Party Animal

Party Animal, originally uploaded by Safety Neal.

Resilient Communities and the Dormant Commerce Clause

The Dormant Commerce Clause (or DCC) posits that states and cities cannot discriminate against any out of town vendor. There are a couple of exceptions, but they're very narrow and essentially create a wide-open market in the U.S.

For instance, the State of Minnesota cannot discriminate against out of state apples or even apples flown in from New Zealand.

When I think about the amount of gas burned (and carbon generated) to bring apples from New Zealand to an apple-growing region like Minnesota, it makes me dizzy.

The Dormant Commerce Clause (or DCC)is a matter of Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution's "Commerce Clause" |Wex|Wikipedia|.

I think Congress should statutorily give governments the power to protect local interest of creating more resilient communities (as John Robb encourages at Global Guerrillas).

Governments should also be able to make regulations than impact trade to curb carbon emissions on a rational basis.

These steps would make it easier to be a localvore.

Fire, then Brimstone

Feuer entfachen, originally uploaded by fotoARION.

Cold Weather Survival: Firestarting & Tinderbox

Winter has officially arrived in Minnesota. I just had an educational CCDC/CERT training session on cold water survival and hypothermia response.

A few ice safety take-aways:

Ice is never safe because of springs and fish activity. It's not necessarily a uniform consistency all over, so depth of ice varies.

Wear a PFD if you go out on the water.

Slush is always a bad sign. NEVER drive a car or truck out on the ice.

Snow mobiles actually exert less pressure per square inch on the ground than a human being. I think this is also true for a person wearing skis.

If someone is suffering from hypothermia, be sure to warm them up slowly. Getting them too warm too fast can result in cold blood shocking the heart and stopping it.

Carry a rope in your car to throw to people who've broken through the ice. (A small weight on one end with a hand loop is great too.)

Never go out on broke ice to "rescue" someone unless you've special training. You'll end up in the drink yourself.

If you don't have a rope, a ladder also works.

Firestarting

Another piece of advice the speaker offered offered was to carry some firestarter.

I'm not good at starting fires, so I struggle with this issue.

Kit Up has an excellent discussion of firestarting titled Lord of the Flame.

This is my current approach:

I use an empty vitamin bottle as a tinderbox. I added some cotton balls (with a dab of vaseline each) to the bottle. I then taped it to a plastic wallet on a lanyard.

The wallet is reinforced with duct tape. Duct tape is handy in an emergency, after all.

The wallet has a lighter, a multi-tool & Swedish Fire Steel in it. See Gear Junkie for a description of Swedish Firesteel.

A plain cigarette lighter at least has a piece of steel and tinder. I like the FireSteel as a backup, but I'm a safety geek...

Add some tinder (dryer lint, fat wood, twigs, grass, paper, char...) and you've a fire making pouch, aka tinderbox. A small candle rocks for light and heat generation. Tea lights, votive candles, candles also come in tins...

The duct tape on my fire making pouch is safety orange, so it's easy for me to find and retain my tinderbox.

Magnesium sticks sound good in theory, but I'm hesitant to use a knife so close to my fingers when I'm freezing to death. The bits of magnesium dust also blow away easily and it's not easy to get the spark strip to work when it's below freezing. (This I've tried.)

Here's a proposition that I've considered, but I would welcome feedback.

Starting a fire is difficult, especially in a strong wind.

In a life or death situation (with the wind blowing 50 mph), you could attach your tinder to a strip of duct tape to hold it in place long enough to get a spark on it. Otherwise tinder is easily blown away.

The downside to the duct tape method is burning a small piece of plastic in the duct tape, which is bad for the environment.

Other suggestions for a tinder box?

|Cross-Posted at Safety Neal's Civil Defense Blog|

Have you tried Google?

The droids we're googling for, originally uploaded by Stéfan.

Acronym War: 4GW vs TIMN

The Committee of Public Safety has an interesting(and wide-ranging) critique of fourth generation warfare as a different way of analyzing the evolution of social groupings, arguing essentially that we've entered the network age where globalization ties people together more by networks of interest and commerce than by national or ethnic interests.

Something to mull over...

Semper Fi

Last week was the 234th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps.

I'm an Army brat and my experience is that all soldiers tend to be gung ho, but Marines are over the top by any standard.

But when it absolutely, positively must be dead by midnight, I can think of no one I'd rather call on than the U.S. Marine Corps.

Oo-rah has a nice post about what it means to be a Marine.

Get some!

A third path for Afghanistan

This weekend I caught up on some of my educational programming on the DVR and I thought Rory Stewart's suggestions on Bill Moyer's Journal for how to approach the Afghanistan problem were insightful. Decide for yourself.



I think Mr. Stewart is correct that Obama has put himself into a box in terms of policy decisions with no way out but to accede to the military's desire for evermore troops and ordinance. Such a waste.

