1. Quit my job in California
2. Got a new job in Indiana
3. Moved to Indiana
4. Moved back in w/ my parents
5. Celebrated the holidays in Indiana with family
6. Looked for a house
7. Bought a house
8. Moved into a house
9. Sold a car
10. Bought two cars

Needless to say, we’ve been rather busy and the server that I run the blog on has been offline for a rather long time, but I’m back baby!  I’ll try to get some pictures and stuff up when I can for posterity’s sake, but you can check my facebook profile out as I update it more often.

-Chris

Here’s my take.

I am a conservative, this does not default to republican in my book, as the republican party has veered very, very far from it’s days of Reagan conservatives. Now, the republican party is happy to grow the government just as much as the democrats, and with just the same amount of bureaucratic inefficiency as their counterparts “across the aisle”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a two-party uber alles system, where the parties spend all their time fighting one another from some ideological bulwarks without ever wanting to work together. But, when you represent a party that has a base that believes in fundamentally small, efficient, and effective governments, who focus solely on what the Constitution requires of them, then they need to represent that view in their daily work. This won’t always be the case, just as sometimes a parent has to overstep their own ideal bounds with their children to steer them away from potentially fatal situations, when they might often let them learn on their own. Sticking your finger in hot water teaches you about hot things and the danger/pain of abuse, sticking your finger in a light socket may prove fatal, thus destroying the entire point of teaching at all.

There will be times (great depression) when the government is forced to act in extreme ways to fend off complete national collapse, but it must relinquish those powers once the emergency is over, lest we see a oligarchical nation come into power before our very eyes.

Looking at heavy-handed communist or socialist countries gives me pause, because most of those nations were founded with the best of intentions. Making the working-class, middle-class people more powerful by putting the government on “their side” looks great on paper, but the more you trust those without accountability outside of themselves, the more personal responsibility you (perhaps inadvertently) hand over to them. You no longer need to worry about working for yourself, you work for the country. You earn what the country earns and live how the country lives. Communities are “installed” as needed by the motherland and all you have to do is what you are told to do.

This system can work, but you don’t need the government to drive it. You can loan money to people without interest, believe it or not. Thanks to our overly-bloated tax and banking laws, it is much harder to do that, but you could do it easily once upon a time. There are lots of things that we now need the government to do for us, that once upon a time, we could do without the help of the government.

There are some things that a government should always be doing. Protecting the nation from threats for foreign and domestic is a good one. Guaranteeing citizens protection from crime and fraud is another one. Also, currency control in order to govern inflation and economic growth to prevent huge swings that are potentially national threats.

Neither of the candidates seem to want to focus on these issues. They both seem content to throw money at problems that call for much deeper reform. The fear I have with Sen. Obama is a complete democratically controlled government. The GOP had that a while back and they hosed it up badly. Checks and balances are our friends, after all.

But, I tend to think that the only thing that will wake up the republican party is to see how many conservatives cannot bring themselves to vote for Sen. McCain. Give me a conservative candidate next time, and he/she will have my vote.

I cannot discount Sen. Obama’s ability to bring a nation together under a notion of change, but we need to change for the better. Believe it or not, this country has “changed” greatly from what the Constitution has laid out for the federal government and I think we need to “change” back into the original vision of the founding fathers.

In debates with folks at work, and following an email list that I run for family members, it seems that many of the Obama supporters would rather the government take over stuff that is working inefficiently. They are fine with giving the government the go-ahead, having them tax the rich more, and then wait for the government to handle it. The problem with that mentality is what do you do when the government lets you down? What happens when a promise about pre-existing conditions turn into a wait in long lines for a “specialist”. What happened in other countries are people paying out-of-pocket to see doctors when they want to.

If malpractice was reformed, health care would see a dramatic shift in pricing and availability. Instead, the candidates want to funnel *more* money into a flawed system. You can’t federalize health care insurance without federalizing health care. The government will soon dictate, like a giant HMO, which doctors can charge what prices under their care. Once that division takes place, it won’t be long until the other doctors are forced into their system to still have patients.

