For several years, I have dabbled in genealogy.  I use the word dabbled, not out of disrespect, but because I essentially did not know what I was doing.  Merely getting a photograph of an ancestor or finding a 1914 High School Yearbook which was the first one done by the school from which I graduated was a real joy.  To find that two of the Nolan sisters who raised me wrote the class poem for it made me extremely happy.  It has begun to interest me in more and more ways recently.  I believe that is because it appeals to to several parts of me, all at once.

• I find myself to be the last one standing that can write about a large part of several lines of family which ended because the people involved never married and produced no offspring.  This feels like both a duty and an act of love to be completed.
• It strongly appeals to that obsessively inquisitive part of me that disassembled clocks as a child, built and learned by doing during my youth, considered various “investigative” careers while coming age, and finally becoming a psychologist where a need to know is essential rather than just being snoopy.
• Genealogy, in its current form, appears to be computer intensive.  That makes it into something that becomes more of an enjoyable hobby than a difficult task.
• A male relative of approximately my age, on my mother’s side of the family, has built a magnificent genealogical chart of that half of my ancestry.  It is done online and I have been able to contribute to it minimally.
• In the past few weeks I have found enough information in a list of high school graduates from the school mentioned above back to its first graduating class beginning in 1890 to make many connections that I knew must be there, but could not get ages done correctly.  The 1880 Federal Census provided so much more in the way of connections that I was both amazed and understood quite well why I had been unable to find several relatives.  Most had immigrated from Ireland, some Irish lines ended abruptly because siblings remained together as families.  A newspaper in the town in which I was born has provided a wealth of connections and dates which, again, I knew must exist but had not been able to find elsewhere.

With that said, I am asking for a bit of advice, tips, experiences, procedure, sources, and other help from any of you who have worked with genealogical research and charting.  I “sort of” know a bit about this and am learning, but am quite an amateur.  If anyone has suggestions regarding best or worst sources or practices, I would very much appreciate your ideas.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2009, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

He that has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family must have been begot by a flash of lightning!
- Thomas Fuller, 1608-61

I was going to do another rant, complete with citations, pictures, and everything about the likelihood of having your passport or RFID implanted credit card cloned from a distance without you having any idea it had happened.  Depending upon your viewpoint, good or bad fortune intervened.

The monitor you see in the background is a 20 inch LCD located approximately two feet from my head.  The monstrous cat you see in the foreground is Bittle (once called Little Bit for some long past reason during his kittenhood.)  When he decides on something, he becomes very persistent.  I had returned earlier from a grocery and cat food expedition.  Both Bittle and Stinky were very aware that when I am gone for about two hours, it will likely result in something good for them.  Of course it did, but I did not unpack it right away.  “The Look” is the result of my lack of immediate service.  Yes, he is that big.

I leave it to you to ask yourself, “Would I get between “Bittle the Barbarian” and food to write a boring post on RFID?”

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2009, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

“ Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer.” – Bruce Graham

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I have been trying to understand what happened to the economy to produce such a global disaster from some United States sub-prime loans.  I’ve learned about leverage, hedge funds, interdependency, trade deficits, gross national products, and various other money manipulations.  Some are so far removed from from the relationship between the value of something produced to how much profit is made when it is purchased, that I’m not sure the people whose work it is to do this stuff understand it.  I found one video that explained and illustrated in simple English,  how the beginning of the meltdown came about:

http://crisisofcredit.com/

This video was found on the Digital Inspiration website which I would highly recommend.

Peace, Doc

“Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.” - Will Rogers

I am doing all that I find possible to make Vista act like XP Pro.  I can’t do it, of course, but I could make it file things similarly (probably slowing it down even further in the process) and I could install wallpaper that makes me feel better about the whole “Vista Experience.”  I have never used wallpaper, other than a single background color, until now:

Don't Touch That Monitor!

My new wallpaper
Keeps my desktop very clean
See that lovely skin

Windows Live People?  Why the hell did you take my Lucida Calligraphy font away?

