Importance of multiple forms of ID when flying

Yesterday I was trying to catch a flight from Chicago to Columbus, GA, I handed my drivers license and credit card to the ticket agent at the Delta counter and in the rush to catch the plane I failed to notice he didn't give my license back to me, just my credit card. Imagine my horror when I went to hand my ID to the security checkpoint and I could not find my Drivers License. I quickly assesed my options and remembered I had my Concealed Carry Permit for my pistol; I thought what the hell it has my picture on it and it is issued by a government agency, I'll try it.

The agent who spoke a very accented English, looked at me like I was crazy while he was trying to figure out what it was. I told him that was all I had, because my license was lost. I couldn't believe it when he asked if I had something else like a SAM's or a COSCO card. I handed him my SAM's card. In the meantime the supervisor noticed that something was wrong and came over to investigate. When the supervisor saw the Concealed Carry Permit, he told the original agent, to let me go, he told the guy that the Concealed Carry Permit was much better than a drivers license since there was actually a background check done prior to issuing it, and if he saw another one let it go by as well.

After arriving in Atlanta I was paged to the Delta counter for a phone call. I was pleasantly surprised when the phone call was from a Delta agent in Chicago who told me she had found my license and I could pick up my license at the Columbus airport the next day.

Pelosi throws cold water on weapons ban

Pelosi throws cold water on weapons ban  unbelievably, the notoriously liberal speaker of the house, came to the aid of law abiding gun owners across the country. Earlier this week Attorney General Eric Holder raised the prospect that the administration would push to bring back the so called "Assault Weapons" ban. A ban that outlawed the selling of many semi-automatic rifles, that are extremely popular today with law abiding gun owners. The ban did nothing to stop illegally obtained automatic weapons that cause so much havoc around the world.

Eric Holder used recent violence in Mexico with automatic weapons and grenades (both of which are illegal in the US) as a reason to bring back the old ban.  But Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated on Thursday that he never talked to her. The Speaker gave a flat “no” when asked if she had talked to administration officials about the ban. “On that score, I think we need to enforce the laws we have right now,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference.

Syslog

Recently I was studying the syslog protocol and ran across this statement in the RFC for syslog and I thought it was interesting.

"Since the beginning, life has relied upon the transmission of messages. For the self-aware organic unit, these messages can relay many different things. The messages may signal danger, the presence of food or the other necessities of life, and many other things. In many cases, these messages are informative to other units and require no acknowledgment. As people interacted and created processes, this same principle was applied to societal communications. As an example, severe weather warnings may be delivered through any number of channels - a siren blowing, warnings delivered over television and radio stations, and even through the use of flags on ships. The expectation is that people hearing or seeing these warnings would realize their significance and take appropriate action. In most cases, no responding acknowledgment of receipt of the warning is required or even desired."

                              RFC 3164 The BSD Syslog Protocol.

Communitarian Network

In January, speaking at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, former president Bill Clinton praised the Brady Campaign for continuing to lobby Congress for a new gun ban, and suggested that the mood in Washington might be more favorable toward a ban now than it had been during the last eight years. Further in his speech he made the contradicting statement that no one wants to revoke the Second Amendment, but later in his speech made another statement contradicting what he said earlier about not revoking the Second Amendment.

"[W]e're now in a position to begin again," he said. "It's not a leftward movement. It's a forward, communitarian movement."

The Communitarian Network or "Movement" is a relatively new political philosophy that started in the 90's, their slogan is "For Individual Rights and Social Responsibility". This sounds really good. While stating that there are not supporting communism or socialism they also publish the following in their Public Platform.

"Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all of us belong. Nor can any community long survive unless its members dedicate some of their attention, energy, and resources to shared projects. The exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which we all depend"

 Sounds like Utopia, but also a little like Communism or Socialism. If you don't believe it read this paragraph:

"At the heart of the communitarian understanding of social justice is the idea of reciprocity: each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its members. Justice requires responsible individuals in a responsive community  .... Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others....Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others."

While stating individual rights as a goal of the movement; they contradict themselves with the statement about the Bill of Rights, in which the United States is based on:

"There is little sense in gun registration. What we need to significantly enhance public safety is domestic disarmament  ...... We join with those who read the Second Amendment the way it was written, as a communitarian clause, calling for community militias, not individual gun slingers."

Mr. Clinton supposedly wants to protect our "2nd Amendment Rights" with the Communitarian Movement. How can this be considering the above direct quote from their platform? On the "Movements" website they state:

"Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, for over a hundred years, that it does not prevent laws that bar guns."