Why not take those monies that you want the government to have and funnel them into non-profits and charities designed to help offset health-care costs specifically for people with a pre-existing condition? There isn’t one? WHY NOT BE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE AND START ONE!?

I know plenty of people that could afford health care, but choose to buy flat-screen TVs and new cars. They take trips and vacations and have the latest technology, then turn around and say that health care is too expensive. Issues like that are about priorities. People with multiple kids have to adjust their spending as well as people that lose lawsuits. Life isn’t “fair” for everyone, but there are ways to make it work, if people are personally responsible enough to actually make it happen.

In my time in Church, I’ve seen that there are people that have a passion for just about anything you can think of. If you want to adopt, they can get you grants, huge sums of money donated by people who have a heart for the suffering of orphans. If you want to go on a mission trip to help build buildings in 3rd world countries, you can get donations to help you accomplish that.

Many children’s hospitals are funded by benefactors so that families can get the care they need without having to bear the entire burden. To think that there is no hope for adults that have a certain condition(s) is to discount the true nature of Americans. You can bet that there are people who have money to send and would happily fund an organization designed to help certain afflicted people get the care they need.

Many issues are just like this! We moved to California a couple years back and now we’re tired of it. The lifestyle is okay, but it’s not Indiana, and we don’t have any family here. In addition, this state is hemorrhaging money into a broken school system and countless junk programs. There are *plenty* of people out here who complain 24/7 about it. They talk about lobbying this and that and trying to change it in such and such a way. Good for them!! Get in there and make a change, but for us, we are going to move to a place that’s more affordable and closer to family. We will bear the responsilibily of moving ourselves and make it happen. I think Californians in general like the idea of a socialist agenda with a huge state government, so I am compelled to leave if I disagree. So be it. I don’t have a right to live in California with a government of my choosing.

The issue I face is that if America takes a turn toward a big-government behemoth, we will have to leave the country to escape that kind of government intervention. That’s a bit tougher for me to do because there have been many people who have fought and died for this country and I want it to flourish like it has the first 225 years of it’s life. We don’t need a bigger government, we need bigger citizens that will take to hear the infamous question: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!”

So, who am I voting for? Honestly, I’m not sure. I guess I pray that there will be something that can convict me what is best for America in the long term, and not just for me in the short term. Here’s to hoping!! /clink

As a last thing, here is JFK’s tremendous “Ask Not” speech. If you’ve never read it, you really should. I pretty much agree with every assertion he makes in that speech…

www.famousquote…

-Chris

However, I recently purchased a new laptop so I could seel my older one to my sister who was in need of a capable computer. Plus I bought a car, so all told it was a killer birthday giftwise. :-)

But, I now embark on my 31st year shuffling around this mortal coil and I’m excited to see where God will take me this year.

Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes!!

-Chris

She’s saying the names of her friends a lot, too. She sort-of has a boyfriend named Logan, whom she calls Lo-dee.

Here

Speaking of making it to 30 though, I got some nice gifts, and got a big surprise. Now, as a general rule, I’m pretty tough to surprise. I tend to pay attention to little details and become suspicious of strange behavior immediately. Combining that fact with Jaime’s *usual* inability to keep secrets for too long means that that cat is normally out of the bag before the bag is closed. Being relatively new out here, I thought there may be something that she was cooking up with some friends of ours in Valencia, but I hadn’t gotten any of the normal “We really should go visit so-and-so!” or “I have a craving for a specific place to eat. Let’s go there tonight around 6:30!” Those are dead giveaways and that would be that. This year, in spite of it being a big milestone, I had heard nothing of the sort and figured we would just low-key it and spend time together, which honetly, is what I want to do every weekend regardless of the “event”.

