News « Chewing The Cud

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Re-assert The Federal Government’s Role As An Agent Of the Several States

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

A template for a resolution for you to send to your state legislature requiring the Federal Government to reign itself back into it’s Constitutional constraints and cease imposing its will on the States. Remember, the Federal Government is an agent of the States, not the other way around.

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”; and

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and

WHEREAS, the scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and

WHEREAS, today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government; and

WHEREAS, many federal laws are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment assures that we, the people of the United States of America and each sovereign state in the Union of States, now have, and have always had, rights the federal government may not usurp; and

WHEREAS, Article IV, section 4, United States Constitution, says in part, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”, and the Ninth Amendment states that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”; and

WHEREAS, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and

WHEREAS, a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States.

THEREFORE – Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the State of <STATE>, the Senate concurring, that:

That the State of <STATE> hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States.

That this Resolution serves as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.

That all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.

That the Secretary of State of the State of <STATE> transmit copies of this resolution to the President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate of each state’s legislature and each Member of Congress from the State of <STATE>.

Replace “State of <STATE>” with your state or commonwealth and send it away. Or create this as a petition, gather signatures, then present it to your legislators. Take back your state from the Federal bureaucrats.

Posted in News | No Comments »

Uncle-fied

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I’m proud to announce the newest addition to the Aimonetti family. Brosef Jeffrey and Steffi have a new son, Leon Jeffrey Michael! He was born this morning, weighed 8 lbs 8 oz, and was 21 inches in length. He, Mom, and Dad are all doing wonderful! Very exciting to have the first nephew aboard.

See the first pictures at my flickr page.

Posted in Fun, News | No Comments »

Obama’s Wealth Redistribution In Action!

Monday, October 27th, 2008

From a mailing list:

Today on my way to lunch, I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read, Vote Obama; I need the money.” I laughed.

Once in the restaurant, I noticed my server had on an “Obama 08″ tie. Again I laughed as he had given away his political preference — just imagine the coincidence!

When the bill came, I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.

He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone whom I deemed more in need — the homeless guy outside.

The server angrily stormed from my sight.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside, who, I decided, did not need the money as much as the homeless guy. The homeless guy was most grateful!

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment, I realized the homeless guy was very grateful for the money although he did not earn it. And the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn, even though the actual recipient deserved the money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application. Or is it? Redistribution of someone else’s wealth is a great idea — or just a fool’s game?

It seems like there should be a market for all those Obama supporters to bind together into a group fund that then they can redistribute their wealth by choice, and not force others that don’t agree with the method of redistribution. Oh wait, there are…they’re called charities and non-profits. No need for the government there! If only…

Posted in News, Political | No Comments »

Happy (belated) Constitution Day

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

From an email received today:

24 Constitutional Questions Every American Should be Able to Answer

Adapted from “A Quiz About the U.S. Constitution”
By John F. McManus, writer and narrator of “Overview of America”

Has the Constitution always guided the country?

Does the Constitution allow the Supreme Court to make law?

Does the Constitution allow the President to make law?

Does the Constitution give the federal government any power in the field of education?

Where in the Constitution is there authorization for foreign aid?

What are the three branches of government named in the Constitution?

Does the Constitution require a minimum age requirement for a Senator?

What are the Constitutional requirements for a person to be President?

Did the Constitution give the federal government power to create a bank?

Can treaty law supersede the Constitution?

Does the Constitution allow a President alone to take the nation to war?

Are there any specific crimes mentioned in the Constitution?

Are the Bill of Rights considered part of the original Constitution?

According to the Constitution, how can a President and other national officials be removed from office?

What authority does the Constitution give the Vice President?

How many amendments to the Constitution are there?

Does the Constitution say anything about illegal immigration?

Does the Constitution tell us how new states are added to the union?

How is an amendment to the Constitution added?

Is the term of a President limited by the Constitution?

