Slanting the news same-same Freedom of the Press

They have been all over Facebook and Zuckerman over the accusation of slanting the "Trending" column by dropping conservative stories.  A Congressional hearing is promised. 
   Not that I approve, I'm conservative too, but the United States has been blessed with slanted news reporting since the founding of the Republic.  Look at the New York Times.  In the 1930's they supported Soviet communism.  "I have seen the future and it works".  In the 1950's they supported Fidel Castro, strongly enough to make him dictator of Cuba.  In the 1960's they backed North Viet Nam.  They published the Pentagon Papers in order to destabilize the Nixon administration.  They published a leak from CIA about tapping Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, result, Bin Laden ditched the phone and went back to messengers. 
   I don't see much difference between want the Times does and what Zuckerman is accused of doing at Facebook. 

More Global Warming

It snowed up here, light, only 1/4 inch, but mid May is very late for snow, even in New Hampshire.  Clearly global warming at work. 
Then my electric bill shows power use by month over the last 12 months.  This year, May 2016, average temperature was 43F and my daily power use was 19 KWH.  Last May, it was 57F and daily power use was 15 KWH.   More global warming at work. 

Wendy's to install automatic kiosks in 6000 outlets

This story has gotten some serious airplay, always followed up with tsk-tsking about how $15 minimum wage causes low end jobs to be automated out of existence.  
It reminders me of  an old old Robert A. Heinlein story.  Our intrepid teen age hero has been invited to breakfast at a truck stop, by a trucker.  To make conversation the trucker says,
   "This joint used to be automated.  Then it went broke, and the trade all went to the Tivoli, down the road apiece.  Then the new owner threw out the machinery and hired girls.  Business picked up."
   At this point the waitress is taking their order and the trucker says to her,
   "I want that egg just barely dead.  If it's cooked solid I'll nail it to the wall as a warning to others."
   "I doubt that you will be able to get a nail thru it," replies the waitress.
   "See what I mean," says the trucker to our intrepid teen age hero.  "How can machines compete?"

   Good luck with automation Wendy's.

Trashing Sikes Picot

NPR and the Economist have been blaming the woes of the Arab world on the Sikes Picot Agreement of 1916.  Must be the centennial that brings this out.  I'll grant every one of the Arab woes, but I cannot believe they have anything to do with Sikes Picot.
   The Ottoman empire (forerunner to modern Turkey) used to own, operate, tax, and run all the the modern middle East, Greece and the Balkans, Egypt and North Africa.  Turkish/Ottoman control began to slip in the 19th century and World War I brought Lawrence of Arabia to completely tear up the Ottoman empire.  In 1916 the British and the French had Sikes (for Britain) and Picot (for France) draw up a plan to divvy up the Ottoman lands after the war.  The British, the French, the Italians, and the Russians all got a big slice.  Old style imperialism at work.  But that's the way things worked a hundred years ago.
   In reality, the local Arabs were too dis organized, too tribal,  too uneducated, and too primitive to actually run things.  It took 30 years for the Arabs to get up to speed and push out the European imperialists and set up their own regimes.  To a certain extent, but not entirely,  the boundaries of the new Arab states followed the boundaries drawn by Sikes and Picot, but so what?  The populations were/are  all Arab, they all speak Arabic, they are all Muslims.  With the exception of Egypt, there are no natural geographic borders (mountain ranges or rivers, or deserts) so one boundary is about as good as any other.
   The entire region is huge,  no Arab government has the smarts, the charisma, or the military force to run the whole place.  Best the Arabs can manage is to run smaller chunks of it, hence the multiplicity of regimes, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, and so on.
   So far as I am considered, the woes of the Arab lands are of their own making, it's not the fault of a diplomatic agreement among European imperialists a hundred years ago. 

Where have all the retail sales gone?

WashPo has a long article here bewailing the lack of retail sales.  One reason might be the really utilitarian product retailers have to sell.  Consider Walmart.  A worthy place, the price is right, the stuff is OK, and I shop there.  But only for pretty utilitarian things, like Jockey shorts, prescription medicine,  and paper towels.   Over the last few years we have lost the Radio Shack, a nice kitchenware place, a decent used book store, a very decent new book and toy store, an Ace Hardware, two video stores, and The Oasis restaurant.   All that's left is Lahout's, Walmart, Staples, Home Despot, and Lowes.  None of them are very gifty stores.
  For Christmas, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, I go on line to find nice stuff to give as gifts.   I gotta drive a long way south on I93,. Tilton or Concord.  to find anything much better.  So this Christmas, Amazon, Lee Valley, Signals, and Garrett Wade got all my Christmas buying. 