I need to preface this little story with a couple things. First, I keep my work life and my personal life very, very separate. It’s a choice I made a long time ago so that I don’t punish my family for bad days at work, and my work doesn’t suffer because of personal issues. Second, I tend not to socialize with my workmates to much because I want to spend my free time with Jaime and Emma. This keeps me in the right frame of mind and I rarely think of bumping into work people outside of work, and personal people inside of work.

That being said, on Friday the 7th, I had a meeting with a co-worker of mine. Her name in Monique and she’s really great. She’s been a solid friend at my job, and gave me good advice on where to live before we moved out here. She’s also a grown-up about work-related stuff, and I enjoy working with her because of her stra0ght forward and practical nature. I am taking on some new responsibilities these days, and she is a key asset to help me ramp up and take on the new stuff rapdily and effectively. Because of this new interaction, we had been meeting off and on the last couple of weeks whenever we got the chance.

On this day, she had scheduled a quick 30-minute meeting to discuss some technology choices. She scheduled it at noon, and apologized that noon was here only free time for the day. I eat lunch a bit later these days, so I thought nothing of it. I arrive at noon, we chat a bit about work stuff and vent a bit about work stuff (as commonly happens). I thought I had a 12:30 call (which I was mistaken about) and told her that I would have a hard-stop at 12:30. She asked who it was with and what I was talking about. “Why would she care?” I thought, but whatever. Around 12:25, she pick up the phone and dials a number. “I need to make a call.” she says. I sat there waiting for her to finish her call, thinking nothing of it. “Yup … mhmm … okay … okay”. click. That was the phone call. No introductions, no “Hi! It’s Monique.” nothing.

That was fishy, but remember, I *do not* combine my personal and work lives so I thought nothing about it being almost my birthday. A few minutes later, she makes another call with the same jittery dialog along with no intro. At this point she stands up and says, “You need to come with me for a second. You’ll want to see this.” or something to that effect. I, just like an unsuspecting steer led to the slaughter, just stand right up and follow her out of her office and down the hall. She walks into the conference room and I followed her. As I’m walking in I notice that the room is filled with my team members, a bunch of food, balloons, and most importantly, Jaime and Emma!

“SURPRISE!!!!!”

Indeed it was.

Turns out, Jaime has played the connect-the-dots game to get a hold of Monique by contacting Don Wood (who is a great friend of mine from Indy) to get information about Monique (who I had talked to Jaime about in the past). Once Monique was mobilized, she and Jennifer (another co-worker) worked the whole plan out and made sure that Jaime/Emma were able to get here and get situated. I understand that Monique and/or Jennifer even payed for some of the party favors.

I was shocked like I’ve never been shocked. It was so nice to see everyone in one place and was great for them to meet Jaime and Emmabug. Very very cool and mega props to Jaime for getting me so good. It’s not easy to do. :-)

It appears that one of the neatest marketing gimmicks that has ever befallen mankind has befallen mankind in Burbank, CA (among other places). Turns out, this Kwik-E-Mart is about 2 minutes from my place of work in sunny Burbank, so I stopped by after work today.

I’ve been a long-time Simpsons nut, and to see something like this was just too cool. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but they did a nice job of dressing the place up and it brought a smile to my face. You can go here to see all the pics I took.

Also, I took the pictures using my new Blackberry 8300, aka the “Curve”, so I apologize now for the saturation and grain of the pics. I will admit though, for a cellphone cam, the pics look awfully good.

There are only a few of these around the US, and you can locate the nearest to you here.

I also got the comic book that they distribute at the stores (grabbed the last one by guessing the exact number an employee wrote on a piece of paper. woohoo!) and a collector’s cup.

Pretty fun time, and as you can see from the pictures, it was a popular place. They had policemen at the door and in the parking lot just to keep the rabid, ne’er-do-well Simpsons maniacs from trashing the joint. :-)

-Chris

Why do you think, after all these years, do I still call you “Andy” when the whole world calls you “Andrew”? Moreover, why do you tolerate it?

