Next year we’ll ply ‘em with rum and teach them about conscription!

Aye, that be a good plan.

-Capt’n Morgan

Looks like there’s a decent number of CNG stations in Massachusetts, all of them charging $2.86. That’s a lot less than we pay for gas.

I was right! (You’re the first pingback on their site, too — nicely done.)

This brings up something that I always thought was an important topic in security, but that seems to go unnoticed pretty often: when you only protect certain things, it’s like putting up a big sign on them saying, “These are the important things.” If I were a terrorist and saw that one building out of a chain of them was blurred, it’d be obvious which one I should target, even if I knew nothing about it. Things like the nuclear reactor at UMass Lowell in particular: I never knew it existed until a friend who went there laughingly sent me the link to Google Maps showing the building it’s in blurred out.

I can see something like the White House: everyone knows where it is, and it’s probably no secret that it has aerial defense. (Okay, I knew nothing about it, and I’d actually have expected there to be missiles off-site or something.) But for things that might not be obvious targets? I’d give it some serious thought before trying to get it blurred.

The government “helping” to provide health care is touchy, too — I think everyone deserves to be able to afford to stay healthy, but I’m also not a fan of “socialized medicine.” (Which isn’t at all what the Democrats have proposed, but I digress.)

I disagreed with agriculture subsidies, but may have wiped out our farming sector in doing so. I don’t really know enough about the issues to actually make a decision there. So I went with my gut, which is that farmers get ridiculous amounts of subsidies as it is.

And I said no to “absolute right to own a gun.” 18+, no recent violent crimes, sure. But, as the court ruled in DC vs. Heller, “[l]ike most rights, the Second Amendment is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose… [It] should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” I’m just bothered by the phrase “absolute right,” given that even the First Amendment isn’t absolute.

So I worry that my interpretation of the questions is going to skew my results. :-\