More on responsibility in the context of gun control

To follow up on the notion that the electorate is uninformed, it is incredible that the gun control zealots are unable to understand the problem, and when you can't define the problem your solution will not make any difference. As reported in the "Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City" for the first six months of 2010: 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic and 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. According to Ann Coulter, the murder rate among white Americans is as low as the murder rate in Belgium. "So perhaps it's not a gun problem," she has concluded. "Perhaps it's a demographic problem."

The gun control argument is that gun laws intended to put guns into the hands of "good guys" are the laws that also multiply guns in the hands of "bad guys". Note that these guns are hand guns and are not the topic of the current assault weapon rhetoric. Gun buy backs in inner cities have had mixed results and may be a short term solution, but in the long term the problem of the black ghetto underclass has to shift from the politically correct argument that white racism is the cause and black inequality is the result. As an example, Bill Cosby is one voice that has tried to transform black helplessness, frustration and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action. As the dropout rate approaches 70% and the teenage single parenthood is about 80% in the lower economic neighborhoods, Coz has emphasized to the students the importance of their education: “Study. That’s all. It’s not tough. You’re not picking cotton. You’re not picking up the trash. You’re not washing windows. You sit down. You read. You develop your brain.” His message is that black poverty will only end when and if black people themselves take responsibility for changing their lives.

Ironically when the country has moved to where the president can and should be an inspiration for those in the black ghetto underclass, he and the gun control zealots are unable to place responsibility where it belongs

Responsibility

Wrote this before the concept of blogs was imagined! More true today...

America is faced with a shortage of personal responsibility at every level of society. In America, pre-World War II, the churches, the schools and the families inculcated the standards of acceptable behavior. New generations learned the established and agreed upon customs of cooperative and civilized behavior very much as they learned a mother tongue. Starting with the psychedelic 1970's, we have been encouraged to do our own thing and all the traditional concepts of right and wrong have been replaced by a psychological approach to values: instead of being taught that there are absolutes by which they must abide, children are taught, "You'll feel better, if you do the right thing." Thus, having replaced moral concepts of good and evil with therapeutic categories of desire and feeling, we have lost the ability to instill a sense of character in young people and will likely continue to produce new generations of cultural orphans. Character is about one's adherence to moral principles and the standards of conduct that distinguish right from wrong.

Moral principles are not relative to the revisionist history of the moment. A clear lack of personal responsibility is when the President of the United States can admit that he lied to the American people, but urges the American people to be angry with Congress for making an issue of his lying - and they agree. The philosophical basis of this new lack of personal responsibility is rooted in determinism, the argument that people have no control over anything they choose to do, since everything anyone ever does is the result of a chain of causes. In order to fill the void of moral accountability, Americans generally rely on the courts to support the moral underpinnings of our culture which among other consequences results in piles of regulations and commensurate numbers of lawyers. As an example, most pundits agree that runaway medical costs could be seriously checked by tort reform. During the 1980’s Americans did collectively start accepting greater personal responsibility for their actions. This new attitude impacted social programs, as people questioned the assumption that unequal distribution of wealth is always society's fault. More recently, both intellectual and financial success have been demonized and we are moving away from the traditional American value that people are responsible for their own lives.

Dr. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish physician incarcerated in one of Hitler's concentration camps. From that experience, he developed a new school of psychiatry; based on the premise that mental wellness is not achieved by helping the individual understand what caused his psychological problems, but by taking action to resolve the problem. When Dr. Frankl lectured in the United States, he would conclude with a plea for Americans to erect a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast because, he declared, freedom requires a balance between those two ideals, liberty and responsibility.

My last day in Napoli

9/21/2012 Anno Domini:  Wake up and grab some breakfast at Capo landing on the way to the FIAT service center in Pozzuoli  to pick up the technician at 0800 who will recode my Panda for the new ignition key and remote. Fortunately, I had been there on Wednesday to purchase the key (former key went missing). , so knew the way because the center is not easy to find.  On the way, coffee spills and my Telepass device drowns.  Before leaving FIAT, asks the tech to grab jumper cables as car has been sitting in garage for several weeks.  Drive to Capo is stop and go, and I am sensitive to riding clutch because on Wednesday rental car clutch popped while on Tangenziale which is another story and one that I was fortunate to walk away from.  Somewhere around Vomero car slips back a few inches and nudges Polizia who just motors on...