-Chris

That’s probably one of the first movies we watched on that thing, although I’m not quite sure that I remember it costing FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS! We were poor college students. I worked at a frickin hole-in-the-wall crappy restaurant just to pay the bills, and here you were living it up with your fancy-pants electronical equipment, speakers bigger than the wheels on my Skyhawk, and more wattage than the entire GPS constellation. Selfish…pure selfish ;)

What I do remember is thinking how cool it was to have a *digital* system to watch movies, and how cool that uber-expensive optical cable was. Did it make a difference? I have no idea, but it was still really neato. What I remember more (unless it’s the same player and I’m having a brain fart) was the super-mega-DVD changer. Now THAT was totally unnecessary, but still completely cool.

We’re here at work watching “The Matrix” at 1am in the morning (0100 military time, 0700 Zulu), and I’m remembering the first time you and I saw it at the Terre Haute mini-plex. Great movie. That was just a few months before we graduated and I moved a million miles away. Now I’ve gone and made myself sad…

This reply is too long for a comment, but not distinct enough for its own post. I’ll blog here if you give me a topic to write on. Deal?

~Andrew

Ah … the good old days.

After a nice chuckle, it dawned on me that I haven’t asked my USAF buddy about his role, or more accuratley, the USAF’s role in the current Iraq conflict. I was also curious about how the war was being perceived by the folks that aren’t necessarily doing the house-to-house combat. He gave me permission to blog him, so here’s his reply, sanitized to protect the innocent:

The AF is completely involved in Iraq, although not as much when it comes to full-up urban warfare in a place like Baghdad, where the Marines and Army have to go house to house and bombs are a little inappropriate.

We do have some pretty cool newer, smaller bombs — do a search for the “Small Diameter Bomb.” It uses the most precise GPS-aided package ever made, and unfortunately I can’t give you the exact precision numbers, but it’s pretty darn good. If you wanted to take out just your neighbor’s car across the street, while limiting damage to the house, this bomb can do it. If you want to kill somebody in the northwest corner of a building, and make sure you don’t kill the POW in the southwest corner, this bomb could do it. If there was a tank hiding under a bridge, this bomb could be setup to penetrate the bridge first, and then blow up the tank under it, without doing too much damage to the bridge itself (besides the hole where it penetrated).

There’s other places where we can provide “close air support” to Marines and Army guys with bigger bombs and what not, like in some of the further-out areas where insurgents lurk. These also use GPS to hit whatever target the soldiers don’t want shooting at them anymore. The soldier pretty much just hits the target with a laser rangefinder to get the coordinates, relays them to the pilot (kinda like when they called in an air strike in old Vietnam movies), and then a plane (sometimes the big B-52s or B-1s even) just drops a single bomb right where the soldier wants it. After that, they go in and clean up the mess.

And, of course, there’s all the non-direct, supporting missions that the AF controls — GPS (yeah!), satellite communications, weather over the war zone (aka “theater”), basically all the space stuff outside of reconnaissance. I also have a buddy over there doing something a bit different — he’s in charge of setting up the Iraq Air Forces version of Officer Training School. It’s where all their pilots and other officers will go to “boot camp” prior to getting their commission as officers and moving on to pilot training or whatever else.

I’m sure there’s plenty of other miscellaneous tasks we’re doing over there, but I’m just not in the know.

As far as your second question of “how do we perceive the whole thing,” well, that’s a bit more of a quagmire (giggity). Some people believe very strongly on one side or the other, but most people are pretty moderate; many of the younger guys just know that “a war is going on” and that we’re providing support through accurate GPS. Although I should, I don’t think I have a strong opinion on the matter. I know what we did was great for the Iraqi people, and I hear stories about their thankfulness when guys come back. I know what we’re doing now is necessary for Iraq’s success as a democracy, otherwise they’ll end up potentially worse off than before. I know we can’t make a public “we’re going to pull troops out by xx date” statement, b/c that’s pretty much a ridiculous mistake that only tells the enemy how long they need to wait before they can attack and meet their objectives without opposition. But that’s about all I know or have thought about.

