Zimmerman redux

Ugh.  After having avoided the Zimmerman non-event event trial for as long I did and having said I was tapping out, I feel compelled to write one last time about it.  The fallout of the case is interesting. A lot of people are calling for the federal government to bring civil charges against George Zimmerman. The basis for such charges would be civil rights violations. Call it O.J. civil suit payback I guess.  The problem for those calling for that sort thing is surprisingly not the lack of reasonableness of such an action, but surprisingly, the FBI.

McClatchy

After interviewing nearly three dozen people in the George Zimmerman murder case, the FBI found no evidence that racial bias was a motivating factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, records released Thursday show.

Even the lead detective in the case, Sanford Det. Chris Serino, told agents that he thought Zimmerman profiled Trayvon because of his attire and the circumstances — but not his race.

Serino saw Zimmerman as “having little hero complex, but not as a racist.”

The Duval County State Attorney released another collection of evidence in the Zimmerman murder case Thursday, including reports from FBI agents who investigated whether any racial bias was involved in Trayvon’s Feb. 26 killing.

The evidence includes bank surveillance videos from the day of the killing, crime scene photos and memos from prosecutors.

Among the documents is a note from the prosecutor who said one of the witnesses said her son, a minor, had felt pressured by investigators to say the injured man he saw was wearing a red top. The boy’s testimony had been considered key, because it backed up Zimmerman’s allegation that he — wearing red — was being pummeled.

Federal agents interviewed Zimmerman’s neighbors and co-workers, but none said Zimmerman had expressed racial animus at any time prior to the Feb. 26 shooting of Martin, a black teen, in a confrontation at a Sanford housing complex. As Sanford police investigated the circumstances of Martin’s death, the FBI opened a parallel probe to determine if Martin’s civil rights had been violated.

This will go as well as the original prosecution, and it should.  And hopefully that is my last post on Zimmerman.

Zimmerman verdict round-up

The verdict in the George Zimmerman case is in.  He's been found not guilty.  Regardless of what you might believe actually happened, the right verdict seems to have been reached.  The prosecution did not prove Zimmerman's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and so he was acquitted. That is the nature of the justice system and it was the only reasonable conclusion if you followed the trial.  I followed the trial but to be honest, only out of a blogging interest.  I was never interested in this story. It should not have gotten national attention. It should never had risen to the level that the president stuck his nose into it.  It should not have risen to the level that an NBC employee had to be fired or falsely editing the 911 call to make Zimmerman look guilty.  Yet it did.

This story is a tragedy. A 17 year old is dead and another man almost went to jail.  There are no winners here.  The biggest loser though, is tempered, sane journalism and that's why I avoided writing about it, and will continue to do so.

Instead, here is a round-up of some good and terrible opinion pieces on this verdict.

Next up - Federal charges?

Head shake.

Let's hope the violence remains isolated.

Prosecution relied on emotion.

The jury is not out on the jury.

And with that, I'm tapping out on the whole Treyvon versus Zimmerman case.

Quick Post: IRS scandal #2

Shady IRS logo for the record company.  Maybe they should switch with the other IRS

I'm behind on blogging and as a result, behind on this new story of more IRS malfeasance.  Or foolishness.  Either way, this is unacceptable.

Via the National Journal:

Another day, another slip up by the Internal Revenue Service.

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of "tens of thousands" of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours after being discovered, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it's a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group's founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency's January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government's website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

So here's the obvious question - were these Tea Party groups?  I have issues with the IRS either way - either it's more persecution of conservative groups, or it's a way to intimate that the IRS is broken but not deliberately working against conservative groups and this is a diversion of anger against the first complaint against the IRS.   There is a third possibility - that the IRS is horribly screwed up and this information came out coincidentally with the other scandal.

More information needs to come out before we can be certain;

(1) Whose info was exposed?

(2) Did it happen after the first scandal, before, or is it part of an on-going pattern of mistakes of this type?

(3) How did the information come to light?

(4) How were those affected by it, affected?

Waiting seems to be the best course of action before making pronouncements on this.

Stuff that keeps me up at night

YJ-62: Part of China's arsenal.

Yikes. China might be beating the U.S. on the naval warfare front.

...a missile race going on in the Pacific, and one China might be winning.

The most muscular of these new Chinese weapons is the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, which counts a range of over 1,700 miles. If in some future shooting war one of these missiles targets a U.S. warship, there might be no defense against it.

China has also been hard at work developing a navalized version of the DH-10 land-attack cruise missile, which can travel nearly 2,500 miles and strike ground targets such as American bases in Guam and Okinawa...

Beijing’s most powerful foreign-made anti-ship missile is the Russian SS-N-22 Sunburn, a terrifying Mach-3 devastator.

...There’s a destroyer-launched version of the YJ-62 with an operational range of nearly 250 miles, compared to the standard Harpoon’s 77 miles. All things being equal, in a head-to-head fight a Chinese destroyer could get the first shot against a U.S. vessel.

And there’s a big push underway in China to build even newer and better ship-killing missiles. Beijing has been observed ramping-up use of special test-bed ships fitted with new sensors that could be satellite communications or fire control systems, or something else entirely.

All this activity on the other side of the Pacific has put the U.S. off its balance. “Don’t be too surprised if the Navy is scrambling to deploy in a hurry, as [the Americans] are chronically behind in EW system fleet upgrades across all three services, due to funding being diverted into [the global war on terrorism] or whatever label is attached these days,” Kopp says.

That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.  They say you have to pick your poison.  In this case America has targeted terrorism ahead of national defense maintenance.  In fact the current administration has picked any domestic pork barrel spending over anything to do with national defense - terrorism or otherwise.  America has been fighting a two front war for over a decade.  Not Afghanistan and Iraq, but rather it has been fighting a war between geo-political national defense and trying to use resources to minimize and mitigate terrorism.

What's the right balance for those two competing needs?  The numbers are pretty clear - the amount spent on Homeland Security that has saved a questionable number of lives (remember jobs saved logic? It's being used here as well) versus keeping the entire nation safe the priority should be on the latter.  After all, the Boston Marathon wasn't prevented despite all of the billions spent on spying on Americans.  That's because you can't prevent everything.  The solution - focus on moving the big rocks.  China is a big rock.  Secondly, in the this-or-that decisioning, it's pretty clear that the public doesn't want to be spied upon anyway.

The decision seems to be pretty straight-forward at this point.  Focus the national defense efforts on China, North Korea, Iran and Russia.  Those are the real dangers.  Yes, terrorism must be dealt with but containing it is simpler if America has international respect as to what it might do to a nation that supports terrorism.  With that respect gone, it's open season on America. By focusing on geo-political foes, America gets a secondary benefit of discouraging support for terrorism.  The reverse case - fighting terrorism helping  contain potential Chinese aggression - is not going to happen.

Did not know that - John Hawkins speaks

One of my favorite right of center political blogs is Right Wing News.  I must confess that when I read it, I still filter through most of the posts by the other authors than the blogs creator John Hawkins, looking for his stuff.  It's not that there aren't great posts from the other authors there - there are some really good ones in fact.  Rather, I like John Hawkins' writing, his ideas and sensibilities on various topics.

What I stumbled upon recently, was the fact that John posts on youtube as well. That's a pleasant surprise. While he hasn't posted to youtube in a few months, here's one of his more recent posts that is still relevant today and will be for a couple of years: Not Jeb Bush.

Saturday Learning Series - Six Sigma (Part 10)

Last week Saturday Learning Series continued MIT's series on Six Sigma.  Today in part 10, they look at quality tools.