I don't believe in thought crimes

Crimes, that get you hauled into court, ought to be things you did, not thoughts you had.  To be a free country, like we claim to be, one should be free to think anything they like.  Only actions can be criminalized. 
And not too many actions either.  I believe Moses got the number just about right, and Moses lived and died thousands of years ago.  

  Take that newsie's Watergate Wail, "What did he know and when did he know it?"  That's a cry to pursue a thought crime.  "Knowing" is pure thought.  It's perfectly legal to know damn near anything.  Why do the newsies go about siccing cops and courts on people just for knowing something?  A far better question is "What did he do, and when did he do it?"  

   A lot of places have passed new laws penalizing "hate crimes".  These are things already crimes, they just added some extra jail time if the crime is motivated by prejudice against minorities.  I don't hold with that.  The law should punish actions, crimes, the same way no matter what the perp was thinking, before during, or after committing the crime.  Murder is murder, doesn't matter why the accused committed murder. 

Cultural Appropriation

The social justice warriors are attacking a good looking young woman for wearing a prom dress with some Chinese style to it.  Despicable.  Its a good looking dress, makes her look good.  You ought to be able to select your prom dress on how it looks on you, not whether SJW fanatics will dump on you for your choice.
   Western civilization has been very effective over the centuries at adopting important technical ideas from other cultures.  Magnetic compass, which vastly improved the odds of your ship returning safely, came from China, and only appears in Western literature in the time of King Richard the Lionheart.  Gunpowder also came from China, although the idea of putting it into cannon is probably a western idea. Some early cannon were taken to the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
   I am in favor of cultural appropriation.  If other cultures have good ideas, or well styled garments, or well cooked food (chili, pizza,bleu cheese,lots of other goodies)  we ought to adopt them.   

Trump vs the NORKs

Hard to tell how things are going.  According to the newsies, Kim Jong whats-his-face has offered to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.  Assuming that's what Kim really said, and not an overly wishful translation by peacenik newsies, it's good.  That's more and better  than any NORK offer since 1953.   Granted we have some well founded trust issues with the NORKS, i.e. we think they are liars, it's still good to have them making the denuclearization offer.
   And certainly we have one idea of what denuclearization means and the NORKs have another, and we may not be able to come up with a compromise acceptable to both sides,  there is still a possibility of success  We ought to go for it.
    Big question.  Why is Kim making nice now?  Possibly the US led trade embargo is beginning to bite?  Possibly the Chinese are worried about American tariffs on their goods killing their economy, and so have decided to make nice with the Americans by leaning on Kim?  My sources say that the NORKs are totally dependent upon imports of fuel and food from China.  Perhaps the Chinese are telling Kim to cool it with the Yankees or face a cutoff of vital imports. Although the Chinese like having the NORKs around as a buffer state between them and the pushy American allied South Koreans, and as an attack dog who they can sic on the Americans any time they want to , they cannot be happy with the idea of a nuclear armed North Korea.  And both we and the Chinese have doubts about the stability of Kim's government.  If  revolution breaks out in the North,  the Chinese fear that the South will take over all of Korea, the way West Germany took over all of Germany.  Bye-bye buffer state and attack dog.  So the Chinese may be reining Kim in to prevent him from over stressing his hold on power in the North.
   Who knows? 
   If things work out right, President Trump ought to get a Nobel Peace Prize. 

The Economist discovers a new Greenhouse Gas

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has been the greenie's favorite greenhouse gas.  Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are blamed for global warming.  These are gases that are transparent to visible light and near visible light (short infrared and some ultraviolet) and opaque to long wave infrared.  Solar heat comes to the earth and warms it as visible light.  The warmed earthly objects, rocks, soil, vegetation, everything, throws off heat by radiating long wave infrared.  On the night side of earth, the long wave infrared goes up into space carrying heat with it.  Overall earthly temperature is believed to be the result of a balance between incoming Solar heat on the day side, and outgoing infrared radiation on the night side.  Increased levels of greenhouse gas block the long wave infrared and are believed to increase the average temperature of the earth. 
   Now the Economist has a long piece about the evils of methane in the atmosphere.  It's dreadful.  Methane is the bulk of natural gas, and flatulence.  It comes from leaks in natural gas pipelines and gas wells, as well as flatulence among cows, of which there are lot on the earth.
  Only one little problem with the methane scare story.  The Economist shows a graph starting in 1984 and going to 2018.  Methane in the atmosphere has increased from 1650 parts per BILLION, to 1850 parts per BILLION. 
Rescale from parts per billion to the more widely used parts per million, and the methane levels become 1.65 PPM and 1.85 PPM. 
   We have good laboratory data going back about 100 years on carbon dioxide levels.  They used to be 350 some PPM, and now are getting close to 400 PPM. 
  Somehow I don't think less than 2 PPM of methane will ever make much difference against 400 PPM of carbon dioxide.
   And for that matter, plain old water vapor is as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide or methane, and the atmosphere contains about 10000 PPM of water vapor.  It varies from time to time, the weathermen call it humidity and report it on the nightly news.  As I write this, it's raining outside, which means 100% relative humidity.   Since there is about 25 times more water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, I don't worry much about carbon dioxide.  Compared to the water vapor, there just isn't enough carbon dioxide to worry about.  And the water vapor is better than 1000 times more plentiful than methane. 
   On a planet that is three quarters ocean, nothing is going to reduce the water vapor content of the atmosphere.  Plus the water vapor comes down as rain, which most places need more of. 

