not technical "issues".

Some more speculation

I have thought that the reason that the State of Texas is so wary of the "Yearning for Zion" crowd is that they are afraid that some court is going to make polygamy and adults having sex with children legal. This is, after all, in the post "Lawrence" judicial environment. By the way, KRLD radio reported that Texas Child Protective Services was turned back by a demand that they get another warrant before entering the "compound".

Two topics

Right now, there are two topics that have my intense interest. One is the ongoing flap over the polygamous cult in Texas. The other is the balloon in the price of oil and gasoline.

As for the first, I heard on KRLD radio this afternoon that apparently, there are more children being hidden at the compound. I assume that they have some problem like pregnant 12 year old girls or the like. What amazed me is that armed guards at the compound turned away the child protective services people and would not let them on the compound. If I did that I would either be arrested or dead. What's the deal?

As for oil, I really expect that as soon as a few days from now, we could be at $150 per barrel and very soon after at $5 per gallon gasoline. We could be quickly at $200 or $250 per barrel oil and $10 per gallon gasoline. How long can Congress keep us from drill for oil offshore, where we know it exists and how long can they keep us from getting oil from the oil sands in Canada and the Upper Mid West? Alaska is not really an issue, as it would take too long to get oil from there. If they won't give in, a clever opponent in this election could beat them with this issue. Of course, the Republicans are incompetent goof balls, just like the Democrats, so we are in deep trouble in the near term. Let us hope that I am wrong!

The wild west is gone

There was something fresh and exciting about the Internet in 1997 and 1998. It lasted for a bit beyond that, starting with the DMCA, the Bush administration, and September 11th, things have gone downhill. There are still some good things happening, but we are at the mercy of the government, the RIAA, and the motion picture industry. We no longer can get uncensored internet search. Instead, we are in a tightly controlled sandbox. While there is a market for an uncensored search, the government would never allow it to exist. Google is the worst offender. Yahoo has not buckled under quite as far as Google. Google is desperate to keep the government happy, so that it will not curtail their business. How will this be fixed? I doubt that electing either Barack Obama or Hillary will change anything. The politics are so incendiary that no one can touch the issue. It seems like our Southern Baptist friends, along with their leftist feminist allies are riding roughshod over rights, claiming that we need to suspend the constitution to achieve their righteous goals.

More Barack Obama thoughts

Barack Obama is the sort of "rock star" personage that Martin Luther King, Jr. had become. Martin Luther King, Jr., we find, had all these lefty white women throwing themselves at him, and being a normal man, he was weak enough to partake of some of their favors. We came imagine that Barack Obama is seeing some of the same sort of thing. He is the great hope (not white) of the left. He is their best chance to have a radical left president in our time. Jimmy Carter comes close to him, but did not have the rock star aura that Obama has. I believe that it was the National Enguirer that had the headline a few weeks ago about the Obama marriage erupting over Barack's infidelities. There may not be anything to it, and the Clinton camp probably will not want to use what they have for fear of alienating lefty voters, but if it is real, it will eventually be exposed.

Are the rumors true about Obama?

I just read Susan Estrich's piece on Hillary and Obama, and I came away wondering if the tabloid rumors about Obama might be true. Is it not plausible that he is a philanderer? All you have to do is listen to his condescending tone to women: the "Sweetie" comments to women reporters.

This is amazing: the strap-on, powered wing

This guy has achieved what people have been talking about for more than fifty years: the flying man. It may not be the "jump off the ground and fly" thing, but what he has is really exciting and amazing.

More weird stuff

The old "Former Naval Person" blog has had some good days recently, but today is the pits. I cannot tell if it is technical problems with Blogger or Google doing bad things, either at Blogger or from search. My TypePad blog that is also "Former Naval Person" had a run of better days, but has dropped back to a lower level. When the traffic was up, it was all driven by different nationality Google search sites. Now, there is a big "unknown" source, which I have thought was from Yahoo image search. My advice to everyone is that if you can, you are better off if you can stay in the good-graces of Google, as when they cut you off, it is pretty grim. A nasty feature of Google is that it is impossible to communicate with them about things like this.

More weird stuff on the web: Blogger at work?

When traffic for the original Former Naval Person blog dropped off this morning, I wondered if Yahoo search had done something. I checked the IndexTools referalls, and Yahoo still predominates, followed by AltaVista. So what gives? I theorize that Blogger is "doing something". After all, they are responsible for putting a robots.txt on the blog to keep Google Image search from indexing it. Regular Google seems to not have the same restrictions, because the TypePad version of Former Naval Person, with similar content, is growing in traffic. You tell me what is happening, because I don't have clue (I bet you guessed that). IndexTools shows that almost all the traffic is from some form of Google search, so that is an indication that Blogger is doing bad stuff. I like Blogger and depend on it, but I don't like what they have been doing to FNP.