Whales in the Creek

As a young boy growing up in a part of the U.S. which has winter weather well suited for outdoor activities, I learned at an early age to ski. The small hill in the back of the house led to an equally small creek at the base of the hill. Occasionally my ability to stop wasn’t quite up to the task so I ended up in the creek. It may have been a little cold when breaking through the ice but that doesn’t stop a 4 or 5 year old.

Then an uncle who randomly showed his face around his mothers house found it great fun to tease me when he visited. One of the things he used to say was to be careful about falling into the creek. I asked why and he would say with hushed tones, “there’s whales in the creek.” I’ve returned to that little house in rural Minnesota and I see the creek has enough water in it to water a few gardens and keep a few frogs happy in the summer. Any fish larger than a minnow would die for lack of water.

The point in telling that story is to illustrate the obvious foolishness of taking everything literal. As a young child it’s not unusual to misunderstand jokes, totally misinterpret sarcasm and to fully believe what adults say. Sooner or later most ‘normal’ people outgrow literalism and perhaps a little magic of discovery along the way. Skepticism takes over because of our understanding that things aren’t always as they are presented and we should no longer become dupes or stooges. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Now comes another story in the news about two young tourists wishing to vacation in the U.S. but are denied entrance based on a twitter posting. Homeland security I suspect uses tools which monitor the Internet for posts with keywords that raise a threat level concern. It should be all too obvious in the U.S. with this current state of heightened paranoia posting certain phrases may get you a visit with people wearing suits and or security personnel with bullet proof vests and helmets. Foreigners however haven’t had the correct political and security phrases indoctrination we have so a word or two out of place and the world becomes a nightmare for the naive. As an example while visiting a friend in the airport and as you greet him from a distance, don’t yell out, “high Jack!”

Picture from CNBC

That can cause you problems and so does posting on twitter; “I’m going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe.” Two young tourists were handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles because of the concerns of U.S. Homeland Security.

It seems no one within the U.S. security services understands Brit slang which defines ‘destroy’ as party and get very drunk. They also seem to be short of TV viewing hours because the part of digging up Marilyn Monroe comes from a TV show, ‘Family Guy‘. The U.K. Daily Mail also goes on to say there are many other words or phrases which can get you into trouble with our security services. It was nice of them to do that but it leads me to my point as I first told the story about my childhood.

As an adult, we have to be intelligent enough to discern between real threatening things such as people who have a pattern of doing harm or engaged in activities which are or could be harmful. We also learn while growing up to not take everything we hear or read literally. The truth of the matter is our airport screenings have gotten out of hand, such as when TSA does a pat down of old women with colostomy bags, very young children, our own U.S. senators and as evidenced in this article, so too have our DHS authorities. Perhaps they should rely on more than a keyword scan for words and phrases somewhere in the social network or blogosphere. Use of these words are supposedly triggers in these scans and the reactionary forces with too much money and not enough brains might pay you a visit. This is a perverse use of technology without regard for the consequences of its use.

Related articles

• British tourists arrested in America on terror charges over Twitter jokes (dailymail.co.uk)
• Brit pair deported from US for ‘destroy America’ tweet (go.theregister.com)

Hey Google What’s Up?!

It’s all over the news right now. Google is changing the way they do business with those of us using their services. They want to identify us more by combining all the collected data in software platforms in which they provide service. If you use Google search, YouTube, Picasa, Gmail, Google+, Google Maps, blogspot, etc., they want to aggregate individual data to be able to track, quantify and ultimately sell those capabilities to their paying clientele.

Sooner or later all of us in the tech universe should realize it comes down to making more money and when you have provided all these services and have the technical savvy which Google possess, it’s only a matter of time whereby the anonymous nature of the individual wanting to use their service is going to give up more of that anonymity to feed ‘the beast’. Facebook has been moving in that direction and now Google.

Effective March 1st 2012, if you want to continue to use their services you will be automatically agreeing with their new policy. You won’t be able to click somewhere on the screen to ‘opt out’. The only way to opt out is to close your account if it is provided by Google and quit using their search engine.

