Back in the day I was a huge Trekkie. Who am I kidding? I still am – I just don’t have a weekly feed of new Star Trek coming in from my television. I watched Star Trek on TV, I saw the movies when they premiered in theaters, and I checked out the latest novels from the public library (even if they didn’t count in the official cannon of Star Trek). I was, and still am, a nerd. As if living Star Trek weren’t enough, I also had to breath it. I started at a young age, probably around ten or eleven, attempting to write Star Trek.

My first attempts, like anybody’s first attempts at serious creative writing, were clumsy. I wasn’t a good writer, and my ideas weren’t exactly great either. Eventually I’d hit a wall of “where now?” in my only partially-formed story idea, and have no clue where to go from there. I vaguely recall one attempt from the sixth grade: it was the story of undefined alien Starfleet Captain Sharaan Attentha (or something like), and he was leading a mission to explore the Andromeda Galaxy, via a quantum slipstream (that’s the only way I can accurately date the story; I tended to seize onto a cool idea from a recent episode, and the quantum slipstream was debuted in the 1998 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, “Hope and Fear” and “Timeless“). There are sixth-grade social studies text books with my Star Trek margin doodles in them somewhere.

After numerous fits and starts, including a handful of not-good short stories and numerous doodles and some more serious drawings of Star Trek starships, by my junior year in high school I’d managed to conjure up a more organized process for fiction writing. While I had numerous ideas spinning through my head for stories, I finally knew better than to just dive in. In the first story or even the first few stories the characters are never fully revealed to the reader. But the writer should know them inside and out, should understand their motivations, hear their voice, and see their mannerisms. So I began drafting character outlines and bios, creating a new cast of characters and a new ship for them to crew.

Why not write a story featuring Captain Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, you ask? What about Archer or Kirk? Put simply, those stories can’t be as interesting. Unless I wanted to split off into an alternate timeline, nothing permanently bad or good can happen to the characters – they and the ship all have to be good and ready for the next story as if this one never happened when all is said and done. It’s the magic reset button. It got a good workout during Voyager, and it was liberally exercised after the end of every Star Trek novel at that time. I didn’t want that.

So by creating my own ship and crew, I could do my own things. There could be lasting damage and enduring triumph. And unlike the happy-go-lucky Next Generation-era Star Trek series, I could create characters that were more flawed. When creating Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gene Roddenberry said that he didn’t want interpersonal conflict amongst the crew, that humanity had grown beyond that. I always found that to be a naively optimistic view of some utopian future where everybody’s happy and has no reason to be upset with their peers. We, the human species, have enough trouble getting along due to purely self-imposed geographic borders, religious and political differences, and – the silliest of all – the color of our skin.

While I am hopeful that we as a society will move past those differences in time (Roddenberry was very forward-thinking in putting a African American woman in Nichelle Nichols on the Enterprise bridge in 1966, even if her ground-breaking role on the original Star Trek was primarily that of glorified telephone operator for all the powerful white men of the Enterprise), it’s silly to think that there wouldn’t still be personality conflicts between members of the crew, especially when you start mixing in other species.

And so, Star Trek: Aldrin was born. I was surprised by how long the first draft turned out to be: ninety two thousand words. That’s very solidly in novel territory (which is an admittedly vague range, but seems to start at around fifty thousand words; ninety thousand words formatted at the size of a paperback novel equals four hundred pages, on normal 8.5×11 it was one hundred twenty pages). I printed it out ten or twenty pages at a time using the library printers at the high school (my apologies to Mount Vernon High School for burning through all that paper).

I thought it was good. Nay, I thought it was awesome. Star Trek: Aldrin, book one: The Enemy Within. Despite my being an avid Trekkie, at the turn of the century it was difficult for a barely-employed high schooler like myself to gain access to Star Trek: The Original Series, so I wasn’t aware that “The Enemy Within” was also the title of the fourth episode of the original Star Trek. Nevermind that I owned the second edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, which dedicated a hundred words to the episode where the transporter splits Kirk into naively good and exceedingly evil halves.

I shared that paper copy of Star Trek: Aldrin with my friends, who were mostly unanimous in their praise, though they may have been impressed by the accomplishment of writing such a lengthy work while still in high school. Fun fact: a good portion of that first draft was written using DocumentsToGo on my Palm Tungsten T3 PDA.

Having a completed manuscript in my hands, I looked into getting it published, though the only way to do that was through the official licensed Star Trek fiction partner of Paramount Pictures: Pocket Books. And Pocket Books had rules, oh did they have rules. Those rules are still largely in place today (though no longer online, here’s a copy), and boil down as such: the magic reset button must be pressed by the end of every novel, and only experienced Star Trek authors are permitted to write stories about new crews (like Peter David’s Star Trek: New Frontier series). Not one to be deterred, I reached out to a few publishing houses, or at least those that I could find through a search on Yahoo, but was rebuffed by them all once they understood what I was pitching them. Thankfully it never got to the point of a phone call – all discussion was held over email – or else they probably would have laughed my naive seventeen-year-old ass off the line.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I was able offer Star Trek: Aldrin to a wider audience. At that time, Star Trek: Enterprise was in its fourth season and its chances of renewal on UPN were looking slim. I got involved in an organization called TrekUnited, a successor the Save Enterprise movement that helped motivate Paramount to produce the fourth season in the first place. While Save Enterprise was a pure fan-driven movement, relying on tried-and-true tactics like an extensive letter writing campaign, TrekUnited aimed to try something unique and very very different: raising funds to help co-finance the production of a fifth season of Enterprise. To a degree, the campaign was successful to a degree, as TrekUnited was able to raise $143,000 from fans and supposedly secured a pledge for $3 million from an anonymous source in the aerospace industry (I was only involved in the forums at that point, so I can’t personally verify anything, but my money’s always been on Richard Branson as the pledge source – he’s enough of a Star Trek fan that the first ship in his suborbital Virgin Galactic fleet is named the V.S.S. Enterprise).

I’d been an occasional visitor to some StarTrek.com chat rooms through high school, but TrekUnited opened me up to a much wider community of Star Trek. I made a lot of good friends, many of which I regret having fallen out of communication with in recent years. But I also got a new audience for Aldrin and was introduced to the concept of “fan fiction”. It’s what I’d been writing all along, my own stories playing in the universe of somebody else’s creation. I’d long accepted that Aldrin was never going to be formally published, and it made no sense to me to sit on the full novel that I’d written. Some suggested that I get around Pocket Books’ restrictions by rewriting Aldrin in a non-Star Trek setting, but that ignored the fact that the story was heavily reliant upon the existing mythos of Star Trek, and that I wanted to write Star Trek. If that meant that was something I was going to do as a labor of love with no chance of ever making money off of it, then so be it.

