A Place On The . Net

              I wrote the following for Servo Magazine but those folks never paid. So here it is for free.    

You may have heard of Thomas Moray, PhD. The good doctor lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s around the time of Nicola Tesla. Like Tesla, Dr. Moray spent his time wondering about electricity. He claimed to have found a way to harvest electrical energy far from power lines, rivers or windmills. Witnesses said he got enough power to cook a turkey. The aroma must have been enticing!

Observers demanded to know how the good doctor did it but refused to pay for lessons. Moray wouldn't budge without cash in hand. It was, after all, his invention and he had the right to reap his rewards from it. The story remained a mystery, a scientific standoff. A few people in the states and in Germany replicated his work. Still, it didn't seem right to others. Moray and the people who copied him were accused of being fakes and liars. Well, they were accused until modern times when NASA did some experiments with magnetic lines of force surrounding Earth. Seems there is plenty of low density power, high up in the atmosphere and in near space. It may have existed close to the ground before the planet was girdled with power lines. We know that Moray used little more than a long wire, a tuned coil and a vacuum tube diode. The patent office was irked because the tube was a cold cathode diode and they just knew that no diode could work that way. (Cold cathodes have been serving mankind for some 50-years now with no difficulties.)

    Since Nikola is off with the upperclassmen somewhere getting a swirley I thought it would be appropriate to sit you down and share more info on the Global Al correspondence course, How to Win Friends and Influence Innocents.

    Pull up a stool and listen to Grandpa.

    I know you have been vexed by that ethereal feeling: Something is wrong with the Global Warming argument. By the same token, you figure that we have a dandy planet here and would like to see it get first class treatment. It is good that you care and Grandpa is glad that you are looking at those things.

    Frankly, it is never wise to accept the easy wisdom of others without some questions... and that goes for Grandpa's wisdom, too. Grandpa makes mistakes like anyone else and you must be the Master of Your Own Cosmic Ship.

    I think you are right in guessing that Al is not operating alone. Back when Senator James Inhofe was risking his life to document and question EPA's large-scale support of a single political party, Global Al was working with several of the institutions that take tax dollars and launder them for deposit into the hands of wealthy environmental activists. That was big crime and it was well recorded, but we turned our heads the other way and forgot.

    You will want to understand the mechanism that makes us turn and forget. (Global Al may have invented this. I dunno.)

    Here goes:

I wonder what a dog with hiccups sounds like.

Now he's got me wondering too.  How about you?

    Some of our friends are awfully intent on Global Warming... Oh, they're not arguing about its existence.

    No. Our Global Warming Activists are intent on narrow purpose: They insist on casting blame and penalizing those who make comfort and large populations possible: Industry.

    You know the chant –

            Ford, Exxon, PG & E,

            Kill 'em all and make us free.

            Kill 'em off so's we'll live in the dark.

            T'will be such a lark.

            Starving kids, Freezing moms.

            Wheezing debs at high school proms.

    Well that's just duckey but please do allow me to tell you the parable of the wheelbarrows and Global Al.

This would be a very good time for most of you folks to wake the hell up.  That's right, dream time is over.  If you are still of the opinion that the cold war is over and we won, snap out of it.  There is hunger, poverty, the charade of "global warming" being used to rip off millions of people, genocide and.....well, it's not over yet.  As if all that wasn't enough, we have a sure sign today that Russia remains firmly rooted in her evil ways.

Garry Kasparov was jailed today.  If you don't know who he is, you should.  Kasparov isn't the kind of guy who "gets caught" by the police, it took a supercomputer to beat him at chess (and that was close).  His arrest sends a message and you better be damn sure you understand what that message is. 

Some of you have had difficulty swallowing what leaders like Bush and Blair have handed you for the last decade.  I promise you that the evil spread by those men is nothing at all like what Putin and his boys have for you.  Yes, Kasparov will spend some days behind bars but I'm pretty sure he intended to sacrifice this pawn.  Kasparov was a player before, helping to bring down the USSR.  He played again in helping to put Russia back on her feet.  The way I see it he is already two games up on Putin and his boys.  Although Putin may not realize it, this arrest may have just resulted in the Russian government putting themselves in check.

