News from the Northwoods

Felt tip

2012-02-11T15:10:00.002-05:00

I'm watching one of those woodworking shows on NHPTV, you know the kind where a museum quality flawless colonial highboy is knocked out in a 45 minute show.
He is using a FELT TIP pen to mark his cuts. I never do that, felt tip ink doesn't come off. It sinks into the wood and stays there. Forever.
Use a pencil, pencil marks rub off no sweat.

Super Pac

2012-02-11T11:43:00.002-05:00

Super PAC, faster than the 24 hour news cycle, able to leap hostile MSM with a single bound. And just born this year. So this is what "campaign finance reform" has brought us to?
Obama and the dems blame it all on the Supremes and the Citizen's United case two years ago. Obama was so bummed out about Citizen's United that he bad mouthed the Supremes in a State of the Union speech with all nine Supremes sitting in the audience, in uniform. Which pissed them all off. Obama must have been really bummed out that day. It's considered stupid and hazardous to your health to go around antagonizing people at the top of the food chain.
Citizen's United was about a small citizen's group with an axe to grind, they made a hard hitting (not to say partisan) movie pushing their issue. And the Federal Election Commission forbade them from showing it. Claimed it was illegal electioneering. Citizen's United felt it was a plain issue of free speach, and they sued. Took it to the Supreme Court and won. And the Supremes said free speech means anyone, citizens, companies, unions, churches, you name it, can spend as much as they like to support any candidate or any issue they like. First Amendment, free speech.
This blew 50 years of "campaign financing reform" out the window. "Campaign Finance Reform", darling of good government groups and liberals, means rules limiting the amount of money political candidates can raise. All of a sudden, the Supremes say that limits are unconstitutional.
This resulted in today's comical situation. Ordinary PAC's and candidates are still subject to all sorts of rules, like no contributions greater than $2500 (chickenfeed). But Super PACs can do anything they want, just so long as they are "independent" of any candidate. Which leads to the comedy routine where Romney says "By law, I have no control over my Super Pac, and there fore I cannot tell them to stop trashing Newt Gingrich."
Elections would be cleaner and less comical without the Super PACs. Just repeal all the "campaign finance reform" laws and replace them with a single simple law that merely requires candidates to report who gave them how much. We voters can figure it out from there.
All the money would flow to the candidates, who have a certain sense of decency, and would not do things like the Swiftboat campaign that did so much damage to John Kerry. Or all those negative ads on Newt. It would be better if the candidates were responsible for their campaign ads.

Hackers slow the F-35 program

2012-02-10T13:16:00.002-05:00

F-35, USAF's newest fighter, is in a limbo between the R&D phase and the "approved-for-mass-production" phase. Small numbers of the aircraft have been built and flown. They have passed some their acceptance tests. Schedule has been slipping, and costs rising.
According to Aviation Week, enemy hackers have broken into contractor's computers and downloaded plans, specs, software, and listened in to on-line video conferences between F-35 project managers. Ouch.
Apparently F-35 avionics software is being rewritten and antennaes are being redesigned after the original designs were compromised by hackers.
Let's hear for Windows and video conferencing.

Words of the Weasel Part 26

2012-02-10T13:04:00.002-05:00

Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft. MMRCA for short. We used to call them fighters. The Indian Air Force used this choice bit of jargon to refer to the French Rafale fighters it is going to buy. Rafale has won a lengthy competition, beating out Eurofighter's Tornado, Saab's Gripen, and Boeing's F/A18.
The Indian's don't have fighter pilots, they have MMRCA pilots.
Right.

Ice, thickness there of

2012-02-09T12:08:00.002-05:00

Back in the day, my mother was VERY firm about ice. The lake had to be frozen four inches thick, as measured by whacking a hole in it, before we were allowed to skate on it. Four inches was it, no skating until the lake froze four inches thick.
On the radio today, some happy safety freak was claiming the ice ought to be SIX inches thick before walking on it.
So what happened? Has the rise of childhood obesity required and extra two inches of ice to keep fat kids from falling thru the ice? Have the safety freaks chickened out again?

Greece, a Mexican Standoff

2012-02-09T11:04:00.002-05:00

You gotta hand it to the Greeks, they got chutzpah. They are so broke that nobody will loan them any more money. They borrowed so much that the lenders don't dare cut the Greeks off, 'cause if they do, all those Greek bonds the lenders hold will dry up and blow away, leaving the lenders as broke as the Greeks. There was a saying "Borrow one dollar and the bank owns you, borrow a million dollars and you own t he bank."
Greece has a E20 billion bond repayment coming up next month. They don't have the cash to pay it off. So the rest of Europe (Germany mostly) is talking about a Greek handout to let the Greeks make their March repayment. But the Europeans want the Greeks to shape up before handing them another E130 billion. The Greeks don't want to shape up, they have riots in the streets every time shape up (cutting back on pensions, salaries, civil servants) is mentioned.
So far, the Greeks have won a significant concession. Greece will only have to redeem it's bonds for what the owner paid for them, not at face value. Needless to say, a lot of folks have been bailing out of Greek bonds by selling them for cheap and taking a loss. The buyers are hoping for a windfall when bonds they bought for some small fraction of face value get redeemed for face value. This latest deal says "Oh no you don't." Beware of Greeks at the negotiating table. The spirit of Odysseus lives on.
Clearly some of the confusion in the Greek bond wheeling and dealing has to do with speculators who want to get rich quick.
The Economist never talks about these messy details, but the Wall St Journal does.

So what does it all mean?

2012-02-08T17:01:00.002-05:00

Rick Santorum sweeps all three caucuses yesterday? Can he rise up and beat Romney? Is Newt really dead? Do these caucuses mean anything? What happened to Romney, coming off a solid win in FL?
Which way is up?

Charlie Bass opposes Keystone XL pipeline

2012-02-08T10:12:00.002-05:00

According to The Hill, Charlie Bass of New Hampshire was the sole Republican to vote against a House measure to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
WOW. Talk about stabbing your constituents in the back. Charlie, just in case you don't remember, ALL your constituents have to buy heating oil at $4 a gallon. Keystone XL would improve the supply and lower the cost of heating oil. Also the cost of gasoline which everyone needs to get to work (if they still have jobs). You still have a primary election to win, to say nothing of beating Kuster in November, if you survive the primary challenge. I glad I voted for Jennifer Horn over you last time.
The greenie arguments against the pipeline are totally worthless. A pipeline is the most spill proof way to move oil, many times safer than sea going tankers. The oil is going to come in one way or another, if it doesn't come by pipeline, it will come by tanker. That "environmentally sensitive" Sandhills area in Oklahoma (or is it Nebraska?), is just one more stretch of prairie already criss crossed with 25,000 miles of pipeline. One more won't matter. The Canadians will sell to the Chinese if they cannot sell to us. It doesn't make any difference to Gaea if the oil gets burned in China or in the US.

Solidarity of the Sisterhood

2012-02-07T09:50:00.003-05:00

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News in a discussion of the Obama decision to force Catholic schools and hospitals to provide birth control pills as part of their health plans. After some heckling from a pro-Obama commentator Andrea said:
"It doesn't really matter, those poor Catholic women are too ignorant/retarded/stupid to use birth control even if was given to them free."
Ohh, Andrea. That's an unkind slam at your own gender. And it's not true. All women, rich or poor, Protestant or Catholic are aware that pregnancy is a life altering event, (to say the least) and they take all kinds of measures to prevent unwanted ones.
Andrea, that remark blew away any respect I might have had for you as a commentator.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people

2012-02-06T17:22:00.002-05:00

Law firms are buying lots of expensive liability insurance now, because companies are more liable to sue their law firm when things don't go right. What's more, the companies zero in on the bigger law firms who actually might have some money to pay off, rather than mom-and-pop outfits that can barely make payroll.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Naming Rights

2012-02-06T17:03:00.002-05:00

Over here the Weather Bureau assigns names to "tropical depressions" aka hurricanes. They used to only do girls names, but the gender police caught up with them and now they use boys names too. In Europe, the Berlin Institute of Meteorology used to do the same thing. Then after a budget cut some brilliant German thought up the "adopt a vortex" plan whereby anyone could sponsor a name.
BMW marketing paid E199 to buy the name "Minnie" for one storm system and E299 to name another one "Cooper". (Mini Cooper, get it?). Unfortunately for BMW, "Cooper" turned into a monster bringing Arctic temperatures, dozens of storm related deaths and heavy snow as far south as Rome.
The BMW people issued a public apology for the inconvenience. It is not known if they plan to persist in this marketing effort.

Literature and Arts vs Science and Engineering

2012-02-05T09:30:00.002-05:00

Starting in middle school, education breaks into two tracks, Literature and the Arts, and Science and Engineering. Literature is English, Latin, and modern languages. Arts are history, painting, architecture, sculpture, music. Science and Engineering includes physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, electrical, mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering. We will ignore the nothing studies like physical education, gender studies, black studies,sociology, education, political science, and underwater basket weaving.
Science and engineering requires some (sometimes a lot of) mathematics. It also leads to jobs in the private sector. Literature and Arts requires no math, and only leads to teaching positions. Of the nothing studies, at least an education major can lead to a teaching job, if the student can survive the boredom of a major with little to no intellectual content.
Looking back on it, my str0ng recommendation for new students is to pick the science and engineering track. The subjects are intellectually interesting, which is another way of saying "fun". They are intellectually rigorous, theories have to be supported by repeatable experiments and observations, which means the conclusions reached are highly likely to be true.
Note, I did not say "bound to be true". In science, we know our history, we know of many instances of new discoveries that invalidated or radically extended existing knowledge. Now a days we like to say, "it's true as far as we know today". In science and engineering it is extremely useful to know the limits of our knowledge. When troubleshooting is it valuable to be able to say "This and this and this are well understood, but that is cutting edge technology and not well understood, yet."
Pure science is the pursuit of new scientific knowledge. Engineering is the application of science to make useful devices, products, and structures. Engineering is fascinating in itself, the question "what science will make this new device work, or produce that new product, both at cost low enough to sell?" It's puzzle solving.
Mathematics is essential to a career in science and engineering. Algebra is the barest minimum. Plane geometry and trigonometry are just about mandatory, and calculus, ( from derivatives, to integrals, and then differential equations) is used just about everywhere. In high school, the wise student will keep his options open by taking the right mathematics courses. High school ought to teach algebra, plane geometry, and trigonometry. If you miss these high school courses you will be behind the power curve in college. College math ought to start with calculus, and without the algebra and trig, the calculus student is doomed unless possessed of genius level mathematical ability. The high school student who dodges the math courses, or gets sucked off into "business arithmetic" or "statistics" even "matrix algebra" has locked himself out of the science and engineering track. Algebra, geometry and trig are required, the others are not. High schools these days tend to call "pre-calculus" what they used to call trigonometry. Either way, you have to take it.

Victory at Sea

2012-02-04T18:26:00.002-05:00

Shortly after WWII they gathered together endless feet of newsreel movie footage into 26 episodes of war fighting footage. Broadway's Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the original score. I remember seeing it on TV as a young child. It turned up in a Wal Mart bargain DVD bin and so I brought it home.
It's all black and white, color film in the 1940's was hard come by and so insensitive to light that everyone shot the faster black and white. Looking at the images today, you marvel at how bad the film really was. Out door scenes are over exposed except in the shadows which are pitch black. No dynamic range, no grays, at all. A good deal of the footage is captured enemy film, showing Japanese and German troops from their side of the trench.
Lots of quaint shots of horses and horse drawn carts, French Navy sailors wearing red and blue striped T-shirts that no American male would be caught dead wearing. Dramatic shots of a great steamship capsizing and then exploding.
Containerization is 20 years in the future, hence endless shots of wood crates being hoisted into and out of ship's holds in rope cargo nets. Plus shots of tanks and army trucks and fighter planes swinging up onto decks. And shots of troops trudging up the gangplanks onto transports. That's all gone now, the troops board jetliners, nary a ship in sight.
Anyhow, if you want a good quick rundown on how WWII happened, this is a good watch.