So I published Star Trek: Aldrin, book one, The Enemy Within on the TrekUnited Forums, starting in April 2005, uploading one chapter a day. The process of formatting The Enemy Within for BBcode allowed me to make some edits, but I only tweaked things and fixed errors. I never really re-read it. It hadn’t been that long since I’d written it in the first place, so I didn’t have the separation needed to approach it as a more mature writer. The Enemy Within was published onto the TrekUnited Forums pretty much as I wrote it two years prior.

To my surprise, Aldrin gained a quick and excited following amongst the TrekUnited community. To this day it still ranks as the second-most-viewed thread in the TrekUnited Fan Fiction forum with more than fourteen thousand, topped only by the thread for the second Aldrin novel – Diplomatic Protocol – with fifteen thousand views. I dove even deeper into my little Aldrin subset of the Star Trek universe, making new drawings, modeling the starship U.S.S. Aldrin in 3D with Cinema 4D, and Photoshopping images of the crew. And, of course, I also worked on the second and third Star Trek: Aldrin books, Diplomatic Protocol and Shadows in the Darkness. That third novel was where I really started to push the boundaries of that magic reset button – not everything was okay at the end, and there would be repercussions in the coming novels.

Then life got in the way before I could finish the fourth Aldrin novel, titled The Other Shoe (as in ‘drops’). By that time I had risen to be the chief forum administrator for TrekUnited and was also in charge of managing the site’s news page. And by in charge, I mean I was the only one, and the well-connected newcomer TrekMovie.com was eating ours and all the other established Trek sites’ combined lunch. I was also still a full time college student and not doing well at that, and had just started writing for PreCentral.net.

Something had to give, and that something was Star Trek. While I remained a fan, I severely scaled back my Trekking. I didn’t have the time to be running TrekUnited almost single-handedly (at that time the forum was still incredibly busy, and purely a community of fans), and I kept running into roadblock after roadblock in my stuttering attempts to resume writing The Other Shoe. So Star Trek: Aldrin got shuffled away into a folder in the Documents folder on my Mac, sitting there staring back at me every time I went to work on something else. I still went back to the U.S.S. Aldrin, at least mentally, every now and then, entertaining the idea of getting back into writing it and finishing out the several novels I had planned, but nothing ever came of those meandering thoughts.

For several years now, November has been marked by two things: Movember for growing mustaches in support of mens health awareness, and National Novel Writing Month to challenge amateur and professional writers alike to put fifty thousand words of a new novel to the paper. Both are fun and worthy causes, but thanks to my job in the military funeral honors program requiring that I be out in the public as a representative of the United States Army at funerals, growing a mustaches has been out of the question. Plus, my father has had a mustache for forever, and as much as I respect and admire the man, we don’t need people drawing even more comparisons.

I first became aware of both Movember and NaNoWriMo in 2010, and I didn’t do much with either that year. In 2011, I decided that I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo. At first my inclination was that I could finish The Other Shoe (it was about half-way done, with some forty or fifty thousand words to be written), but then I went back and started rereading the previous Aldrin novels to reacquaint myself with the details of my own work.

At that point it had been seven years since I’d first started writing Star Trek: Aldrin. In that time I had grown to be a much more competent writer, thanks in large part to being employed as a writer for TrekUnited (on a volunteer basis, that is), PreCentral/webOS Nation, and the Army, plus the veritable reams of paper that you’re required to fill with words as a college student. And rereading The Enemy Within, I realized it needed to be heavily and severely edited. The concept was good, and the story was good, but the writing was not up to my apparently heightened standards.

The edits wouldn’t just be to make it ‘better’, but also to better set up future stories, even those much further down the line. And like when I decided that I was going to tweak and refine my 3D model of the Excelsior refit, all pretenses of editing were quickly abandoned as I dove in and began a complete and utter rewrite. As I went I gained a great appreciation for how far I’ve come as a writer over these past several years. I’ve put down millions of words for Star Trek, webOS, and Mother Army, and I have no desire to stop writing any time soon. It’s an awesome creative outlet for me, I can be much more precise, specific, deliberate, and descriptive when writing than I can when speaking. Plus I can edit things, which is much harder to do when speaking.

As with nearly all of my plans, rewriting The Enemy Within didn’t go as well as I’d planned. There was the matter of webOS, which at the time was severely in limbo following HP’s cancellation of webOS hardware a few months prior. And I was also still in the process of renovating my house at the time, and working full time for the honor guard (thankfully being a student was no longer on my plate, turns out I’m not good at that, though that’s a discussion for another time). And so I probably got fifteen or twenty percent of the way through my rewrite before it fell to the wayside, sitting in the bottom right corner of my desktop (an almost always visible corner on my screen) as ‘Star Trek Aldrin 1 – The Enemy Within REV.doc’. And it sat there untouched for months before I opened it back up in the spring and made some progress, and then again in the summer when I made some more progress, getting to about the halfway point in July.

It wasn’t until September of 2012 that I really buckled down and powered through the rewrite process, finishing in early November with a hundred-thousand-word draft. In the process several extraneous scenes had met their end, and many plot points were massaged to be more, well, better. The dialogue is more natural and the exposition more explanatory. I tried to gear it such that you wouldn’t have to know Star Trek to be able to understand and follow Aldrin, though that’s clouded through my lens of already having an intimate relationship with Star Trek, so what do I know?

The end result is a Star Trek: Aldrin that is more mature and flows far better. It’s a novel, that if not for Pocket Books’ rules about what they’ll accept for first time submissions, I like to think would rank highly among Star Trek novels. Alas, my vision of the continuing twenty-fourth century narrative varies radically from the course that Pocket Books has steered with their raft of veteran Star Trek authors. I’m not going to spoil any details of what happens in the official unofficial novels, but I will say that I am not at all a fan of the destructive direction in which they’ve taken the Star Trek universe.

While Aldrin never was, and certainly isn’t now, a happy-go-lucky Star Trek story, I’ve always tried to maintain an air of hopefulness amongst the despair. Pocket Books, meanwhile, saw fit to practically obliterate the Star Trek we came to know and love. I have no interest in making Aldrin fit into that universe. Thankfully, as Aldrin is classified as fan fiction and the Pocket Books novels, though officially licensed, do not factor into the official Star Trek cannon, I don’t have to fit with that universe.

