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Monthly Archives: January 2013

Things That Concerns Seniors


Many seniors have concerns ranging from health to social security:

  1. On the health front-the issues are incontinence, sex drive  or lack of if you believe the as seen on TV ads. The sex thing is more that it just takes too much energy and the recovery time is well into the next day so sex has to be scheduled for weekends only. Medications that help some ailments but require other medications to mitigate the side effects of the first medication and sometimes yet another medication to mitigate the mitigating one.
  2. The hair issue by the time you get all of  (whats left) the gray hair coated, covered or dyed its time to do it again, taking up way too much time which you have very little left anyway.
  3. In the social security area you receive what ever amount you get minus the price of medicare part a,b and sometimes d. This reduces the net amount you have to live on.  Your heating gas, electric and other utilities continue rising as you use less. Your conversations revolve around : what celebrity died to day and which ones are gay.
  4. You keep a list of the 1/2 price dinners in your area ( sometimes you don’t even like the food but its a deal!). You watch reruns because you can’t remember if you saw them.
  5. You keep a list of the stores that have a seniors discount day.
  6. You can’t figure out why you can’t make a call because you pressing the buttons on the remote , further confusing are the 3 to 4 remotes required to operate the TV, DVD player and cable box, trust me Universal remotes are not universal.
  7.  When you thought it was bad enough-you get shingles a remnant from the time you had chicken pox and couldn’t remember having it, so you didn’t take the shingles shot.

Lastly you have to pat yourself on the back (without injuring yourself) because getting old is not for wimps.

What Is The Answer?


Today I spent several hours listening and watching the Congressional hearing on the proposed “assault” weapons ban or what ever it will be called. The pro and cons are difficult to assess as the two overlap so much. No current firearms owner wants any more restrictions placed upon them yet the need for some sort of control over the availability or access to high capacity firearms or really the  magazines or clips is the  big issue. I did not see this addressed, I saw and heard the same information that has been out there for years. This information cannot, will not and has not resulted in the desired end. There have been some progress but not what current laws were purported to address. I t seems to me that we have a situation where any illegal weapons, no matter what the origin is will be available to people who use illegal means to get them. This process has nothing to do with the people who follow the laws, local and federal to own and procure firearms.  The issue appears be a way of halting the legal or illegal purchase and use of firearms with high capacity magazine or clips*. Laws do not work because the lawless do not follow them. Armed security in schools is  like having children in jail except for having no bars on the windows and doors. Many public buildings have metal detectors at the doors so there is no issue there but all of this still does not address the availability of illegal firearms and what to do about it. Until this issue is resolved this conversation will have no end and we will all be assailed by rhetoric on the subject until Utopia arrives somewhere in the far distant future, perhaps.

 

*Clip is synonymous with magazine

How the ATF works


The ATF works in typical government fashion to protect us as evidenced by the following article. 

In the fictional world of television police dramas, a few quick clicks on a computer lead investigators to the owner of a gun recovered at a bloody crime scene. Before the first commercial, the TV detectives are on the trail of the suspect.

Reality is a world away. There is no national database of guns. Not of who owns them, how many are sold annually or even how many exist.

Federal law bars the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from keeping track of guns. The only time the government can track the history of a gun, including its first buyer and seller, is after it’s used in a crime. And though President Barack Obama and numerous Democratic lawmakers have called for new limits on what kinds of guns should be available to the public and urged stronger background checks in gun sales, there is no effort afoot to change the way the government keeps track — or doesn’t — of where the country’s guns are.

And tracing a gun is a decidedly low-tech process.

“It’s not CSI and it’s not a sophisticated computer system,” said Charles J. Houser, who runs the ATF’s National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W. Va.

To trace a gun, the search starts with police sending all the information they have about the gun — including the manufacturer and model — to an office worker in a low-slung brick building just off the Appalachian Trial in rural West Virginia, about 90 miles northwest of Washington.

ATF officials first call the manufacturer, who reveals which wholesaler the company used. That may lead to a call to a second distributor before investigators can pinpoint the retail gun dealer who first sold the weapon. Gun dealers are required to keep a copy of federal forms that detail who buys what gun and a log for guns sold. They are required to share that information with the ATF if a gun turns up at a crime scene and authorities want it traced. Often, gun shops fax the paperwork to the ATF.

That’s where the paper trail ends.

In about 30 percent of cases, one or all of those folks have gone out of business and ATF tracers are left to sort through potentially thousands of out-of-business records forwarded to the ATF and stored at the office building that more closely resembles a remote call center than a law enforcement operation.