Want to learn more on what your options are and how this might affect you? Go here — Google changes FAQ.

Related articles

• How to prepare for Google’s privacy changes (cnn.com)
• What to do before Google’s privacy policy changes on March 1 – Macworld (macworld.com)
• Google Executive Chairman Warns Against Regulation (webpronews.com)
• Last chance before Google rounds up your web history (ctv.ca)
• Make Sure To Clear Your YouTube History Too Before March 1st! (googleexposed.wordpress.com)
• Big Brother Google (blogpackinglight.wordpress.com)

Why American Foreign Policy is Broken

To be sure something as complicated as international relations is a tenuous business at best, however American foreign policy has been a stick and carrot mentality for over 100 years and with great emphasis on the stick. There are many examples, such as our military involvement with Iraq and Afghanistan whereby we not only planned regime change we expect their people will want to adopt democratic rule along with capitalistic economies. Success in the international community most often is judged by historical review and that’s where perhaps we need to take off the blinders.

The US clearly moved away from isolationism when it engaged itself in a war that to this day makes little sense, the Spanish American War. The 1898 Treaty of Paris, which followed the end of a 10 week war, was favorable to the U.S., allowing temporary American control of Cuba and, following their purchase from Spain, indefinite colonial authority over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

WWI and II, and to a lesser extent the Korean war, were our last successful forays into gun boat diplomacy. Each of these wars produced “state offspring” which carried on with rebuilt nations, albeit Korea became a divided government. The prosperity and degree of freedom among the people of South Korea far overshadows the North.

It is the nation of Cuba which displays a vivid reminder of how poorly and in such an amateur way, the U.S. has failed to help secure a more free and just society. From the end of our late 19^th century hostilities with Spain to this day, America has failed miserably in helping this country. John Quincy Adams, who as U.S. Secretary of State from 1817 to 1825, compared Cuba to an apple that, if severed from Spain, would gravitate towards the U.S. From the beginning of the 20^th century to date, we did everything we could to corrupt and rot the apple.

When the U.S. was at the height of expanding it’s economy and population, selling soft drinks and automobiles at an ever growing rate, the darker underbelly of capitalism, arguably the same type of forces in play today, were exercising their influence on Cuba. Havana in particular became sort of the adult Disneyland in the 1950′s. The political as well as organized crime influence peddlers of the day had set up what they saw as a huge mecca for illegal foreign trade and gambling. The leadership was corrupt and mostly under the control of U.S. money, whatever it sources. The succession of puppet dictators provided fertile ground for revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

The indigenous Cuban population was treated badly for it’s Spanish heritage and strong allegiance to Catholicism by it’s English speaking mostly Protestant neighbor 90 miles north. Casinos and brothels were de rigueur for this island economy and the message of freedom combined with the anti-capitalist voice of Marxism were generally well received by the youth and the disenfranchised worker. Castro started out as a lawyer in Havana and took on the cases of those who could least afford it. He honed his oratory skills and saw an opportunity to realign the economy and appeal to the populist morality.

After elections were shown to be corrupt and the majority of voters could no longer obtain justice through the ballot box, revolution became their only viable option to change things. Despite the latest in U.S. armaments and financial support of the existing regime, the guerrillas lead by Castro won the support of the population and over threw the dictatorship.

What followed this change was where the U.S. in a continuous series of failed coup and assassination attempts pushed Castro in an alignment with an equally powerful ally, the Soviet Union. America’s attempt to embargo Cuba’s chief export sugar, and subsequent removal of technical support of the internal communication systems only exacerbated the problems. American politicians minimized diplomacy and with the guidance of the CIA aligned themselves with American Mafia leadership to come up with a plan to kill Castro or destabilize the country. Castro with every reason to become paranoid encouraged and supported efforts by the Soviet Union to become influential in the western hemisphere and permitted the construction of land based nuclear missile facilities in Cuba.

Numerous books and movies have dramatized and fictionalized the great diplomacy of the Kennedy administration in handling the “Cuban missile crisis” all the while absolving the American leadership of their part of the responsibility leading up to the crisis.