We have a replacement for Global Warming.

2012-02-03T09:42:00.005-05:00

Now that global warming is getting debunked, the disaster industry is looking for a new menace. They think they found one.
Solar storms.
Sounds bad doesn't it? There is a bit a added drama in the reference to "every eleven years the sun goes ballistic" . What is the author talking about? He is referring to the sunspot cycle. The number of sunspots rises and falls on an eleven year cycle. This was discovered back in the 1600's. Sunspots do effect the earth's ionosphere, a fact well known to high frequency radio operators. Radio propagation is best at sunspot maximun, and worst at sunspot minumum. Radio amateurs have known about this for nearly 100 years. Nothing new here.
Now the disaster industry is beating the drums about a massive solar storm knocking out the electric power grid.
Highly unlikely. All those wires running thru the air get struck by lightning, every day, thousands of times. A lightning bolt can do real damage, start fires, blow out electrical equipment. Nothing keeps out a lightening bolt, the voltage is high enough to arc thru any amount of insulation, including thousands of feet of air. A bolt struck the powerline leading to my mother's house a few years ago. It destroyed her satellite receiver and burned the insides of her CD player black. Took out some light bulbs too. But the electric grid kept right on working, her lights stayed on.
Bottom line, the electric grid shrugs off lightning hits strong enough to fry consumer electronics.
No solar storm is going to be a strong as a lightening hit.

can we believe CBO estimates?

2012-02-02T17:51:00.002-05:00

CBO Congressional Budget Office, makes predictions of Federal government revenue, deficits, debt, and so on. Typically they are asked to predict the effect of laws (Obamacare, Bush tax cut extentions, hiking taxes on the wealthy) upon the Federal fisc. Unfortunately, CBO predictions are often pure BS. For instance CBO predicted that Obamacare would save money. Yeah right.
CBO predictions are based upon unrealistic assumptions. Such as, Congress won't ease the Alternate Minimum Tax (which they do every year). Or that Congress won't pass a "doc fix" easing Medicare fee cuts (which they do every year).
The House of Representatives spent today arguing over reform of the CBO estimating process. The Republicans want more realistic estimates. The democrats stand foresquare for bull crap estimates.

Romney wins Florida, Thank Goodness

2012-02-01T13:22:00.001-05:00

Big relief last night. Mitt beat Newt decisively in Florida. A good thing. Mitt can beat Obama, Newt cannot, Newt is too flaky, and has accumulated too many enemies over the 30 years he has been in national politics.
Unless something really strange happens, Mitt will get the nomination, and Newt will go back to consulting.

It's baack

2012-01-31T16:23:00.002-05:00

My old friend virus DOS/Alureon.A popped up yet again today. His footfall is heavier and louder now, I pretty much knew I had a virus as soon as he showed up. I ran the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (January version) and if found him. Only took 4 hours of scanning.
But the damn thing has gotten wilier. The fix I posted about earlier this month no longer worked. Alureon has figured out how bollix the ComputerManagment/Storage/DiskManagment tool I used to blow his partition away last time. The tool still starts, but Alureon has done something magic to cripple the tool and make it ignore the hard drives. It just shows the DVD drive.
However antivirus MalWareBytes has gotten stronger and was able to find Alureon on a quick scan and blow it away.
I don't know what security hole in Windows is letting this bastard in, but Microsoft hasn't patched it. Thanks Bill Gates.

Voter ID

2012-01-31T16:11:00.002-05:00

Listened to a long talk on NHPR about voter ID. It gets down to "show a picture ID (driver's license for real people) in order to vote." Such a law failed to pass in NH just the other day. Can't remember if the Gov'not vetoed it or they didn't have enough votes.
Trouble is, none of the three guests on the show were willing to admit that we had any voter fraud in NH. So if we don't have a problem, why are we agitating for more red tape? I mean our polls are all manned by public spirited, un-paid volunteer citizens who get up early and work late on election day. God bless them. I don't want to make them do even more unless there is good reason for it. If we don't have a problem, why make things harder for everyone?
Plus, my town is so small everyone knows every one, and the volunteer poll workers pretty much know every voter.

Boondoggle

2012-01-30T12:10:00.002-05:00

The Wall St Journal reports the Pentagon spent $330 million to develop 20 fifteen ton bunker buster bombs. Wow.
That's $16.5 million per bomb.
Bunker busters are nothing new. British genius Barnes Wallis invented the first one back in WWII. Wallis' "Tallboy" weighed six tons, and the later "Grand Slam" weighed ten tons, the heaviest that 1940's aircraft could get off the ground. These bombs have a very strong steel casing and when dropped from high altitude, they penetrate deep into the ground before exploding. The casing has to be very strong, in one case, old cannon barrels were used to make the bomb casings.
Nothing here to justify a $16.5 million price tag.
Looks like a good place for some defense budget cuts. Better here than cutting 89,000 soldiers and marines.

Computer Movie Reviewer

2012-01-30T10:56:00.002-05:00

Good old Netflix keeps throwing up movie suggestions " You ought to rent this one" to me. And Netflix does pretty well, most of the suggestion are things I like. Netflix claims to select each movie suggestion "because you liked Such and Such".
This means that Netflix has a way of classifying movies, so that given one movie the customer likes, the computer finds movies of a simular classification system.
I'd love to know just how that classification system works. How much weight is given to who stars in the movie vs subject matter, vs era, vs who knows what? Surely a classification system that matches my personal likes and dislikes so closely could tell us something about what makes a good movie and what makes a crummy one.
Hollywood could use the help. They have been making more crummy movies than good movies lately.

Rising Sun Victorious by Peter Tsouras

2012-01-30T10:37:00.004-05:00

An alternate history of WWII where Japan wins. It's written for history buffs and wargamers. It discusses a variety of alternate histories. For instance, more effective Nazi diplomacy gets the Japanese to attack the Soviets rather than the Americans. This scenario actually makes some sense. The Nazi's came very close to crushing the Soviets in the first year. Had the Japanese attacked in Siberia it might well have tipped the balance. The last German drive on Moscow was stopped by reserves that Stalin pulled out of Siberia. If the Japanese had gone on the offensive, those reserves would not have been available.
Other than that, the idea that Japan could defeat a United States with a larger, loyal, and warlike population, vastly greater national territory, advanced technology, massive industry, and plentiful farmlands is foolish. Admiral Yamamoto understood this, no other senior Japanese leader did.
What the book does highlight is how slender the US margin of victory was. At Midway had a lost American air strike turned south to look for the enemy instead of north, or had a Japanese cruiser's floatplane got airborne on time, the Japanese might have won. Had a Japanese admiral had a little more Samurai spirit, the battle of Leyte Gulf would have been a famous Japanese victory.
A fun read.

Ravens

2012-01-29T12:48:00.003-05:00

How big does a black bird have to be to be a raven instead of a plain old crow? I just had a black bird that musta been better than foot long from beak to tail strut down the middle of the road in front of my place. Surely that is too big not to be a raven?

Sprngfield

2012-01-29T12:16:00.002-05:00

The great model train show that is. It's so great that I drove down, some three hours, and so as not to miss anything, I got up early and had the Mercury on the road at 0600. It was still pitch dark, sun rise didn't happen til 0700 and by that time I was over on I91 headed south at 80 mph. Sunrise was lovely and surprisingly brief. Lasted about ten minutes and then it was daylight.
By the way, I don't believe all that stuff about crumbling infrastructure crying out for money. I91 was pot hole free, fresh black asphalt, not too much traffic. Not like New York which is a state of potholes.
The show was huge. It was in the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. It filled four big exposition halls with running train layouts and vendors selling all things railroad, from striped engineer hats to railroad lanterns to $1000 brass steam locomotive models. My feet managed to survive all four halls and five hours. They filled up all the open land with parking. I saw plates from NJ, NY, MA, CT, NH, Quebec and Ontario. Like maybe a third of the plates were from out of state. Crowd was easily in the 100,000's. The aisles were jammed, mostly with seniors of my generation and grandchildren. The kids were all well behaved, well dressed, and skinny. If there is a childhood obesity problem you couldn't prove it by this crowd.
A fun day, and the cat was overjoyed to see me when I got back.

Poor Cannon

2012-01-27T11:15:00.002-05:00

Bad weather for skiing. It blew hard all last night, rattling the windows, with a trace of snow. But now it warmed up to nearly 40 F and its raining. Bad for the skiing.

Circustime on CNN

2012-01-27T08:56:00.002-05:00

Caught last night's debate on CNN. Arrhg. It was a circus, complete with steam calliope, three rings of newsies pontificating, and a truly clueless ringmaster.
The ringmaster was Woof Blitzen, a sawed off little guy who doesn't shave and has oatmeal for brains. He managed to get Mitt and Newt to trash each other on stage, it took Rick Santorum to point out that they both sounded like idiots while doing it.
Give me debates on Fox any day.

Then they got going on NASA. None of the candidates had a clue about the real issue. Since we scrapped the shuttle, we cannot get astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) except by paying the Russians. That makes it a Russian Space Station, since the Russians control all access. We have two commercial boosters (Space-X 's Falcon and Atlas V) that have plenty of boost to loft capsules full of astronauts and supplies up to the ISS . So does NASA use a well proven and paid for existing booster? No way. NASA started an expensive new booster program (Constellation) and managed to spend every penny they had before Congress shut the program down. Since then NASA has been completely wrapped up in turf wars. We should just flat build a capsule, pop it on top of a Falcon or an Atlas V, and launch. NASA seems incapable of doing this. So cut NASA out of the picture and let a contract to Space-X or Lockheed to get on with the job.
None of the candidates understood these issues.

Bo-o-ring!

2012-01-25T12:08:00.004-05:00

Obama's State of the Union that is. Ran for an hour and a quarter, promised pie in the sky for nearly everyone without ever getting into specifics. Never used the words "Keystone XL", "deficit", "Solyndra", "Iranian nuclear weapons", "cap and trade", "capital gains", "global warming", or "health insurance".
Raved on and on about ending tax breaks for corporations that "ship jobs overseas". Strange, I never heard of THAT tax break before. It probably exists only in the minds of Democrats.
He got a lot of standing ovations. I could not be sure on account of the camera angle, but it looked like only democrats stood up to clap for him.
There is a republican slam video going around showing clips of Obama saying the same damn thing at his State of the Union speech this year, last year and the year before. That pretty well sums it up, this guy has run out of ideas. And a good thing too.

TSA hassles Congressmen

2012-01-24T11:24:00.002-05:00

Back when I was an Air Force officer, USAF doctrine on Congressmen was very firm. Treat them with courtesy and respect, get them any information they ask for right away, fly them anywhere they want to go, and furnish them with an official car and a driver. Be nice.
Why? Two reasons really. The Air Force is the armed force of a democracy, it is under the control of the civilian government, and Congressmen are that civilian government. Showing respect to a Congressmen is like showing respect to the flag. Plus, Congressmen write the Air Force budget, treat them properly and the service might get more funding next year.