Ah, well.  It is what it is.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2009, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, do something else.” – Doc

In my last post there was a bit of confusion concerning my mental status and the veracity of the topic about which I was writing.  Let me reassure you that I do not believe that all of these observational activities were happening to me.  Let me as strongly assure you that they could have been.  To any of us.  I simply told a fictitious (and I thought humorous) tale made up of potentially true elements.  I did not come close to including all the ways in which we can be spied upon or have information about us gathered. 

To a very large degree, I don’t mind for myself.  Younger readers should be more concerned, as a function of how many more years they expect to live in a developing society.  In my opinion, during the last administration, one was not normal unless one was more paranoid than would ordinarily seem normal to most people.  I can’t imagine the pressures and requirements for rapid and sweeping  action that President Obama inherited along with his inauguration.  Some of which, I’m sure, I haven’t even the slightest clue.  Others, I have minimally informed guesses derived from putting together pieces from disparate sources and having them fit, though not understanding enough of the whole picture to know exactly where, why, and how.  Then there is the range of “what if’s” that many or most of us have heard about, seen on the news, read in the Sunday funnies, or wherever.  I won’t belabor those, at least here and now.  Finally, there are the ones already in place or very likely to be in place within the very near future.

Please understand that when I describe two of my pet hatreds, I am also quite willing to admit that most have legal, helpful, and possibly life saving purposes, or that they can and do make our lives much easier.  The first and of lesser importance is the electronic law enforcement area.  I don’t have much of an argument about security cameras, monitors, and tapes in stores or other public places where they could well help solve a crime or put a criminal in jail.  The assumption that they are always right, however, leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.  They are tools and tools don’t generally think.  People do, rightly or wrongly, in devising, implementing, and using the results produced by these tools.  A single example from my own life will suffice to explain why I might not be fond of traffic monitor cameras.

About three years ago I sold a car to a (then) family friend.  He paid me in cash and I foolishly trusted him by allowing him to leave the license plates, registered to me, on the car to drive home.  Roughly four months after that transaction, I received a notice to pay a fine of $88, or appear in court to explain why I should not, for illegally passing through an iPass (transponder) toll road lane four times without a transponder.  There was quite a nice picture of the car, centered on the license plate, accompanying this notice, along with the stern warning that a claim of not being the driver of the car was not grounds for dismissal and, if I had that in mind, don’t even bother.  Just send them a check.  I did so, as that was the only defense I had.  This was also around the time that the Illinois Tollway Commission had (or was about to) sell/lease that section of tollway to the Chinese.  We had already leased the Skyway to an Australian business.  The point was that in this case, to me at least, it was evident that the primary purpose of the device was to obtain revenue for the owner/operator.  It could have uses to track speeders, specific transponders, photograph stolen cars or plates, etc. but in this case, was simply used to gouge dollars from a citizen who did nothing wrong.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the following is not a joke, parody, or in any way intended to be funny.  By far my direst concern is the spying allowed under the Patriot and FISA acts, and the establishment of national databases for complete health information on every citizen.  Both Microsoft and Google are in the running for the contract to store and correlate this information.  Essentially, it gives away everything I have felt so strongly about as a clinician trying his best to follow all of the rules and regulations in the HIPAA act which protects patients’ rights to privacy and confidentiality.  As part of the “Bailout Plan” that President Obama is working on, a large amount of money is expected to be saved by the use of the EHR or EMR, which does away with paper records, makes the process quicker and easier for the big business portion of the chain, and has already been hacked by a hired consultant.  Additionally, the NSA incidentally happens to have occupied an unused Sony facility in Dallas.  It is a very short distance from the Microsoft facility expected to house the database if they either get the contract or a portion of it.