Did that answer your questions? There’s actually good info/stories on the www.af.mil page from overseas about what some guys are doing, and (I don’t know the link) there’s more in-depth stories in “Airman Magazine” somewhere within the af.mil domain.

I told him that we feel about the same way. The Iraq war is a nightmare on many levels, but we have to complete the mission or we will have made an even bigger mess than we already have. Timetabling the way to a specific date will definitely end the insurgency, because why waste anymore munitions? We’re leaving, so just wait. That can only be perceived by the enemy as a victory on their part. They finally beat us into submission, and we’re pulling out disgracefully.

The other thing I did was go research a bit on the stuff that was mentioned. These “Small Diameter Bombs” are very cool. Their accuracy over the distance they can be fired is amazing, and the description of hitting a car while minimizing damage to the house seems to be awfully accurate. The GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb is some serious technology that is very versatile in what it can accomplish. If you don’t believe the claim about blowing up a tank under a bridge without heavy bridge damage, check this out. Here’s the aftermath. Sure enough, minimal damage, even through steel reinforced concrete, 3 feet of which is within operational specs of this particular munition.

Now, as to my title question. How does any of this justify the expense required to build/maintain/deploy it? For me, this is easy…

This is a graph of a concept known as Circular Error Probable (CEP). This graph is very important for many reasons, but let’s start with some basics. A simple definition of CEP is “The distance from a target in which 50% of munitions will hit.” Now, if you’re any kind of statistician, you already balk at the “50%” statistic. Obviously, if 50% hit within a certain distance, then 50% hit outside that distance, so it’s a bogus stat and might be easily written off. But, the graph clarifies this further, because CEP is the first distance “n” given all distances using a normal distribution of ordnance distances from targets. That means there is a “bell curve” that peaks at the target position and trails off very rapidly by 3 times the CEP.

Moreover, the CEP for precision guided ordnance doesn’t follow a normal distribution due to the very precise nature of the weaponry. That means that the CEP will more than likely contain a higher than 50% ratio of hits and nearly 100% of all munitions land within 2xCEP of target.

In the case of the SDB, the CEP is 5-8m. That’s 15-25 feet. Since the bomb is precision guided, that means that almost all ordnance will hit within 50ft of the target, even on the worst possible targeting effort. This also means that a majority of the ordnance will land within 20 feet of the target. If the weapon is fired from a closer range the accuracy increases still, and the more telemetry that can be leveraged, the more accurate still.

Basically, everything my USAF buddy claimed is correct. This bomb gives you the ability to hit very isolated targets and save lives. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t put a price on human life, not even an Iraqi citizen halfway around the world that I’ve never met. If spending more money on defense provides one piece of technology that can accomplish the mission with less collateral damage, then spend the money.

If we stopped all this high technology and went back to churning out high-explosive and incendiary bombs and revert to the carpet bombing days of WWII. Heck, we could even try to top the Soviet Tsar Bomba with a >50 Megaton nuclear bomb and just level Baghdad altogether. I’m sure that our defense costs would drop dramatically in the R&D areas and we would have a nice budgetary surplus thanks not only to the decrease in defense spending, but the lack of foreign aid as most all of the middle east would soon perish in the nuclear winter and fallout.

I realize that we need to spend money here for things like roads, schools, and life-enrichment, but I think Mother Teresa was onto something when she said, “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” If my daughter having a better education comes at the cost of lost lives in other parts of the world, then I’m home schooling her. The Bible (as usual) sums it up even better, “Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world. (Jam 1:27 MSG)”

We have a responsibility to protect all the people in the world from corruption, and a strong defense insures the old adage “Peace Through Strength”. Sun Tzu recognized that adage as an important part of maintaining peace in a world of war, and Ronald Reagan saw it as the same. If the USA can keep the peace by showing unwavering strength, we will be respected. If we can do that while simultaneously demonstrating a desire to preserve and enrich all human life, then we will be admired.

-Chris