Now we come the the TSA, who hassled Senator Rand Paul the other day. TSA apparently doesn't believe in showing respect to anyone, let alone Congressmen. And they are stupid enough to think they are immune to budgetary reprisals. That is an atrocious attitude for the security forces of a democracy.

Health Care according to me

2012-01-24T10:47:00.002-05:00

My concern is that the US spends entirely too much money on health care. We spend twice as much as any other country on earth, 19% of our GNP. For spending twice as much, the health in the US is no better than any other country. In short we spend twice as much and get less than other countries.
Health care does not create wealth, it consumes it. Health care spending does not produce goods or services than can be sold, exported, or consumed. The US cannot compete against foreign countries when US products bear a 19% markup to pay for the workers health care, and our foreign competitors only pay 10%. Manufacturing is "outsourcing", moving overseas, in order to avoid ruinous US health care costs.
Why is US health care so expensive? Simple. For the majority who have health insurance, it's all paid for. The providers, facing cost increases, merely raise their fees. The patients don't care, they don't have to pay for it, that's what insurance is for. So why not do that extra CAT scan, just to be sure, do that extra doctor's office visit, do some extra blood work, it's all paid for. I remember Uncle Remus, where Brer Rabbit claimed to be making a dollar a minute. My doctor does better. My last yearly office visit cost my insurance company $500 for fifty minutes. That's ten dollars a minute.
If patients had to pay for health care out of pocket, a lot less money would be spent. Insurance is needed to cover the big stuff, because the big stuff can cost more than a house, and few people have that kind of money. But the routine stuff, yearly physicals, children's earaches and sore throats, a few stitches here or there, most of us can handle out of pocket. You used to be able to buy "hospitalization only" policies for $3000 a year, as opposed to "everything is covered" policies that cost $12000 a year. With the $9000 savings you can do a lot of routine stuff. And, since it's your money, you will bargain for fees less than ten dollars a minute. Obamacare outlawed those, all that is legal now is the $12000 covers everything policy.
Competition would bring down the price of health insurance. If insurance companies were allowed to sell policies nationwide, policies would cost less. Up here in the northwoods there are only TWO health insurance companies selling policies. If we could buy our insurance from any company in the US of A, we could find better prices out of state.
Competition would bring down the cost of medines. We ought to be able to buy pills from any decent first world country, like Canada, England, Japan, or pick your favorite. We can't because US drug companies have wined and dined the FDA into forbidding imports, so that they can charge ridiculous prices ($2 a pill) to US patients.

Too bad none of these made the Wall St Journal 's list of "crucial" health care issues.

Health Care according to the WSJ

2012-01-23T15:49:00.002-05:00

Special six page section in today's Wall St Journal devoted to "six crucial health care issues" with pro and con articles on each one. Somehow the Journal's six crucial issues" are not my crucial issued. The Journal lists:
1. Should everyone be required to have health insurance?
Of course the medics love this one, it would ease their burden of indigent care. Doctor's have to treat all patients, it looks really bad should they pitch someone out on the street 'cause they don't have any money. If everyone is required to buy health insurance, that problem goes away.
2. Should healthy people take cholesterol lowering drugs to prevent heart disease?
Jeeze, you'd think this question should have a solid statistical answer, you know compare life expectancy of people taking cholesterol lowering drugs with those that don't. Apparently this hasn't happened or the Journal was able to find some doctors who don't believe cholesterol lowering drugs actually do much. The drugs are pretty cheap, the one I'm on, Simvastatin, is only $4 a month from Walmart. Lipitor is coming off patent and should get cheap soon.
3. Should we create a medical ID number to tag patient's electronic medical records with?
This is a crucial question? Once your medical records are computerized, hackers will get them and sell them to employers, political enemies, nosy neighbors, the cops, and a whole bunch of people you would rather not see them. A special "unique" ID number won't make much difference.
4. Should doctors use email to communicate with patients?
I think they are trying to say that doctor's could cut back on office visits if they accepted and answered email queries from patients. This is crucial? In actual fact, the doctor is always going to say, "Why don't you come in and we'll have a look".
5. Should drug patents be extended?
That's obvious. The drug companies will say "Yes" and the rest of us will say "No".
6. Can "Accountable Care Organizations" (ACOs) raise quality and reduce costs?
Who knows? But this sounds like Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) all over again.

Newt!

2012-01-22T09:56:00.002-05:00

Well, Newt came thru like gangbusters and the GOP nomination is still open. And we still haven't killed off Ron Paul or Rick Santorum. But it surely looks like a showdown between Newt and Mitt.
The real question is who has the best chance of beating Obama? Both Newt and Mitt have some baggage that doesn't help. Newt has a long history of supporting and defending damn near everything under the sun. So does Mitt. Newt has two exwives and two ugly divorces. Mitt is a rich man who pays capital gains rates.
In my estimation Mitt should have handled the Bain Capital attacks. He had his supporters, Chris Christy and the Wall St Journal step up with solid defenses, but Mitt said nothing. Mitt should have said "At Bain I invested money into [list of winner companies]. Those companies are doing well today and employ [pick a good defensible number] people, who would be on unemployment today except for my investments in their companies. "
Mitt never came forward with a tax overhaul plan. 9-9-9 might not be fiscally possible but it was clear and simple and we voters had no trouble figuring out what it would mean to us. I have no idea what a Romney administration would mean to my taxes. Mitt has learned the lesson of the media too well, don't say anything at all because whatever you say gains you enemies, never friends. He has been very adroit at coming out four square for motherhood and apple pie and never saying anything of substance. We voters notice. Particularly from a man who has stood on both sides of abortion, single payer health care, gun control, tax hikes, and many other things. If you look at Mitt's record, you can't tell where he is coming from, and waffling on the debate platform doesn't help him.
Gingrich sounds very good on the debate stage, and we love to hear him raking newsies over the coals. He figures the newsies will never give him any decent coverage so why not let 'em have it, right between the eyes? It's a good show, and there are enough obnoxious newsies out there to furnish a target rich environment right up to November. Gingrich sounds feisty and we voters want someone to go to Washington, take names and kick ass. Gingrich puts on a good show, although a thoughtful voter might think that trashing Congressmen the way he did poor Juan Williams could be counterproductive.
But, who can win against Obama? Up til last night, I would have said "Mitt". Now I am not so sure. I want a candidate who can win because four more years of Obama will wreck the country, even worse than it is now. I am not yet convinced that Newt is electable. And we have endless primaries yet to go.

Mitt's tax return

2012-01-21T10:42:00.002-05:00

Actually, we don't need Mitt's tax return. When he said he paid only 15% he did himself a lot of damage. And I'm sure Mitt has that right. He makes his money by selling stock or cashing in stock options, rather than taking a salary. And selling stock is perfectly legitimate capital gains. I ought to know, I spent plenty of time in the past figuring capital gains on my stock sales. A guy like Mitt shouldn't be paying more than capital gains rate (15%) unless his tax accountant is brain dead.
Mitt would have done better to just release his tax returns without comment. Few newsies are intelligent enough to read a form 1040 or schedule D and they might not have noticed that most (perhaps all) of Mitt's income was from capital gains.
A better public debate would be about having capital gains at all. Why not tax money made by playing the stock market the same as money made any other way?

Heard on NPR

2012-01-21T10:33:00.002-05:00

"Or perhaps the voters won't accept anything (Newt Gingrich's ex wife trashing him on ABC) from sources that they don't like. "
"Don't like" isn't the issue. "Don't Trust" is the real issue. I was surprised to hear that staid old NPR has finally realised that the MSM has a credibility problem. Dawn over Marblehead.

Looks like SOPA/PIPA is dead

2012-01-20T15:26:00.002-05:00

Or at least seriously wounded. We should not allow injured animals to suffer, we need to follow the bloodtrail and finish them off.
Then we could have another go on copyright revision. The last copyright law extended the life of copyright to "life of the author plus seventy years" which is forever for all practical purposes. We ought to set copyright to a flat 17 years. All the serious money that is going to be made is made in the first 17 years. Stretching copyright beyond 17 years is welfare for lawyers, and red tape to overcome for libraries, websites, and people who need one more copy of an out of print work.
If we limited copyright to 17 years, then most music downloading would become legal. I never hear anything but "goldy oldies" on the radio. Few of my children's CD's have any artist that wasn't popular when I was in high school. Most of what is downloaded is older than 17 years, because stuff younger than 17 years mostly sucks.
Then we could look at the Constitution which only empowers Congress "To Promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Not a word about music. Music is not one of the useful arts, it's a fine art. And it certainly isn't a science. In short, the plain language of the Constitution does not allow copyright on music at all.
Losing copyright on music would infuriate the RIAA and the labels, but it wouldn't make much difference to the artists, who mostly survive by doing live gigs for cash. Few of them get much royalties from the labels. In fact the labels have been suffocating the artists, which is why there is so little good new music out there. We would have more good new music if we didn't have the labels.

Maybe we can get union guys to vote Republican?

2012-01-19T10:11:00.002-05:00

Obama put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipe line yesterday. This was a privately financed shovel ready big project that would employ thousands of dues paying union members, give us oil from a friendly neighboring country, and keep the price of my furnace oil down.
Obama claims he needed more time to "evaluate" the project. The paper work has been in for two years already. Then he claimed that a piece of Nebraska prairie was "ecologically sensitive". This bit of prairie already has 25,000 miles of pipe buried in it, but for Obama a few more miles was unthinkable. Pipelines are the cleanest, safest, most accident free way of bringing in the oil that fuels the country. Without the pipeline, the same oil comes in by tanker, and tanker accidents are really messy. There has never been a pipeline accident as bad as Exxon Valdez.
In a way, this might help elect a Republican president. Union guys have been known to vote Republican now and then. Where as the lefty greenies who want to stop the pipeline would cut off their fingers before pulling the voting machine lever for anything but Democrats.

MilSpec Semiconductors, Tax payer ripoff.

2012-01-18T13:44:00.002-05:00

Defense Department procurement weenies insist that all military electronics be built with MilSpec semiconductors. Which cost ten times as much as commercial semiconductors. Are MilSpec semiconductors better than commercial semiconductors? No.
Many years ago I was on the design team for the anti ballistic missile radar at Raytheon. We were doing a big phased array radar for Mech Island in the Pacific. The contract called for a "brassboard" radar to be built and tested at the factory, and a second "deliverable" radar to go to Mech Island. To save money we built the "brassboard" using commercial semiconductors. We got the brass board working, and past the government acceptance tests. Then we started construction of the deliverable. Same circuit boards, same technicians, in the same shops, to the same drawings but all the semiconductors were MilSpec instead of commercial.
The deliverable didn't work. Argh. Trouble shooting revealed that the MilSpec semiconductors had lower gain, higher leakage, and could not withstand as much voltage as the commercial devices. It was so bad that we had to redesign some of the circuits to make them perform when built with lower quality MilSpec transistors.
Not only were the MilSpec devices lower performance, they had a lot of duds. I can remember going thru a brand new box of JAN2N5109TX transistors with a Simpson 260 meter and finding one in ten devices didn't work at all. That's 10 percent duds. For this we paid ten times the price of good commercial parts.
And, turns out, a fair number of MilSpec devices are counterfeit. The scammer buys good commercial parts, wipes off the commercial marking with solvent, and repaints the devices with the JAN-TX markings. Presto, chango, we turn honest commercial devices into pricey MilSpec devices. Several cases of this made the news over the years. In the last case, the defense department admitted that the counterfeit devices were as good as MilSpec and they had no intention of recalling the equipment (some of which was in outer space in satellites) to replace the counterfeits.
We could save defense money by scrapping the whole MilSpec semiconductor "thing" (boondoggle actually). Semiconductors never wear out. If the system powers up and runs and makes it thru high and low temperature testing, the semiconductors are good and will last forever.
It ain't like it was with vacuum tubes.

