The Birds, Bees and TSA Screens

Hello, STEEM world! 

It’s late night here in Portland and here I am with one of my beehives that I featured in my first post!

https://steemit.com/bees/@rafikichi/a-visual-walkthrough-of-a-honey-bee-top-bar-hive   

First off, I am a long time follower of Dan Larimer’s revolutionary pioneering of Techno-Austrian Economics and an original investor of Bitshares when they were just Protoshares! I registered my BitsharesTalk profile in December 2013. Time flies when you aren’t making any money (:  

How the heck the market pegged gold and US dollar system never made everyone rich I have no idea. I waited two years for the Bitshares project to go from improbable to reality to nobody-cares… Worse than that, why did I decide to stop paying attention to Bitshares just in time to miss the unveiling of Steem?  

Finally a real world profit-incentivized application for market-pegged assets and I find out in a dang clickbait article!?  

The upside to this is you and I are still in the capital formation bottom level of this beast before even one celebrity or “news-worthy” person has made their bazillion dollar introduction post. It’s not too late for us normal people to get a cut of the personal freedom and pure promise that the Steem blockchain offers! 

I have been closely following cryptocurrency projects since 2011 (BTC, LTC, BTS and beyond) and will inform the Steem community about a major competitor/complement project that is in the early stages of development but will provide some important unrealized features. It’s never too late to get in before the next 1000% marketcap moon shot!  

Ok, on to myself.  I am a busy brained learner type, always watching for the swan event that will either destroy or enlighten humanity and practicing self-sufficiency skills along the way.  In this post I will share a little preview of all the ways I plan to contribute useful content to the Steem community.  

The first accomplishment I pride myself on is having been a 2008 Ron Paul Delegate to the Washington State GOP Convention when I was 21. I also served as the State Platform Committee member representing Clark County (basically Vancouver, WA). Needless to say, my fresh libertarian ideas weren’t well taken by the McCain big government majority of committee members… If only I convinced the eager Sanders revolutionaries how it always ends up by the time presidential election day comes... No good choice. 

I also ran for city council. Mainly to show that anybody can do it, but also to provide a contrast to the go along get along government lover that had been there for eight years with no real policy positions besides signing off on crony capitalist developer friends’ tax breaks and growing the government. 

  

Part of why I mention this is my intention to share my political and economic insights on and about the Steem platform. There are a million unrealized uses only a breath away from sweeping onto the Steem platform. Stay tuned, I will make the case why the immutable social media blockchain can be the solution to many of the fragile systems currently used for commerce and communication. There will be some goodies I will post about but here is a personally bothersome political tidbit I have been holding onto for a while:  

I worked at the Portland International Airport (mid-2000s) for five years as a supervisor for all commercial aircraft re-fueling.  Here I am standing in front of a Boeing 777-300ER, that has the largest aircraft engine in the world.

During this time I became familiar with the huge farce and mechanism for control that is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). While all the passengers and airline personnel have to go through invasive and demeaning screenings for each flight, I learned behind the scenes how completely useless all of it is. Airline contractors like myself daily drove onto the tarmac while never having to go through any security screenings yet guided giant multi-1000 gallon fuel trucks underneath aircraft, having full access to board any plane, and come and go into the “secured” terminal areas as needed or just because. There is basically no regulation; we could drive a truck up to an aircraft, load any package onto a plane or pass any objects off to “secured/post checkpoint” passengers in the bathroom outside their gate, and the government has known this ever since day one of the post 9/11 security paradigm. It is a drug mule or terrorist dream, yet the trouble of screening tarmac minimum-wage workers doesn’t matter to people whose main goal it is to convince the American public that it is necessary to give up their rights for the feel-good of security. Any libertarian thinker knows that all of this is just a grand illusion. The TSA itself is a make-work welfare program employing tens of thousands of people, whose jobs are to make people feel comfortable and adjusted to having their right of travel restricted without first being heavily searched.  I can see the TSA expanding to all forms of domestic transportation and public gatherings. All it will take is the right crisis.  

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had the best foresight on the question of security versus freedom: 

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” 

Scary shit, right? All this trouble having to get basically x-ray scanned or fondled to fly on a plane and the whole time it is for no guarantee of security. There is no way to have absolute safety while protecting freedom. It is a tradeoff that we must come to terms with and understand that every big government measure comes with little gain but extreme cost.   

Right, on to some more about myself. I have a beautiful red-haired two year old son, Justice, with my dream fiancé who is now 36 weeks pregnant with our daughter, Liberty. Almost there, I am so excited!

Steem has come along at a perfect time in my life to help assist our family. I thank you for reading this far and value your upvote.   

I have been experiencing the keeping of bees for two years. It is a great way to practice patience and relaxation. The bees can tell when I am stressed or in a hurry, and teach their lessons at the threat of stings. But it really has been a great hobby and there is so much to learn from the bees. In future posts, I will share my photographs and advice to advocate for backyard beekeeping. 

I have been raising chickens from chicks for two years now and this year even got to experience one of our hens hatch eggs and raise her own chicks! Another fun hobby that I will share more photographs and advice for anybody interested in backyard chickens. My son loves his chickens, they are easy pets to care for and poop breakfast for you every day!  

I have been a lifelong student/geek of computer technology and explorer of all innovations digital. My career is helping people solve their computer problems and I am pleased to finally be putting some of my knowledge and experience into writing on the Steem platform. The first couple tutorials I plan to share about computer and internet technology:  

* How to install an activated fully-updated Windows 7 with all drivers automatically installed in a few clicks. This has been a real interest from friends of mine after their operating system automatically updated itself to Win10.  

* How to privately and quickly download your favorite TV shows without ads now that KickAss is offline and bittorrent swarms are monitored. 

That’s just a beginning and there will be plenty of time to share more, but for now I thank you for reading my introduction. Hope you enjoyed it; have a great day!