The records are stored as digital pictures that can only be searched one image at a time. Two shifts of contractors spend their days taking staples out of papers, sorting through thousands of pages and scanning or taking pictures of the records.

“Those records come in all different shapes and forms. We have to digitally image them, we literally take a picture of it,” Houser said. “We have had rolls of toilet paper or paper towels … because they (dealers) did not like the requirement to keep records.”

The tracing center receives about a million out-of-business records every month and Houser runs the center’s sorting and imaging operations from 6 a.m. to midnight, five days a week. The images are stored on old-school microfilm reels or as digital images. But there’s no way to search the records, other than to scroll through one picture of a page at a time.

“We are … prohibited from amassing the records of active dealers,” Houser said. “It means that if a dealer is in business he maintains his records.”

Last year the center traced about 344,000 guns for 6,000 different law enforcement agencies. Houser has a success rate of about 90 percent, so long as enough information is provided. And he boasts that every successful trace provides at least one lead in a criminal case.

“It’s a factory for the production of investigative leads,” Houser said of the tracing center.

A 1968 overhaul of federal gun laws required licensed dealers to keep paper records of who buys what guns and gave ATF the authority to track the history of a gun if was used in a crime. But in the intervening decades, the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups lobbied Congress to limit the government’s ability to do much with what little information is collected, including keeping track on computers.

“They (lawmakers) feel that the act of amassing those records would in essence go a step toward creating an artificial registration system,” Houser said.

What the ATF can do is give trace information to the law enforcement agency that asked for it and in some cases uses the data to help point them in the direction of other crimes.

Houser said the “manually intensive process” can take about five days for a routine trace. In some cases, completing the trace can mean sifting by hand through paperwork that hasn’t yet been scanned.

In more urgent situations, including the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting in Connecticut last year, ATF agents run a trace within about 24 hours. Oftentimes, that involves sending agents to the gun dealer that first sold the weapon to quickly find the paperwork listing its original buyer.

Despite having access to millions of records about gun purchases from dealers that have gone out of business, the ATF isn’t allowed to create a database of what guns were sold to whom and when.

ATF does keep tabs on how many guns are manufactured and shipped out of the country every year, but only gun makers and dealers know for sure how many are sold. There are also strict limits on what the agency can do with the gun trace information. And that’s just the way the gun lobby and Congress want it.

Various laws and spending bills have specifically barred the ATF from creating a national database of guns and gun owners. And due to the efforts of lawmakers, including former Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, ATF agents who trace the history of a gun can’t share that information with anyone but the police agency that asked for it.

As it stands now, local law enforcement doesn’t have access to regional data about gun traces. So if the police commissioner in New York City is trying to figure out where the guns are coming into the city from — whether they’re going to New Jersey first or upstate New York, for example — that data is not available because of an amendment introduced by Tiahrt, said Mike Bouchard, a former ATF assistant director for Field Operations. ATF can tell police where most crime guns are traced from, by state. But it does not release information on gun shops or purchasers.

If police chiefs want that, they have to reach out to individual chiefs at other departments and ask.

“It’s pretty ridiculous when we have an automated system that will do it for the chiefs,” Bouchard said.

Tiahrt said he first proposed limiting access to trace data to make sure the information wasn’t available under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. It was an issue of keeping undercover police, informants and innocent gun buyers and sellers out of the public eye, Tiahrt said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Knowing who legally buys guns won’t prevent gun violence, the former Republican congressman said.

“We’re chasing these wisps of smoke that won’t solve the problem,” Tiahrt said. “Get to the root cause. Put out the fire. Deal with mental illness. Deal with situational awareness.”

Houser said he would prefer the tracing center’s operations to be expanded and a center built that would use some technologies to help more easily trace a gun. But until the law changes, his staff will continue removing staples, turning pages right-side-up and taking digital pictures of records.

“Our job is to enforce the laws that are passed to us,” Houser said. “What they give us is what we are required to work with.”

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Associated Press reporter Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

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Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

Here We Go Still.