Nearly all 4200 passengers & crew got off safely

2012-01-17T11:40:00.002-05:00

We should be thankful that so few died in such an enormous sinking. The survivors on TV speak of confusion and ignoble actions, but in the end, they got nearly everyone off alive. Not too shabby.

It's warmed up.

2012-01-17T11:39:00.002-05:00

We have 25 above this morning. A LOT warmer than yesterday's four below.

Words of the Chuckleheads

2012-01-17T10:41:00.002-05:00

Been hearing a few. "The ship was evacuated" (referring to the Italian liner sinking) You abandon ship, you don't evacuate it. Ships don't "crash" they sink. Aircraft crash, but not ocean liners.

Chuckleheads on TV News

2012-01-16T13:38:00.002-05:00

Just heard one on Fox. He was saying, "We don't get our oil from the Persian Gulf, so we can let the Iranians close the Straits of Hormuz and it won't make any difference to us."
Right. That's a chucklehead. Of the brain dead variety.
The people that do get their oil from the Persian Gulf will do anything to keep their houses heated and their motor vehicles running. They will start buying oil from all over the world. Suppliers all over the world will start rationing by price, i.e. they raise the price to reduce demand to what they can supply.
$200 a barrel oil. $10 a gallon gasoline and furnace oil. We can't afford that.

We can keep the straits of Hormuz open. The Navy will have no trouble sinking anything Iranian that floats or flies. For good measure they can take out Iranian nuclear facilities and anything else of enough value to be worth the cost of flying the mission against it. The Straits of Hormuz are an international waterway which makes it just like the high seas. Interfering with shipping on the high seas is an act of war, and has been since Thomas Jefferson's time.

Words of the Weasel Part 25

2012-01-16T09:18:00.002-05:00

Impact, used as a verb. On NPR this morning "The tornado impacted Joplin Missouri". Proper English is "The tornado hit (or struck) Joplin Missouri".
Impact is a noun (the impact of a bullet) or a condition of teeth (the dentist extracted four impacted wisdom teeth.)
Bureaucrats love "impacted" because it sounds so benign. "The regulations impact business" sounds so much better than "The regulations hurt business."
I dislike people who say "impacted". I figure they are attempting to conceal something unpleasant from me. The common word for people like that is "liar".

It's still COLD

2012-01-16T09:15:00.002-05:00

It's four below zero F this morning. Colder than yesterday. If I have four below up here, then it will be 8 below down in the valley. Fortunately the cars have gotten much better at starting in cold weather and my car is snug in my garage where it's always 20 degrees warmer than outside.

Federal Flood Insurance

2012-01-15T11:51:00.002-05:00

Way back when private companies used to sell flood insurance. After loosing barrels of money, private companies stopping writing flood insurance and changed home owner's insurance to exclude flood damage. Floods are not insurable because they are predictable. Any place that flooded in the past is bound to flood again in the future. Since the hazard is predictable, only people in flood prone areas buy flood insurance. People with hilltop lots don't buy. This results in a situation where EVERY policy holder is going to make a claim. Nobody can afford that. And so no private company will write flood insurance.
This resulted in a hue and cry from waterfront voters for the government to do something. And so Uncle Sam offers flood insurance. And looses barrels of money doing so. Tax money paid by everybody is going to rebuild the property of the few.
Truly we ought to get Uncle out the the flood insurance business. Unfortunately we don't have the votes to do that.
What might work, is a "one-flood" policy. Once property suffers a serious flood, Uncle pays off and then refuses to renew the policy on that property for ever. The owners get paid once, but if they rebuild in the same flood prone place, they do it at their own risk. They ought to rebuild on higher ground so they won't need flood insurance.
Keep this up for long enough, and we won't be insuring flood prone construction and reconstruction.

It's COLD today

2012-01-15T10:55:00.001-05:00

Thermometer read zero F this morning. It's 11 oclock and it still reads zero.

Taking down the Christmas Tree

2012-01-13T13:47:00.002-05:00

Well, you gotta do it sooner or later. But taking it down is never as much fun as putting it up. Then there is the "which ornament goes in which box" dilemma. I've begun labeling each little box. Then there is a flimsy box problem. The ornament boxes are ultra cheapo with huge cellophane windows and they just sort of disintegrate sitting in the attic waiting for Christmas again. Egg cartons last longer. How do I know? Simple, a fair number of my boxless ornaments now live in old egg cartons, and have been living there for several seasons now.
Then the light people need to sharpen up. The damn things come with a 10 conductor cord thick enough to moor a cabin cruiser. Even though it's tastefully dyed green, it still looks humungous up on the tree. Sort of "Santa comes from PSNH" looking.
Then we have the bubble lights. My grandmother gave us a couple of bubble lights for Christmas back in the dawn of time. We kids loved them. Mother thought they were tacky and plastic and she made them disappear. Years later I see boxes of bubble lights in the store and buy a couple for old time's sake. Trouble is, the lights only bubble when they are straight up and down. The cheapo plastic clips on the sockets are mostly busted off, and this year the lights hung every which way and didn't bubble at all. Next year either no bubble lights or I make some kind of clips (twisted paperclip wire?) to hold them in place.

Snowmageddom

2012-01-12T16:20:00.002-05:00

They put on a winter storm warning for midnight last night. Things sounded so scary that they cancelled a session of the state legislature in Concord. They predicted three to six inches. So far we got 3/4 of an inch and the snow has let up. The town snow plow went by once.
What they will do for a real snow storm?

Zapped another one

2012-01-12T13:34:00.002-05:00

The January version of Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, (MWMSRT) helpfully downloaded by Windows Update, ran and detected a virus. MWMSRT called this fellow "Trojan:Dos/Alureon.E" which is probably Microsoft speak for "It's a Trojan Horse, it doesn't run under any flavor of Windows so we will call it a DOS virus and Alureon.E is it's name.
MWMSRT claimed to have winged it but not killed it dead. MWMSRT recommended I run a regulation anti-virus to get rid of it.
So I did. I have two anti virus programs and I ran them both. Then I reran MWMSRT to make sure Alureon.E was good and dead. No such luck. The slippery little rascal was still in my system.
Arrgh.
So I googled for him and turned up a lot of chit and chat. You have to be careful googling on viruses, cause all sorts of Internet slime will offer to fix it for you, just download their program. Avoid those.
There was no clear cut "how-to-kill" posting. There was a hint that Alureon.E hides out in a special 2 megabyte "disk partition".
So for Windows XP, open "Administrative Tools". On my machine "Start->Settings->ControlPanel" gets me there. On your machine it might be different.
Once inside Administrative Tools, click on "Computer Management". Inside Computer Management find "Storage" and under "Storage" click on "Disk Management".
Look at the "Volumes". There ought to be a big one with a name containing "C:" and perhaps second one with a name that corresponds to a disk drive that you recognize from Explorer.
Those are good guys.
The bad guy is a partition with no name and 2 megabyte size. That's where Alureon.E lurks.
Right click on him and delete him.
Presto, Alureon.E is toast and MWMSRT will run clean.

Continental Airlines scores again

2012-01-11T13:57:00.003-05:00

The Wall St journal had a front page story about transatlantic airliners making emergency fuel stops at strange locations like Goose Bay Labrador and Iceland. Turns out a certain cheap ass airline has been flying 4100 mile range 757's on transatlantic runs of 3900 miles. Leaving just a few hundred miles of reserve range in the tanks. When the winds are against them, they run out of jet fuel and have to make unscheduled stops in the boondocks. Making the flight VERY late and causing passengers to miss what ever connections they had booked.
In USAF mission planning we were supposed to have enough fuel on board to divert to another airport should the weather get bad at the airport you planned on. Sounds like the airlines are no longer bothering.
And guess which airline is inflicting this inconvenience upon long suffering passengers. My old favorite, Continental. Good thing I have avoided flying Continental for the last 40 years.

Incidentally, you also want to avoid Air-Trans. They are prone to canceling flights for the convenience of the airline. Leaving passengers stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The need for numbers

2012-01-11T10:11:00.002-05:00

There's been a bit of talk about the defense budget. Obama and Panetta have been on TV talking about how great our armed forces are. But they gave no numbers.
We ought to know how many regular combat troops we will have. There was a time (WWII) when we had ten million men under arms. That's probably more than we need in the 21st century. But it does seem prudent to have enough regular troops to do down a third world pest hole like Iran or North Korea. Say 140,000, which is what we had in Iraq at one point. When doing the counting, we ought to count regulars separately from reserves. And we only want to count real combat arms, infantry, tankers, gunners, and combat engineers. Public affairs officers, contract administrators, motor pool, logistics, POL, finance, base housing, and MP's are not combat soldiers.
In the case of the Navy and Air Force, the numbers that matter are the number of operational warships and aircraft. Don't count rustbuckets in mothballs or antique aircraft parked at the Davis Monthan boneyard.
There is probably some fat to be trimmed out of the defense department. Parkinson (of Parkinson's law fame) once observed that the Royal Navy back in WWI had a large number of ships and a small number of clerks. By 1960 the navy had half the number of ships and ten times the number of clerks compared to 1914. That's an example of cuttable fat.
Then there is military procurement, so beloved of Congressmen. We could start by burning the 100,000 pages of procurement regulations that just add cost and slow deliveries. Insist that the services go out for competitive bids on EVERYTHING. Don't accept excuses that there isn't time for bidding. Accept bids from close allies like Canada and Britain.
Knock off the gold plate. Buy Jeeps for $22k instead of Hummers for $60K. Buy off-the-shelf equipment rather than design special stuff at extra cost.

So what does it all mean? NH Primary that is

2012-01-11T09:19:00.003-05:00

Well, it certainly puts more air into Romney's balloon. And that's a good thing. So says Captain Obvious.
Just as good, it takes a lot of air out of Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. Both of whom would IMHO be disastrous GOP candidates, easily beaten by Obama.
Too bad Ron Paul is still flying fairly high. The TV pundits all dismiss Paul saying "he could never get the nomination." I hope they are right, but I don't see what makes the pundits so sure. This is a democracy, votes are votes, and Paul has a goodly number of them. He sure has a lot of yard signs out up here.
The opposition started whacking Romney about his days at Bain Capital. Bain is venture capital/private equity and their business was investing in shaky companies hoping to turn a flake into a winner. Sometimes Bain won it's bets and sometimes it lost them. Romney should be saying something like, "At Bain we financed this winner and that winner and this other winner and today they are all in business, employing this many people, people who would be out looking for work if we hadn't financed the company that employs them today. Sure we had some losers that didn't work out, but our winners employ far more people than the losers laid off. "

The NH primary day finally arrives

2012-01-10T13:42:00.002-05:00

So I got up and rolled down three mile hill to vote. Town Hall was open for business, polls open. I faced 30 choices for Republican president, most of whom I had never heard of. Chatted with a number of friends and acquaintances about the surprising lack of poll watchers. There was nobody out in front waving signs for any candidate. Possibly the so-so weather (30 degrees and threatening snow) drove them off, or perhaps the great excitement with this primary exists mostly in the minds of the newsies. Or perhaps we voters aren't really very fond of any candidate, certainly not fond enough to stand out in the cold all day.

