Donald Winslow's blog

If Mitt Romney’s “47%” quote didn’t make the Republican agenda completely clear, the statements of a couple of Pennsylvania legislators leave no room for misinterpretation. Like many states, Pennsylvania recently passed a law requiring would-be voters to present identification cards. As in other states, the law is being challenged in court. Usually supporters of such bills claim they are trying to eliminate voter fraud, but the PA Republicans make no bones about it. Their target is lazy people.

According to this article published today in Wikinews, State Representative Daryl Metcalfe said “We have 40-something percent of the people that are living off the public dole, living off of their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there who are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need.” House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said that the voter identification law is “going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania”.

The implication is clear. If lazy people are allowed to vote, they will support policies that allow them to avoid work. This is an unveiled attempt to marginalize slackers! I argued in June that slackers need to demand access to information if we want a voice in politics. Clearly we need to demand the right to vote, also. If the Republicans are correct that 40-50% of Americans are slackers, we will not be ignored!

If I get around to it, I’ll ask my wife to stop in the county building and get sample ballots before the first Tuesday in November. That way I can publish them here at donaldwinslow.info, and other slackers won’t have to walk downtown to learn who they get to vote against on Election Day!

Foreign forces in Afghanistan are between a rock and a hard place–we can’t stay but we can’t leave. Now one may argue it’s been like that all along. Afghanistan has been plagued by war for decades; surely civil war will follow when ISAF withdraws. But now there are some concrete logistical barriers to leaving.

Earlier this year Pakistan refused to allow the United States to transport supplies through their territory. An apology and a bit of haggling allowed those routes to reopen, but it will still be dangerous and costly to move equipment and supplies out of Afghanistan.

And now insider shootings are frustrating American attempts to train Afghans to take over security. That’s the key step in the plan. Karzai and Obama assure us the Afghan forces will be able to keep militants in check after NATO and allies are gone. But American forces have now suspended training Afghans because of the increasing incidence of uniformed Afghans shooting foreign soldiers. By various accounts, 10-25% of these killings may be accounted for by Taliban infiltration and coercion. If this was actually the Taliban’s plan, it’s brilliant. If foreign forces can’t train their replacements they can’t leave. But they will have to, because of declining morale and domestic pressures, so they will leave without replacements.

Tyrell Mayfield (http://www.thekabulcable.com/?p=1513) pointed out that the number of insider killings is in fact small compared to the incidence of suicide among American troops. In fact, in July more American soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. Now I’m not going to pretend to understand what causes a soldier to take his own life, having never been in combat nor had suicidal thoughts, but I think it must be related to declining morale. So the Mujahadeen are winning the moral war. By this I do not mean that a majority of Afghans believe that the militants are more righteous than American or Afghan troops; rather I mean that the militants believe in what they are doing more than the American forces believe in what they are doing. And because Jihad is a movement and not an organization, drone strikes on prominent leaders and innocent villagers will only draw more militants to the fray.

The war in Afghanistan is becoming decreasingly popular in the United States, as it is in most of the nations who have sent troops. In the USA the main two presidential candidates avoid the issue. Mitt Romney did not even mention the Afghan war–the longest running war in US history–during his convention speech. Barack Obama can only say that we are leaving by 2014. But for many Americans that’s not soon enough. And most observers are forced to conclude that Afghanistan will not be ready by that time.

So we can’t leave, but we can’t stay.

On 12 August 2012 an article by Mark Brunswick on domestic drone use was published in The Star, a Canadian newspaper.

Brunswick states that as many as 30,000 may be in use in the USA by the end of the decade. A Predator drone was used in 2011 to arrest six individuals on their family farm in North Dakota, apparently for cattle rustling. Some drones are small enough to be hand-held.

The military is pleading for more money for pilots. Even though these devices are unmanned, it takes a lot of men to fly them. The Grand Forks Air Force Base is expecting to acquire about 20 more drones and about 900 more personnel to operate them.

A sheriff’s deputy reported seeing one hovering above his patrol car.

The ACLU wrote a policy paper called “Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance”.

Brunswick quoted Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School: “Think about it; they are inscrutable, flying, intelligent. They are really very difficult for the human mind to cleanly characterize.”

Brunswick quoted Al Palmer, director of the University of North Dakota’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research, Education, and Training: “Where aviation was in 1925, that’s where we are today with unmanned aerial vehicles. The possibilities are endless.”