Which part of Congress is designated by the Constitution as having the “power of the purse?”

How does the Constitution explain expelling an elected member of the House or Senate?

What does the Constitution say about financing a military arm?

How many times is the word democracy mentioned in the Constitution?

Also, why the economy is tanking, why it is the Federal Reserve’s fault, and why aren’t the two major party candidates talking about it? The Fed and the Recession

Posted in News | No Comments »

More Wget

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

It’s hard to understate the usefulness and robust feature set that most of the GNU tools have in their arsenal. Today, I’ll make mention of one such tool, wget, and a novell use of the command.

As I go through my work, I find that sites we agree to take over have little structure. They generally were slapped together a long time ago, with little thought to organization, made with Dreamweaver or, Stallman forbid, FrontPage. I’m not judging; as long as something looks okay in the browser, a company can proclaim, “We’re on the intarwebs!” However, tracking down all of their pages to be converted into a CMS, for instance, can be time consuming. Not wanting to waste a client’s money by searching through the source for links and images, then manually reconstructing the layout of the files, I fell on my trusty GNU tool wget. (I also did not have FTP access, but I knew there were dead pages that I didn’t want to resurrect. Using wget in this case helped me retrieve only the pages that were still linked to from the main page).

Here’s a variation of the incantation of wget I used:

wget -r -A '*.htm*, *.jpg, *.png, *.gif' -l 3 http://www.example-site.com

What’s it all mean?
-r: wget should retrieve recursively
-A: takes a comma-separated list of patterns to match files to accept (use -R to reject). In this case, we want all htm, html, and most picture format files.
-l: denotes how far down the rabbit hole to venture. I started with 1, so only links from the first page were parsed and followed. I then tried 2, following links that were a level below the parent and compared the resulting structure. Trying 3, I found no difference between 3′s results and 2′s results, meaning all links had been followed and accounted for.

The result:
A directory called www.example-site.com that contains the files in their layout on the server. Now I knew which pages needed converting and which images to add to the new site.

A side note: A handy way to see the layout of your newly downloaded directory is to use the tree command.

tree www.example-site.com/

will display something like this:

www.example-site.com/
|– about.html
|– calendar.html
|– committees.html
|– contact.html
|– otherdir
| `– index.html
|– images
| |– header.gif
| |– logo.gif
| `– spacer.gif
|– index.html
|– join.html
|– news.html
|– partnerships.html
`– scoopholiday.html

Posted in Geekdom, News, Work | 1 Comment »

Walk the Walk

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

I’ve had the pleasure of working on the technology that powers iliveinspired.com and know that the founders, Rob and Chris, are working their butts off to make this a great service. Armed with not much more than inspiration and determination, they are taking their service to the world by foot. Their first foray into marching marketing was to sign the Dalai Lama on as a content provider. Not only did the Dalai Lama receive them (read about their trip, starting here), but he embraced them and their message and agreed to work with the service.

Now these two are on a mission to sign Oprah and are generating some press about it. Pick up the story from their blog here, and then read about some of the press they’ve gotten here, here, here, and here. This is a great service, there are lots of different themes to choose from, and it’s a cheap service that can provide a lot of value. Why else would they offer the first 45 days free of charge?

What’s keeping you from living inspired today? Visit I Live Inspired and start receiving daily inspiration on your phone.

Posted in News, Work | No Comments »

Michael Scheuer and Ron Paul

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

There may not be a better authority on Osama Bin Laden than Michael Scheuer. Intimately involved with the tracking down of bin Laden from at least 1996 to 2004, Scheuer has also written several books dealing with the handling of the Middle East by our government over the last 40 years or so. So when this man speaks on the Middle East and bin Laden, he speaks with authority that is unrivaled by most anyone else.