Fix for Microsoft and/or Windows update.

2012-01-09T14:45:00.002-05:00

If Windows or Microsoft update stops working, it may be that wuaueng.dll has been "deactivated".
You can "re activate" same by typing this command into the Run window on the Start menu:

%SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\REGSVR32.EXE %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\WUAUENG.DLL

It works for me. I found this gem on the Microsoft Web site here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_other-windows_update/windows-update-error-number0x80070424/95998d7e-9e38-4599-a6cd-fd201447fa92

Broadband dies

2012-01-08T11:16:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I powered up trusty desktop and oops, "Network Cable disconnected" said Windows, and sure enough, no Internet. I looked in the rats nest of cables behind the computer, and the network cable was plugged in and the green LED was glowing. Huh? How come Windows says the cable is unplugged when the LED says it is plugged in?
So I wiggled some cables and started up the hardware troubleshooter program and bingo, the cable became connected, Internet returned, and I could read my email. This lasted for about an hour and then that pesky cable popped out and the Internet went away.
After a while the urge to get on line became irresistible. Maybe it's something wrong with trusty disktop? I pulled antique laptop out of its carry case, unpacked, unrolled, and plugged in the power pack and the mouse, and booted antique up. She was unable to find the house wireless router signal. Argh. Must be something wrong with the broadband.
Maybe that flaky router is finally dying? Router will lock up and refuse to connect until it gets "reset" actually I pull his plug out of the wall for the count of ten, then plug him in again. And, believe it or not, I have a spare router, just lying around the house. So I swap out the router, see the new router's LEDS light up, and go back up stairs to my computer farm. No luck. No Internet.
Well maybe Comcast is down? That happens now and then. So the rest of the day goes by, I go to bed, and next morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I try for Internet. No dice. Windows still thinks the cable is unplugged. Just to be sure I look at the cable again, it's plugged in, but the LED that was glowing green the day before is out. I inspect the router, and notice, the router ain't showing any lights either. I check the wall wart that powers the router and AHAH, it ain't giving out 12 volts like it ought to. It's showing a measly 2.46 volts DC on my new-to-me B&K DMM.
I rummage in my junk box, and wonder of wonders, I have another 12 volt wall wart, and it still works. And the plug matches! So I put the backup wall wart to work, and lo and behold, Internet returns.
Anyhow, that's why no post on Saturday. (Is that a Harry Potter line?)

Polyanna rides again

2012-01-06T10:45:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we had Obama and Panetta on TV talking about the defense budget. To listen to them, you would never think that they were planning to cut same. They talked about adequacy of the armed forces, leanness and meanness, retention of veterans, upward and onward. Sounded like everything was going to get better and better.
No talk about how much defense we were giving up. Like how many combat soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and Navy ships the US would have this coming year. For extra credit they could tell us how many we had last year. Nor did they mention the number of dollars involved. Chalk this up partly to the general innumeracy of the chattering classes, and largely to a desire to conceal the size of the armed forces under Obama's new regime.
Citizens who bothered to listen to this drivel learned nothing worth learning.

Science Fiction Project canceled

2012-01-05T15:38:00.003-05:00

USAF's Airborne Laser project, a Boeing 747 filled with a multi megawatt chemical laser was supposed to by able to zap enemy ICBM's as they cleared the silo. It was supposed to have enough range to loiter over South Korea and zap North Korean missiles launching out of North Korea.
The project has been going for 16 years, and has consumed $5 billion. Which is a lot of money for a single aircraft. In testing, a few missiles were zapped out of the air, and more were tracked.
Lets hope we obtained $5 billion worth of technological advancements, 'cause we certainly did not obtain a working weapon system for all that spending.

Innumeracy by the newsie's

2012-01-04T11:58:00.003-05:00

Was up early and on the road by 5:30 AM this morning. The car radio was full of Iowa caucus stories. At 5:30 we heard that Romney "won" by 8 votes. And that Santorum was number 2 with just about as many votes as Romney. It wasn't until 8:30 that NHPR finally broke down and told us how many votes Ron Paul got. Three hours of listening to reporter's drivel before we get a real number.
Then, at least twice, I hear some pundit say "Well, Iowa is full of evangelical voters but New Hampshire is different." Yeah right. Come up my way and I'll show you a humungous bunch of very conservative voters.

No Fly List

2012-01-04T11:55:00.001-05:00

Continental Airlines has been on my no fly list for 40 years. I was on a Continental charter to go to Viet Nam back during the war. The plane got as far as Hawaii and made a fuel stop. Then it took off and climbed up to altitude. A few minutes later the captain came on the PA system to announce that something was broken and he was turning back to Hawaii for repairs. And a few minutes after that, the captain came back on the PA system to announce that what ever it was has got well and he was going to press on. I haven’t flown Continental since.

Youngest son is flying to DC and now that we can all book out own flights, he books an 8:30 Continental out of Manchester for DC. So we get on the road in the pitch darkness of 5:30 AM and get to the airport on time. Just in time to find out that Continental had cancelled the flight. “Weather” they said. It was a beautiful clear morning, and the day before had been nice too. If Continental won’t fly in that kind of weather they are Class I wimps.

So they get the boy onto a US Air flight that doesn’t leave til 11:30, has a layover in Philadelphia and doesn’t get into DC until 4 PM. If you have time to spare, go by air.

Anyhow Continental is still on my no fly list.

Nuclear Iran

2012-01-03T11:17:00.003-05:00

We really don't want the Iranians to get the bomb. Even if they don't nuke Israel immediately, it will terrify all the other middle east countries, pushing them to start their own nuclear programs, and it will make it impossible to employ conventional military means to do a regime change. Driving tanks into a nuclear power is very dangerous, they might nuke your capital.
What to do? Diplomacy is a waste of time, the Iranians are bound and determined to get nukes and not amount of talking will change that. Air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities might not work and they will certainly strengthen the regime and its determination.
There might be a third way. This suggests that the Iranian regime has powerful internal enemies. Surely there is something we could do to help them along. Money, web access, passports, explosives, prepaid cell phones, computer viruses, you name it, we have it. Come to think of it, the Iranians have been having a bunch of serious industrial accidents. Perhaps the Green party has a hand in that.
If we are doing useful work in this area, I hope our leaky CIA and State Dept can keep it secret. A news headline "Iranian Green Party is CIA catspaw" would wreck the whole thing.

Iowa

2012-01-02T11:04:00.002-05:00

Damn, Iowa is all the TV news is talking about. Must be the only thing that isn't happening in the US of A. And all they have to talk about is the poll results (changing now and then) and their hopes of the future.
Well, I have some hopes too. I hope the GOP's most electable candidate wins. That ought to be Mitt Romney. Trouble with Mitt is, he never says anything, no promises to fix what's broken, stop the federal gravy train, repeal job killing bureaucratic regulation, nothing substantive. Mitt has learned that saying anything substantive just makes you enemies, never friends. For any policy issue there are people on both sides. Take a stand, and the people on the other side become your mortal enemies, the people on your side pay little attention. So the safe and election winning strategy is to say nothing at all, except perhaps to declare yourself in favor of motherhood and apple pie. Romney has been that way thru out this primary. It seems to be working for him, but it's hard to get excited about him.
Here's hoping Iowa votes for Mitt.

New Year's

2012-01-02T11:01:00.004-05:00

I refrained from making any New Year's resolutions. I shall also refrain from commenting upon the year just past except to say "bummer". I shall refrain from predictions about the year to come.
I do have some New Year's wishes, but they are just wishes, not predictions. And I'll keep them to myself.

True Grit II

2012-01-01T10:21:00.002-05:00

Watched the Netflix DVD last night. It's really good. I didn't expect a remake of a classic to be much at all. This one is. Hailee Steinfeld plays Matty Ross and does an amazing job, especially as she is only 14 herself, just what the role calls for. I would have guessed her to be older, say 18 or so. I will look for her in future movies. Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn. His Rooster is more disreputable than John Wayne's Rooster. Long gray beard, uncut hair, generally scruffy look, drinks harder. The other parts in this movie, Matty and Laboeuf, get better roles than they did in the original, which was a John Wayne vehicle and focused on the Rooster Cogburn role. The bad guys, Tom Cheny and Ned Pepper are not as well played as they were in the original. Lots of the dialog is unchanged, I assume it comes from the book, which I never read.

The Economist hates Republicans

2011-12-31T16:19:00.002-05:00

The Economist, for those that don't know it, is a weekly news magazine published in London. They do a lot of real news, unlike Time and Newsweek, but they also have some of their own ideological hangups. According to the Economist the Republican party is handicapped by the following beliefs.
1. Pro-life. Tut-tut. Actually we Republicans make a strong effort to avoid this wedge issue and concentrate on matters of real public policy.
2. Anti-gay marriage. Another Tut-tut. Again, this is a divisive wedge issue that we don't campaign on.
3. Anti-amnesty. This is a hard one. No one wants to let illegal immigrants into the US ahead of legal immigrants who have been waiting in line. No one wants to send out SWAT teams to round up the illegals and bus them to the border. If there is a decent solution I don't know what it is.
4. Anti-Obamacare. True. Obamacare will destroy company health insurance where most of us get our health care. It does nothing to reduce health costs. It imposes rationing and death panels. And endless paper work.
5. Anti global warming. True. Global warming is a scam. The climate gate emails revealed a conspiracy between climate "scientists" to exaggerate the warming and edit the data to create Michael Mann's hockey stick temperature graph.
6. Anti-gun control. True. We Republicans strongly believe that a piece in the cash drawer or the bedside table reduces crime. Most Americans agree with us.
7. Anti tax increase. True. Raise more revenue and the government will just spend more.
8. Pro Israel. True. The Israeli's have created a decent and humane democracy in the face of intense opposition. They are to be admired.
9. Anti-EPA. True. The EPA is on a tear to shut down coal power plants, the auto industry, pour money down "green" ratholes and throw people out of work.

Other than this kind of bigotry, The Economist is an interesting read.

Those limo's are Lincolns.

2011-12-30T18:02:00.001-05:00

The Wall St Journal had a good clear picture of the Kim funeral and you can see the Lincoln hood ornament on the limo.
I wonder how a Lincoln limo gets to Pyongyang. Sure they don't have a Lincoln Mercury dealer up there.

Popevers finally popped

2011-12-30T17:48:00.002-05:00

Half a dozen batches of popovers made in the last few months have failed to pop. They would come out edible enough, but without the high rise crustiness that makes a popover a popover.
Today it all came together and the popovers rose, got crusty, and were delicious.
The recipe is simple, cup of milk, cup of flour, two eggs, pinch of salt (1/4 tsp actually) and a tablespoon of melted butter. NO BAKING POWDER! Preheat oven to 400F. Add the milk, eggs and salt into a mixing bowl. Beat with an egg beater til smooth and fluffy. Melt the butter (I cheat and use margarine) in a big spoon on the stove. Beat the melted butter into the eggs & milk. Sift in a cup of flour. Only this time I used bread making flour instead of all purpose flour. It has more stickiness than the all purpose flour. Grease a muffin tin liberally, the popovers can stick and their hollow nature doesn't support prying out of the muffin tin. Bake 25 minutes at 400F, back off to 350F and give 'em another 15 minutes.
Yummy.