Defensible

The Sun Sets on Château de Chillon, originally uploaded by Pear Biter.

The party of medieval romanticism

Juan Cole's supplies a larger context to the Republican resistance to trials for Gitmo inmates.

Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight [Obama's decision to try Al Qaeda detainees in New York District Court], since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution.

In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned.

Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago. |The Only Anchor - Informed Comment|

I'd never really thought of the Republicans as being this reactionary, but Professor Cole makes an interesting connection here.

Ever since George Bush characterized the Iraq War as a crusade, I've wondered how many of the more fundamentalist Christian members of the US Armed Forces view our actions in the Middle East as a modern day crusade.

A few days after [September 11, 2001], George W. Bush... [s]peaking spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or speechwriters [described] "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism."

Crusade.

I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the President's use of that word, the outrageous ineptitude of it.

The vertigo lifted, and what I felt then was fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude.

My thoughts went to the elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been, Bush already reading from his script...

Contrary to schoolboy romances, Hollywood fantasies and the nostalgia of royalty, the Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes. I hear the word with a third ear, alert to its dangers, and I see through its legends to its warnings.

For example, in Iraq "insurgents" have lately shocked the world by decapitating hostages, turning the most taboo of acts into a military tactic. But a thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the severed heads of Muslim fighters as missiles, catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities under siege. Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade or jihad. |The Bush Crusade - Alternet|

Putting heads on pikes and using them in catapults, now those were the good ol' days!

Cartman takes a page from Glenn Beck's Playbook

New Blog: Legal Search and Rescue

I've started a new blog, Legal Search and Rescue (LSR). The Fireside Chat will remain my primary personal blog while LSR will be an outlet for my interests such as disaster law, law enforcement & military powers, martial law and other legal research topics.

Rules of Gunfighting

Fun post on rules of gunfighting over at Everyday Gun Blog.

Who knew there were so many rules?

Riparian

Sun on the west, originally uploaded by Katarina 2353.

A more perfect Union, the EU after Lisbon

The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty last week creates the potential for a stronger, more assertive Europe, but the character of the new President and Foreign Minister of the EU will have a profound impact on the role that Europe takes.

[T]he Lisbon Treaty has the potential to herald the emergence of a new world actor – a Europe that can look upwards and outwards and is equipped with the bureaucratic tools to do so. In his recent speech, British foreign minister David Miliband laid out why this matters. Without greater coherence – and an integrative system in place – European countries, however big, will become bystanders in a G2 world run by China and the US. A coherent framework for cooperation will help Europeans get a clearer sense of each other’s priorities and to develop a shared idea of the foreign policy challenge they must confront. Butterflies are beautiful, in part because they take time to develop, and at no stage during their caterpillar period look as if they can emerge colourful and lithe. The same is the case for common and effective EU foreign policy.|Lisbon Treaty Passes, Europe Might Emerge As A New World Actor - GovMonitor|

It will be interesting to see if the new President can paper over European differences and make the EU more powerful.

Foreign Policy has a short post on the four most unexpected consequences of the fall of the Iron Curtain, one of which is Europe's geopolitical weakeness.

This Cyborg Life

Gizmodo has invited Aimee Mullins to be a guest editor. I love their tag This Cyborg Life.

Here's Aimee's recent presentation at TED.



Aimee's impressive modifications that make her taller, faster, better.

Arguably I am a cyborg already because of my constant interface with the Internet through the elegance of my Iphone and the clunkier reality of the 3-5 desktop computers I use on a daily basis.... but I won't really feel like a cyborg until I get a mindjack.

Mad Men

Do you ever wonder if anti-depressants are so common because almost most every person on Earth has some form of mental illness? If not organic mental illness, then traumatic stress disorder.

Even the odd sane person has the misfortune of being a sane person in an insane world... which makes that person a guard in this asylum we call Earth.

Spam Poetry

I just received a piece of spam mail with the reference line: sad love words filthy ass whore...

This juxtaposition of sentiment amuses me.

Taser warns not to shock chest

CNN has coverage of Taser's new cautionary advice to police departments, don't tase people in the chest as this is more likely to lead to accidental death.

Taser stun guns has advised law enforcement agencies to avoid hitting suspects in the chest, partly "to minimize controversy." ...The company advises aiming a Taser at a person's back, pelvic muscles or thigh.|CNN|

Taser's advisory to police departments suggests that this new targeting strategy is a response to all of the litigation resulting from deaths in custody when a Taser is used.

Sudden cardiac arrest, a leading cause of death in the United States, often occurs in the midst of an arrest, Taser International said in the bulletin. If a stun gun is discharged to the chest, a lawsuit likely will follow, charging that police used excessive force, the [Taser advice] document said. Plaintiffs could charge that the electronic control device caused an arrhythmia, or a disruption of the heart's rhythmic beating, the advisory said. |CNN|

I think this change is long overdue.