Eight years after I first started putting together the story of the crew of the U.S.S. Aldrin, I’m thrilled to be able to release the completely rewritten first book in the series, the completely rewritten Sic Semper Tyrannis. As with all fan fiction, this is purely a labor of love, with no expectation of making any money off of it. I offer Star Trek: Aldrin, book one, Sic Semper Tyrannis to Star Trek fans, free of charge, for their own enjoyment. Sic Semper Tyrannis is available in multiple formats at the new Star Trek: Aldrin website, though I ask that you please do not redistribute them yourself (even if they are DRM-free).

I’d like to recognize my friend and fellow tech-editor Rene Ritchie for heroically serving as my volunteer editor and sounding board for Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Whether or not you enjoy Star Trek: Aldrin, or even bothered reading it, to please consider making a donation to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to help preserve our world’s space exploration heritage so that it may inspire the next generation of explorers for the final frontier.

Live long and prosper, friends.

Second only to to the first amendment prohibiting government from preventing the free exercise of speech, the press, assembly, and petition, the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is the most debated in our modern society. The debate surrounding the first amendment is mostly a philosophical one, revolving around whether or not the government is interfering in the exercising of said rights. The second amendment, on the other hand, has much more tangible consequences, as seen recently by the horrifying massacre of teachers and young students in Connecticut.

The debate over the right to bear arms has raised its ugly head far too often in recent years. The senseless mass shooting at a congressional campaign event in Arizona. A crazed lunatic opening fire inside a movie theater in Colorado. And now a disturbed young man walking into an elementary school and killing kids. I don’t have children of my own, but it still breaks my heart to see the news reports coming out of Newtown.

This debate over the rights of gun owners is a good one to have. The Bill of Rights is an important document in our nation’s history, but it and the rest of the Constitution are not above reproach. The Constitution and its amendments at points in history turned a blind eye towards slavery, said that only white men could vote, and for some inconceivable reason banned alcohol. The Constitution is a living document, open to debate and alteration. We should respect it, but we should also question it. It is not the be all, end all, of American governance.

So, let’s talk about the second amendment, shall we? “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s it. The question about what exactly the framers of the Constitution meant by this oddly-worded passage is, well, debatable. Those first four words – a well regulated militia – stand out to me. The well-regulated militia of the United States has evolved into what we know as the Army Reserve and the National Guard, and as a member of the latter organization I can tell you it is quite well regulated.

But how many gun owners in the United States are members of those or any other well regulated militia? A relatively small portion, it appears. There are just about as many guns in the United States as there are people, and to be fair, for every crazed man afraid the g-men are going to come and get him there are people who merely collect guns with no intention of using them on another person. And there are a lot of people who simply own a small handgun for the purposes of self defense. I know a lot of people that do, though I personally do not. As much as I enjoy the rush that comes from pulling the trigger on an M-16 once a year for qualification purposes, I’m not entirely comfortable with the thought of having firearms in my home. And, again, I live by myself.

The question of gun control is always a prickly one, and as with most issues I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I can understand and comprehend both sides of the debate, and both make sense.

There’s the side of the gun rights supporters, backed up by the millions of members of the NRA, who believe that bearing arms of all types is an unassailable American right (I’m going for the fringe for the purposes of making a point here, so don’t jump on me). They point to hunting, sport, and self defense as the need for having their own firearms. They, quite rightly, point out that this country was born and these very freedoms secured by men with rifles willing to take up arms against a government they viewed as oppressive.

And there’s the side of those that view guns as weapons of violence and murder. They point out that America’s murder rate is far higher than any other first-world nation, that thousands of people die every year in firearms accidents, and to incidents like the abhorrent murder of twenty children in Connecticut, for reasons that are still unknown.

Let’s be perfectly honest, guns were created for one purpose and one purpose only: killing things, be they people or prey. Guns are weapons made for killing, and there’s no ignoring that fact. There are plenty of people that use guns for sport that wouldn’t fathom turning that pistol or rifle on another person, but that’s not why Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Browning, Remington, and the dozens of others that build firearms got into business. Guns are made to make killing easier, plain and simple.

When people bring up banning or limiting firearms in the wake of incidents like these, far too often the rebuttal is that the crazed individuals that perpetrated these heinous acts would still find a way. And they probably would try, there’s no doubt. Crazy is crazy, and access to firearms don’t make crazy want to kill. But access to firearms does make it innumerably easier for crazy to kill. Build and planting a bomb to kill dozens of people is difficult, as is setting a fire that will burn quickly enough to have the same effect. And forget knifing people to death – just the other day a man in China went on a stabbing spree and injured more than twenty people, but didn’t manage to kill a single one.

For complicated and very good reasons, the second amendment will not be repealed any time soon. This is a nation born of violent uprising, a nation that owes its existence to firearms. This is a nation that came into being when its residents turned their rifles against the might of the British army. This legacy of overthrowing oppression drives a great many American ideals. It’s why we cheer on the popular rebellions in Africa and the Middle East, we see them as following in our footsteps.

Many Americans live in fear that the federal government could someday need overthrowing by popular revolt. Thankfully the political system we’ve established has enough checks and balances that such an event is highly unlikely, but it’s still disturbing to see the amount of unchecked power the government has accrued for itself. But we the people still have the power of the vote and the right to free speech and freedom of the press and assembly, which is far more powerful than any bullet, but bullets have been proven necessary throughout history to maintain those rights for ourselves and others across the globe.

Let’s be honest, though, while the British Army of 1776 was well-trained and well-armed, they weren’t a vastly superior force in comparison to the Revolutionary Army led by General Washington. Both had access to the same comparative firepower, and both were limited by the technology of the day. Those muskets they fired at each other were loaded by hand between shots. I have no doubt that the framers of the Constitution had no inkling of the kind of weapons technology we would possess just one hundred years later, let alone two hundred plus years later.

The British Army of 1776 would stand no chance against the arms available to today’s citizens, but today’s citizens stand absolutely no chance against the United States military. The Air Force has missile-armed robots that roam the skies. No AR-15 is going to defend against that, as many deceased members of Al Qaeda would tell you, if they weren’t, you know, deceased. (yes, the military has not achieved total victory in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but keep in mind that the rules of engagement did not allow for the scorched earth tactics last used in World War II, and don’t think that a government intent on suppressing its people would be hesitant to make use of those same tactics – hypothetically speaking here).