Frosty

2011-12-29T09:50:00.001-05:00

It's below zero this morning. Coldest it's been so far this winter. Must be global warming.

Where do they get those cars?

2011-12-29T09:45:00.002-05:00

The North Koreans did a state funeral yesterday. Vast empty street, Snow on the ground, crowds of mourners confined to the sidewalks.
Humungous long black limousines, with a '70's look to the styling. They weren't Cadillacs. I don't thnk they were Lincolns. Were they Russian? Do they Russians make such cars? And export them? And what do they do the rest of their lives, when they aren't hauling coffins in state funerals?

Hyping your headlines

2011-12-28T12:21:00.002-05:00

Today's airliner incident, a 737 aborted its takeoff. According to Fox TV News, the tires "exploded".
Yeah right. Any motorist knows that tires blow out, they don't explode.
But the writer's must think "explode" is catchier. Or maybe they are just ignorant. TV people are poorly educated.
But for those of us who drive or fly, "blow out" gets our immediate attention.

Words of the Weasel Part 24

2011-12-27T09:59:00.000-05:00

Underperform. Fox News Speak (heard on air this morning) for lose. As in "Newt Gingrich may underperform in the Iowa Caucus."

Should party primaries be open?

2011-12-26T11:12:00.002-05:00

Well, they are in New Hampshire. We allow voters to change their party affiliation at the polls on election day. And to change it back again on the way out the door. Party members often complain about this, saying it is wrong to allow non party members a voice in party candidate selection.
I disagree. To win office, candidates must attract votes from the undecided middle. The independents or the opposition. The way things are right now, about 30 percent of voters are die hard Republicans, who will vote Republican no matter what. Another 30 plus percent are yellow dog Democrats. And the remaining 40% of the electorate can vote for either side.
Allowing that 40% middle to have a vote in the primary helps nominate candidates acceptable to the middle, and thus have a chance of winning the general election.

Did Congress slip on over on us?

2011-12-24T09:11:00.002-05:00

The news is full of talk about the "payroll tax reduction" bill that might have passed the House yesterday. Actually it's the FICA tax they are talking about. Used to be, FICA was levied only on the first $110k of income, income over that limit was not subject to FICA.
According to Tax Prof here, the new law levies a 2% FICA tax on all income over the $110k cutoff point. That's a pretty stiff tax bite. And right out of the blue, too. This is the first I'd heard of this new "revenue enhancment".

Do your Christmas shopping in Littleton

2011-12-24T08:57:00.002-05:00

Went out Christmas shopping yesterday. You gotta do it, websurfing and Amazoning just lacks the flavor of going into stores and looking at stuff and exchanging Merry Christmas greetings with strangers met in stores. Main drag of Littleton can be walked, lots of neato stores carrying stuff you can't find at Walmarts.
Much better than mall crawling.
Then we had family over to decorate the Christmas tree and consume a bit of Christmas cheer.
Merry Christmas.

Tis the season to go virus stomping

2011-12-22T11:44:00.002-05:00

Got another one. This guy called him self "XP Antispyware 2012". He tries to look like he is official Microsoft issue, although he isn't. He throws up a window that looks like an anti virus scan and shouts about infections. And he gets into the registry and fixes it so that anytime you run an .exe file, he get run instead.
I'm so glad Microsoft gave us the Registry with the power to reprogram every part of Windows.
Fortunately good old Bleeping Computer had a fix for him.

Model Number, lack of

2011-12-21T16:13:00.002-05:00

Trusty Hoover upright vac is running on it's last bag. So I note "Vacuum bags" on the shopping list on the refrigerator door. Then I look at the vac for a model number to put on the list. Damn, no model number or name (e.g. Supersucker 1234) on the vac. I turn it over, no luck. Hoover didn't bother.
So tomorrow I'll be in the supermarket looking at a dozen different dirt bags wondering which one will fit.

60 day extension of Pay Roll tax, meaningless

2011-12-20T14:05:00.002-05:00

Obama is on TV right now whining about the failure of the 60 day extension of the pay roll tax cuts. Is there much of a difference between a tax hike in January as opposed to the same tx hike in March? Is a mere 60 days worth all the speechifying and bloviating?
Far as I can see, makes no real matter.

Double Tap. A space age derringer.

2011-12-20T13:44:00.002-05:00

Full page ad in my January American Rifleman. It's a double barreled belly gun chambered for .45 ACP. It gives you two shots and then you break it open to reload. It holds two more rounds in a compartment in the grip. Only 14 ounces, available with either a titanium or aluminum frame.
No price listed in the ad.
Hmm. two rounds of .45 ACP ought stop most anything, if you can hit it. It's small. I don't want to think about recoil or muzzle blast. The .45 round kicks hard and is loud fired from the big government model 1911. It will be worse fired from a smaller lighter gun.
All in all, I think I would rather have five rounds of .38 Special than just two rounds of .45ACP.

Whither North Korea?

2011-12-19T18:21:00.002-05:00

Medium duty dictator, Kim Jong Il, croaked last night. We have no idea what comes next. The South Koreans might have a clue, but we don't. Perhaps heir Kim Jong Un (28) has the stones to take over from his father and actually run the country. Perhaps the North Korean establishment will run things with Kim as a figurehead. Perhaps the North Korean regime will collapse under the pressure of starvation and famine.
The last possibility is the most worrisome. If the North collapses, the South Koreans will be under enormous pressure to do something. A lot of South Koreans still have kin in the North. They will demand relief efforts to keep their relatives from starving to death.
The Chinese have been very happy with North Korea. It gives them a friendly border state, who can tie the Americans in knots at the drop of a nuke. The idea of having a pushy capitalist South Korea, hand in glove with the Americans, on their border is anathema. So the Chinese are under pressure to intervene to save the communist regime in the north.
So now we have South Korean army units, trucks loaded with relief supplies and peace flags fluttering from bumper mounts, tooling around in the north, with Peoples Liberation Army units doing the same thing. The nasty possibilities should be obvious.
If things blow up, we will be under enormous pressure to back up the South Koreans. They are good people, lots of us have been to their country and come back impressed with their country, their industry, their people, and their army. We will see the issue as support of a loyal long time friend of America, against Communist aggression.
We don't really want to get into a scrap with the Chinese, with whom we do a lot of very profitable business, but we don't want to leave a long time friend in the lurch either.
With luck, this issue won't come to a head until we have replaced Obama with a real president.

Why we love Microsoft

2011-12-17T13:04:00.002-05:00

Trusty antique laptop had been running Office for years. For some damn Microsoft reason Office suddenly decided to stop working and whine. It wants "activation" and threatened to die for good if not "activated" within the next few usages. So, I clicked on "activate by Internet. The program hummed and whirred and then choked up. "Cannot contact Microsoft Activation Server, check your internet connection." Lovely.
So I tried "activate by telephone". At least the phone answered, a robo answering machine. The robo responder wanted me to key in a 54 digit magic number displayed by the program. After a lengthy button pushing orgy, the robo server decided the number was no good and hung up on me.
So I did some internet searching. Apparently I'm not the only one whose Office got surly for Christmas. But no real fixes were posted anywhere. I was hoping for a registry patch. No such luck.
Finally I tried the "activate by telephone" trick again. This time it worked. I keyed in all 54 digits and the roboserver responded with a second 48 digit magic number, which I copied down and then input to Office. Must be that I messed up keying in the magic number to the telephone last time.
I love Microsoft.

Teebow?

2011-12-16T10:35:00.002-05:00

All I know is
1. He plays professional football. (Nothing wrong with that)
2. He is apparently pretty good at it. (Commendable)
3. He has been observed praying on the field. (Commendable)

And for this he is getting more air time than a Presidential candidate.

Coffee makes the age of reason possible.

2011-12-15T15:21:00.001-05:00

This one is cool.

Aviation Week doesn't know why the drone crashed

2011-12-15T15:01:00.003-05:00

They said it wasn't shot down, 'cause the picture shows it all in one piece, no blast damage, no scorch marks or bullet holes. Makes sense.
The undercarriage is hidden in the photo the Iranians released which suggests "The lack of crash damage would indicate the standard UAV flight-termination procedure after an airborne mishap of going into a flat spin."
That's cool. A flat spin slows the drone down enough to recover it in one piece. Just what you need on a peacetime test range. It's nice to have a chance to fix what broke and fly it again. Not sure if that's what you want in wartime. I think it ought to do a power dive into the ground leaving a big hole. And a lot of scrap metal.
Aviation Week said the nobody was very concerned about compromising secrets. They claim the payload was a "full motion video sensor" aka ordinary TV camera. As far as the air frame and engine go, the experts claim there is nothing new there. Right.

California Cognac

2011-12-14T10:50:00.002-05:00

Cognac, the brandy of Napoleon. Comes from just one district in France, and is so smooth you can sip it neat, from a special glass (a brandy snifter). Under French law, only brandy produced in the Cognac district can bear the Cognac label. Everyone else must label the product "brandy". And just plain "brandy" is so rough that us ordinary mortals must add ice and soda to make it drinkable.
Out in California the E&J (Easy Jesus my son calls 'em) has long distilled an ordinary brandy and sold it in cathedral shaped bottles. E&J was OK as a brandy, but you don't want to sip it neat. Now E&J has gotten better at it, and offered a brandy marked "V.S.O.P." the traditional mark of high class Cognac. The NH liquor store carries it, at 1/3rd the price of Hennessy.
It's not bad. It's smooth enough to sip it neat. If they can keep it up, E&J might have a real product here.

HR whines again

2011-12-13T08:25:00.002-05:00

This was on Vermont Public Radio this morning. An aircraft maintenance company out in the mid west is complaining about the lack of qualified aircraft mechanics to hire. An lady HR rep from the company said on air "You cannot just hire high school graduates to do this work."
The hell you can't. That's all we did in USAF. We enlisted high school graduates, put 'em thru a few months of tech school, and then put 'em to work on the flight line as apprentices (3 levels in USAF jargon). They worked under the supervision of journeymen and masters. After taking some courses, getting lots of hands on experience, and passing some tests, they got promoted to journeymen (5-levels). Took about three years for the average guy. And with more experience, and training, and testing, the journeymen became masters.
That maintenance company could do the same.
Then they revealed that they only paid people $12 an hour to start. No wonder they have trouble filling vacancies.

Bad day at the Green Hill Mall

2011-12-12T15:48:00.002-05:00

It's Christmas shopping season, the sun is out, the snow is melting, great day to be out and about. I needed some electronic parts. The local Radio Shacks are all out of business, so I drove over to a surviving one in St Johnsbury. It was in a nice new mall, with a micro Sears, a J.C. Penny, a dollar store, a bank, couple of shoe stores, you know, the usual. Christmas carols are playing on the PA system.
One thing wrong. The place is deserted. The halls are empty, the stores have more clerks on the floor than customers. The mall has four giant gaping vacancies, the parking lot is nearly empty. Great Depression 2.0 is hard at work around here.