 Obviously they have not read the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Report on the subject or many of the Supreme Court rulings that the 2nd Amendment's reference to "The People" is the exact same as the references to "The People" in the 1st and 4th Amendments. They state that it is an individual's right not the right of an organized (state or community run) militia.

The "Movement" likes to quote values of the ancient Greeks like the following.

"The ancient Greeks understood this well: A person who is completely private is lost to civic life. The exclusive pursuit of one's self-interest is not even a good prescription for conduct in the marketplace; for no social, political, economic, or moral order can survive that way."

The "Movement" obviously prescribe to the teachings of Greek philosopher Plato. In Plato's ideal state, the one-man rule of a tyrant is replaced by the one-man rule of a philosopher-king. The king uses a professional military/police class — the Guardians — to keep everyone else in line. Like the people of the former Soviet Union, the common people of Plato's ideal state would be trained periodically (once a month) in use of arms, but would have no right to arms, and arms would be centrally stored in state armories (Plato, Laws).
 

Because it does not fall in the "Movement's" ideals they totally ignore the wisdom of Aristotle. Like Plato, Aristotle considered arms a fundamental source of political power, but unlike Plato, Aristotle wanted ordinary people to possess this power. So it would seem they want to ignore the writings of Aristotle, who authored the Athenian Constitution this is a little odd since the Encyclopedia Britannica states, "Aristotle, more than any other thinker, determined the orientation and the content of Western intellectual history." 
In Aristotle's book, Politics, he argues that each citizen should work to earn his own living, should participate in political or legislative affairs, and should bear arms. 

Arms are essential to any good government: "Let us then enumerate the functions of a state, and we shall easily elicit what we want. . . . thirdly, there must be arms, for the members of a community have need of them, and in their own hands, too, in order to maintain authority both against disobedient subjects and against external assailants" (Book 7, ch. VIII). It was hardly surprising that dictators always disarmed their subjects: "As of oligarchy so of tyranny . . . Both mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms" (Book 5, ch X).

Aristotle considered the possession of arms synonymous with possession of political power: "when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name — a constitution . . . in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens" (Book 3, ch VII).

In the Athenian Constitution Aristotle even makes his position on the right to bear arms by explaining that throughout Greek history disarmament of the public was the first step to Tyrannical Rule and in every respect showed a great advance in cruelty and crime.

I compiled the above information from many different sources including but not limited to:
The Communitarian Network
The George Washington University
Communitarianism - Wikipedia
The Second Amendment - Wikipedia
Aristotle vs. Pluto
Arms and the Greeks
The missing guns of Bombay

Failure to Deliver What You Sold

I ran across this on the DSLReports homepage. It is so interesting the way Obama is living up to his nickname of the "Waffle King".

I am hoping Obama does well and pulls the US out of the hole, but I am afraid he is going to be a typical sales person and not be able to deliver what he sold the country. He sold the country on unity and a break from politics governed by special interest. The article below shows another broken promise.

Obama Stocking DOJ With RIAA Lawyers
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
02:12PM Thursday Feb 05 2009 by Karl Bode

Techdirt, CNET and Slashdot all note that the new Obama Justice Department is looking increasingly like a RIAA/MPAA reunion, with a flood of ex-industry lawyers now stocking the DOJ shelves. In addition to Obama's RIAA-friendly VP pick, Obama has hired several of the of the RIAA & MPAA's top lawyers (Tom Perrelli, Donald Verrilli), and the BSA's anti-piracy enforcer (Neil MacBride). Assuming he adheres to them, Obama's own rules would prohibit these gentlemen from working on issues where they've represented the entertainment industry. Still, it's not exactly a comforting development for those who wanted more progressive leadership when it comes to copyright.

Good Day for Verizon Speeds

It amazes me the difference in speeds I get with my Verizon broadband connection with no changes in my configuration. I have seen speeds change from 128kbs to 1549kbps.

Today is the fastest I have seen so far, generally it is around 380 - 450 kbps.


I still wish I could get a DSL connection, but if I could sustain this type of speed I would be content since it is a faster download than the fractional T1 I used to have here at a 10th of the cost. The upload speed is about 1/3rd of the speed I used to get with the T1 but it is still usable for VPN and Terminal Server operations.

SASS Cowboy Action Shoot

You are invited to view Dale's photo album: SASS SASS Crawford, AL - Jan 31, 2009 by Dale Pictures from the first SASS (Cowboy Action) shot held at East Alabama Gun Club View Album Play slideshow If you are having problems viewing this email, copy and paste the following into your browser: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=dalesides&target=ALBUM&id=5297673459135359953&authkey=B_rJatV0DNY&invite=CMHA-J8L&feat=email To share your photos or receive notification when your friends share photos, get your own free Picasa Web Albums account.