Receding

Hamburger-Speicherstadt (HDR), originally uploaded by Kliefi.

I am a Warehouse

Interesting item in the Guardian about the play, Building Understanding: Epitaph for a Warehouse, performed by Chris Gunness, chief spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency.

The Israelis fired white phosphorus artillery shells (aka WP or willy pete) onto the warehouse, there's really no denying that. Of course, some people consider the mere use of white phosphorus in an anti-personnel role to be a war crime, so it's not surprising that the Israelis deny using it.

While I don't think one can uncategorically declare the use of WP to be a war crime, using WP against civilians is pretty hard to justify regardless of how you feel about using WP against soldiers.

It's definitely nasty stuff. As the article mentions, it burns on contact with air and burns through flesh to the bone. If you jump in the water, it stops burning... until you emerge and then it finishes burning.

The UN recently did put out a report |Reuters|that clearly indicates Israel is guilty of a war crime in its use of WP, which is controversial in the US, of course, given the nature of domestic politics in the US and Israel.

Mr. Gunness' approach to telling the story from the apolitical viewpoint of a warehouse is inspired.

First Annual Winter War: Kill Those Damned Lawyer First

Those Damned Lawyers invite you to an afternoon of Winter Paintball: Kill Those Damned Lawyers, First Annual Winter War, 2010. The Winter War shall kick off with the invasion of SplatTag |Directions|at 1300 hours on Saturday, January 2, 2010.

Participants must bring a red or blue armband. Lawyers should bring red armbands and non-lawyers should wear blue armbands. Anyone not wearing an arm band shall be shot on sight.

We encourage participants to bring their own mask, snow camo, and body armor.

Be supplied for a four hour forced march through enemy territory. Conditions will be frigid and treacherous.

Safety Neal shall make a reservation with SplatTag. Reservations can be cancelled on 24 hours notice in case of national attack or everyone pussies out.

If there's a blizzard bring your cross country skis and we can play "Defend Finland 1939".

Overrun

Polo Horse Rider at Kargil, originally uploaded by Captain Suresh.

Jaded

Thomas Ricks has a post about some of the lessons learned by the US military in Afghanistan. But what I thought was most interesting was one of the comments on Rick's post, which I've quoted below.

[The enlisted personnel in the US Army] have learned that they are being sent to the graveyard of Afghanistan to fight and die for the criminal puppet Karzai and his lucrative heroin cartel.

The Afghanistan people hate [the US Army] completely and want to see them killed and mutiliated. The Afghan "Army" will betray their plans to the Taliban and shoot them in the back. They will never accept the invader/occupier of their land.

Their senior officers do not care about them at all. They only care about impressing their higher ups for promotion, cush assignments, and high paying jobs in the arms industry.

Afghanistan is page 14 news to most Americans and they pay no attention at all to what is going on there. The majority of Americans can not even find it on a map. They are broke, in debt and one pay check away from financial disaster. Afghanistan is the last thing on their minds. Iraq is ancient history.

The DC politicians and pentagon gangsters only pay lip service to their [sacrifice], and use them as pawns for their own greedy motives. Same goes for the corrupt "Think Tank" propaganda [parasites]. They look at the enlisted as "Fly over" trailer trash, while laughing all the way to the to a belt way booze and hooker party. Their bank accounts are swelling with enlisted blood.

The enlisted are blamed for failure, and officers will take all the credit they can for themselves, adding as much ribbon and tin to their uniforms as will fit on their puffed up chests, while [mutilated] enlisted men and women waste away in VA hospital wards for decades to come, completely forgotten. |Link|

My father was an enlisted man in the Army and he would refer to me as officer material at times, it was a backhanded compliment.

Which is why I think I relate to the perspective of this author.

I guess I'm not quite as cynical as I believe there are many causes for our landing in the current quagmire. Afghanistan is a clusterfuck that is abetted by the extreme partisanship of our political leadership, by the incestuous nature of our political class and the defense contractors which is abetted by the pride, tenacity, and detachment of military professionals from our political discourse.

We are hip deep in the quicksand and unwilling to pull back. Maybe it's time to fix bayonets and charge!

Who promised you a rose garden?

Stephanie Johnson, a recent college graduate wrote a touching (if rather naive and self-pitying) commentary about the curse of graduating in the current recession/depression in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required).

[W]hat I'm certain will mark my existence forever is this: The curse of graduating in 2009... my college class faces the toughest job market in 25 years and our wages will be less than those of other graduating classes for at least a decade...

The unemployment rate is 9.4 percent when I walk across the stage... and accept my bachelor's degree in English. I smile as the photographer takes my photo, not knowing exactly what I'm smiling about.