Get tech on base through security and proceeds to synch key with car using his laptop.  Turns out battery in car is fine, but battery in laptop is not. After a few tries, the key and car are properly coded.  Drive tech back to Pozzuoli pay the 100 Euro service charge, then return back to the Capo base...

Stop at Vodafone to give them my Iphone which had a new SIM installed Wednesday but did not work.  (Note alternative was some sort of three month process to terminate phone service.) This was the second time, I had been to Vodafone with the same problem and so wanted my money (approx $50) back.  Clerk informs me that “this is not the way we do things in Italy.”  ...

Drop by the JAG office to get POA so Lenny can sell Panda after I leave.  Getting POA is a priority as will be difficult if done long distance.  Sign says be back in five minutes, after 15 I leave. Check in on Lenny but he is not in (my old) office.  Drop by Security, another priority, but they closed at 1100.  Participate in a much appreciated farewell lunch with Lenny and Kirsty. Strategized on how they could maintain the momentum gained in the last couple of years...

Drive to Support Site for 1300 meeting in housing. Landlord did agree to sign release form so that deposit could be returned minus some sort of year end 700 Euro charge for gas.  Did not dispute, but wonder why service would not be terminated if bill had not been paid in eight months, but apparently this is not the way they do things in Italy.  Got my deposit from cashier at support site in cash (largest note they had was 100 Euro). Remember that for a long time 500 Euro note could not be tendered in Naples because the notes were generally considered counterfeit. Go to NEX to terminate Telepass and phone.  End up paying about $50 for last bill which I am being told will be reconciled with a final final phone bill in about six months...

Drive back to Capo and JAG office.  Great that both Lenny and Notary are there, because this is a two part process where you have to go to motor vehicle office (fortunately in same building) to fill out form and then to JAG for notary.  Completed just before 1530 closing. Over to Security (open on a Friday afternoon!)  to sign some forms and do what they needed to do.  Next stop: Vodaphone. SIM and phone now working, but considering I leave Italy in less than 12 hours phone is not as useful as it could have been the day before when coordinating pack out and appliance pick up from the apartment in Marechiaro...

Go to Capo NEX to exchange NATO gas coupons for gift card. Kept one coupon to fill rental. Next, clean out Panda which is still on base. Car was best memory of Italy, but no opportunity to drive this trip to Italy.  Drive downtown to see if I cannot get a leather briefcase that I had bought and then had to return for repairs when the handle broke.  I had been back to the store at least a half dozen times, but they were always closed.  Stop on way to top off rental using gas coupon. Unbelievably store is open and clerk remembers me and DOES have the briefcase, but instead of repair, it is replaced with a different color briefcase.  I wanted my money back, but remembered that this is not the way they do things in Italy. Traffic congestion so bad that it took more than an hour to drive back to Capo and so had to top off car at Esso station near Hertz.  Suspicion attendant took my 15 Euro and never filled car, but needle may have needed more time to sense fuel level.  Return car to Hertz without incident. Nice stroll back to Capo, as I have made the same walk while in the rain with suitcases etc. ...

It’s now about 2100 and I have a beer and special order pizza at the Capo landing.  Both are good. Italian bartender starts talking about how locals can't be trusted, and as an example he tells me that each year he gets a surcharge from the gas company for about 700 Euro when the gas company figures out that their pension plans have been underfunded for the year.  Now, this is THE way they do things in Italy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Aircraft Factories Shutter, Space Remains Bedrock Industry in Southern California

National Defense

April 2011

By Stew Magnuson

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Aerospace employed some 160,000 workers in the region in 1990, but that is down to about 47,000 in 2010, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Other states such as Arizona may have friendlier tax codes, or lower cost of living for employees, but one can’t easily pack up a satellite manufacturing facility and move it to friendlier states, said Craig Cooning, vice president and general manager of Boeing space and intelligence systems.

“What really built Southern California was the aerospace industry,” he said. The state would benefit from an understanding of why so many companies have left, he added. He did not want to elaborate, but taxes and regulations have been the oft-mentioned reasons for the exodus.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of space industry consolidations. Both the Raytheon and Boeing facilities in El Segundo were once part of Hughes. Northrop Grumman merged with TRW in 2002, and took over its facility in Redondo Beach.