As both a psychologist and an old coot, I have come to believe that the old maxim, “Money is the root of all evil,” if not literally and absolutely true, is a very good place to start looking when one doesn’t understand a situation involving two or more people in social situations.  Money is referred to by (some) psychologists as a universal reinforcer for humans, in whatever form it takes.  Beads, bucks, or bullion, one can trade it for almost anything.  The possession of it makes one feel good because they can then satisfy anything from the lowest of needs (shelter, food, warmth) to the highest (luxuries, community improvement, political action, or philanthropy.)  The problems that quickly arise are need and greed.  We make moral and ethical judgments about where the dividing line between the two lies, but for the vast majority of us, it tends to stay pretty much in the same place.

Knowledge is money in various ways; legal, gray-market, or illegal.  The lines really blur in this area as to what is “right” or “wrong.”   The knowledge of, say, only your name and address is useful to direct mail advertisers, local politicians seeking your vote, Aunt Louise inviting you to dinner, or collections callers.  One can generally find this in the telephone book.  Attach more information such as gender, age, and income level to this basic beginning database, and more can be done with it.  Targeted advertising, certain types of discrimination, more accurate guesses about credit worthiness, and the like come into play.  Here, our toes touch or cross the line of “good” and “bad” but it is still perfectly legal to obtain.  I will skip some of the intermediate areas, other than to add that credit card records of what we buy, computer cookies and site stat information gathering, who our friends are, what organizations we belong to, and other more personal information is collectible.  It is legal, but approaches the possibility for unethical or illegal.  From here on, let’s follow the money and danger of this “health” database.

More information becomes available to “someone” via dumpster diving for personal information, mailbox theft, listening in on phone calls, having less than legal searches done on an individual, trickery, tracking Internet activities, hacking into databases of banks, corporations, insurance providers, hospitals, care provider groups, and yes, especially the national health database.  There are many more ways in which information can be gathered, but I will attempt to refrain from sounding like a “nut bucket” by avoiding listing them here.  Well, people already know that stuff about me anyway, we might say.  True, but they are not yet combined into a single database for the vast majority of us yet (I don’t believe.)  How could “someone” make money with this information?  The deeper one digs, the more sinister the possible misuses and consequences become.

Presently, there is certain information which a prospective employer may not ask or consider before hiring a new employee.  “Someone” might want this data, legally obtained or not, in order to gain the best possible return on investment for every employee hired or retained.  What better place to find the information you want than a centralized database?  Do you want to hire and train a young, pregnant woman, only to have her leave before she has fully begun the work you have trained her for?  Do you want to hire a person with a history of cardiac problems without knowledge of that information?  Would you want to hire a person who “looks OK” but has a progressively deteriorating health condition that will require frequent time off and payouts from the health insurance you provide?  And on and on.  Get the information in the database covertly and you reduce your corporate risk and enhance your bottom line.  You probably have very little risk if you hire a good hacker and don’t make your illegal decisions too obvious.

“Somebody” might be a health insurance company.  They would most certainly be interested in pre-existing conditions, undisclosed family and genetic health information, information markers of diseases likely to develop, probability of the development of long term disabling conditions, mental health history with the likelihood of hospitalization, or, once again, anything that would lessen their profits.  Consider also that they already have access to the database in their processing of claims made.  They are in business to make money, not to be nice to us.  To this end and to reduce costs, they, hospitals, HMO’s, big pharmaceutical companies, and like organizations are all in strong support of Electronic Medical or Health Record.  The majority of individual health providers see both the inherent flaws in the system and do not wish to use an EHR or EMR system.  Very soon, they will have to do so in order to be paid for their services, even at the cost of their ability to promise their patients the privacy and confidentiality required by the HIPAA legislation.

“Somebody” might be a life insurance company.  in the past, they worked more purely on actuarial information on how long the average person lived and made their bets against them living that long (with a little extra payment added for profit.)  More recently, they added known major disease causes such as smoking, blood pressure, cardiac problems, history of cancer in yourself or your family, thus honing their ability to predict how long a person would live.  Given the information that the national database is to contain, it might literally be able to pin down life expectancy to the month.  I sincerely hope I am exaggerating.  Once again, they are a business in existence to make money, not to be nice to us.  Access to such a national health database would clearly be almost irresistible to a business based on such information.  I think they’d cheat, if possible.