I'm lucky; I know this. My graduating class is largely unemployed right now, as are thousands who graduated before us. Data released in October from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds is 15.1 percent...

I struggle with guilt over not appreciating the job I have...

For now, being cursed is something other graduates and I have no choice but to live with. There are few jobs to be had, and there is no upward direction to strive for. I don't know what to set my sights on, because the jobs I thought I'd be doing are either filled by people with years of experience, or they have disappeared.

I'll just have to worry about it if and when our curse lifts. |Chronicle of Higher Education|

There are so many people in the world who would kill for a chance to come and live in our depressed economy. And those of us lucky enough to live in the United States need to come to grips with the fact that we are no longer the world's richest country.

We're deeply, deeply, deeply indebted to the rest of the world. Norway and Japan have higher standards of living than we do and China has far higher currency reserves. Japan also has more advanced consumer technology.

The United States is a second world nation and the sooner we accept this, the happier we'll be.

We need to lower our expectations, individually and as a society.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the bankers!

The House Of 647 Thieves, originally uploaded by BarneyF.

As the Republic turns...

Matt Taibbi does a nice job of encapsulating how corrupt and dysfunctional our political system is. I've been saying for years that the only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is who their corporate masters are.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that we have problems whose solutions involve taking on powerful interests, political challenges that will necessarily involve prolonged and hard-fought conflicts, but what we have in the Democratic Party is an organization dedicated to avoiding such conflicts and resolving issues in the manner of a corporate board, in closed meetings with the chief cardholders where things get hashed out to the satisfaction of everyone present.

The problem from the standpoint of the typical voter is that he is not terribly present in those discussions. When Rahm Emmanuel met with Billy Tauzin and Merck and Pfizer in the Roosevelt Room (how ironic!) of the White House earlier this summer to work out the details of exactly how much of a bite the new health bill was going to take out of the pharmaceutical industry — the answer turned out to be none, and all the insane subsidies of big Pharma are going to remain in the final bill — were you there? Was anyone representing you there?

The Democrats feel safe in leaving you and me out of that room for two big reasons. One, our main electoral alternative is the party that put George W. Bush in office. Two, the last time significant quantities of Democrats decided to buck and send the party a message, they helped get George Bush elected by giving Ralph Nader the deciding votes of what turned out to be the tightest of elections. Or at least that’s the storyline that’s been popular since that incident. The Nader “debacle” forever closed the notion of third-party progressive challenges to mainstream Democrats, at least in the minds of the Democratic Party bigwigs, anyway. |Elizabeth Warren for President - Taibblog at TrueSlant|

Via Global Guerrillas

Predictions

Colin Gray has a short article on security situation in the 21st century that I just read. It suggests the future will be characterized by the following:

• Great power rivalry
• Adverse climate change
• Resource rivalries and shortages (food, water and energy)
• Overpopulation
• Disease pandemics
• Jihadi terrorism and insurgencies
• Nuclear proliferation
• The "unknown unknowns" (the things to worry about if we know about them, for example, asteroids)...
• "global economic meltdown"

That about sums it up!

Hate to let food go to waste...

People lie. The evidence doesn't lie., originally uploaded by Eduardo!.

Thrill Killers

Murder is a perennial topic of interest for myself and sociologists. Murder is the most easily documented crime because it's so hard to get rid of the body.

There are many different types of murder: murder-suicides, serial killers, spree killers, thrill killers, manslaughters (accidental murders), self-defense murders, political assassination...

But thrill killings are especially troubling to safety geeks like me, since the murders are often seemingly random.

Boston's Sarah Schweitzer discusses patterns in recent thrill killings in New Hampshire.

[P]art of the pattern tends to be teens killing without obvious motive, specialists said. While murders by older people tend to be motivated by jealousy or greed or revenge directed at an individual, youths who kill tend to act out feelings of rage or alienation on people they don’t know or against people with whom they have little cause to be angry.

Their target is not one particular individual, but rather anyone who is available.

“The victims are interchangeable,’’ Levin said. “They look at the accessibility of the victim. They make sure the victim lives in an isolated area, with no security system. They use vulnerability as a criteria.’’

Some specialists say that a sense of disenfranchisement was bound to be stronger in small New Hampshire towns, such as Amherst and Brookline, the hometowns of the teens charged in the [killing of Kimberly Cates of Mount Vernon, New Hampshire, see also Nashua Telegraph coverage].

In small homogenous communities, teens who don’t fit in stand out much more than in cities, they say.

“A strong sense of community is wonderful if you happen to be accepted,’’ Levin said.

“But if you are regarded as an outsider, you may feel profoundly rejected . . . Their peer group is the only game in town. If they are rejected, they have nowhere else to go.’’|Some see links in ‘senseless’ killings - Boston|