Need to Know, We have a democracy

2011-12-12T15:20:00.002-05:00

Was watching a new PBS Sunday pundit show yesterday. "Need to Know" they call it and it has Ray Saurez of the Newshour as one of its hosts. They had a panel of elderly Congressmen and newsies, bewailing the current problems of Congress. They had a clip of Elmo from Sesame St saying that a nice playdate would solve all the problems. The panel talked as if Congressmen were both the cause and the solution to the current deadlock. They talked about the good old days when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, or Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton could get together and cut deals that would stick. If only Congressmen would socialize with each other more, all the bad partisan feelings could be soothed and we could pass some of each side's favorite bills. The entire focus of the discussion was upon Congress and Congressmen, as if the real world didn't exist.
In the real world, Congressmen have to vote their district. A lot of democratic Congressmen became former Congressmen last November because they forgot that rule. On issues that the district cares about, Congressmen have to toe the line.
In the real world the country is evenly and deeply split over many issues, taxes, spending, abortion, immigration, oil drilling, coal burning, Iraq, global warming, Afghanistan, bailing out Detroit and Wall St, to name just a few. Many districts have strong views on these issues and insist that their Congressmen support their views. When the country is split, Congress will be split too, at least a democratically elected Congress. Which is the way it ought to be.
Not only that, Congress is set up to to prevent the "tyranny of the majority". We cannot allow a slim majority to impose its will on a large minority that is dead set against the change. The country won't hold still for it. The way things are now, the country closely split, it's better to keep things the way they are, than pass laws that 49% of the country will detest.
And that is what is happening. On the deeply divisive issues, the Congress is leaving things the way they are, because it cannot muster the votes to push thru changes that are stoutly opposed by one side. And that is the way it ought to be.
Too bad no one on this panel of supposedly wise men understood that.

David Gregory, master of stupid questions

2011-12-11T09:08:00.002-05:00

He is interviewing Ron Paul this morning on Meet the Press. "Who is the real conservative, Romney or Gingrich?" he asks Ron Paul. Who cares? What we want to know is where the candidates stand on healthcare, taxes, global warming, budget cutting, Israel, nuclear power, Syria, Iran, and numerous other important questions. In particular, when you are interviewing a presidential candidate we want to know where he stands, not what he thinks about his competitors.

Whap!

2011-12-10T17:16:00.002-05:00

That's the noise a bird makes flying into my Thermopane windows. They been doing it more and more. Just this morning I watched a blue jay perched on my porch railing. The jay spread his wings and took off, gathered speed and whap! Right into the window. He must have survived, I didn't find him lying dead in the driveway.
And it ain't like that window wash commercial "Our Stuff makes glass so clean it seems to disappear." My windows have a goodly selection of bug smears, condensed wood smoke and they all need cleaning.

Mitt or Newt?

2011-12-10T08:56:00.000-05:00

Newt is an interesting guy. I'd love to have him over for dinner. Newt is an idea man, he has ideas running out of his head and all over the floor. Most of them are good ideas, some of them are bad ideas. We could be in a lot of trouble should a President Gingrich push thru one of his bad ideas. Mitt is a nice guy, nice wife, nice kids. He has real executive experience and can get uncooperative legislators, investors, and promoters to cooperate. Mitt is a middle of the road guy. He isn't going to go to the mat against abortion, gay marriage, legalized grass, amnesty or any other wedge issue. He will do his best for the economy, employment, and the deficit. The independents are more likely to vote for Mitt, which makes Mitt a better bet to beat Obama.

How did that US drone come down in one piece?

2011-12-09T11:58:00.003-05:00

Iran is displaying a futuristic looking drone it claims is of US origin (despite the lack of USAF markings) . How did it fall into Iranian hands in one piece? Did the Iranians get onto the drone's command frequencies and order it to land? Did the drone encounter some kind of in flight failure and the on-board artificial intelligence made a safe landing in a field? Were the Iranians merely lucky? Like the US was in WWII when we found a crashed Japanese Zero in Alaska in good enough shape to salvage and even fly.
If Iran did force the drone down via the radio command link, how come said radio command link was not encrypted? There are plenty of uncrackable encryption schemes that can be realized on a 3 by 5 inch printed circuit board. Why did not this top secret drone have encryption?
And, why is the US admitting that the Iranians have a top secret US drone in their possession? We don't have to lie about, we just say nothing. In response to reporter's questions refuse to answer. That way anyone who wants to believe the Iranians are not being truthful, can go right on believing. But once some big fat mouth in DC says "Yeah, that's ours" the jig is up. Once the Americans themselves confirm Iranian claims everyone will believe those claims. If we could just say nothing (difficult for politicians and bureaucrats) we would leave the matter in some amount of doubt.
Finally, does this drone have anything to do with the series of massive explosions plaguing the Iranian nuclear program?

Plumbing

2011-12-09T08:59:00.004-05:00

My least favorite household activity. The bathroom sink faucet has been leaking for months. Not on the floor, just a little dribble on the sink. I finally got irritated enough to fix it. Drive in to Littleton, all the while thinking to myself "Lowes or Home Depot?". We have both, next door to each other. Eventually I found myself in the Lowes parking lot.
They had a lot of faucets. Shiny Chrome, gun metal, porcelain knobs, all pricey. I settled on an el cheapo Pfizer model for $18, thinking that the fancy jewelry grade faucets would look out of place in my humble bathroom. Only when I got it home and unpacked it did I see the "Made in China" sticker on this old line American plumbing fixture company's product.
Now the fun begins, getting the old faucet out of the bathroom sink. That fellow has been peacefully rusting in place since the house was built in 1962. The brand new $15 basin wrench was able to loosen one of the four nuts holding it in place. A heavy shot of PC blaster loosened a second nut enough for the basin wrench to turn it, but the last two were stuck fast. A half an hour of groveling around on the floor and using bad language convinced me that those two nuts were really stuck. So I disconnected the pipes lower down and took the entire sink off the wall and down to the shop. There a one and one eighth inch Craftsman deep well socket made the last two rusty nuts say uncle.
More fun was in store. Replacing the sink on the wall revealed that the new faucet was a quarter of an inch shorter than the old one, and the hot and cold water supply tubing didn't quite reach far enough. Damn.
Make a quite speed run to the hardware store, arriving just before closing time. Bought two new supply tubes. Returned to the job, and found the new supply tubes were the wrong size.
And now it was after five o'clock and the hardware store was well and truly closed. Another struggle and I was able to stretch the old supply tubes just enough to fit. And wrenched them good and tight, and Halleluiah, they don't leak.
I hate plumbing.

Bankers must do their own risk assessment

2011-12-08T13:53:00.002-05:00

Rather than depending upon ratings agencies. Well how about that? Bankers will have to work at their trade, inside of accepting outside opinions. About time. The secret of banking is making loans that will be repaid. Any turkey make made a loan, the trick is to make loans that get repaid. On time, with interest.
The Wall St rating agencies, Standard and Poor's, Moody's Investor Services, and some others, have been "rating" investments, banks, and even countries as AAA, A,B,C just like grades on report cards. Trouble is, the ratings agencies made some astoundingly poor ratings over the years, such as rating mortgage backed securities AAA. Banks have been dumb enough to accept agency ratings and been burned badly.
Apparently the word is getting around. Congress required the the FDIC to remove any language referring to agency rating from the banking regulations. This is finally filtering down to even the dumbest banks.

Don't blame Wilileaks

2011-12-08T13:43:00.002-05:00

Blame some government weenie who gave Army privates access to State Dept classified. Today's WSJ has an op-ed piece by Floyd Abrams decrying the really bad effects of Wikileaks posting classified State Dept cables. Numerous US diplomats expelled after their classified cables containing perfectly true but uncomplimentary information became public.
Abrams blames all this on Julian Assange, Wikileak's founder.
Wrong. The blame belongs to the un named bureaucrat who gave Army private Bradford Manning access to State Department classified. Manning turned into a traitor of the Benedict Arnold class and stole thousands of classified documents and gave them to Wikileaks. Manning is in custody, but the unnamed bureaucrat who gave Manning access is getting away scot free.

Gotta prove intent in order to prosecute

2011-12-07T10:09:00.002-05:00

That's the whine I read in the Wall St Journal. Some investigator working to nail somebody, anybody, for causing Great Depression 2.0, or at least profiting by it.
What is this? Intent is thought. Are we trying to prosecute thought crimes? Real crime, which juries will convict for, involved actions, not thoughts. Taking cash out of the vault, out of safety deposit boxes, out of customer accounts (Corzine!), forging signatures, that's crime. The law has been real clear on this sort of thing since Moses's time.
Buying a stocks and bonds that go down in value ain't criminal, dumb maybe, apt to get you fired, but it ain't a crime.
What this guy is complaining about is really one of two things.
A. Nobody committed any crimes.
B. He is too stupid to prove the crimes. (You gotta be smart to be Sherlock Holmes. Few guvmint employees are very smart)

Crime should not rest upon mental attitude. Proof of a crime should be proof of some action, not wheither the perp was thinking impure thoughts as he did the actions. Juries largely agree with this, and have been returning verdicts of "not guilty" when the government brings a thought crime case.
And no, we do not need more vague laws making impure thoughts into felonies.

Banking with Basel

2011-12-05T12:27:00.002-05:00

Or, how banking regulations drove the world economy over the cliff. The Basel agreements on international requirements for banking capitol drove banks into unsound lending.
To understand the issue, we have to understand "capital" as related to a bank. Let's try a simple case, a medieval bank that gets its funds from depositors, in gold, and makes loans. Obviously such a bank cannot loan out ALL the money in the vault, they have to hold onto some money to cover withdrawals and losses (some borrower fails to repay his loan). Obviously the amount of capital to keep is a delicate balance. Money sitting in the bank's vault pays no interest, so the banker is motivated to loan it all out. On the other hand, the banker knows that he can't go THAT far, if he does he will be unable to pay off a depositor, and then a lot of bad things happen, like a run on his bank, tar and feathers ...
Now a days things are more complex, but the issue of capital reserves is the same. Banks ought to keep adequate capitol reserves to cover bad loans. But, now "capital" is more than gold coin. We count paper money, US treasury bonds, and less safe things like mortgages, Greek bonds, common stocks, anything that could be quickly sold for cash to meet obligations. Things like real estate don't count as capital because they cannot be sold quickly. Suppose you needed to sell the Empire State building to raise cash; how long would it take to find a buyer? Who knows.
To create a level international banking field, the big boys got together at Basel Switzerland and set up rules for how much capital banks must hold, and what things count as capital. They even talked the American SEC into imposing these rules on US banks. Trouble is, the Basel rules are bad rules. And every bank got pushed into doing things the Basel way. Under Basel , banks had to hold 8% capital against corporate loans, 4% against mortgages, and 1.6% against mortgage backed securities.
Right there you can see we are in trouble. Everybody knows that mortgages are pretty sound investments ("Safe as houses" they used to say), but mortgage backed securities are extremely risky. But the Basel rules encourage investment in flaky mortgage backed securities instead of genuine mortgages.
It gets worse. Basel defines sovereign debt (Greek bonds) as risk free, so a bank can buy any amount of sovereign debt (loan to flaky Euro governments) and not have to hold any capital at all. This was pure crazy. What is sounder, bonds issued by the likes of IBM, Southwest Airlines, Caterpillar Tractor, or bonds issued by Greece, Iceland, Ireland, or Albania? What kind of loan does more to develop an economy? Loans to flaky governments to pay for welfare benefits, or loans to productive corporations that create jobs?
Basel "regulation" is responsible for the Euro debt crisis. It encouraged banks to load up on high paying but flaky bonds, and now the flaky is coming home to roost (default) Plus, no longer do bad things happen to bankers who make dangerous loans. TARP or the ECB or somebody bails out the loser banks and nobody looses their job or gets prosecuted.
Regulation can be a disaster.