Cluelessness runs in the family

Apparently Chelsea Clinton's husband, Marc Mezvinsky, some kinda stock broker wheeler dealer has lost humungous amounts of his clients (suckers) money.   According to the Daily Mail, he lost the money speculating in Greek bonds.  That's a maximum stupid in my book.  Anyone with two brain cells firing knew that the Greeks were broke and would never be able to pay off their bonds.  Looks like Chelsea married a chucklehead.

There IS a difference in supermarket brands

Surefine (Mac's Market house brand) 100% Colombian coffee tastes better than Shaw's house brand 100% Colombian coffee.  Was in Shaw's the other day and picked up a can of their stuff by mistake.  Bad idea, it was harsh and bitter.  Even youngest son commented on how bad it was.  Whereas the Surefine at $4 and change a can tastes as good as jazzier coffees going for as much as $9 a can. 

North Carolina Bathroom Brouhaha

The Obama justice department and the state of North Carolina are now suing each other over the bathroom bill.  The Feds are threatening to cut off some serious federal money unless North Carolina knuckles under.
   Leaving the bathroom bill issue for a bit, let's ask why the Feds were giving a state that kind of money in the first place.  Education is a state and local responsibility, and should be paid for by state and local governments.  When the folks that spend the money have to raise the money, they are a bit more frugal in spending.  Where as free money handed out by the Feds gets spent as fast as possible.  There is always something to spend money on. 
  In short, why is my federal tax money being set to North Carolina?  It's a nice place and all, but I think it ought to be raising its money from its own citizens, not freeloading off of me, up here in New Hampshire.

Army to Shrink to 480,000 troops

  So how many are real combat soldiers, infantry, artillery, and armor, and how many are paper pushers and Rear Echelon Mother F----rs (REMF)   480,000 real combat troops is on the thin side, but possible. We only sent 140,000 troops to take out Saddam Hussein a few years ago.  But 480,000 who are mostly REMF's is scary.   
   In the real world, the troops are dispatched on one year overseas, unaccompanied, combat tours, and then they expect at least one year back home with their families.  When there ain't enough troops, the same guys get sent back on second and third and fourth combat tours with only a few weeks at home in between each combat tour.  This is pretty damn hard on the troops.  
    

Why we don't want a President Hillary

She would pack the Supreme court with lefties, who would rule against liberty and in favor of regulations, bureaucrats, against the second amendment, and uphold rights for tiny minorities at the expense of the general public  They would support all kinds of government snooping on citizens  These lefties  would stay on the bench for decades suppressing liberty and enhancing federal power. 
  She would veto repeal, or even any changes to, Obamacare. 
  She would bungle US foreign policy the way she has bungled Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Ukraine, North Korean, Iraq, and Iran.  She is possibly clumsy enough at foreign relations to get us into yet another war.
  She is a gun control freak and will attempt to take our guns away. 
  She will continue Obama's economy killing policies.

   The "Never Trump" people talking up Hillary as better than Trump need to think about these things.  

Selling the Nerd Mobile on TV

One of those  successful car commercials.  Opens with a sporty looking little red car zipping down an empty road. (When was the last time you got to drive on a road empty of cars?).  Camera zooms in on the driver's seat and we have the biggest nerd you ever saw driving the car.  That's gonna make me want to buy it.  Then we see a cop car, bubble gum machine flashing blue and red in the rearview mirror.   Commercial ends, mercifully, before we get to the cop writing the nerd a ticket.
   Do they really think this is gonna sell cars?

Computing Gross National Product (GNP) according to the Economist

Actually, in these PC days they call it Gross Domestic Product (GDP) .  National has become a dirty word in PC circles.  But it was GNP when I went to school and I am not PC.  The statistic began to be computed in the 1930's as a measure of an economy's war potential.  The Americans managed to shift a third of their massive GNP into war production by 1945, and that buried the enemy under an avalanche of ammunition, rations, tanks, jeeps, warplanes, army trucks, aircraft carriers, radar sets, and finally nuclear weapons.
   GNP is defined as the total output of goods and services, expressed in dollars, and figured on a yearly basis.  Goods is easy enough to understand, goods are packed in cartons, stacked on loading docks, shipped to customers.  Services used to be necessary things like transportation (rail, shipping, trucking) or utilities (electricity, water, sewage)  As time went on, service providers of lesser importance wanted the prestige of  being included in GNP figures.  In the UK they now include the services of "sex workers" and there is a push to include housekeeping and child care into GNP figures.
   The Economist did not explore a few issues in GNP computation.  Consider automobile production.  Clearly number of new cars produced times the average sales price of new cars goes into GNP.  But, consider this, Detroit doesn't make everything that goes into a new car.  They buy tires, batteries, spark plugs, wire, fasteners, glass, paint, sheet steel, lotta stuff from other companies.  Think about that spark plug company, Champion say.  They ship a lotta plugs to Detroit, which have an average sales price.  That goes into GNP as well as the new cars do.  In this case the plugs get counted twice, once as the leave the spark plug company, and a second time as they leave the auto plant, securely screwed into the engine of the new car.
   Then how do you handle big construction projects.  Say the World Trade Center.  That took years to build.  Did they estimate the amount done each year and add that into GNP?  Or do they wait until the building is finished and sold?  We are talking of a billion dollar project here.  Lumping years of work into the last year gives you a GNP bump in the year the job finishes.  And what does 9/11 do to GNP?  Do they even count that in GNP? 
   Anyhow the Economist devoted a full page to GNP calculation this week.