Too bad about Bill Cosby

I remember Bill Cosby in "I Spy" on Philadelphia TV in the 1950's.  I once owned the "200 Miles an Hour" LP record.  "Mother Jugs and Speed" was hilarious.  "Fat Albert" livened up Saturday morning cartoon time. He did the Doc Huxtable gig well.  I never met the guy, all I know him by is his entertainments, which were entertaining.
  I am sorry to hear that he has been convicted of sexual some-thing-other committed 14 years ago.  We used to call it rape, but apparently simple four letter words are too much for lawyers and the political correct now a days.
   Too bad such an good comedian turned out to be a rapist.  
   
  

New Hampshire must be doing something right

Thursday's Wall St Journal had a bar chart, showing growth of personal income in all the New England states.  New Hampshire is best in show, with 3.5 % income growth for last year, 2017.  Better than Massachusetts (3.3%) , better than the US average (3.1%).  Way better than Connecticut which only managed 1.5%.    The purpose of the editorial was to trash Connecticut's performance and blame it on state government's tax hikes, deficit spending and driving GE to move to Massachusetts.  It didn't say anything about what pushed New Hampshire to the top, but Governor Sununu ought to use this chart in his next campaign for governor.  

Farewell to Heat and Eats

They aren't the greatest, they aren't the worst, and they do heat up and serve just one, which is nice for us who live alone.  But now, it looks like heat and eats are off my menu.
  Reason?  More and more heat and eats now say "Microwave only" and "Do not heat in conventional oven or toaster oven".  I don't have a microwave, my kitchen is very small and I just don't have any counter space to put a microwave.   And I don't plan on remodeling my kitchen just so I can microwave heat and eats.
   I wonder why the heat and eat makers only want us to microwave their product?

How Hollywood can improve its product

Let's start with the actors.  Actors must speak up.  Mumbling, or whispering means we the audience don't hear your lines. Do enough of that and we loose interest in the movie.  And in the same vein, sound men need to take especial care to place the microphones in just the right places.  And when editing the sound track, mixing in the score and the sound effects, don't obscure the dialogue.  Mute both score and sound effects when the actors are speaking. 
   First rule for camera men.  Put the camera on a tripod and leave it there.  Those arty shake the camera shots which were are the rage a few years ago are just plain annoying to us in the audience.  And turn the lights on set ON, before starting to film.  Don't do those black on black shots, with all the lights out.  Game of Thrones, season 6 is a prominent offender in this respect. 
   Directors need to help us in the audience by putting different costumes on the various actors to help us tell one from another.  Don't have everyone wear the same costume, or even worse, same uniform.  They used to have the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats.  That was a good idea, and should be kept up. 
   A movie needs a protagonist ($2 word meaning hero or heroine) with whom we can identify, and like.  Don't show us scumbag protagonists, we won't like them, or the movie.  Female protagonists are fine,  Katniss Everdeen and Rey did just fine.  Protagonist needs a challenge to overcome.  And we in the audience need to know what that challenge is, early on, it helps us understand what is going on.  Tolkien handled this in the second chapter of Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring and what has to be done with it.  For the rest of the trilogy, it was clear to us readers what was going on.  Build the movie to a climax, where the protagonist faces his/her challenge and either defeats it or suffers defeat him/herself.  We like movies where the good guy[s] win, but we will put up with a tragedy if it's well done.
  And we have enough comic book movies.  If you lack the originality to do your own story, there are plenty of good books that have not yet been used as the basis for movies. 

How did those refugees get on the train roofs??