Neverland

2011-12-05T10:35:00.002-05:00

Watched it last night in the SyFy channel. It's a made for TV miniseries about the Neverland before Wendy, Jon and Michael Darling fly in. It's an origin story of Peter Pan. Naturally I watched it. I've read the book, I've seen the movie,and I'm ready for more.
The sets and costumes are good, the actor playing Peter is the right age and the right size, and cute enough. The girl who plays Tiger Lily is not cute at all, neither is Tinker Bell.
The two hour premiere is kind of unsatisfying. Peter never gets a clue as to what he should be accomplishing. We hear some talk about getting home to London, but we all know that ain't gonna happen. We know Peter Pan will establish himself and the Lost Boys in Neverland and have adventures going up against pirates and Indians. So when he talks about going back to his previous Oliver Twist like existence in turn of the 19th century, Dickensian London, we know he doesn't have his head screwed on nose to the front yet.
Matter of fact, the opening of the story looks more like Oliver Twist than Peter Pan, right up to including a Fagin, who Peter wants to work for as soon as he is old enough. Fagin gets transported to the Neverland along with Peter and morphs into Captain Hook somehow. Peter has a confusing emotional relationship with Fagin/Hook. At one point they confront each other with large bore flintlock pirate pistols at four paces, only Peter looses his nerve and gives up his gun. Bad Form! The real Peter Pan would have pulled the trigger, blown Hook into next week, and escaped by some magic/acrobatic trick.
The second episode is on tonight. Despite the numerous flaws in the script I'll watch it just to see if something good doesn't happen in the last reel.

Euro land woes

2011-12-04T10:53:00.002-05:00

We have all heard about Greece, Italy and the Euro bond/bank disaster. Essentially, private investors will no longer buy Euro land government bonds, not even German bonds. Investors as a group now doubt that any Euro land government is good for the money. The 50% haircut on Greek bonds is an object lesson.
The dead beat Euro governments are crying for the European Common Bank to print barrels of Euros, and buy their worthless bonds with the freshly printed Euros. The bank is resisting this pressure, so far.
Friday, Angela Merkel was quoted in the WSJ as saying that euro members would have to accept a certain loss of national sovereignty. In plain English, she means that deadbeat members would have to accept outside (IMF, ECB, or German) control of their taxes and spending. Wow! Somehow I don't think that is going to work. Any national government with a speck of pride would rather do without borrowing at all than allow outsiders to set their taxes and spending.
Perhaps the Europeans could take a lesson from the Yankees. American state governments somehow manage to maintain their bond ratings without Federal supervision. The penalty for states that overspend is simple, they have to pay more on their bonds, or in extreme cases, they cannot borrow at all. And, like Euro land governments, no American state can print it's own money.

Line Item Veto vs Balanced Budget Amendment

2011-12-04T10:10:00.003-05:00

A line item veto for the president would allow him to delete costly pork barrel projects from budget bills without vetoing the entire bill, and giving the budget writing treadmill another turn of the wheel. In real life it's hard for any president to veto a highway bill or a defense appropriations bill just because Senator Fogbound has slipped in a little $1million bit of pork for his district. If the president could kill off the pork without throwing the entire department into budgetary chaos quite a bit of money could be saved.
Congress critters are dead set against a line item veto just because it would let the president deprive them of the fruits of much hard lobbying and bargaining with mere a tick of his pen.
I am dubious about the value of a balanced budget amendment. Too many ways to weasel around it. First and easiest way, over estimate tax revenues. The budget next year is "balanced" if taxes are as large as spending. Those taxes have not been collected yet, so no one REALLY knows how much tax money will come in. So they make an estimate. And since estimates are subjective, it doesn't take a very smart politician to raise the estimate enough to declare the budget "balanced". Then they can go home and not have to face worrisome questions about budget cuts.
The second way is the "off budget" scam. Declare certain activities, a state toll road authority, the state retirement system, the state university, the social security system, the federal home mortgage bank, stuff like that, to have their own budgets, independent of the state or federal budget. New Hampshire practices this to perfection. More than one half of New Hampshire spending does not come out of the general fund, it comes from a myriad of special purpose funds. It is not hard to show the general fund running a surplus by pushing expenses off on the special purpose funds, who can borrow to pay bills. The general fund can look really good when overall the state is spending more than it takes in by way of taxes.
This simple scheme works; New Hampshire newsies are so clueless as to fall for it and only report on the general fund, ignoring the overall picture. National newsies are as clueless as the New Hampshire sort.

The Cat Listener

2011-12-03T16:04:00.003-05:00

Cats are not pets. In actuality cats run the house. Humans are placed under some kind of spell that causes them to feed the cat, pet the cat, let the cat in, let the cat out, etc etc.
Cats say many things. The attentive human will understand most of them. Cat sayings:

Meow (plain meow): I want attention.
Meow (with some snarl to it): Don't do that.
Purr: I am happy and contented.
Tail lash: I am loosing my temper, beware
Tail Twitch: Something ain't right.
Siren Howl: Get off the property, Right Now
Mewrrp (soft): Pet me.
Hiss: Watch out you. I am planning violence

"Republicans" who voted AGAINST Right to Work

2011-12-01T11:35:00.002-05:00

Right here on Granite Grok

http://granitegrok.com/blog/2011/11/republican_defectors.html#more

I'm sorry to see John Tholl's name on this dishonorable list. We supported him. I went up and poll watched for him one frozen February day.

Cutting the Defense Budget

2011-12-01T10:48:00.004-05:00

Now that the super committee has failed to do squat, the Defense Dept is facing up to some deep budget cuts. Aviation Week published a list of big defense projects that might be canceled to save money

1. Joint Strike Fighter, F35. They are outrageously expensive and killing the program would save really big bucks, more than any other program. Cancellation would piss off a lot of allies who have ordered the fighter and who would now have to scramble to find something to replace it with. A compromise would be to kill the VTOL version which is having technical troubles, and proceed with the standard version.

2. V-22 Osprey. This is in production and has entered squadron service with the Marines. It' been in "development" for nearly 20 years. Trouble is, ordinary helicopters, Chinook, Blackhawk and such, can perform the V-22 mission. And they cost less.

3. Next Generation bomber. The Air Force wants a B-52 replacement, without one, the nuclear deterrent mission goes to the ICBM's sitting in silos. Last time the Air Force went for a next gen bomber it got the B-2 stealth flying wing; a cool plane but so expensive that they could only afford 20 of them.

4. Ground based Midcourse Defense. A legacy ICBM based missile defense system that I never heard of before.

5. Ground vehicles (Tanks, Hummers, MRAPS, Bradley's) What exactly do the Army and Marines need after Afghanistan and Iraq?

6. Ford class aircraft carriers. These are super carriers and super expensive.

7. C-27 Light transport. This is a cargo plane that looks like a miniature C-130 with only two engines. Trouble is, the good old C-130 can do every thing the baby C-27 can do; plus carry more stuff farther.

8. Helicopter modernization. A never ending black hole for money. You can spend the price of a new helicopter on add-on gadgets, bigger engines, and "stuff". In actual fact the existing helicopters are flying missions without expensive modernization.

9. DDG-51/DDG1000 new Navy destroyers. As usual, new Navy warships cost more than existing ones.

10. Littoral Combat Ship. I think "littoral combat" means shore bombardment. Do we want to buy warships so specialized that they can only handle a single mission? Warships are so expensive that I expect them to be able to handle more than one mission. Like deep sea escort, raids on enemy oil platforms, and anti submarine work. Put a couple of decent sized guns on existing warships and they could do shore bombardment. A lot of modern destroyers only have a single three inch popgun.

The real defense funding issue. Should we not have more infantry, so the poor infantry men don't have to serve back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and other nasty places?

Right to Work vote.

2011-11-30T15:42:00.002-05:00

The email lists were buzzing. I received nearly a dozen invitations to go down to Concord and demonstrate in favor of the Right to Work law (HB 474). It was hinted, but no promises were made, that it would be voted upon today. The house speaker, Bill O'Brien, has been biding his time, hoping to scare up a few more votes. But time is running out, and right-to-work will be dead at the end of this session, with out a vote, so maybe it's time.
Any how I passed the invitations along on the up country email list, and set the alarm for 6:45. I set off for Concord thru early morning ground fog and light rain. I parked in the big shopping center, the one with Market Basket, the state Liquor Store, and Burlington Coat Factory. Our side had coffee and muffins and bright green T-shirts in the capitol cafeteria. I encountered a few stalwart north country types, Omer and Henry Ahearn, and Russ Cumbee. At nine o'clock we all file into the capitol visitors gallery. I was pleased to see we had as many of our people in green T-shirts as there were union guys in red T-shirts. Apparently the email gets around.
Business opened with CACR 14, a constitutional amendment having something to do with schools. I'd heard of it, but cannot remember whether it continued Court supervision of schools, or ended it. CACR 14 used up an hour before it was voted down and killed for the rest of this legislative session.
Then Rick Perry addressed the legislature. Perry laid into Wall St and Washington, accusing both parties of engaging in corrupt crony capitalism. Looks like it could be a grim year for Wall Streeters. The union guys were rude enough to boo Perry.
After Rick ran down, Huntsman popped up and spoke as well. Huntsman sounded more mature and less "hot button issue" than Perry.
Finally we moved onto the main event, HB 474, the right to work law. Both sides put up some speakers, and by noontime, the speaker called for a roll call vote (actually a push button vote recorded by computer). In New Hampshire, the push button vote lasts for a mere 30 seconds, unlike the US Congress which can let 25 minutes go by on a push button vote. In New Hampshire the legislators have to stay in their seats and make up their minds.
Too bad, when the red LED stopped blinking, the vote was 240 in favor to 139 against. Since this was a veto over ride vote, we needed two thirds (253 votes) to override Lynch's veto. Close but no cigar.
Too bad. Kiss that automobile assembly plant goodby. Apparently the campaign donations and votes of a mere 9% of the New Hampshire workforce are enough override the needs of the 91% of our workforce who are not in a union. Democracy in action.

Return to Harvard Square

2011-11-29T12:46:00.002-05:00

I love Harvard Sq. I've been going there all my life. I visited it again yesterday, after an absence of a year, due to living in upcountry New Hampshire. Drove down on I-93. New Hampshire is widening I-93, making that four lane strip between Manchester and Mass, into 6 lanes. They are building the new lanes in isolated bits and pieces, so that they won't do us motorists any good until all the road is widened, in maybe four to five years. Smarter would be to start the widening at one end and build methodically toward the other end. That way as sections are finished they can be placed into service.
Harvard Square is still there, but it saddens me to think of all the great places that are no longer there. Ferranti-Deggi, that great camera store, where once upon a time I acquired a Kodak Retina SLR is gone. The Sunflower, with it's magnificent copper topped bar down stairs, got turned into a Pizzarria Uno. The Crate and Barrel in the three story concrete building out Brattle St, is now a ladies clothing store. The great book store that used to be across the street from it is gone. Wordsworth books in the basement of that strange round brick building on Brattle Sq is gone and the space is "For Rent". Abercromby and Fitch wiped out The Tasty and the Wurst House. Now Abercromby is gone and the space has a bank and a Starbucks. Boring.
The Starr bookstore in the Harvard Crimson building is gone. Brine's Sporting goods is gone.
There are a few survivors from the old days. The Million Year Picnic is still there and so is Charlie's Kitchen.
After three hours of Christmas shopping all I found were some comic books (aka graphic novels) for daughter, and a used Andre Norton paperback for myself.
Pretty soon it won't be worth going to the Square at all.