No matter how many legally-obtained firearms the people of the United States have at their disposal, there’s no way we can defend ourselves from stealth bombers, tanks, drones, and nuclear submarines. But does the overwhelming firepower that the United States military possess mean that the people shouldn’t be permitted to obtain and maintain the tools to defend their rights and property from government interference? That’s part of the question we have to ask ourselves here.

We also have to ask ourselves what kind of firearms the citizen should have access to. Putting aside the unlikely event of a second American revolution, what Earthly reason is there for the average citizen to own an assault rifle? I can’t fathom why, despite knowing several people who do own AR-15′s and similar weaponry.

Even if we were to ban assault weapons, we have to accept that we are at the point of no return when it comes to the possession of weapons in the United States. There are too many guns and too many gun owners for there to be any meaningful repeal or restriction on gun ownership. Guns are not going away, plain and simple. Gun ownership is a fact of life in the United States, where there are nearly nine guns for every ten residents, double the rate of the closest first-world nation. That nation is Switzerland, with between four and five guns per ten residents.

It’s popular amongst gun right advocates to claim that Switzerland and Israel have high gun ownership rates and low levels of violence, so guns must not be the problem. In Switzerland every citizen is a member of the army, and while they used to keep their issued weapons at home, that’s becoming less-and-less the reality. In Israel the gun ownership rate is below ten percent, and only those that live in the settlements, work out in the settlements, or are likely to face violence as part of their job, and higher-ranking military personnel are permitted to own firearms. Israel, a country of nearly eight million, has only around five hundred thousand firearms owned by its citizens.

The arguments of Switzerland and Israel, however specious, are used to back up the claim that an armed citizenry is a safer citizenry. The tens of thousands of gun deaths in the United States versus the rest of the world would beg to differ. In a country where, statistically speaking, there are eight guns for every ten potential gun owners, we suffer from the highest rate of gun violence by far (excluding Mexico, who thanks to their ongoing literal drug war is excluded from this discussion). That’s by all possible measures, including adjusting for population and gun ownership rates. Having more guns has not made us safer by any measure.

Note that I said “by all measures”. While access to firearms obviously makes it more likely that gun-related violence will happen, even when you adjust for the gun ownership rate in the United States our gun violence rate is still highest in the developed world. And not by a little bit – the United States throws the curve when it comes to global gun violence, we’re so far and away overachieving in our gun violence rates.

They say that if everybody was armed, then everybody would be safe. The statistics say otherwise. Even with the highest level of gun ownership in the world, the United States is by far the country where you’re most likely to die of a gunshot wound (again, excepting war-torn Mexico). Yet, despite this level of gun ownership, how many crazed madmen firing indiscriminately into crowds have been stopped by a citizen bearing arms? Having trouble thinking of even one, aren’t you? It could be that the kind of people that are likely to go for the concealed carry license aren’t the type to go into crowds anyway, but then the people that go into crowds aren’t likely the type to want the responsibility of carrying a firearm.

When it comes to home defense, I understand the appeal of owning a firearm. But by the same token, we’re advised that for our own safety and especially for the safety of our naive children that we should keep our weapons safely locked up and separated from the ammunition. I’m in the military and we don’t even leave loaded weapons just lying around, even in combat zones where you’re far more likely to have somebody trying to shoot at you. I don’t know about you, but I’m highly uncomfortable with the idea of keeping a loaded weapon on my pillow. Too many things can go so horribly wrong.

The United States has a frightening culture of violence. It bears repeating, violent overthrow is how this country came to be. But our culture has come to glorify violence in many disturbing ways. The top-selling rappers record tracks about gun fights and pimping and drug use. Our top-selling video games are centered around warfare – Call of Duty alone has more than twenty titles devoted to warfare, all released in the last ten years. The most popular dramas on television are about crime – the top drama of the past few years is about crime and the military. The biggest movies are about violence, well, more accurately about fighting violence, but violence is still central to the premise. And this is all, more or less, about fictional violence.

Turn on the TV and watch the news and you’re inundated with violence. Reports of murders headline the local news, and the uniquely executed ones or those that involve pretty white girls make the national news. The shooting in Newtown has dominated the past twenty-four hours of the news cycle, and since the rise of the cable news channel that means it’s been constantly on since the first word broke.

We glorify violence, even the most appalling violence. How many of us remember the names of the thirteen killed in the Columbine High School shooting in 1999? Do the names Rachel Scott, Steven Curnow, or John Tomlin ring any bells? How about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? I’ll admit, I had to look up the names of those three mentioned victims from Columbine, but I didn’t have to think at all about the names of the two perpetrators. And this is something that happened when I was just thirteen-years-old, and I can remember then that the media coverage was intense.

Today, thirteen years later, the media coverage is obscene. Reporters were interviewing elementary school students who survived the shooting. Seriously, they’ve just been through one of the most traumatic experience a person could possibly face, and they’re children that aren’t even ten-years-old? How far have we fallen when our journalists are willing to interview the stunned and frightened and probably permanently scarred children who just survived such a horrific event? And we can’t blame it entirely on the media – they are, after all, serving up what they think we want to see, and the viewership ratings for incidents like this back up this sort of journalistic overreaching.

Adam Lanza’s name is going to go down in our memories. He’s going to be in the news for weeks upon weeks as investigators try to piece together his motives, rebuild in excruciating detail what happened inside Sandy Hook Elementary, and figure out how best to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again while trying not to upset the advocates on either side of the gun rights debate.

We can all agree that this was a tragedy and a failing of our society. Well, all of us excepting the nutcases at Westboro Baptist Church, though they’re a discussion for another time. But what are we going to do about it? How are we going to fix our laws and our society to prevent this from happening again?

A debate we should be having alongside the gun rights discussion is that of mental health in our country. It seems more and more like the crazies are coming out of the woodwork, either bearing rifles or making their way to political pulpits. It’s possible that we aren’t any crazier than we’ve ever been, but that the machinations of our modern society make crazy easier. We’re all too busy with our iPhones and our Facebooks and our texting to look up and recognize the crazy in the people around us.

Nobody just ‘snaps’ and loses it. There’s always a build-up to the activating event, there’s always somebody who looks back on it and goes “oh…” upon realizing that they saw the signs of a human being deteriorating and did nothing about it. We like to think that our modern technologies have made it easier than ever to stay connected to our friends and family, but this constant connection is almost always merely superficial. By plugging in, even to social media, we’re checking out from real life. I’m fully guilty of that, I have fewer meaningful real life relationships now than at any point in my life because I’ve let the internet supplant my real life. I’m not blaming the internet for this or any other shooting, mind you, but the way that our society has taken to so-called social networking is indicative of the decay we’ve allowed to permeate our society.