We is stuck with Trump.

Yesterday's solid Trump win in Indiana got Cruz, and now Kasich to both throw in the towel.  Barring an act of God, The Donald is the Republican nominee. 
   The Donald is not my favorite candidate, but, druther him than Hillary.  Gotta start thinking up things to say to get people to vote Republican. 

Book cooking for fun and profit.

Companies are required to publish periodically their profits or losses.  Computation of profit can be pretty slippery.  In principle, profit is gross sales less legitimate expenses.  Legitimate expenses can vary a lot.  When doing the books, any clever accountant can find various ways to make profit come out higher or lower.  When doing the books to show to the taxman, the accountants work real hard to make profit as low as possible, since the company is taxed on profit.  When doing the books to show Wall St investors and sell the company's stock, the same accountants work real hard to make the profit higher. 
  This is natural, not good, but natural. 
  But, in the United States, we allow companies to keep two sets of books, one to show the taxman, another to show to stock buyers.
   This should not be.  We should insist that companies keep one set of books, and the profit they brag about to investors is the profit upon which they pay taxes.  In fact, the IRS could do investors a favor by merely publishing all the company tax returns.  They are public companies after all, and so their tax returns are public information. 

Winning World War II, Combined Arms Operations

WWII broke out in September 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland.  From there, going on til 1942, the Germans' won every battle.  They crushed Poland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece,and finally France.  They drove the British into the sea at Dunkirk. 
   What accounts for the amazing German combat power?  Answer: combined arms.  German attacks had tanks as the spearhead, with the infantry right behind them.  They had artillery support and air support.
This is effective as all getout.
   It took the Anglo Americans three years to catch on and launch their own combined arms attacks.  It's tricky.  For something real simple, just order an infantry battalion, about 1000 men, to attack somewhere.  This is straight forward, you pass the word to the colonel of the battalion.  Where, when, and that's it.  Now lets add artillery support.  You have to get the guns moved up into range, get the ammunition (heavy stuff that) moved up and the guns emplaced.  Then you have to coordinate so that the artillery knows where and when the infantry will attack.  You want the enemy's front lines shelled just before the infantry moves up, but not too early, shelling tells the enemy that an attach is coming and all chance of surprise is lost. And you want the barrage lifted just before your troops get there. You want the enemy head quarters shelled, you want enemy artillery batteries shelled, and you DON'T want your infantry shelled as they press the attack. You need to make sure the artillery and the infantry are using the SAME maps, with the same names and numbers for terrain features.  You want to have artillery forward observers, with radios, with the infantry so they can let the artillery know when the infantry falls behind the schedule.  All this is complicated. 
   Then if you have tanks, you want the tanks to lead the attack, at least as long as the terrain allows the tanks to pass.  Tanks are maneuverable, but they cannot climb roadless hills, cross swamps, or climb vertical cliffs. Takes more coordination to get the tanks to show up at the right place and do what is necessary.
   Even trickier is arranging for close air support.   Step one is to avoid fratricide.  Your ground units need to be distinct from the enemy's units lest the Airedales bomb your own men.  More coordination.  Get anything wrong and lots of bad stuff can happen.
   It took the Anglo Americans about a year of fighting Germans in North Africa to get all this straight. 

Retraining for workers whose jobs have fled overseas

NHPR was pushing retraining for the jobless this morning. But if there are no jobs, all the training or retraining in the world won't help.  We gotta do the hard stuff, create new jobs, foster new business formation, drive off the hordes of bloodsucking paper pushers and their job killing regulations, make taxes lighter and fairer.  Keep the NIMBYs and BANANA's from stopping projects. 
    Liberal NHPR isn't going to understand any of this.

