Reluctant Politician

We found ourselves, as Americans, reminded today that there are people out there who want us all dead. Based upon intelligence reports, al Qaeda tried to bomb at least two Jewish places of worship in Chicago. Much like the Christmas Day bomber of last year, the terrorists’ plot was foiled.

Some may say that this attempted terrorist attack proves our security measures to protect our borders are a failure. In my opinion, this latest failure by al Qaeda proves how well our intelligence agencies are performing a task which in all reality should be nearly impossible to achieve.

Yes, our security measures are not 100% effective. This won’t be the last time al Qaeda – or another terrorist group – tries to harm Americans on our own soil. And eventually something will slip through the cracks. Any bookie or mathematician would tell you it is a simple numbers game. No security system we put in place will ever guarantee our safety without a doubt. There will always be blind spots as we are a country with relatively open borders. A simple fact which I hope never changes.

Hundreds of thousands of people fly into the United States daily. Approximately 90,000 flights occur within U.S. airspace each day. More than 70,000 cargo containers enter U.S. ports every day. Not to mention the tens of thousands of cars and trucks which cross our borders with Canada and Mexico on a daily basis. As well as all the cruise ships which dock at American ports and unload passengers carrying suitcases.

I do not support the stripping of our freedoms which came about via the passage of the Patriot Act and subsequent interpretations of it. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have used it to continue to slice away at privacy previously afforded every American by the U.S. Constitution.

However, neither will I deny the success which our intelligence agencies have had at preventing further attacks since 9-11. Nine years after the fall of the Word Trade Center’s twin towers, we find ourselves in a world where al Qaeda has become so disorganized and ineffective that the organization is now reduced to trying to mail bombs from Yemen via UPS and FedEx to churches in Illinois.

Protecting American citizens has had a heavy price, but this is actually a government bill which seems to come with a positive outcome as well. The results speak for themselves. May that fact never change either.

Some of you may have noticed that this website – as well as practically all my other sites – was unreachable for several days last week. No, I had not given up on my political convictions and abandoned you the reader. It turns out my webhosting company did a critical kernel patch and installed new blade servers. To put it mildly, the brief down time scheduled for a mere few minutes on Thursday night instead stretched into a nightmare of technical problems which kept this blog– and thousands of other websites hosted by the same company – offline through nearly the entire weekend.

All is better now though. It appears the issues are resolved and as far as I can tell so far no data has been loss. With that said, if you come across any missing or corrupted articles, please feel free to let me know. Luckily, I do have a backup of the site stored on my MacBook Pro just in case disaster should strike.

Now back to the business of American politics. And as always, thank you for reading.

(Note: Posting of this article was delayed by a major outage of the webhosting provider causing this blog to go offline for several days. The published date has been adjusted backward to reflect when it was meant to go live here.)

Mario Sepulveda, 39, is the second miner to leave the San Jose mine with the Phoenix rescue capsule the night of October 13, 2010. An accident trapped 33 miners for more than nine weeks in the mine located near Copiapo, Chile. CREDIT: HUGO INFANTE/GOVERNMENT OF CHILE

Major props go out to the entire country of Chile for pulling off a picture-perfect rescue of all 33 trapped miners.

If you have not already seen it then by all means take a look at CNN’s 360-degree view of the mountain location of the mine. For such a desolate area it was amazing to see the mass of humanity which was basically camping out awaiting the rescue operation to succeed.

As incredible an undertaking as the rescue was, much of the credit goes to the miners themselves for functioning as a group to survive for 17 days entirely cut off from the outside world with no idea if anyone would ever find them at all. Or if anyone was even trying to after more than two weeks.

It is also nice to see how the American government and private companies contributed to the rescue efforts. While it received some news coverage here in the States, I have no idea if our involvement was recognized by the news media of other countries. Nor does it matter. Helping is its own reward and all those who contributed from Chile and around the world, I’m sure that seeing the face of each miner as he exited the rescue capsule was a priceless joy. (continue reading…)

While I had promised in my previous posting that I would tackle the issue of taxes next time, well, it is not going to happen. At least not yet. That post is still planned for ‘next’ time however. I found myself elsewhere discussing ways to save electricity. My simple posting there became something much more in-depth than I had planned and decided to move the whole thing to here. I’ll go back later to my personal blog and try once more to write the simpler yet related related posting from scratch on that site.

With all our electronic gizmos and indoor climate control it comes as no shock that as American we are easily among the top users of electricity in the entire world. Surprisingly the numbers are not as bad as could be expected, but there is still much room for improvement.

According to the CIA World Fact Book the United States has the world’s third largest population at 307 million people – massively trailing India (1.15 billion) and China (1.34 billion). And with an annual average population growth of less than one percent – placing 130th in the world – it is assured that we’ll be outnumbered for many years to come.

The truly interesting numbers to me though are in our generation, utilization and waste of electricity as nation. (continue reading…)