This is the point where some would claim that this degradation of society and the emergence of the crazies is because we’ve allowed god to leave our society. And that’s an absolute crock, as anybody willing to look at the numbers can tell you. The American population is highly religious, with eighty percent of adults claiming a religious identification of one sort or another. Forty percent of Americans regularly attend religious services, with only a handful of countries notching a higher percentage of churchgoers. The religious are far from some persecuted minority in the United States, and the belief in god or some other divine power is far from absent in our society. Has religion become less important in the United States? Yes, it has. But when it comes to religious identification and how important religion is to citizens, we are still far ahead of other nations with much lower crime and gun violence rates.

I’m not going to advocate that we take away all guns. That’s a nonstarter, and frankly not something I’d support anyway. I’m also not going to advocate that we start arming teachers and movie theater ushers and every citizen, as that’s a recipe for complete and utter disaster. Would you trust your elementary school teachers with guns on the statistically insignificant chance that somebody is going to barge into the classroom with a semiautomatic rifle? That’s just a bad idea right there – while the thought of armed teachers might be enough to deter that sort of violence, it’s opening up the door a whole host of potential tragedies.

More guns are not the answer to a gun problem. More guns mean more gun problems; the statistics do not lie. But guns are not going away. So what’s a nation obsessed with guns and violence to do about its problems with guns and violence?

I believe it’s going to have to come down to education and awareness. Thousands of people are injured or killed every year because of carelessness with firearms, and there’s absolutely no reason for a single person to die of an accidental weapons discharge. Guns are machines meant for killing, and they shouldn’t ever be pointed at anything ever that you don’t fully intend to kill, regardless of whether or not you believe it to be not loaded. Period. Guns and ammunition should be stored separately in locked containers, with guns having additional trigger locks. Period. If you’re going to put a gun out on display, remove the firing pin or other vital mechanism and lock it away. Simply, don’t leave a functioning weapon out in the open.

We also have to be fully aware of our surroundings and the people in it, especially those closest to us. If you live with somebody with deranged tendencies – you know if you do, because you worry about them – don’t have deadly weapons on the premises. And make sure your disturbed relative or friend gets help. Listen to that nagging voice at the back of your head.

We’ve gone so far down the road of everybody is special and everybody is a winner that we’ve lost track that there are people in our society that genuinely need help that parents and the schools cannot provide. Not everybody can be fixed, and we’re so much in the business of ignoring flaws in our fellow humans that we can’t even see them anymore. I’m not sure when or how it became a rule that teenagers get their own computers and televisions in rooms that are their own private sanctuary free from the interference of their parents, but I can’t help but believe that this sort of “give them everything they want” attitude is what’s leading us down this path.

I had a laptop when I was in high school, but it was a laptop I bought myself, and I wasn’t allowed to use it with my bedroom door closed. Parents seem to be more and more allowing the television and the computer to be their babysitters, as if a child occupied by a glowing screen is a child that isn’t in need of monitoring. To be fair, a lot of these parents are also obsessed with their glowing screens, leading to this horrifying lack of awareness in the world and people around them – people that should be the most important thing in their world.

The second amendment is not going to go away, and it shouldn’t. The right of the people to defend themselves against each other and the government should not be infringed, though we should give greater thought to the idea of the well-regulated citizen militia. But we have to give more thought to how we treat guns and violence in this nation. Guns are instruments of death, that is their reason for being, and there’s no point in denying that.

We need to acknowledge that pistols and rifles are tools meant for killing, even if we have no intention of using them as such, and treat them with the respect and caution that they deserve. You wouldn’t leave a stick of dynamite lying out, even if the matches and fuses are tucked away in separate cabinets, and you shouldn’t do the same with guns. We need to do more to educate our citizens on how to handle and behave around firearms, and we need to be cognizant of who we allow around firearms.

America is failing when it comes to our attitude towards violence. Our constant exposure to it through the all forms of media, both voluntary and forced, has numbed us to the horrors we inflict upon one another that it takes an outright appalling tragedy light the senseless slaughter of twenty innocent children and six of their teachers for us to have this conversation on a national level.

We can do better.

We have to do better.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for everything you’ve done for the technology industry and society at large. The products of Apple not only have been beautifully designed and envelope pushing, but they’ve also changed the way that we interact with each other and the world around us. The world is a different place because of your work, and you will be missed.

TiPb: Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple, becomes Chairman of the Board, Tim Cook becomes new CEO

This past month has been an insane one in the world of politics. The debate over the federal debt ceiling and spending finally came to a head in Washington and Congress spat out the most pathetic attempt at cutting spending I’ve ever seen: a budget plan that cuts $1 trillion over the next decade, coupled with a debt limit increase that will get the federal government into 2013 – past the next election cycle.

Now, a trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is, except when you’re talking about our budget deficit and accumulated federal debt. The Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the White House over the past decade have failed the American people when it comes to controlling spending. This latest deal is the cherry on the debt sundae: $100 billion cut a year over the next decade. This bill was passed at a time when our budget deficit for 2012 is forecasted at a stomach turning $1.65 trillion – more than the entire federal budget of 1997. To make things worse, that’s $1.65 trillion on top of the $14 trillion we’ve racked up over the past 175 years (1836 being the last year in which the federal government was debt free, under President Andrew Jackson).

(a quick primer if you’re confused by the terms: deficit is how far short income (taxes) falls short of spending (budget), while debt is the accumulation of deficits over the years).

So how does this relate to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how is he responsible for making America weak? Let’s take a look at some of the biggest items in the 2012 federal budget, shall we?

The New York Time’s excellent infographic that breaks down the government’s spending also details how much that spending costs per American household. As you can see, more than half of the taxes that you pay go towards the government’s healthcare and retirement programs.

Fifty five percent of our federal budget comes from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Here’s where things become the fault of Roosevelt and the 74th United States Congress. In August 1935, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, which created a new federal agency tasked with the operation of a “social insurance” policy for the elderly.

Social Security was a reaction to the in excess of 50% poverty rate of the elderly during the Great Depression. It was a noble idea: make sure that this doesn’t happen again. But from the start the system was flawed.

