Posting Hiatus and a Change in Direction

     I have a few papers to publish, and I will probably publish some of my discussion notes;  but I have been hesitant about putting these out because so much of my work over the last six weeks has been sub-par for me.  Now I have excuses; I sold and closed on my house, ran into two bad weeks of insomnia, and had a love life setback.  But life goes on, and I shouldn't use such things as a reason not to publish.
     One of the reasons I started this blog was to compare my work from beginning to end.  Another was to have my references and my ideas handy for future projects.  In that context, I need to put my work up no matter how bad of a judgement I make on it.  Having said that, I have noticed way too many spelling mistakes in the papers I have put up so far.  I have been using Open Office Writer, and though I can't blame my spelling mistakes on the processor I can certainly fault it's spell checker for not catching some easy ones.  I will be forking some cash out for MS Office after all.  One issue I have noticed is that the quality of my introductions and concluding paragraphs has been abysmal this quarter.  That is something you will notice over the next few days as I schedule to work to publish.  Even more importantly, that is something I need to work on in the upcoming classes.

     Finally, I have taken a change in the direction of my studies.  When I started this program, I was undecided as to what exactly I would focus on.  I was looking at the options of counter-terrorism, border security, and cyber-crime; all these subjects have some interest for me.  But I have not been able to distance myself from the anger at out politicians and the decisions regarding national security they have made.  So I have decided that the focus of my study will be on the effects that politics has on national security.  Now many folks may ask if this is appropriate in a Criminal Justice program; however, the focus of my program is in Homeland Security.  Furthermore, I consider crime to be a national security issue in of itself.  In addition, there is a host of other issues associated with these ideas; the militarization of our police, the freedom destroying nature of the War on Drugs, and the privacy issues associated with mass spying on the populace in the alleged service of national security all come to mind.

     I will be meeting with the dean in a couple of weeks, and  hopefully get the how's and why's of the thesis down pat.  I don't know what I am supposed to be doing outside of classes, although I suspect there is a wide range of things I need to be doing to make this degree worth it.