OK, we have briefly covered some possible abuses in business, the health industry, and the life insurance arena.  What about some really illegal uses?  This database, as it expands, would clearly contain a gold mine of information for identity theft, blackmail, high level corporate mergers or takeovers, and … well, almost any situation in which extensive knowledge of your adversary, partner, a company’s work force, or very detailed information about another person gives one a significant advantage. 

Possibly the most beneficial and the most diabolical use of this information lies in the future.  Access to a wealth of information such as this could be of immense benefit, for instance, to the physician discussing the prognosis for having a normal child versus having a terribly damaged one.  An informed decision could then be made with as many factors included as possible.  Having a full medical history immediately available in an Emergency Room would clearly save lives and prevent some medical errors.

There is a very dark side to this same ability to predict the birth of “normal” children, however.  In various times, it has been called by different names; Eugenics, Final Solution, Genetic Cleansing, Genocide, Selective Breeding, and others – all very ugly in their implications and in the actions taken in their name.  The single question here, regardless of what one names it, is where could one possibly find a repository of information so useful in its execution.  Choose the most troublesome or costliest to a society and, based on this database, determine who should not be allowed to have children, which children will not be born, or eliminate the genetically tagged troublemakers before they enter the world.  Animal breeders have been doing this for centuries without such information.  Determine how revolted and afraid you are by knowing the society involved and who the decider will be.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2009, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

Beware, my Lord!
Beware lest stern Heaven hate
you enough to hear your prayers!
By Anatole France

OK.  Maybe too long to read?  Boring?  Didn't get to the end?  At least watch a very recent CNN video.

This post might also have been titled A Little Healthy Paranoia Is Good For You.  My readers and friends will already that I named myself well as Cynical Psychologist, but I didn’t manage to work the word suspicious into it.  I am both.  I find it quite difficult to take anything at face value.  Unfortunately, my suspicions usually have more than a grain of truth in them.   So do delusions.  How does one, trained in psychology or not, know which applies them?  The old adage that “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is” would be a good place to start.  That’s a positive way to state how much is known about us and is free or available for purchase or theft by someone to gain from it.  Enter a contest and you give away your name, address, and possibly your phone number.  Save an extra 10% by using our store’s credit card (and pay us at least that much in interest on the unpaid balance from our credit department.)  Buy a gift card from our store and let the recipient pick out what they really want (and Oh, by the way.  Did we mention we are filing for bankruptcy at the first of the year?)  That last one got me very recently when a large chain of electronics stores filed.  Those are all relatively knowable things that, given a little thought, become apparent.

The kind of suspiciousness I am currently writing about is about things which are not so obvious.  Let me just take a bad case, but probably not worst case, view of what could be known about me from yesterday’s short shopping trip.  I leave my apartment and probably nobody would know except the neighbors and my cats.  Possibly others, if I was under surveillance for something, but quite unlikely.  I start toward my car and the possibilities begin.  My relatively plain cell phone has GPS enabled and GPS disabled settings on it.  I have it set to GPS disabled mode, but if one has read the manual, one is aware that this does not completely shut off the service.  It can still be used by police, fire, and other emergency workers to locate me.  Nothing in the manual stated who else might want to use it or anything that would prevent its use by others.  Should I then assume that, despite which icon is displayed, my position can be located?  Unusual, put presumable possible.  I haven’t gotten the 50 feet to the car yet, but it is now possible to be seen by anyone or anything from a private detective to Google Earth, to a government (not necessarily ours) spy satellite.

Finally I get into the car.  Safe?  No, less so.  Same eyes watching, but when I turn the ignition on, I also turn on the black box which, given the make, model, or year of the vehicle, can do anything from engine and emissions diagnostics to recording high speeds, hard braking, be hacked by evil hot rod fanatics to change factors in the power curve, used by insurance companies when paying accident claims or by the police if you are in an accident, or reveal your global position.  You may not have known that one was there. 