While Social Security has long brought in more money than it paid out, the flow of money has always gone the wrong way – the working of today are paying for the retirements of today. Essentially, the money that you pay into Social Security today doesn’t go to your own retirement, it instead goes to the Social Security check of somebody who is currently retired (and the same happened back when they were paying into Social Security). If you’re thinking that this sounds like some sort of Ponzi scheme, then you’d be right – Social Security as it exists is in fact the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of scams.

Social Security was created a safety net for the elderly, in the event that their savings or pension fell through. The problem today is that it’s not a safety net – there are tens of millions of Americans that look at Social Security as their right, as how they’ll pay for their retirement (operating under the mistaken belief that they’ve “paid into it” through their working years).

It was America’s first massive entitlement program, but it wouldn’t be the last. The 1960s saw the creation of Medicaid and Medicare, two federal healthcare programs designed for low-income families and individuals and the elderly. Like Social Security, noble initiatives, but flawed in execution.

Programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have helped millions upon millions of Americans over their existence. I won’t deny that. What I will deny is that they are good for the country in their current form. They’re supposed to be safety nets. Instead they’ve become spider webs. They’ve chipped away at what it means to be an American.

If you go to the National Archives in Washington, DC, you can go see the founding documents of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. They call them the Charters of Freedom. These documents call for such things as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the “right of the people to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures”, and the right to freely practice religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. They all collectively were created to ensure the independence not just of the nation, but of the American people from the government.

Social Security was the first step in whittling away at that individual independence of the American people. Today we have successive generations with a sense of entitlement that demands more and more from their government when the government can’t afford it. Unfortunately, our government has been run for decades by politicians more concerned with their careers than what’s good for the nation. They’ve passed budget after budget with ballooning deficits. Ironically, the only time in the past several decades that we’ve had a budget surplus (where the government brought in more money than it spent) was under the budgets created under the administration of Bill Clinton’s second term as President. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all ran up deficits in the hundreds of billions (and trillions under Bush 43) of dollars.

The problem with Social Security is that it exists in perpetuity. It was an extraordinary solution created in response to an extraordinary problem. But even though we’re experiencing economic problems right now, they’re nowhere near the extraordinary levels faced in the 1930s. Instead we’re faced with an extraordinary governmental problem of an impending massive rise in Social Security and healthcare costs.

Which leads me to ask the question: why?

Why are my tax dollars contributing to somebody else’s retirement? Why is the government involved in retirement at all? How far should the government be reaching into our healthcare system?

Don’t get me wrong – I have to qualms with reasonable regulation. It’s regulation that makes sure airlines are safe to fly, cars are safe to drive, and food is safe to eat. Regulations exist to protect the people against problems the individual citizen is not able to address.

The answer to the above questions is complicated, but it all goes back to the idea of the independent American. The federal government has established minimum wage to be at $7.25 and hour, which at full time equals out to about $15,000 a year. That may not seem like a lot in a world where everybody expects to make $40,000 annually right out of school, but it’s enough to get by and still have some savings. In fact, according to the US Census, $40,00 is right around the average income for a single American.

The sense of entitlement among Americans is what has gotten us into massive financial trouble. We have a right to our freedoms, but that freedom only extends as far as your arms can reach, voice can be heard, and dollar can be spent. We have no right to the house of our dreams or that shiny new car or even a pack of cigarettes. We have to work for those things, which requires planning and saving. But thanks to the government’s programs there to catch us when we fall, we’ve come to not think far enough ahead past that next payment on the mortgage or the trip to Disney World. We don’t think about how much retirement is going to cost, because the government’s supposed to be there to take care of it.

Social Security has to end. But it can’t end overnight. Whether or not the government had the authority to create Social Security, it made a promise to current and future retirees that it would take care of them. We’re in deep enough trouble as it is – the last thing we need to do throw the populace over the edge and roll back any chance of fixing the problem.

Here’s my rough proposal. I’m no politician, nor am I any sort of financial whiz, but I can see a way out. It’s a graduated plan that phases out social security over the next several decades. It continues to take care of today’s retirees and gives current workers time to prepare for their own self-financed retirement.

Current life expectancy in the United States is 78.7 years. If life expectancy continues to increase at the same rate it has over the past several decades, by 2020 the average life expectancy will be 80, and by 2045, 85 years. That means that not only will more and more retirees be joining the ranks of Social Security recipients, they’ll also be collecting for longer. It’s an unaffordable future that must be changed.

Current retirees will continue to receive their current benefits plus applicable cost-of-living increases. The current average Social Security recipient receives $1,777 a month (that’s actually more than a full time worker on minimum wage). Future Social Security recipients will receive benefits (plus cost-of-living increases) based on the year they first start receiving benefits. The table below lays out the target average payment for that year’s new recipients.

The idea is to slowly phase out Social Security over the course of the next 50 years. That gives today’s workers plenty of time to save for their retirement. Will it mean that retirement won’t be as comfortable for some as it is now? Yes, it will. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s required medicine. Phasing out social security will greatly diminish federal spending (especially given the swelling ranks of retirees) and force more independence on the part of Americans. It will also require the average American to save considerably more for their retirement to make up the difference.

The savings requirement is the reason that Social Security cannot just be turned off like faucet. Working Americans will have to start saving immediately for their retirement, lest they stop working and have no savings to live off of. Personally, I believe that you should be saving for your retirement and not counting on the existence of Social Security. If you’re working and you’re not saving for your retirement, you’re a fool.

Spending discipline is something missing from both the federal government and the American individual. Living within our means doesn’t mean anything any more, and it’s time we correct that before it’s too late – assuming it’s not already. We as a nation have to face the fact that we can’t have the house, the boat, and the car. Heck, if you can’t afford it, you probably shouldn’t have kids either (that’s a rant for another day).

My retirement is not the government’s responsibility, and it shouldn’t be.

NPR: Obama Signs Bill To Raise Debt Ceiling
ABC News: Obama Unveils $3.73 Trillion Budget for 2012
Bloomberg: Obama’s 2012 Budget Underestimates Federal Deficits, CBO Says
NPR: When The U.S. Paid Off The Entire National Debt (And Why It Didn’t Last)
New York Times: Obama’s 2012 Budget Proposal: How $3.7 Trillion is Spent
Social Security Administration: History
CNN Money: How does Social Security work?
The National Archives: Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom
Congressional Budget Office: Historical Data on the Federal Debt
United States Census: Personal Income 25 or Older, 2005
Central Intelligence Agency: Life Expectancy at Birth
Social Security Administration: Average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker

Most of you who are reading this are aware of my position an editor at PreCentral.net. It’s a great job, and I get to work with awesome people doing superb work. But PreCentral is my “night” job. My “day” job is a strange one, and it’s one that I don’t go into a lot of detail about, but after today’s work I feel the need to put it down in words.