All of the recent writings I have offered and the many high profile (for better or worse) pro and anti firearm people serve to show that this issue is more like a dog with a bone. We just keep gnawing and gnawing but never making any substantial headway. The solution is a lot simpler that it appears because the talkers are each jockeying for position as being right. There is no right for the many people who have been killed or injured in the several recent and past firearm incidents around the country. The bottom line as I see it is the lack of  attention paid to the people young and old who have known and perceived mental instability. This lack is due in part to laws enacted ( or not) by States and Federal government that could have allowed these people to be properly treated or hospitalized if needed. It does not matter that our health care system is still not as good as it could be due to the many resistive  elements from State to State and in the (gasp) Congress. If these energies were directed toward  solutions, think of where we would be.

Another View Of The 2nd Amendment and Militia.


I read an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal by  Chris Bray-a former Army Infantry Sargeant who is now an adjunct assistant Professor at a college in California. I have transcribed his article as it was printed in the Journal. I see this as another view in a shouting match where no one is really heard or listened to :

It’s the discussion Americans can never settle: Does the Second Amendment convey an individual right to bear arms, or does it only establish the means to arm the state military institutions that the Founders knew as the militia and we know as the National Guard? Those stark choices shrink our history into cartoonish simplicity. The real story is far more complex and illuminating. At the nations beginning, there was a variety of middle ways regarding militias, a set of expectations and boundaries built in culture and enforced by community. In a box at the Rhode Island Historical Society, a contract describes the creation of a militia in Kent County during the crisis year of 1774. ” We the subscribers do unanimously join to establish and constitute a military independent company”, reads an agreement signed by dozens of local men. “That on every Tuesday and Saturday in the afternoon for the future, or as long occasion require it shall be judg’d   necessary or expedient a Meeting to be held at the House of William Arnold in East Greenwich for the purpose aforesaid.”

For Instance:You and Bill and I hereby agree to make an Army, and let’s meet at Bill’s house to practice.

Formed by an  agreement between armed individuals, the Kentish Guards became a militia organization without being  a government institution, though the members would soon approach a colonial government of Rhode  Island for a charter. It was a “militia association,” built in equal measure from  multiple foundations. The men of the Kentish Guards weren’t a militia merely because they each owned guns, and they weren’t a militia because the government said they were. They became a militia when they talked among themselves, agreed on rules and a shared purpose, and signed a mutual contract. They were a militia as a community. The agreement to make a militia empowered its members and restrained them at the same time , allowing them to act but demanding that they act together in considered ways. The early American militia was neither purely individual nor purely governmental; rather, it was deeply rooted in a particular place, making the militia a creature that stood with one foot in government and one foot firmly in civil society.

In this social vision, government couldn’t properly take guns from the men who then made up political society but those men couldn’t properly use guns in ways that transgressed community values and expectations. The bearing of arms was a socially regulated act.

That mixed reality grew from a social world that looks nothing like our own. The first few American police departments were still many decades in the future and the victims of crime could only shout for their neighbors. Whole neighborhoods raced into the street in response to a cry for help and victims could personally bring the accused before a local magistrate. Communities turned out to face military threats, neighbors joining neighbors for mutual defense. Adulterers and wife beaters were often punished in the ritual called “skimminton” or “charivari” (where they were ) bound to a fence post and paraded in shame by their jeering neighbors. With this kind of local experience, the bearing of arms was an individual act undertaken in carefully shared and monitored ways. The historian T.H. Breen has described the citizen-soldiers of colonial Massachusetts as members of a “covenanted militia”, bound by agreement.

Another historian, Steven Rosswurm has described the negotiations between Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary government and the ordinary men, service as privates in the militia, who formed a “committee  of Privates” to present the terms under which they would perform armed service. Government did not just command; state and communities talked, bargained and agreed. individuals were both free to act and responsible to one another for their actions, in a constantly debated balance.

In the predawn hours of April 19th, 1775, militia men of Lexington, Mass. gathered around their commander, Captain John Parker greeted each man, writes the historian David Hackett Fischer in his book “Paul Revere’s Ride” as ” neighbor, kinsman and friend”, joining them to decide what they would do about the British Regulars marching towards their town.  “The men of  Lexington gathered around Captain Parker on the common and held an impromptu town meeting in the open air.” They had a commander and he joined them for discussion.

Today, we are presented with a false choice in which either the government bans  assault weapons or an unfettered individual right makes it possible for a monster to spray bullets into school houses. The forgotten middle ways of our nation’s earlier days, that world of mutuality that  excluded more people than it included ,its shortcomings are well known but the benefits of a strong civil society are lost to us when we expect government to address and solve our every problem.