TV has been talking up a caravan of central American refugees, traveling up thru Mexico, riding on the roofs of boxcars, heading for the US border.  Hoping to be granted refugee status in America.
Question.  How did all those people get up on the roofs of the boxcars?  In America, the Federal Railway Administration decided that allowing railroad workers on top of cars was just too dangerous.  They ordered the roofwalks and the ladders removed.  Back in the dawn of time, before the invention of the Westinghouse air brake, railroad brake men used to run along the tops of the cars, tightening up the handbrake wheels when the engineer whistled for brakes on.  This hasn't been necessary for the last hundred and something years, the engineer now pulls a brake lever in the engine cab, and compressed air puts the brakes on, thruout the length of the train.
    Anyhow, about 1970, on American railroads, new cars were purchased without roofwalks or ladders giving access to the roof.  By now, no freight cars in the US have easy access to the roof.  I assume the Mexican railroads follow US practices since they interchange cars with US roads, and vice versa.
   I assume that an athletic 20 something can climb up on top of a boxcar without ladders.  But what about women and children?  Surely not all of those refugees are athletic 20 somethings? 

Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans?

It's hard to tell by listening to the politicians.  They mostly bland down their words until they really don't mean anything.  They have learned that speaking out on one side of any substantive issue just looses them votes.  The voters that don't like what they hear will remember and make a point to vote against them, where as the voters that like what they hear don't care enough to get to the polls on election day.  So the professional politicians practice saying as little as possible while sounding good.  Hence all the happy talk about motherhood and apple pie.  Donald Trump is an exception to this rule and it hasn't killed him, yet.
  But there are real differences between the parties.  Consider the matter of helping the poor.  Republicans believe the real solution to poverty is plenty of decent jobs. Which means they favor things that help business because business creates those decent jobs. Democrats believe the real solution to poverty is government handouts, welfare, food stamps, single payer health care and such.  Paid for by confiscating (taxing) wealth from the wealthy and giving it to the poor.  With some nice fat skimming off  the top for deserving friends of the party.
   Modern Republicans believe that America, as the largest and strongest country in the world, needs to take action to oppose foreign tyranny, obnoxious ideologies, nuclear proliferation, and out right banditry.  Modern Democrats are isolationists and peaceniks.  They don't believe that anything outside our borders deserves our attention.  This is a reversal of the party positions from the early years of the 20th century. 
   Republicans are respectful of Christianity and organized religion.  Democrats favor removing religious symbols (creches) from just about everywhere, and punishing anyone who offers prayer in public.
  

Is Fiction Really Dead?

Every Saturday the Wall Street Journal publishes a best seller list.  They break it down into hardcover fiction, ebook fiction, hardcover non ficition, ebook nonfiction and business titles.  Often as not, best sellers in hardcover fiction will be Dr. Suess, or Shel Silverstein.  Both of these are classic children's books, every child has, or ought to have, a copy.  Parents, grandparents and grown up friends and relatives buy these classics for birthdays and Christmas presents.  There is a steady market, proportional the the number of small children in the country.  When one of these steady sellers makes it to the top of the best seller list, it really means that no other author has been able to sell all that many copies of their work.  The last real best seller fiction were the Harry Potter stories, that J.K. Rowling fed into the market every other year or so.  I can remember riding the Boston subway to and from work where a quarter of the riders in the subway car would be reading the latest hardback Harry Potter yarn.  That's a best seller.  We don't seem to have any best sellers of that magnitude any more.
   Partly the dropoff in best seller fiction is the fault of the big publishers.  They won't look at any new fiction unless the author has acquired an agent.  There aren't all that many agents in the world and the ones that are out there, are swamped with clients.  They won't take on a new author.  They are too busy.
   Even best selling author Tom Clancy had to go all around Robin Hood's barn to get into print back in the 1980's.  His best seller, Hunt for Red October , was finally published by the Naval Institute Press,  a specialty house for technical works for Navy officers.  After  the smash hit success of his first book, Tom had no trouble getting his second best seller, Red Storm Rising, published by GP Putnam.
   What this means, is as the established authors die off,  (for example Clancy died quite recently) there is nobody in the pipeline to replace them. 

Slow News Day

Friday's Wall St Journal.  Front page color photo.  Heartwarming shot of  Senator Tammy Duckworth bringing her new born baby into the Senate chamber for a vote on something.  All the adults in the photo have fond smiles, everyone likes small children. 
   It's cute and all that, but is this the most important thing happening the world on this Friday?

Probably a bad idea.