As many of you are aware, I am a member of the Ohio Army National Guard. I have two jobs within that. There’s the standard “one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer” reservist thing where I’m a Specialist in the 122^nd Army Band, based out of Columbus, Ohio. The other 28 days of the month I’m a member of the Southwest Ohio Military Funeral Honors team, ensuring that those who served in the military of the United States of America receive the final respects they deserve for having sacrificed for their country with honor and distinction. I put on my dress uniform almost every day and head out to the cemeteries of the Cincinnati-Dayton area (and beyond) to sound Taps, fold the American flag, and present it to grieving loved ones. On occasion, pall bearing and rifle salutes are included as part of the ceremony (due to personnel constraints, the “full honors” is typically reserved for those that have retired from the service or were killed in action).

It can be an emotional job, but in the three years I’ve been doing it I’ve learned to separate myself from what’s going on. It can seem cold, but I’ve been told several times by family members that they appreciate the stoic and calm that the presence of an emotionally-detached honors team brings to the funeral service. I regularly see people at one of the worst moments in their life: the loss of a parent, or long-time spouse, or life-long friend. It can be tough, but there’s almost always a sense of closure that the funeral service brings to these families. It’s the end of what was usually a long and rich life for the deceased, and often the end of a physically and emotionally painful decline at the tail end of their life. I hear often that the deceased is now free from the pains of his Earthly body.

While I don’t believe that the consciousness that once thrived in the body in the casket or urn before me has gone anywhere (that’s a discussion for another point), it’s comforting to know that whether the “soul” goes to a great beyond or just ceases to be, the suffering inflicted by cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and advanced old age is at an end. And the suffering that is watching the decline of their loved on is at an end for the family and friends. There’s closure, and it has nothing to do with the afterlife – it has to do with the end of a long and quiet suffering here in this realm.

What makes that closure become realized is that the family knows it’s coming. We all know we’re eventually going to die. Most of us are going to succumb to a disease of old age, be it the end result of the habits of our lifestyle or just a ticking time bomb in our genes. But we know it’s coming, and when we’re relatively young, it seems to be a long way off. When we start that decline, we have time to prepare ourselves and our loved ones for the inevitable. Hopefully by the time we reach that point in our lives, we’ve been able to live a rich and rewarding life and have an appreciable impact on the lives of the people we love.

That encapsulates what I encounter on most days of my job. Resignation, closure, and relief. It’s the end of suffering.

Sometimes, my job forces me to see the beginning. Today was one of those days.

This morning I reported to Cincinnati’s Lunken Airfield to welcome home Army Private First Class William Blevins. PFC Blevins was serving in the Kunar province of Afghanistan when he was killed by an IED on May 23^rd. He was 21-years-old. Three of his fellow soldiers – SSG Kristofferson Lorenzo, PVT Krippner, and PVT Allers – were also killed in the blast.

All families of service members know that should their loved on be deployed to a combat zone, there’s the chance they could not come home alive. But nobody actually expects for their child, spouse, or – worst of all – parent to not come back alive. We always expect for the worst to happen, it’s instinct, but we don’t actually plan for the absolute worst. Our loved ones are supposed to come back home after a year with a smile on their face, a few medals on their chest, and some interesting stories to tell. Not in an oak casket.

From the honor guard perspective, what I did today is coldly called an HTR – an Honorable Transfer of Remains. In the simplest terms, a six-person pall bearing team carried PFC Blevins’ casket from the chartered transport jet to the hearse, and then from the hearse to the funeral home. As far as sequence and steps go, it’s a simple job: we’re moving a casket from A to B in the most dignified manner possible. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of practice doing this, so we’ve gotten to be quite good at it.

What makes an HTR difficult is the emotions. With two exceptions, every HTR I’ve participated in was for a fallen soldier that was younger than me. I’m 24, and I don’t anticipate my life ending any time soon. I’ve accomplished a lot, but there’s still a lot I still want to do with my life. Those two exceptions I mentioned, those were for the recovered remains of soldiers from WWII and Vietnam; the emotions of the small family contingents on the tarmac were almost entirely relief – they long ago accepted that their loved on wasn’t coming home.

Today was not like that. PFC Blevins came from the town of Sardinia, population 826. On hand to honor the return of his remains was myself and six of my honor guard colleagues, at least three dozen members of the motorcycle-riding funeral escort group the Patriot Guard Riders, members of the Cincinnati police and fire departments, and the Blevins family, having traveled the hour from Sardinia to Cincinnati. The press was kept off the airport grounds, providing coverage from outside the tarmac fenceline.

The notes of Taps often elicit weeping from mourners at the funerals I participate in. Military honors typically take place after the conclusion of the religious service, and as Taps signifies the end of the duty day on military posts around the world, it also signifies the end of the “day” for the body we’re laying to rest.

There is no sounding of Taps at an HTR. There’s no presentation of the flag to a grieving widow or the report of three rifle volleys. There’s only silence, barely punctuated by the sound of the quiet commands given amongst the honor guard team. Service members killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq are first flown to Germany, and then to Dover, Delaware. From there, a contracted jet specially outfitted for the sole purpose of transporting the remains of fallen veterans, flies directly to the closest airport to the family. When that jet lands, it has a pilot, co-pilot, an escort officer, and the flag-draped casket on board. Nothing else, save the lift used to bring the casket down to the tarmac (it’s far preferable to the airport tarmac conveyer belt that used to be used when caskets were shipped as freight in the cargo hold of commercial passenger airliners). The crew of the transport jet works quietly and professionally getting everything set up to bring the casket out. They’re good people doing a righteous job.

But as soon as the casket is pushed into view the silence is broken. Not by Taps or the sound of synchronous rifle shots. Not by honor guard commands or a minister’s prayer or a humorous story that encapsulates the spirit of the deceased in a eulogy that brings tearful smiles to the faces of the mourning.

It’s the sound of crying.

Sometimes it’s a muffled sob. Sometimes it’s a yell of anguish. It comes from mothers and fathers, girlfriends and wives, children and life-long friends. And it’s always painful. I’ve built a wall between my emotions and my actions, I know that if I think too much about what it is that I’m doing, then I’m likely going to start crying myself.

