Meet Marilyn Hartman, serial stowaway:

She's an unremarkable person with an interesting obsession, that she pursues beyond all rationality.  

Here's a little bit that we know about her. She's from the Chicago area and but has lived extensively in San Francisco and Hawaii.  She has two brothers that she is currently estranged from. She lived a fairly unremarkable life up 1990 ish and then......something switched.  She was working for a law office and became aware that they were rigging cases for the federal government. She turned them in, changed her name from Marilyn Stall to Marilyn Hartman got a sizeable payout from the whistleblower case she started, and.....got a new life.  

After this series of events she moved to the west coast, and picked up the worst, least controllable case of restlessness most anyone can has ever heard of. No lie, this is gonna be a textbook entry for both psychological and security training going forward. She has taken perhaps some twenty odd flights without paying, both domestic and international, and has been arrested dozens of times in failed attempts in a half dozen states. Classic social hacking stuff.  She's given dozens of interviews-which makes this an easily tracked issue-but it's fair to say that if she's not in jail she's at the airport or on the way to the airport.  

Marilyn is quiet, non violent and completely unable to explain or stop her hitching behaviors. Everyone involved but her considers this a mild (ish) form of mental illness. It's not a previously known or well diagnosed sort of thing and treatment appears to be …..well complicated. She can't be committed as she is not remotely dangerous, is not a minor, and when she is not in jail, does not consent to treatment. Since she isn't really a security threat-she regularly passes through all the security screening (just you know, without a ticket) thus the charges she gets hit with are not the kind of thing that keep you in jail long. Sometimes the charge isn’t even a felony-something like theft of services-what you'd get if you hopped on a bus without a ticket.  

So the question that the cook county court system is struggling with is how do you treat a nonviolent, non-dangerous mildly mentally ill person without their consent(besides you know, electing them president)? There is no real answer right now-and maybe there is no solution in a free society. But it's an issue that affects literally thousands and thousands of Americans.   

For your personal edification(and many more details) try the following links: 

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-woman-who-smuggled-herself-6342569.php?cmpid=email-tablet 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/24/serial-stowaway-marilyn-hartman-mental-health-homeless 

About that border wall....

As you may have heard the United States government is moving towards building a wall to keep out primarily Mexican rapists, by executive order although sooner or later congress will have to get involved not least in order to pay for it. While there are 1.5 million reasons why this may or may not be effective let’s just take a quick peek under the hood shall we?

Land ownership – there is this thing in the united states called private property, and for the most part pretty much everything belongs-legally-to someone, and the land the wall is going to be built upon  is currently consists of valuable useful stuff like ranches and farms.

Assuming that the landowners are interested in giving up the family farm in places like Arizona and Texas-which may not be a good bet-Texan’s are famous for being stubborn knuckleheads- it is unlikely that they will be fully recompensed for the full value of their land. The technical word for this is eminent domain. In 2015 the administration used it to seize land on the border. According to Tony Sedgwick, the co-owner and manager of Carmencita Ranch states that the land government seized at  for 3,000 dollars per acre was land valued at land valued at 10,000 per acre in what was a total overreach of power via executive order. There is actually quite the argument that government by executive order is just pure overreach no matter what the use.

Contractors- as always there is some concern over who will be doing the work. For example the steel is coming in from overseas and little if any American steel will be used. In a wall. Meant to keep out foreigners. Moving on.

Who’s paying for all this anyway? It seems like Miguel the guy that runs the taco truck in the parking lot at work is not going to have the 3 trillion dollars that building the wall will need. Nonsense you say, there’s no way that beautiful wall will cost three trillion dollars, that’s crazy talk, and it’s only going to be 400 billion. Which Miguel is also unlikely to have. Or even the current low end estimate (and contractors are always just so good at the low end estimate aren’t they?) of 15 billion. So far the forms of payment proposed by the super awesome very good executive fiat are 1. Congress, which means every American citizen. 2. A 20 % tariff on every product brought in from Mexico which makes perfect sense because that’s exactly how the free market works best with more regulation. On the first blush this sounds great-make someone else pay! Ha ha those suckers that buy stuff from those companies are sure gonna get screwed! Yeah you know customers of companies like Wal Mart, GM, Boeing, Coca Cola, Caterpillar and John Deere.  All of which would in all probability increase their prices by 20%, or possibly more. Let alone anyone that buys corn, watermelons, strawberries, tomatoes or gasoline because yes, mexico is the third largest supplier of oil to the united states only just behind saudi arabia by volume.. 3. A cross border tax. Which is another word for a tariff and is also another great free market idea. Except that it isn’t a great free market idea. It also would mean expanding the IRS beyond the capacity to drown it in a bathtub forever and also would make the IRS more powerful which is totally (not) a great plan.