Hughes Communications Inc. carried on the famous industrialist’s name as an Internet satellite services provider for more than a decade after relinquishing its satellite manufacturing business to Boeing about the same time. In February, Englewood, Colo.-based EchoStar acquired Hughes for $1.34 billion. Soon, the only places where the legendary moniker may remain in Southern California is on the streets that bear his name.

Because of the different space-related nexuses in Southern California, the region has a unique and knowledgeable work force. Two of the three largest satellite manufacturers, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, remain in Southern California. Lockheed Martin, the third, is in Sunnyvale near San Francisco. NASA affiliated facilities such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and the Dryden Flight Research Center are nearby. The Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in El Segundo and Vandenberg Air Force Base where rocket are launched to the north, are also located here.

Google for the Brain

A colleague of mine, Scott Coughlin, established a blog called a IT Thought of the Day. Afer reading an article in today's USA today about "augmented reality", here is my thought- coupling a Google for the brain with “augmented reality”.
How often have you recognized someone, but forgot their name ? Although this by itself may be embarrassing, memory loss can obviously have more dire consequences. Our brain is a sponge that absorbs a lot of information starting at an early age. Would it not be useful to be able to recall what is locally stored? Indeed, I find myself using Google to seek information about stuff that I was taught in school, but have forgotten. According to Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, “What we remember at any single moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can influence our delicate memories.” Making our memories more accurate and more accessible would require a Google-like search engine which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers. Furthermore, there's no reason in principle why neural prosthetics could not incorporate this sort of functionality.
To take this one step further, you could upload this memory bank information to a smartphone which combines a camera, GPS and web access. The phone's camera can already "recognize" an object or place that a user is pointing to by overlaying the screen's image to location data. The travel industry is starting to exploit this new "augmented reality" technology to give tourist-friendly information about restaurants, sights and shops. This information could readily be displayed on the heads-up display of the wearer’s glasses. Imagine while you are talking to someone you have access to all his public information (e.g. Facebook etc.) and all the information that was shared in previous conversations or observations. A more far-future neural prosthetic might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see Google results on your retina. If everybody were on Facebook, we could know anybody’s name that we saw on the street – and more.
Opposing viewpoints about whether having a Google brain is a good thing or bad thing are discussed in Discover magazine's Google is Making Us Smarter and Atlantic Monthly's Is Google Making Us Stupid?.
There are additional cons. One issue that will have to be resolved is the downside of surfacing repressed memories which are usually traumatic in nature and block a painful time in one’s life. Another issue is that in general our Google brains also are changing to become overly dependent on the rewards of the Internet. According to neuroscientists stopping this frequent self-directed intellectual stimulation, may become hard to stop. Not only does this result in less downtime for our brains, but it also can lead to exhaustion. Many studies have shown how important downtime in the brain is for creative thinking, working memory in general, all complex problem solving, and of course, error detection.
After all, when we recognize someone we want to actually get their name right.

Maritime Domain Awareness at a nexus

Recent piracy activity calls attention to the notion that today’s interdependent global economy depends on the free and uninterrupted use of the sea. Not only is the U.S. Navy well positioned to help other maritime forces and organizations maintain an orderly maritime domain, the enabler of Maritime Domain Awareness is critically positioned at the nexus of the technological and cultural implications of networking; the renewed impetus for data sharing across government and non-governmental organizations; and the general goodwill for building maritime partnerships.

Networking
Networking and social networking, in particular, are the astonishing phenomena of our time. Conventional wisdom is that the value of a network is demonstrated by Metcalfe's Law (a network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users). However, Reed’s Law argues that Metcalfe actually understates the potential value of the network, because the real power of the network is not n² but 2n, which is a number that gets large very fast. Ipso facto if Facebook was a country it would be the 4th largest country in the world.As digital networking brings scale and global reach to all aspects of our lives and activities, established processes will adapt and evolve. Collaboration will replace structural impediments that often exclude valuable contributions. Wikipedia is an example of collaboration - small contributions/comments become a resource for all to use. Clay Shirky who focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies (and recently cited by ADM Stavridis) argues convincingly, that even though hierarchical organizations are established for the purpose of efficiently allocating resources and achieving goals, they are inherently inefficient and self-limiting. Networks can be an alternative to centralized and institutional structures. Consequently, legacy models of authority based on personal or institutional authority are evolving to what is termed algorithmic authority. This refers to regarding as authoritative the unmanaged process of extracting value from material from multiple sources - sources themselves that are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness. Trust comes from producing good results (Wikipedia), or when people trust others (eBay). A key enabler of Maritime Domain Awareness is a robust network that allows for information to be accessible, usable and sharable.

