my own drum

Response article to New York Times original artice 'Failure to Navigate'

The U.S. Coast Guard set about on an ambitious plan to retrofit their existing fleet of ships and aircraft, and to add additional capabilities. This was to enable them to expand their current missions to include homeland security. And then something went horribly, expensively, wrong.

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The title of this article links to the pdf version of the Iraq Study Group Report. That report is the second kick to 'stay the course', the first coming on the day after elections. 'Stay the course' as official public policy is a dead horse, finally. And as Bushes go, this ranks right up there with "Read my lips, no new taxes". President Bush has attempted to build a Bush legacy for the White House, and he wrongly decided to utilize much of the braintrust of his fathers presidency. The legacy may not go down so well after all.

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This week the news is from Taco Bell. A familiar strain of e-coli bacteria has turned up in their food in the Northeast, making some people very ill. This on the heels of a national recall of fresh packaged spinach back in September, which was closely followed by an outbreak of botulism in carrot juice. Why do I even care? I don't eat fast food as a rule, and I'm not into branded organic products either. But I do like fresh spinach. The reason that I care however is because these cycles of bacterial infection make clear that there are holes in the structure of our food distribution networks. We are a nation of consumers (no news there), and being consumers we must be able to trust our sources since we don't actually produce for ourselves. Those in charge of food safety and distribution seem to be real good at notifications and tracking down sources of infections, but they are failing at prevention. And as much as I hate to point this out, our food chain would seem to be highly vulnerable to external influences - people who would infect that food as a means to an end. So my concern is not about a localized infection, natural or otherwise, but about how the distribution of a that infection or tampering could easily reach a large number of people.

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Imagine the prospect of thousands of individuals in places all around the world, each communicating what they know with one another. If they are doing this on a wiki website or a blog, chances are good that their communications would be indexed with a good search engine, making them readily available for all the world to see. What if that same group of individuals all shared a common chat room? Maybe one of them has an image or a file that needs to be shared with the others. Wait, that sounds like.. the internet.

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The girl is all over the place, getting her mug, and her vagina, coast to coast coverage. The picture we all want to see isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I've only seen an altered version, so that even what I could see, I couldn't. I'm once again reminded of "Dot's Rule".

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The news reports are in for this week, and a major winter storm dumped a lot of snow across the midwest US, from Texas to Michigan. Up to 18 inches of snow was reported in Butler, MO, with many places reporting more than a foot.

And then the power outages began.

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