And as US consumers seem less willing or able to spend, most retail analysts expect this downturn to continue.

"The holiday season will be terrible," said economist Ian Shepherdson.

Year after year I'm accused of having a dislike of Xmas.  While I still deny that, the above excerpt from a BBC story on the economy is the perfect illustration of why the holiday season sucks. 

There is a reason they call today "Black Friday".

Figure it out people! The holiday wouldn't suck if you celebrated the holiday instead of the retail gods.  The god I believe in isn't short of cash and the economy doesn't determine if his holiday will be terrible or not.  I hate to sound like an elitist but....that's why my god, and my Holiday are better than yours.

I really am my own biggest stumbling block. For all of my life, the biggest obstacle to success for me has been myself. That's nothing unusual, I believe this is true of most people. It is very rare for someone to possess the qualities for success, especially as an individual.

Understanding this has been key anytime that I have experienced success. When I pay attention to my shortcomings, keep my eyes open, and plot a course that navigates me clear of my own bungling actions, I can actually win at some things. However, it is not enough to simply avoid tripping over myself.

The most important part of my military experience was learning to be a team member. I don't want to sound like a TQM (Total Quality Management) cheerleader, I used to hate those zealots. But the truth is that real success can only be experienced by a team. How that team is made up and driven can vary, sometimes it's inmates or slaves and other times it's highly paid multi-billionaires doing something with a ball and motivated by profit. No matter what the motivation or reason for the team, it takes a team to succeed.

Of course the team does have to have a motivation, members have to have synergy (to use a 90's buzz word).

Long before I came to work for Bonner County, clear back when I worked for one of their communications vendors, there had been the spark of an interest in improving......communications. It wasn't well defined yet, but the interest was there. They knew there was a need but they didn't know what they wanted. The county had a single communications technician who worked only for the sheriff on projects that pleased the sheriff. He had little or no budget.

It would seem that someone local....I wonder who...is very upset that this Giuliani video was released.  The video has caught the attention of some local administrators and now they're curious.  They want to know more.  They're wondering what all the fuss is about and why firefighters back east are so extremely upset with both Giuliani and Motorola.

That's exactly the sort of thing that this certain local someone doesn't want to happen.  Asking questions might be bad for his plans.  Questioning the desires of Motorola might be very bad for him, his plans and the plans of the state.  Encouraging any sort of competitive consumerism might be bad for Motorola.  One really starts to get the impression that Motorola is worried that their proposal to the state wouldn't hold up against competition.  One would expect a world class company like Motorola to be confident enough in their quality and ethics to actually encourage competition.

I find it odd that although I had nothing to do with the creation of the video, this someone seems to blame me for it.  I did make a couple of people aware of it.  I forwarded an email that I received and, of course, I put a link to the video on this web site.  But this someone went running right straight to mommy the minute he found out that I was promoting it.  Oh boy did he run to mommy.

Run along sonny, isn't there some police work that needs done around here somewhere?

That wonderful video in my last blog entry has been extremely popular.  I think we all know that the GOP is getting tossed out on its ear (everywhere but Idaho) in the next election so the Giuliani part isn't such a big deal.  Most off the interest seems to be about the FDNY / Motorola deal.  So I'll share some more material here on that very subject.

Radio Silence F.D.N.Y. is a book that explains how the firefighters were betrayed.  One of the authors was a battalion chief with the department.  Good reading.  The website for the book is here.

On that same site is a section here for you to share your own story.  I am not alone in my concern!

There is this discussion from 2004 over on Firehouse.com

The site that provided the excellent video, http://therealrudy.org has this entire page for the radio issues with Motorola alone.

James Careless at EMS Responder has this story about the radio system three years after the WTC incident. 

Wikipedia has this entire page about radio communications on September 11, 2001.  From that page let's note "The Commission report did not cite any technical flaws with the NYPD radio system" and that NYPD does NOT have an exclusive no bid contract with Motorola, they use a variety of manufacturers and lots of Vertex.