Let’s think about some of those possibilities. Clearly not everyone will be able to obtain a permit to fly a drone, so drones will serve to enhance the power of the federal government. If not properly regulated, they could allow private contractors to spy on individuals beyond the scope of government contracts. Drones have been subject to cyber attacks, so they could even be used to serve the interests of insurgents or criminals or terrorists. Alternatively, they could be used by a corrupt administration or regime to maintain power. Currently, it takes a lot of human work to operate them, but they will inevitably become more autonomous. Eventually, they could even be threatening to those who operate them.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1239494–aerial-drones-spies-in-the-sky-signal-new-age-of-surveillance

We are currently under water rationing in Shawnee. For instance, our household is only allowed to use water outside on Tuesdays and Fridays, and only before 10 am or after 6 pm. We are told that the lake levels are fine, and the limitation is rather the capacity of the water treatment plant.

There are two questions one might ask about this situation. One would be “Why did the City of Shawnee contemplate building a sports facility on the other side of the highway if the water treatment plant needs to be upgraded?” On the other hand, “Why do the citizens of Shawnee need treated water to spray on their lawns?”

We should all have rainwater collection systems on our houses. I had one at the last house I inhabited, but haven’t put one in here. I have no interest in watering my lawn (then I’d have to mow it!), but I would like to water my vegetable garden. It rained tonight; I should have had my buckets out!

Every time an election comes up, I find myself cramming at the last minute to decide whom to vote against. Usually I don’t even know what races I’ll see on the ballot. Sometimes I don’t even know there’s an election until Tuesday! Now if I read the paper every day and attended public forums I’d be much better informed, but we slackers will never have a voice in politics unless we demand easy and transparent information about elections. Unfortunately, Pottawatomie County does not have a webpage and there is no simple way to be sure what will be on the ballot when I go into my polling place.

To rectify this situation, I asked my wife to stop by the County office and ask for sample ballots for our precinct (630003 in Shawnee, Oklahoma). I scanned them and posted them here. There’s a ballot for the city elections, and Karen (a registered Democrat) also picked up the Democratic primary ballot. Sorry, you’ll have to look elsewhere for the Republican ballot.

I received a message in my inbox from Staples, Inc., asking me to review a product I buy fairly frequently. I went ahead and filled out the review form and wrote a two-word review and then clicked “publish”, but an error message came up to tell me I needed to agree to the user agreement. So I clicked on the user agreement (with a company called PowerReviews) to see if I would agree to it and found this passage:

“By transmitting product or service ratings or reviews (collectively, “Reviews”) to the Review Service, you hereby (a) irrevocably assign and transfer to PowerReviews all of your rights, title and interest, on a worldwide basis, including, without limitation, all intellectual property rights and moral rights, in and to such Reviews; (b) to the extent the preceding assignment and transfer is ineffective, grant PowerReviews an exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display such Reviews throughout the universe in any media…”

So you’re telling me I can’t publish my review on Venus, because it’s now owned by PowerReviews? I’m probably violating their intellectual property by publishing part of the user agreement. So sue me.

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of making a rule to limit the amount of carbon pollution from new power plants. The press release states that it will be possible for natural gas and even coal plants to meet the standards. To meet the standard, a gas plant simply has to be efficient enough to produce at least one megawatt-hour for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Now coal is basically carbon, so how is it possible to burn coal without emitting carbon? The answer is that a power plant can capture the carbon dioxide and store it somewhere. Forever.

According to the press release, “Even without today’s action, the power plants that are currently projected to be built going forward would already comply with the standard. As a result, EPA does not project additional cost for industry to comply with this standard.”

So the proposed rule does nothing. Nevertheless, the National Audubon Society is urging its members to write the EPA to demand that it enforce the rule it’s making.

I’m sure I’m simplifying the situation, because I have not read the whole 257-page proposed rule.

The latest issue of The Lancet has an article about the movement to legalize assisted suicide in Britain (Holmes, 2012). In the same issue there is an open letter to the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, asking for the company to control the distribution of a drug it produces so that the drug won’t be used for capital punishment in the United States (Nicholl, 2012). It’s interesting to note that on this side of the pond, we tend to have the opposite set of viewpoints. A government should be able to take a citizen’s life, but no one can take his or her own life.

Holmes, David. 2012. Legalise assisted suicide, UK Commission urges. Lancet 379:15. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960005-1/fulltext

Nicholl, David J. 2012. An open letter to Michael Ball, Chief Executive of Hospira Pharmaceuticals. Lancet 379:25. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960013-0/fulltext

OK, I was there and I briefly held a sign, but isn’t the message kind of lost here? After all, the 99% already occupy Shawnee. The point is more clear on Wall Street. Nevertheless, spirits were high in Woodland Park, and the people did outnumber the squirrels. Passersby seemed receptive once the message was explained to them. The veteran’s sign says “I fought for all of America not just 1%”.