This family didn’t have the warning to prepare for this day. Less than a week ago their loved one was alive and well, fighting for what he believed in in a land far from here both physically and mentally. And then, in an instant, that life was snuffed out. What I see in my job is only a part of the grieving process, and I can’t imagine how much pain these families have endured in just a few day’s time.

Our job is to transport the casket from the plane to the hearse. With that done, we render one final salute and leave the area. It might seem cold to just up and leave, but we do it to give the family space and so that we don’t serve as a distraction. From the airport we drove out to the funeral home in Russellville (just a short drive down the road from Sardinia) so that we could be ready to transfer the casket from the hearse into the funeral home, where it would be prepped for a viewing later that night at the local high school (the only local venue large enough to hold the anticipated crowd).

We were at least five miles out from Russellville when I noticed the yellow ribbons. They were placed on sign posts, mail boxes, power poles, guard rails, and trees. When there was nothing within a few yards to stick it to, a post had been put into the ground for the sole purpose of displaying that ribbon. Once we got into Russellville, we saw the American flags hanging off every streetlight. What was more impressing, however, were the people. Our honor guard group arrived about thirty minutes ahead of the funeral procession, and the residents of Russellville and Sardinia had already lined Columbus Street to pay their silent respects to PFC Blevins and his family.

When the procession made it to town, they had a six-car police escort at the front and a few dozen Patriot Guard Riders on their thundering motorcycles, each flying a large American flag. It’s an impressive sight, and an impressing experience. It sticks with you. But what I think might stick with me even more was the reaction of the crowd that had gathered along the street. They stood quietly and solemnly, some holding each other, some holding their hand over their heart. All somber. All grieving for their community and the Blevins family, even if most of them didn’t even know William.

Most days I’m able to do my job with minimal emotional involvement. You can develop a morbid sense of humor on the job, and I’ll admit I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about how I want my own funeral to be conducted. I’ve heard many great stories about great people, and been there to serve as that solemn rock when a grieving family needed it.

But days like today, filled with outpourings of grief, pride, sorrow, support, and the unmatched pain of the sudden loss of a dear loved one… days like today can get to me. Days like today are why I do what I do. I’m not likely to find myself in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other military harm’s way anytime soon. I fire a weapon once a year only for qualification purposes, the rest of the time I play a clarinet and make graphics and spreadsheets on a computer. I can’t measure up to those that have laid down their lives in defense of their country, their friends and family, and their ideals. What I can do is make sure their sacrifice is honored. That those that have given that last full measure of devotion are laid to rest with the dignity and respect that they so deserve.

Cincinnati.com: Fallen soldier returns home for burial
WLWT: Fallen Soldier Reutnrs To Tri-State

Apparently the U.S. government is considering taking an $11 billion loss by selling the 26% stake it has in GM shares so that President Obama doesn’t have to deal with the ramifications of owning 1/4 of a struggling automaker while campaigning for reelection. Despicable.

If you’re wondering what I mean by struggling, don’t think for a moment that GM is doing well. All the reported good news over GM has been whitewashed to make it look like the American auto industry is back on their feet and doing well, when really only Ford is the one running a competent business operation. GM’s profitability is dependent upon a series of tax breaks on massive losses that it suffered pre-bankruptcy. And no, it’s not kosher to claim tax breaks on losses and debts that are no longer on your books because you underwent a federal-expedited bankruptcy that shunted all of those losses and debts over to a shell of a company designed to absolve GM of all its troubles.

In  a little reported part of GM’s bankruptcy reorganization, the “Motors Liquidation Company” was formed, taking on all of GM’s debt and all of the public shareholder’s stock. Suppliers, banks, average Joes with a few shares of GM stock; they all got hosed. And despite this hosing, GM still hasn’t managed to get its act together. But that’s for another post some other day.

In the here and now, the Federal Reserve is playing politics with the American taxpayer’s money. Taxpayer funds supplied $50 billion to ensure that GM wouldn’t fail, and it did regardless. That $50 billion netted the US government a 61% share of GM (with the rest split by Canada and bond holders). After GM’s public IPO, the federal government’s ownership in GM was reduced to 26.5%. GM stock re-debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at $33-a-share, and has since dropped to $29.93.

That’s not a horrible drop by any measure, but it’s nowhere near the $53-a-share that the US government needs to break even. Instead we’ll just take a multi-billion-dollar loss just so Obama can claim it as a successful instance of government intervention.

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Hurries to Sell GM Stake

Hi.

Derek Kessler here.

You might be wondering what it is you’re looking at. Well, friend, this is Derek’s pitiful attempt at a blog. And yes, I’ve modeled my design after that of Daring Fireball. Great artists steal.

Assuming I can remember to consistently update this blog (it only took me 19 months of having this domain to finally get around to putting up something other than “coming soon”), you’ll see a mix of content. This is bound to become my outlet for all things random, so you can expect topics to bounce between technology, politics, cars, science fiction, military stuff, graphic design, and likely much much more. And you are correct, there are no comments here.

A little bit about myself, in case you don’t know who I am: I have two jobs. My “day job,” if you can call it that, is as a Specialist E-4 in the Ohio Army National Guard. Within the Guard I actually have two jobs: there’s the standard ‘one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer’ that I do as a clarinetist in the 122nd Army Band, where I make music, graphics, announcements, and computers not suck quite as much. During the rest of the month I’m a member of the state Military Funeral Honors team, which has me out nearly every day performing final military honors (flag folding, sounding taps, rifle salutes, the whole shebang) for veterans that have served our country with honor and distinction.

My other job is as the Managing Editor of PreCentral.net, the leading HP webOS news site and community on the internets. In that job I manage the site’s news content (writing some of it myself), to include news posts, device and app reviews, editorials, and the like. PreCentral actually takes most of my time, and I’m okay with that.

I’ve been a native Ohioan my entire life, currently residing in Cincinnati where I’m renovating a house designed by an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright-style, but without the multi-million-dollar premium). I should mention at this point that I likely qualify as an architecture buff. I studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and The Ohio State University, but in the end it turns out I’m just not that good at being a student. I’m a doer.

I’m also a rambler. So let’s wrap this up, shall we? I am on the Twitter (@dkdsgn) if you’re into such things. Chances are that’s how you found this blog. If you’re looking for the RSS feed for my ridiculous blog and it’s not appearing in your address bar. here you go: http://dkdsgn.com/blog/feed/

So that’s that. I’ll see you around.