With that in mind, have a listen to an interview he gave recently (video was posted February 19th, 2008). Two things, among the many, that I found enlightening: first, Scheuer makes it clear that bin Laden and al Queda do not hate us for our freedoms, liberties, etc, as Bush, Guiliani, et al, have tried to ram into the conversation. It is about our involvement in the Middle East that bin Laden fights against. Second, of all the presidential candidates, Scheuer believes Ron Paul “gets it”.

Having a girlfriend invested in the green movement, I’d be remiss to comment on another bit of Scheuer’s interview and I’ll paraphrase my understanding of his remarks. When you look at the Middle East, what is there that is of interest to the US? Oil, obviously. Hmm… umm… gee… well… Not much else! So if our government were to get serious about investing in green energy and not using it to garner support while not producing results, we’d lose our interest in the Middle East, at least from a policy perspective. So using less oil = stopping the support of terrorism!

Here’s my beef for the current crop of Bush clones: they preach Christianity, family values, and all that. Fine, all well and good. However, it seems not a week goes by that a Bush supporter in the Congress doesn’t go down in flames with a scandal. But most important of Jesus’ teachings was the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Take a moment and think back to how mad, upset, fearful, irate, how incensed with anger you were on September 11th, 2001. Planes were high-jacked and rammed into the World Trade Center. Now imagine that level of violence occurring everyday. Now double it, and double that. You’re starting to get an approximation of what the average Iraqi goes through each day. Imagine having to cope with all of those emotions everyday. Imagine, upon waking, not knowing whether you’d live or die in some suicide blast or gun fight. A terrible world for anyone. And yet our government is subjecting a country to that everyday with their occupation.

I implore you, regardless of political affiliation, to investigate Michael Scheuer’s writings and interviews and see an expert talk about the situation. Then compare that to the view given by your favorite candidate.

More important than any other issue today is our foreign policy, including the economy. Our next president must understand what’s at stake with respect to the rest of the world, not with respect to a small part of it (namely the European Union countries).

The slim silver lining here is two-fold. Wean our economy and way of life off oil and we lose interest in the Middle East, and, support Ron Paul and bring a man into office that is knowledgeable in both foreign policy and the economy.

Join the REVOLUTION

Posted in News, Political, Research | 2 Comments »

Save the Tongass

Friday, February 1st, 2008

Add your name to the list of those that want to save the Tongass (read more here).

Call (202-205-1661), write, or email Abigail Kimbell of the US Forest Service and let her know your disapproval. The form email sent from the NRDC site is:

Chief Abigail Kimbell, U.S. Forest Service
1400 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20250-0003

Dear Forest Service Chief Kimbell ,

I strongly urge you to protect all remaining roadless areas in
the Tongass National Forest and to direct Forest Service
officials not to increase costly road-building or logging in
this precious national treasure. Roadless areas comprise our
last wild places and they should not be made vulnerable to
logging, drilling or other development. As a nation, we must
continue to safeguard the heart of our national forest legacy by
protecting the ecological health, wildlife habitat, drinking
water and recreational value of those few American forests still
unspoiled by roads.

It makes no sense to use taxpayer subsidies to destroy the
Tongass, America’s great rainforest and one of the crown jewels
of the national forest system, and jeopardize all that it offers
for local hunting, fishing, recreation, tourism and subsistence
use.

Time and again, citizens like me from around the country have
called upon you and the administration to protect the Tongass.
It’s time to heed this overwhelming public sentiment by
preserving, not destroying, the remaining wild stretches of this
truly unique part of our natural heritage.

Sincerely,

YOU!!!

Posted in Green Living, News | No Comments »

Save $150 Billion Much?

Friday, February 1st, 2008

It’s a sad state of affairs that we as voters must wade through so much posturing and pandering by the presidential candidates. Particularly hard is when we find out after they are elected that their words were vaporous and meaningless. What’s a voter to do?

A study released January 29th of this year by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation helps tax payers cut through the facade and see the real truth, expressed in hard numbers. Keep in mind that the United States has trillions of dollars ($9,200,874,834,693.13) in debt, is spending close to $1 trillion a year on Iraq and Afghanistan, and is facing the housing market implosion. Now, with all this economic unrest, which candidates actually want to do something about it and save some dough?