Ok, I head for the pharmacy.  I could be tracked by phone or car black box, seen by satellite, or whatever if anyone were interested.  I’ll assume they are not.  I pick up my prescriptions and use a replacement credit card that I just received and activated a few days earlier.  I found that it had Blink written on it and noticed that, upon close inspection, it had a tiny Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) laminated into it   When I originally noticed it, I could see no advantage to me in having such an addition over a card that one simply swiped or handed to a salesperson.  Another company calls this technology expresspay and still another calls their version paypass.  It appears there is no advantage for me, but if it is lost or stolen, I am responsible for all charges made until the missing card is reported to the CC company.  My, what a convenient “out” for them.  I am currently trying to determine if there is a penalty of any kind for disabling the RFID chip with an X-acto knife.  But enough of this particular crankiness.  I paid for my prescriptions, and now the Blink people have a partial record of what medication I take.  Did you know, by the way, that it is perfectly legal for pharmacies to sell your prescription information?  It shouldn’t be too difficult to determine what maladies you suffer from the medications that are prescribed, the total opposite of all the ethical concerns of the medical and mental health communities.  But the Electronic Medical or Health Record (EMR or EHR,) Central electronic health databases, and ePrescribing are more than enough for a series of posts.

I drive out and travel toward the grocery store after making absolutely certain that I have my Blink card, vaguely wondering if it has been hacked (yes it is possible and has been done as a proof of concept,) and wondering which of three countries and how many corporate satellites might be watching, who might be GPS tracking me, making sure that I don’t speed or brake too hard, and that nothing simple like a radar trap is waiting to catch me.  I make it to the big-box store unscathed and scuttle in the door as quickly as possible.  I already knew that the eight parking lot surveillance cameras were watching me.  To my relief, the store was warm, unlike the less than no degrees available outside.  I went about gathering the items on my list, well aware that my movements would be recorded and that I was being watched for shoplifting or any public display of perversions.  I briefly became concerned that two or more of my purchases could possibly be combined to create a weapon of mass destruction, but the worst scenario I could come up with was a Pepsi exploding and hurling a day-old apple fritter at someone.  When I was done with my shopping, I went to the shortest checkout line and made sure that the clerk noticed that I had two cases of Pepsi in the cart passing the cash register.  The clerk was quite nice and told me that I had bought three of an item which was selling as “buy one – get one free,” and shooed me off to get another one free.  I took the Blink card with me.

When I returned to the checkout, I thanked her, swiped the dreaded card through the reader, and signed the electronic screen.  My signature disappeared.  “Oh my God, they’ve caught me!  I have no idea what for, but they’ve got me!”  In my panicky haze, I heard her say, “That happens all the time at this register.  Here, let me show you something.”  To my shock and amazement, she drew a straight line with her fingernail in the signature space and the transaction went through.  Further, I got a $5.00 and a $7.00 coupon that I could actually use along with my receipt.  Having paid with my usual (now Blink) credit card, I knew that not only the store but the credit card company had a record of everything I had ever purchased there and that it had just been added to.  I made it past the exit scanners without setting them off and headed for the car as quickly as possible.  I hate wind chill.

I put the groceries in the trunk, got into the car, and started it.  Back to a place of safety and, relatively speaking, warmth.  My cell phone rang.  Nooo!  Now there’s a record of who called me, at what time, and where I was at the time.  When I was finished with the call, I drove back to the apartment slowly and in the dark.  I crept silently up the stairs, only dropping one case of Pepsi to give my presence away.  After getting my purchases put away, I went back to what I was comfortable doing, only having my viewing habits recorded by my cable provider, my computer wanderings and words being recorded by fewer than 100 people or agencies, and being eyed suspiciously by two cats.  Sigh.  Apartment, sweet apartment.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2009, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” - Kurt Cobain

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