What can we learn from our failed Cuban diplomacy? Are there lessons we can take away from our half century of continual misunderstanding and characterizations? If our primary objectives are to influence people to become free of despots, clearly our actions toward Castro and Cuba have done nothing to enhance our credibility. We were supportive of Cuban dictators who were favorable to our economic interests, but did whatever we could to destroy their economy and leadership when Castro refused to see it our way.

In truth, we polarized a nation and it’s leadership in our actions toward Castro and Cuba. What we should have done with him and their country is take the John Quincy Adams approach of diplomacy. Using whatever means possible we should have acted as if we are a kind and forgiving nation, pretended to be their friend even if we really despised his leadership and offered trade and economic policy which would enhance our communication with the people of Cuba.

As-is, we did everything we could to isolate them, make them our enemy and ensure hatred and misunderstanding through 10 Presidents and 50 years of lost opportunity. Does that sort of bull headed attitude work on a personal level with you? If you had a family or a member of a family that attempted to prevent you in succeeding economically and even went so far as to attempt to kill you, how much of a friend or a member of that family would you want to be? Does this type of strategy really work anywhere? We are told it does but I can almost guaranty it won’t by looking at our history in world affairs. Perhaps we should reassess our gun-boat diplomacy in the middle east.

Related articles

• Gingrich: I’d Overthrow Castro
• “First of all, you thank heavens that Fidel Castro has returned to his maker.” (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• American Congress moves to lift ban on Cuba travel | British Airways – Travel Industry News (travelnews.britishairways.com)
• Mort Zuckerman: Time for U.S. to Review Its Cuba Policy (usnews.com)
• Huge Oil Rig Ready To Drill Off Cuba (miami.cbslocal.com)

Change – The One Constant . .

The End of an Era?

There’s a familiar ring to that phrase and I’m sure it has been used in a number of ways to describe the changing of a generational control, passage of a phase in music or the changes in technology.

I’ve seen many of these come and go but as this article points out with some truth is that much of the curiosity of how devices work appears to no longer be of interest. The End of the x86 Era by John Dvorak points out “that nobody in today’s market really cares how anything works.”

“This public divorce from mechanism actually began before the poke-and-shove interface. It was realized during the wishful thinking ethos of the 1990s when people wanted computers to become appliances.”

He continues to briefly describe the mutation of the early personal computers into the push, shove, point and click interfaces we have on the small Pad and net-book platforms we have today.

This metamorphosis hasn’t simply been confined to computing, although I can recall driving around in Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota from surplus store to store looking for suitable discarded electronics parts from the many major manufacturers found in the area. I and my fellow technology oriented friends wanted to build our own computers. Those with the earlier boat anchors were given tremendous street cred by fellow computer geeks for their ability to scrounge, program the I/O and display something resembling a program on the typically RF connected portable television. Graphical development in those early machines consisted of using characters such as the asterisk, period, comma, etc.

There were many other pursuits into photography, home movies, amateur radio, radio controlled aircraft and rocketry. Many of us repaired or modified cars and motorcycles. Although I never experimented much in the area of customizing other than a carburetor / exhaust enhancement, I did my own British motorcycle repair as well as some of the first few automobiles I owned. I still do some of the maintenance items such as brake pads or computer tech through OBD II scanner.

By and large the era of the do it yourself person has changed from electronics projects through distributors such as Radio Shack, Heathkit, Lafayette Radio and Allied Electronics to home projects assisted by large retailers such as Home Depot or Lowes.

I think my generation has an interesting place in history. It bridges the gap from grandparent pioneers and World War I veterans to parents who were grounded in the Depression era and World War II. We were a curious generation often schooled in trades and tinkered with many different electronic and mechanical projects. Some of these interests were idyllically captured on film such as American Graffiti or Goonies from cars to gadgets.

Will we see a resurgence in interest of how things work? Perhaps not as prevalent but the Internet has many sites dedicated to furthering our understanding. I’m still waiting for the plans to build my own Transmogrifier. Calvin and Hobbes fans will understand that reference.