The four respective frontrunners in the two parties (John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama), proposed overall fiscal policy agendas whose net effect would raise annual federal outlays between $6.9 billion and $287.0 billion.

The top-tier GOP candidates often portrayed as “conservative” (Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee) actually called for significantly larger spending hikes ($19.5 billion and $54.2 billion, respectively), than the so-called “moderate conservative” (John McCain, $6.9 billion).

Among Democrats, Barack Obama, often described as ideologically more “moderate” than Hillary Clinton, actually has the larger agenda of the two ($287.0 billion vs. $218.2 billion).

Defense-related spending items received the highest proposed spending increases among Republican candidates. Huckabee and Romney, for example, offered $67.2 billion and $40.6 billion, respectively. Among Democrats, Clinton’s biggest boost goes toward health care ($113.6 billion) and Obama’s for economy, transportation, and infrastructure ($105.0 billion).

Two of the eight candidates proposed sufficient spending cuts that more than offset their new spending plans: Rudy Giuliani (-$1.4 billion) and Ron Paul (-$150.1 billion).

Taking into account that Rudy Giuliani has dropped out, this makes Ron Paul the only candidate that actually wants to save the country some money, and he wants to do it on a large scale. Why are we pouring in so much money in taxes, to support a government that doesn’t represent us? Why would you support a candidate that wants that trend to continue? Where is this money going to come from?

Would you rather not pay income taxes? I know I would. What if you got to keep an extra third of your income? Don’t you think that’s a bigger chunk than a proposed $300 tax rebate Congress is now considering to “stimulate” the economy? I know it is significantly more for me. I would rather spend the money that I earned than some small rebate the government gives me. We don’t know the source of that rebate either. The administration is currently engaged in deficit spending, racking up more debt to pass on to future generations. How long until China calls in those debts?

It’s time to make the government stop spending, and the only way to do that is by electing Ron Paul, the only candidate left that is 100% for real about cutting spending and saving US citizens their hard-earned income. Read his views, compare them with an open mind to the other candidates, and you’ll see Dr. Paul is truly about getting our country back on track.

Join the REVOLUTION

Posted in News, Research | No Comments »

MySQL -> CSV

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Always on the lookout for increases in efficiency, I love when I find a slick snippet of command line goodness that makes a hard sounding task simple and quick. I was tasked with creating an email list from a database and putting it into a csv format, and had only the command line to interface with the DB. My first attempt revolved around using the SELECT … INTO OUTFILE syntax. Unfortunately, I was unable to write out to a file with the DB user I had access to. What’s a fella to do?

Unix pipes to the rescue.

First, the whole command:

echo “select * from example;” | mysql -u user -p dbname | tr ‘^V^I’ ‘,’ > filename.csv

Let’s break this down, in case Ben is reading and can’t follow along. The echo statement contains your query. It is sent to the mysql command, which connects you to the database and executes the query, returning the data in tab-delimited format to the console. The tr command reads from STDIN, and replaces tabs (Ctrl-V Ctrl-I) with whatever delimiter you want (in this case the comma). The final touch is sending it to a file of your choosing.

*Note* – You actually have to type the Ctrl-V Ctrl-I when entering this command. Copy/paste won’t cut it in the example above.

*Note* – You typically do not want to actually enter your mysql password on the command line, as commands run are typically logged. Omit the password to force mysql to ask for it (it won’t interfere with the query). And if you don’t have your mysql access password protected, WTF? You’re asking for trouble.

So there you have it. Simple, easy to follow, effective. As always, this example can be extended into a variety of different ways. It’s up to you to figure it out (you can, of course, pay me to figure it out).

Posted in Geekdom, News, Research, Work | No Comments »

Chewing The Cud