Info Sharing
Recently, after the attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound flight on December 25, the White House reiterated its information sharing policy. Although the 9/11 commission famously concluded that authorities did not “connect the dots”, the case for more information sharing got more impetus last Christmas. To highlight a new era of open Government, President Obama on his first day in office directed all agencies to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure .Likewise gaining momentum is the unifying concept of information sharing for maritime security partnerships and for good reason. According to the Naval Studies Board, “A comprehensive MDA system would permit identification of threatening activities and anomalous behavior. Achieving such a system where it does not now exist—and strengthening it where there is already a foundation—must be viewed as a critical step in building regional partnerships.”Some regions already have established MDA information sharing networks, some examples being the Malacca Strait Security Initiative partnering Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia; the Gulf of Guinea network; the Joint Interagency Task Force-South that addresses concerns in the Caribbean region and the Virtual Regional Maritime Traffic Center - Americas (VRMTC-A) in Latin America.Good enough, but the diversity and complexity of interests in the maritime domain require an outreach to additional entities: law enforcement agencies, local civil authorities, commercial and nongovernmental actors, like shipping and insurance companies.The downside of collecting all this flood of information (estimated at 1,200 exabytes) is the challenge of analyzing the data to spot patterns and extract useful information.There are policy issues. Critics perceived President Obama's plan for "knowledge discovery," as a revival of the controversial data-sifting program that the Bush administration launched after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A recent Economist article on the deluge of all this data points out that the potential for good depends on making the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data – and when to share it.
From a technical standpoint, the Navy’s emphasis and investment in Maritime Fusion and Analysis Services recognizes the challenge of finding the needle in the haystack. Using rules derived by crunching through billions of transactions, credit-card companies have led the way in their ability to monitor purchases and identify fraudulent ones with a high degree of accuracy (e.g. stolen credit cards are more likely to be used to buy hard liquor than wine). Similarly, fundamental to maritime anomaly detections are the rule sets that trigger an alert. Developing these rule sets comes under the umbrella of Techniques, Tactics and Procedures and should be a Navy priority.

Building partnerships
The security of any country is improved by improving situational awareness of what is happening in its maritime areas. Therefore any country ought to be willing to share relevant data with those it perceives to have congruent interests. Relationship building and information sharing during normal times is likely to influence the ease and trust with which information or individuals can be accessed in a time of crisis.ADM Roughead has remarked , “You cannot surge trust because trust will underpin everything that we do. Trust does not have a switch: you can't turn it on, you can't turn it off. It is something that takes time to build and must be worked cooperatively to maintain that trust.”The success of the 19th International Seapower Symposium (ISS) at the Naval War College underscored the world's maritime services’ enthusiastic commitment to bridge regional initiatives and build a network of partnerships by linking cooperative efforts beyond and across traditional regional maritime boundaries. "I believe that we maritime service chiefs are on the cutting edge of international partnership, and I do believe that we must challenge ourselves during ISS 19 to think expansively about how our mutual efforts can safeguard international peace and prosperity in the 21stcentury," said ADM Roughead.According to the Naval Studies Board, information sharing can be facilitated through combatant maritime operations centers which develop awareness and relationships with partner nations. Exercises and exchanges build trust.The bottom line is that the pace of networking, info sharing and partnership development is accelerating. Maritime Domain Awareness is on the bow wave.

DoD Official Policy on New/Social Media

The Department of Defense released its official policy on new/social media today. The policy (Directive-Type Memorandum 09-026), which is effective immediately, states that the default for the DoD non-classified network (the NIPRNET) is for open access so that all of DoD can use new media.