The-Asterisk

As many of you may know, I, T. Hyphen Asterisk, was in the Navy for over 30 years both active and reserve. The entirety of my career was spent "behind the green door" in secure spaces. In my case, the green door was entire buildings, but for many of my fellow sailors, it could have been a cramped, closet sized compartment on a ship or a sub. Nevertheless, the intelligence which we gathered gave the US and our allies the edge in putting the Cold War to bed (despite the best efforts of traitors such as Aldrich Ames, Ronald Pelton and the Navy's scourge, John Walker .) After joining the Navy Reserve, my assignment was to a unit which worked in and around the NSA in this iconic building. One of the missions which our organization was assigned to prosecute was Own Force Monitoring or OFM. If you have ever been on a military base, you certainly saw the stickers on every telephone reminding you that your conversations may be subject to monitoring. Well, guess who did the mon...

All of the brouhaha here , here , here , here and here , about  Indiana over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is really much ado about nothing. First, one thing I can say without reservation is that conservatives SUCK at messaging. SUCK! Conservatives care about the end result, not the journey to get there. Liberals know how to spin and are willing to spend years in the wilderness as they slow chip away at the edifice of social norms. George Stephanopolous' well orchestrated attack on Gov. Mike Pence on This Week, last Sunday was no accident. Pence had to have known that he would be punching the tar baby. Why he chose to subject himself to such a set-up is puzzling. As George kept baiting him with the question "Under this law, is it legal for a florist to deny service to a same-sex couple citing religious reasons?" and later "So, answer yes or no, is it OK to discriminate against gays in Indiana?", the governor was not going to take the bait, so he ...

For those of you without a Netflix account, shame on you! That means that you likely have never watched House of Cards . Kevin Spacey's exquisitely played character, Francis J. Underwood, is the protagonist of this series, now in its third season. Caution: Spoiler Alert. Plot twists ahead. To call Frank Underwood "ambitious" would be like calling Donald Trump "an achiever." Underwood grew up poor in rural Gafney, South Carolina, went to college at The Sentinal (Citadel, anyone?), then ended up running for Congress in South Carolina's 5th District after marrying Claire, a young, well-to-do college girl from suburban Dallas. In Season 1 he was the House Majority (Democrat) Whip. Denied his promised Secretary of State position after helping with the election of President Garrett Walker, and feeling double-crossed, he and Claire went on a conniving and scheming (and somewhat murderous) tear in Washington DC. In Season 2, as a classic manipulator and pul...

I will probably "step in it" on this one, but I wanted to comment on former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani's recent, rather un-PC comment that President Barack Obama doesn't "love America". It was quite a dumb thing for a seasoned politician to say even if it was a private event (ask Mitt "47%" Romney about that) unless he really wanted to evoke comment and controversy. When Giuliani attempted to walk his comment back last week, he really didn't say what I think he really meant. Let me see if I can "help" him with that effort. President Obama loves America. He would just love it to be different and it is his love for the country he knows America could be that he twice ran for, and was elected as its President. Less than a week before his election in 2008, Barack Obama told the world, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Certainly, no one can argue that he has not been rathe...

I just read this insightful piece  (not inciteful , well... maybe a tiny bit inciteful) by Kurt Schlichter. It is entitled, "Ignoring Conservatives = President Hillary" It is about how Republican presidential candidates will ignore conservatives at their own peril. My takeaway from the article, though, is what he wrote in the second part of the piece under Lessons Three and Four. It is about how candidates need to use social media for more than 140 character fluff pieces. I would have titled the article "Je Suis Iowa", but since the Townhall.com editors didn't choose that name, I took it! I have followed Kurt on Twitter for many years and he has followed me since way back in the day. His acerbic wit and biting commentary make following him fun, and his ability to toy with trolls like a cat plays with a wounded field mouse never fails to entertain. He knows Twitter and knows how to use it, so his suggestion on how candidates can connect with potential voters i...

While going through some old stuff, I found this 1990 letter to my Congressman. Although it was written 25 years ago is it still a valid idea?     April 13, 1990 Congressman Owen Pickett Washington, DC Dear Congressman Pickett,         I would like to propose an alternate form of taxation. As an independent business owner, I am acutely aware of the twisted and grossly unfair way that we are taxed. Let me tell you right off that I do not mind paying taxes… my fair share, that is. I feel very strongly that all people should pay taxes. Our system of government 'persuasion' by non-taxation has everyone constantly worried about the tax consequences of every business decision. The first question is not whether something is good for business, rather we worry about how it will affect our taxes. We as a people give billions of dollars per year to banks just so we do not have to give it to the government. Is this logical? I think not....

