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"The first duty and the right of the art of war is to keep
policy from demanding things that go against the nature of war,
to prevent the possibility that out of ignorance of the way the
instrument works, policy might misuse it."Carl von Clausewitz.Ignorance indeed. Americans have a right to expect competence in their officials, and we have been badly served by this dministration and this Congress.As a Vietnam combat veteran, I have my own point of view. People are dying without serving the national interest, and this is criminal.
 Technical Interests
When I returned from Vietnam (October, 1968) I was at loose ends and unsure what career to pursue. I took a vocational test offered by B'Nai Brith, paid for the VA.
The result was a recommendation that I enter the new field of computers. Naturally, I didn't take the advice. Subsequently, I took a Fortran course just to get enough credits to graduate (Towson University, 1971). In 1975 I entered the insurance industry (Prudential) and stuck with that for 10 years, briefly flirting with a computer system for managing sales contacts, but it was too expensive to justify. In 1990 I signed on with a local agency to manage one of their new sales offices. The previous occupant had left us an IBM PS/2 system they used to manage their database (DBase), and I had a lot of free time while getting the new office off the ground. After managing to crash the system several times, I eventually learned some BASIC and Dbase programming, and wrote some useful utility programs while managing to get our entire local database into the system. I eventually left that job, but I was hooked. I visited my brother during this period, and he had acquired an Atari system he used for playing games. I was up for 4 days mastering King's Quest, still one of the best games ever, in my opinion. When I returned home to Annapolis, I managed to acquire a 286, and got very interested in Fractals. This system was so slow, with 640kb of RAM, that some relatively simple designs took over 24 hours to generate. I spent $100.00 I couldn't afford to put a math co-processor in this machine. I also contacted the designer of this shareware program to beg for a 1024 x 768 resolution to accommodate my 19" SVGA monitor. He complied. I've had many computers and peripherals since then, but those were exciting days. Today, I'm the go-to guy for my small circle of friends, and I have belonged to several forums that involve answering reader inquiries about computer problems. I've learned more from answering these questions than from any other source.
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