I'm not exactly in mourning

Communist, anti-American thug Hugo Chavez has died.

Aaron Swartz and Manipulation of Mental Illness

The tech and legal communities this week are debating the suicide of 26-year old computer genius (and that is not too strong of a word by any means) Aaron Swartz, who was found to have hanged himself last Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. The Wall Street Journal gives background on legal troubles Swartz, who was believed to be suffering from clinical depression, was facing:

A few years ago, Mr. Swartz caused a stir by downloading some 20 million pages of court documents from the fee-charging Pacer website by exploiting free access given to libraries. No charges were ever brought, and no crime was committed, his lawyer said. But his efforts to make online content available for free ultimately brought him into conflict with federal prosecutors.
He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.

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Sorry for the light posting ... again

Between my law practice and editing Rising Sun Falling Skies, I've had almost no time to blog. Will try to blog more often, but posts may, as you've seen, be sporadic for a bit.

On the bright side of life

The largely disastrous negotiations surrounding the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" at least gave us this, by far the best picture evah of House Speaker John Boehner:

Remember

December 7, 1941. The unprovoked (no matter what leftist historians say) attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Carrier Striking Force Kido Butai.

Calling Kido Butai

It seems China's bullying in East Asia has gotten a predictible response. Smaller Asian nations are now coalescing around Japan in an effort to counter the "rising" dragon. And Japan is strengthening itself as part of that effort:

After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, the pacifist nation of Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries’ defenses to counter a rising China.

Already this year, Japan crossed a little-noted threshold by providing its first military aid abroad since the end of World War II, approving a $2 million package for its military engineers to train troops in Cambodia and East Timor in disaster relief and skills like road building. Japanese warships have not only conducted joint exercises with a growing number of military forces in the Pacific and Asia, but they have also begun making regular port visits to countries long fearful of a resurgence of Japan’s military.

And after stepping up civilian aid programs to train and equip the coast guards of other nations, Japanese defense officials and analysts say, Japan could soon reach another milestone: beginning sales in the region of military hardware like seaplanes, and perhaps eventually the stealthy diesel-powered submarines considered well suited to the shallow waters where China is making increasingly assertive territorial claims.

Taken together those steps, while modest, represent a significant shift for Japan, which had resisted repeated calls from the United States to become a true regional power for fear that doing so would move it too far from its postwar pacifism. The country’s quiet resolve to edge past that reluctance and become more of a player comes as the United States and China are staking their own claims to power in Asia, and as jitters over China’s ambitions appear to be softening bitterness toward Japan among some Southeast Asian countries trampled last century in its quest for colonial domination.

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No surprise here

The investigation of the explosion in the Richmond Hill subdivision that killed two is now a homicide investigation.

This is not a surprise, as the circumstances surrounding the explosion are simply too suspicious. The behavior of the owners of the home has raised red flags. And houses simply do not explode with that level of force without some "help." Authorities are looking into an unidentified white van that was spotted near the scene.

Hopefully law enforcement will get to the bottom of this in short order.