Sustainability . It is one of those words whose meaning has shifted, in recent years, from the dictionary definition to a more trendy meme-style  feeling. When I hear "sustainability", I think of environmental activists and left-wing reactionaries with an agenda to sell but I also think about average folks who just want things to work year after year in a non-wasteful manner. You probably thought this posting was going to be about how businesses can operate in a more sustainable environment, but I want to talk about another aspect of sustainability... back to the dictionary meaning of the word: "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level." I want to know why businesses cannot exist in a sustainable, non-growth manner. Friday's Wall Street Journal had an article about how Tesco, UK's massive grocery and merchandise retailer, is struggling to continue its growth curve. Because growth has subsided, the Tesco stock has plummeted over the past 12 mont...

(The-Asterisk asterisk: I was writing this post before the Apple announcements on September 9, 2014) I am not an expert in the minutiae, but I know a bit about security. Here is my 'simple man' idea to fix the rash of fraudulent credit card charges and debit card withdrawals happening more and more these days. Let's first stipulate that just about everyone has a smart phone onto which an app can be installed, or to which a text message can be sent. Every credit card on file would be registered with an app installed on a phone belonging to the cardholder. Even with multiple cards of various types, the user would be covered (hopefully by a single app.) So, when you go into Target or Home Depot to make a purchase with your compromised credit card, you swipe it at the point of sale (POS) and during the verification process, a challenge procedure is triggered. The credit card clearing house would send an alert message to your app (or a text message to your phone). Thi...

It all started with a lightning strike last week. We love the TV show 24. Jack Bauer is the man, so we DVR'd the series when it started again in May. Last week a TREMENDOUS thunderstorm moved through our area and there was a lightning strike at our house. It was so close that there was no delay between the flash and the thunder. Nothing appeared damaged until Monday night. We always start watching the show about 15 minutes after it starts so that we can zip through the annoying swamp of commercials. So, we settled into the den around 9:15 and turned on the DirecTV box and the TV. "No Signal" was the message on a beautiful blue background. The little orange light on the front of the DVR indicated that it was recording the show so I didn't want to power cycle the box, but after 20 minutes of trying, I determined that the satellite receiver had taken a hit. No 24 for us tonight and we had no recording of this episode. The next day, I went looking for the vi...

With the recent FCC ruling , which seems to be pushing the door closed on the "open Internet", fresh in everyone's mind, Comcast (also known as the 800 pound gorilla, or the "Evil Empire") is indicating that within five years, Internet usage will be metered like electricity or water. Kind of sounds like a utility, doesn't it? But, if Comcast and other Internet service providers (ISPs) are deemed to be utilities, then they would not be able to discriminate against consumers and content providers like they can now. Comcast really wants it both ways. They want to tie up their cable TV offerings, restricting access to content that they have purchased, plus they want to either charge alternative content providers like Netflix or Amazon or put a "pay for usage" billing model on consumers. If I was Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cox or any other ISP, I would want it that way too, but there is precedent to stop it. Like electricity or water, there is a ...

As someone who has written software, I became aware of the term creeping elegance early on. It is the natural tendency to add features and to keep tweaking at the user interface making the application "just a little bit better". If you succumb to the siren call, you can end up spending a lot of time creating (and fixing) features that no one really wants, while avoiding spending time innovating. It is my humble opinion that Apple has swerved into the world of creeping elegance with its latest v7.0 and v7.1 releases of its iOS. Apple released the new v7.0 in September 2013. I resisted upgrading my iPhone and iPad for a while, adhering to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" maxim, as well as the "don't upgrade until the .1 version is out" theory. When I finally upgraded sometime in November, I was underwhelmed by what I saw. It appeared to me that Apple changed the user interface (UI) just because it could. After all, how can you be e...

I just participated in a short thread on Facebook about childhood diseases prompted by a tweet from Donald Trump and a Mother Jones article . It got me thinking about how many diseases I contracted as a child (measles, chickenpox, mumps, influenza, mononucleosis, etc.) and how many I was inoculated against (polio, smallpox, tetanus, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhoid, etc.) If one were to listen to modern day experts, I should be dead by now. It seems that every technological advancement fixes 99% of the problem, but then there pops up an advocacy group to wear us down over the final 1%. Remember how filthy and stinky our air was back in the 1950s and 1960s from car exhaust? We got rid of almost all of it with catalytic converters and changing gasoline formulation, but now there are still groups that go apoplectic over the last .01% of any tailpipe emissions. Look at our water quality. Rivers used to catch on fire ! So, now, we have rivers so clean you can almost drink out of...