Nuts to Pastry-20 minutes excluding baking time


My favorite snacks have become home made pie. I prefer Apple and Pecan. Each one has no preservatives and  so far no huge amount of caloric content. The most time involved is the baking (50 minutes at 350). The  crust is a new recipe I found exceptionally easy, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes top put together  and roll out. I still use the vodka/ water mix but did not need to refrigerate the dough before rolling. This new recipe requires only the shortening and butter combination, mixing and kneading the dough until you form a soft ball, then roll it out and place in pie dish, the crust is a dessert by itself. The recipe makes a decent 9 inch pie but you would need to double it for a ten inch dish. Ingredients: 12 -14 oz package of whole pecans, 1/4 cup each of butter and shortening, 1.5 cups of all purpose flour. 1/4 cold water (half of this amount is vodka). Cut the butter and shortening into the flour until it is pea sized pieces. add water until it is moistened enough to form a ball. Roll out and put in pie dish, add pecan mixture (1/2 tsp vanilla, 1 cup corn syrup, 3 slightly beaten eggs, 1/2 cup sugar and pecans). Bake 55 minute until done. You can prevent the crust from burning by taking a 12 x 12 sheet of foil, fold in quarters, cut 3 in section from center, open and place over crust of pie and bake for 25 minutes, then remove and cook and additional 30 minutes). Good Pie.

Shrimp Scampi


A few days a go I made an attempt at Shrimp Scampi, I neglected to make a note on what I needed for it. I purchased the shrimp and made the basic dish and realized I needed angel hair pasta. I used thin spaghetti-not nearly the same. The angel hair when cooked is still substantially less bulky in the dish. The other thing I realized that the thicker pasta kills the flavor making entire dish pretty bland in spite of the amount of garlic required. I added in chopped green onions which helped but I am sure the wrong pasta is what made the dish as blah as it was. In Shrimp Sampi, the pasta is important.

The Ediot


A book that could be set in today or tomorrow, not an action book but certainly futuristic in its scope. It reminds me of a combination of “Blade runner” in 1968 and “1984 “in 1956. This proves that writing becomes an art form when properly presented.

The Answer to The Question: Did Beyonc`e Lip Sync?


Don’t we have better things to talk about?  if not I suggest looking at our elected officials who have perpetrated the worst hoax on us-getting elected on promises they never keep!

WASHINGTON (AP) — There’s no question Beyoncé’s  rendition of the national anthem was a roaring success. The mystery: Was it live  or lip-synced?

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marine Band told news outlets that  Beyoncé  had lip-synced at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Master Sgt. Kristin  DuBois said the band was notified at the last minute that Beyoncé  would use a prerecorded voice track.

But by late afternoon, the Marine Corps backed off that statement.

Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Gregory Wolf said that because there was no  opportunity for Beyoncé  to rehearse with the Marine Band, it was determined that a live performance by  the band was ill-advised. Instead they used a prerecorded track for the band’s  portion of the song.

“Regarding Ms. Knowles-Carter’s vocal performance,” Wolf’s statement  continued, “no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was  live or pre-recorded.”

A representative for Beyoncé  did not respond to requests for comment.

Du Bois declined to answer further questions. Earlier in the day, she told The  New York Times that the rest of the inaugural performance was live and they did  not know why a recorded track was used for the national anthem.

“It’s not because Beyoncé  can’t sing. We all know Beyoncé  can sing. We all know the Marine Band can play,” she said.

Kelly Clarkson’s representative said she sang live to perform “America (My  Country ‘Tis of Thee).”

All inaugural music is prerecorded in case weather conditions or other  circumstances interrupt the program.

The use of a recording is typical in big events. In 2009, cellist Yo-Yo Ma  was questioned about “hand-syncing” for Obama’s first inauguration. Ma said  instruments weren’t functioning properly in 19-degree weather

Another Take ON the Firearm Issue


Fear of a Black Gun Owner

 

Ironically, the NRA used to support gun control — when the Black Panthers started packing.

By: Edward Wyckoff Williams Posted: January 23, 2013 at 12:21 AM

Huey Newton of the Black Panthers at a Revolutionary People’s Party Convention in 1970 (David Fenton/Archive Photos/Getty)

(The Root) — It may seem hard to believe, but the modern-day gun-rights debate was born from the civil rights era and inspired by the Black Panthers. Equally surprising is that the National Rifle Association — now an aggressive lobbying arm for gun manufacturers — actually once supported and helped write, federal gun-control laws. In light of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre that claimed the lives of 20 children as well as escalating violence in cities like Chicago, which saw 500 homicides in 2012 alone, President Barack Obama recently unveiled his plan for stricter gun control. The proposal calls for a universal background check and a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, along with 23 executive orders. But these efforts — no matter how reasonable — are not without their critics.