The real problem with all these proposed ideas is that even if they just are proposals for negotiation- they are are in practical terms a tax increase no matter how it is worded. A tax increase without going through congress-which is the sole constitutional authority on taxation-not the president’s office. Kind of a dangerous precedent to set no matter how you feel about immigration.


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/08/obamas-homeland-security-seizing-private-citizen-property-via-eminent-domain-along-mexico-border/

https://qz.com/895816/trump-wants-to-pay-for-border-wall-with-mexico-with-tariffs-on-trade/

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/whos-going-pay-wall-congress

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38764079

Fake News Is Making Your Soup Cold

If you haven’t fallen for some story in the last few months then you havn’t been on the interwebs or watching tv.
Like a Big Mac there currently is a profusion of lets just say less then helpful articles designed by escaped nazi scientists to hit that sweet endorphin spot in our little reptile brains that’s says” Hmmm. That’s exactly what I want to believe, so it must be right!” Unfortunately, reading just about articles that state exactly what you believe isn’t any better for you then eating big macs all the live long day.

This is kind of a big problem, way bigger even then a triple patty bacon burger with blue cheese dressing, cheese, supersized waffle fries and a Godzilla sized artificial ingredient shake.

The thing is if you can’t get good information, how can you figure anything out? While there is considerable stuff being done on this, (silicon valley developers are working on an app! because of course they are. ) you don’t have to wait for someone else to figure out a solution. Do your own thinking. Look stuff up-using searches such as is bengazi a scam, or pizzagate fake news would have saved some folks a world of foolishness. Ask a librarian. Ask someone that knows about the issue-think crime is on the rise? Find a local cop and ask them. It’s not hard, they are usually at the police station (or, er, a donut shop. Yes it’s a joke ha ha, but it’s also a great place to sit down out of the weather for a minute at 3 am to get paperwork done, that also has a bathroom. Which is also why you’ll  also find ambulance crews there.) Use the good common sense that god gave you. If the article seems to good to be true….well.  Remember that pictures and words together do not equal facts, and no matter how much you want something to be true (like santa claus) that doesn’t mean it is true.

Want to learn more?
Have some fun links. Well, links anyway.

http://www.factcheck.org/
http://www.bbc.com/news/38053324
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/12/15/pitched-fight-against-fake-news-takes-shape/95110032/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442776/fake-news-crisis-no-good-solutions

Obligatory Intro Post

Well.
This is awkward.
I've decided to fool around a bit with a blog thingy helpfully provided by der google, because what else are you going to do at 3 am when you're sober and can't sleep? Right?

Things you should know about me: First, and this is important, I am a very very serious person. Second, sometimes I lie.

I like long walks in the rain, food-both the making and the eating- varuios beer related activities, various ways to spell words, reading all sorts of things-mostly books- and travel. My hobbies/obsessions are the art of quality assurance, movies that have aliens invading the earth or giant monsters eating people, arguing with my wife, and military science. 

Oh, and coffee. I really like coffee.

If that doesn't make me the most serious person ever I don't know what else could.

I aim to have fun with this here blog thingy, but I'm like, totally new at this. Hopefully by the time you read this it'll be all professional and shiny looking and not all bare bones, and you'll be all like "whoa....this is so awesome, this guy has it all together......man....." instead of "whoa...........this dude is so odd............."

Either way I still plan to have some fun, and find a useful way to catch all that random crap that comes out of my head.

I can add pics? Really?

Here is a random pic that I can't possibly explain the logic of:

Ya know just Darth Vader on his lunch break, walking around like he do.