My local newspaper recently ran an opinion piece by Paul Krugman  concerning Paul Ryan's report on the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty. The Fiscal Times also ran a piece on the same report. In my response, I reference a column by Coby Dillard which is linked here . I wanted to share my response to the newspaper. Paul Krugman is the undoubtedly the most arrogant pundit to grace your pages. In “The Hammock Fallacy” he criticizes Rep. Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee’s new poverty report for twisting the conclusions of research cited so voluminously in the report. In spite of, or perhaps because of his Nobel Prize in Economics, Mr. Krugman makes no such citations himself, relying solely on his own unassailable version of facts to rebut the Congressman.   Research properly done produces statistics and figures commonly referred to as facts . Reports, based on these figures, produce opinions. Like the story of the six blind men and the elephant , a set of facts han...

A day at the office At one point on Friday, there was a NINE AND A HALF MILE BACKUP at the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel ! To Norview Avenue! NINE AND A HALF MILES! Every time I hear someone wanting to give the government more power and to let them spend more money on this program or that program, I think about our traffic situation in Hampton Roads. A backup of that magnitude in our metro area is inexcusable . Highway traffic (especially on our interstates) is the lifeblood of our region. Unless a bomb went off in the tunnel or a ship crashed into one of the bridges, there should NEVER be a tie-up like that. If you owned a business and someone dropped a big messy jar of something at the only door in and out of your establishment, what would you do? Take four or five hours to clean it up, or would you swoop in, scoop up what you could, mop up the rest, and worry about who to blame afterwards? NO ONE seems to care about the effect of these government indecisions on ...

Progress is a funny thing. You can walk into a brand new house, or a house that is 50 or 75 years old, and fundamentally, it is the same. You have your electric outlets, pipes for water, drains for the sinks, ducts for the air conditioning and some sort of heat. Lights haven't changed much, Sure, your phone lines feel a little lonely, your TV antenna wires have been replaced with cables and you have a lot more junk that you don't need, but really... thing haven't changed that much in a house. But think about how your life has changed, how you entertain yourself, how you eat differently, how you communicate and where/how you work. That has changed monumentally, but from the outside it all looks hauntingly familiar. So, what about education? Lots of change, there. Modern elementary and middle schools look like colleges, staffing levels are through the roof, the cafeteria serves all three meals and school has become as important for its day care function as it has for its ...

Strassel: Harry Reid's Senate Shutdown The Senate didn't pass a single appropriations or jobs bill in 2013. by Kimberley A. Strassel ( From wsj.com 1/10/14) The popular judgment that Washington's dysfunction is the result of "partisanship" misses a crucial point. Washington is currently gridlocked because of the particular partisanship of one man: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And Republicans are warming to the power of making that case to voters. It's often said the 113th Congress is on track to become the "least productive" in history—but that tagline obscures crucial details. The Republican House in fact passed more than 200 bills in 2013. Some were minor, and others drew only GOP votes. But nearly a dozen were bipartisan pieces of legislation that drew more than 250 Republicans and Democrats to tackle pressing issues—jobs bills, protections against cyberattack, patent reform, prioritizing funding for pediatric research, and strea...

Outrage. That sense of being incredibly, vein-poppingly angry about something you have no control over and that you feel is totally someone else's fault. The sort of outrage that residents of Ft. Lee, NJ are expressing this week over the discovery that members of Gov. Chris Christie's staff ordered lane closures as alleged retribution for Ft. Lee's mayor's unwillingness to endorse Christie's bid for reelection. I get it. It sucked being backed up in traffic for close to an hour. Normal rush hour gridlock extended into the mid-day time frame. Heck, people are even calling it a "public health issue" because ambulance service couldn't get across the bridge. But what about non-Governor-caused traffic tie ups? Those where there is a bad accident and a major highway is shut down for hours with no regard for those involved in the tie-up? Where is the outrage? Where is the class-action lawsuit when you have been held captive in a traffic snarl for 90 min...

You are sitting in 23B, a middle seat near the rear on a packed Southwest 737-700. On the second leg of your flight to Las Vegas, you try to get as comfortable as you can, considering the circumstances. You usually book Early Bird so that you can board in the "A" group, but you screwed up and forgot to check the box when making your reservation, and to make matters worse, you didn't log on 24 hours ahead to grab the earliest boarding number you could. So, there you were. Getting on the winged bus holding a C27 boarding pass which meant 146 people had boarded before you. The overhead bins were already full, but you were able to push and squeeze your carry-on bag in the bin six rows back. Well, at least you found a free space. You made eye contact with the big guy sitting in 23C on the aisle. He gave you that "Damn, you had to pick this row" look, unbuckled his seat belt and tripped into the aisle. You guiltily slipped into 23B and shoved your shoulder bag und...