In a statement released last week, the NRA expressed its disappointment that “the task force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearm owners.” Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) went so far as to threaten impeachment if President Obama used executive action. The conservative entertainment complex — from Fox News and the Drudge Report, which likened gun control to Nazi Germany, to talk-radio host Alex Jones, who invoked the Tea Party insurrection of 1773 — employs propaganda tactics to convince Americans that Obama wants to take away their guns. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the history of this debate is a curious one.

It is ironic that the modern-day argument for citizens to arm themselves against unwarranted government oppression — dominated, as it is, by angry white men — has its roots in the foundation of the 1960s Black Panther movement. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale became inspired by Malcolm X’s admonishment that because government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of African Americans, they ought to defend themselves “by any means necessary.”

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler explores this history in his 2011 book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement,” Winkler writes. In their opinion, “the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect the public: the police.” Winkler goes on to say, “Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms.” Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation. “The Panthers responded to racial violence by patrolling black neighborhoods brandishing guns — in an effort to police the police. The fear of black people with firearms sent shockwaves across white communities, and conservative lawmakers immediately responded with gun-control legislation.

Then Gov. Ronald Reagan now lauded as the patron saint of modern conservatism, told reporters in California that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” Reagan claimed that the Mulford Act, as it became known, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.” The NRA actually helped craft similar legislation in states across the country. Fast-forward to 2013, and it is a white-male dominated NRA, largely made up of Southern conservatives and gun owners from the Midwest and Southwestern states, that argues “do not tread on me” in the gun debate.

The gun-rights movement has been co-opted in the post-civil rights era. Loud voices both inside and outside the NRA use the claxons of government tyranny and fear of supposed “street thugs” to justify deregulation. The Second Amendment text that calls for a “well-regulated militia” is often ignored in favor of the ambiguous phrase, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The framers never could have imagined the sophisticated artillery available in 21st-century America, yet despite military-style assault weapons being used by the likes of Jared Loughner in Tuscon, Ariz.; James Holmes in Aurora, Colo.; or Adam Lanza in Newtown, Conn., the gun lobby and their most ardent supporters remain obstinate.

It seems the arguments and the players have been reversed. At its founding in 1871, the NRA was an organization dedicated to promoting marksmanship, firearms-safety education and shooting for recreation. Today it promotes utter irresponsibility and unfettered access to deadly weapons.

In just a few short decades, what was once a reasonable debate in Washington has become corrupted. In 1989, Republican President George H.W. Bush issued an executive order banning the importation of semiautomatic weapons. Bill Clinton followed suit in 1998 and, in 2001, banned the importation of assault pistols. Today the inmates are in control of the asylum, with Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee refusing to entertain any civilian restriction to military-style assault rifles.

But unlike Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the NRA and their GOP allies find it hard to justify unbridled support of gun ownership and access. As MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry brilliantly described in a recent segment, the Black Panthers may not have been what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they described “a well-regulated militia” taking up arms against the tyranny of the state, but that is exactly what they represented.

The Panthers sought to protect themselves and other law-abiding citizens against indiscriminate violence perpetrated by police forces. But firepower in the hands of black men was — and still is — seen as dangerous and wildly inappropriate. Unless, of course, that violence is intraracial. When black males from Baltimore to Chicago shoot each other, policymakers hardly notice. Apathy breeds inaction, and big business encourages that the status quo be maintained.

The justified anger that informed decisions by the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to fully embrace their Second Amendment rights has been bastardized by contemporary arguments for lax gun control. And as money continues to corrupt, it only gets worse.

Last week, just one month after the Newtown massacre, the NRA released an iPhone app that teaches children age 4 and up how to shoot at targets. With gun sales at record highs, the NRA and its client roster profit at the cost of innocent lives. This prize of profits over people should make Obama’s decision to bypass Congress and issue gun restrictions by executive order all the easier.

As arguments over gun rights continue and the debate about what constitutes “well-regulated” becomes clearer, perhaps history will inform policy and remind Americans of a time when the tyranny wasn’t colorblind.

Edward Wyckoff Williams is a contributing editor at The Root. He is a columnist and political analyst, appearing on Al-Jazeera, MSNBC, ABC, CBS Washington and national syndicated radio. Follow him on Twitter and on Fa