I watched The Donald's foreign policy speech yesterday

It was fairly sanitary, no gratuitous slams on Mexicans, women, Chinese imports and other things that have made the headlines over this campaign.  He used a teleprompter, which means he took this one seriously and didn't want to make off-the-cuff blunders.
   It was pretty vague.  He came out for defending and advocating American interests, with out ever saying what those interests might be.  He said ISIS would be gone, soon, but he never said how, or how far he would go to waste them.  Would he send in the US Army to deal with them? Would he nuke them?  Who knows?  
   He never did really say where he stood on free trade, although he made disparaging remarks about NAFTA.  He is against "nation building" but he never addressed the problem of weak or failed nation states that revert to wildlands, harboring terrorists.  You need to remember that Osama Bin Ladin settled into the wildlands of Afghanistan, where there was no effective national government.  From this safe haven Bin Laden set up the 911 operation.  This would not have happened had the United States done some nation building in Afghanistan after the mujahedin drove out the Soviets in the 1980's.  Go watch the movie "Charlie Wilson's War". 
   The Donald made few to no concrete promises in this speech.  Applause sounded kinda thin, to the point where I wondered how full the room was. 

Democratic Turnout Down 4 million

So says the Drudge Report.  Does this show a significant party switch in the electorate?  Or does it show four million democrats who wanted to vote in the Republican primary, but will vote Democratic in the general election?  Who knows? 

Progress in DVD burners

After ten years of service, the DVD burner in Trusty Desktop stopped playing.  Something got jammed and the tray would no longer open.  Even after pulling the drive from Trusty Desktop and prying it open, I could not get to tray to move, at least not with the amount of force I dared apply. 
  So ho, for a new one.  A bit of internet research disclosed that the design of DVD burners changed a year after Trusty Desktop left the factory.  The DVD burner that came with him has an IDE connector, a parallel interface with 40 odd pins in the connector.  The new DVD burners have a serial interface (only four wires).  They haven't made the DVD burner that fit Trusty Desktop for the last ten years. 
  OK, so there is a salvation.  They now make USB DVD burners, USB is universal, Trusty Desktop has plenty of USB ports.  So I bought a Verbatim model down at Staples, only $50.  Very small, only 1/2 inch high, compared to old one and 1 1/2 inches high.  It's faster too.  Burns a 4.7 Gig DVD in about half the time the only one needed.

To Alpha Centauri in just 20 years?

Sounds good.  Ultra small spacecraft, one big silicon chip containing camera, radioactive thermal electric generator, comm and nav systems, to weigh a couple of grams.  A light sail one meter square.  A 100 Gigawatt laser plays on the light sail for 10 minutes and accelerates the micro probe to 20% of the speed of light.  That will get it the four light years to Alpha Centauri in 20 years.  Then it radios back what the camera's see. 
   One sticky point, how does a micro probe, weighing only grams, have enough transmitter power to drive a radio signal back to earth? 
   Idea comes from internet investor Yuri Milner.  He is making grants to fund research.

Weak Tea from The Economist

Cover story this week "Can She Fix it?"  Cartoon on cover shows Hillary, dressed in mechanic's coveralls, holding a monkey wrench, studying a beat up engine hanging on a chain hoist.  Said engine's outline is the lower 48 of the United States.  Of course no mechanic has used a monkey wrench since WWII, real mechanics all use Snap-on socket wrenches.  But that's all right, the guys who write for the Economist were never hot rodders. 
    The think piece article goes on for three quarters of a page laying out the woes of the American economy, low growth, growing unemployment, stagnent wages, and all the rest.
    But the Economist doesn't suggest any serious fixes for all this woe.  They call for "slashing unnecessary regulations" without naming a single regulation in need of slashing.  "Ensuring big firms no longer operate in protected markets"  without naming a single protected market or big firm wallowing in one.  And they call for more government bailouts to companies going down the drain.  And retraining for workers in down the drain companies. 
   Some how I had expected better from a newsmag named "The Economist".
   

North County Do, The Lincoln Reagan dinner

We do this once a year up here in Grafton county.  It's a big deal, everyone who is anyone in the state comes.  This year we had all four republican candidates for governor, and both candidates for US senate. and both candidates for NH senate.  And some candidates for NH house. I've been kicking around NH politics long enough now that I knew most of the people there. 
   For governor we have Frank Edelblut, youn guy, first term NH rep, enterpreneur,  talked about making live better for business.  And we have Ted Gatsas, four term mayor of Manchester, older guy, didn't talk much, I was sitting next to him.  And then Chris Sununu, comes from a good family, good name recognition, made a good talk, probably best of the governors.  And Jeanne Forester, current NH senator, well liked and respected, she has been around for a while and everyone speaks well of her. 
   The we come to the US senate race.  We have a primary challenger (Jim Rubins) to well liked incumbent Kelly Ayotte.  Far as I can see, Rubins is a loser, if he wins the primary, the democrat Maggie Hassan, current governor, will beat him.  Kelly Ayotte is sincere, hard working, and with luck and a lot of help, she can win. 
   I see men's fashions are changing.  Half the men there, myself included, were wearing blue blazers, the kind with brass buttons, and khaki slacks.  The other half were wearing dark business suits.  And some untraditionalists, like Jim Rubins, showed up in blue jeans.