Florida Republican Rep Ron DeSantis, and ten colleagues sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff  Sessions asking for criminal investigation of Obama people Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and Andrew McCabe. 
   Much as all these low lives deserve some criminal investigation, trial and jail time, doing so is a bad idea for the country.  We don't want to criminalize loosing an election.  If politicians understand that loosing the election will put them in jail, they will fight all the harder, and use even dirtier tricks to stay in office.  Even the Russians let Krushchev retire to a dasha on the Black Sea and write his memoirs, rather than executing him they way they did Beria, Trotsky, and perhaps Stalin. 
   American politics is so difficult, demanding and dangerous that few first rate people go in for it.  First rate people go into business, high tech, the military, doctoring, Hollywood, lawyering, and professional sports, rather than politics.  If we make politics even less attractive by adding the risk of going to jail when you loose the election, even fewer decent people will go out for it. 
   It's best for the country in the long run to let those who are defeated in the election go on about their lives in peace. 

Civilization[s]

New PBS TV show.  Kind of a remake of the Kenneth Clark show of a similar name from back in the late 1960's.  This one goes way further back in time, this first episode starts off with cave paintings.  They showed some cave art that was new to me, and a lovely ivory figurine that I had never seen before.  The voiceover commentary was less than satisfactory.  They didn't show where these and other like works where from.  They did opine about the age of the pieces, but did not mention the type of dating used, the uncertainty of the method, or recent  revisions of carbon 14 datings of great age. 
   Then they went globe trotting, to some ancient recently discovered bronzes in China, to the Mayans, couple  of other places.
   Not as good as the original Kenneth Clark show, but watchable. 

Junk Science

Headline of op ed in Tuesday's Wall St Journal, "How bad is the Government's Science?"  It speaks to the reproducibility crisis in science, where a large number of published scientific papers simply cannot be reproduced by other workers.  Which says that the published paper was just plain wrong.  A 2015 study estimated that $28 billion a year was spent on wrong science.  Which is a terrible waste of both money and the time of scarce and hard to train scientists. 
   I ran into the reproducibility problem myself back when I was developing a portable heart monitor.  I needed a way to compress the sampled EKG so that the device could store more EKG data in its limited memory.  I researched the literature, and bingo, I found a paper discussing compression of EKG and offering a method that claimed much higher performance than the standard technique.  I read the article thru, and then programmed the new algorithm into our prototype monitor.  It worked, it did compress the data, and the decompressed EKG was of good quality, but, I could only obtain one half the amount of compression that the author claimed.  I troubleshot and debugged and finally telephoned the author to ask for help.  The author rather sheepishly, admitted that he had left out a key factor in his paper, and that yes, the compression obtained would be only half of what he had claimed.  I managed not to express my dismay over the waste of two weeks of the project's time. 
   One thing legislators could do about this.  Require that all government financed researchers publish all their raw data.  Right now, a lot of researchers keep their data private, hoping to either use it for another publication, or to prevent skeptics from going over it looking for faults.  Far as I am concerned, if the taxpayers are paying the freight,  the taxpayers own the results.  This policy would go far to squelch the likes of leftie greenie "climate scientist" Michael Moore, inventor of the global warming hockey stick. 
  Another thing, someone ought to keep score.  Any scientist who publishes unreproducible results should be barred from future government research grant money.  That will make them a bit more careful. 

Friction? Would you believe real hostility?

Front page of Monday's Wall St Journal.  "Friction between the president and Comey resurfaced after details from the former FBI director's new book reopened the debate over his firing. "
  If that's "friction" I'd hate to see real hostility.

Graduation from College, and College Guidance Councilors

You can graduate High School by merely attending classes until you make it thru 12th grade.  College is trickier.  You have to have enough course credits to get your degree.  Just attending classes for four years isn't enough.  You have to have all the required credits in the required courses.  Missing just a single credit in physical education can deny you a diploma.  And tie you up for another year, and another year of tuition payments.  Nobody wants this.
   The number and type of credits you need depend upon your major.  At my Alma Mater, engineering majors required about 15% more credits than education majors or liberal arts majors.  And each major required different course credits for graduation.  So, you need to pick your major early on, like freshman year.  Early in freshman year.  Before Christmas for sure.
   To pick your major, you have to have some idea of what your want to do with your life after you make it thru college.  You need a major that makes you employable in your chosen field.  Don't have a chosen field?  Do some serious thinking, talk to your parents, friends, relatives, get some advice, cause this is one of the most important decisions you will ever make in your life.   Colleges offer a fair number of interesting sounding majors that are totally worthless when you go job hunting.  Avoid them.  Gender studies, ethnic studies, anything studies, art history, sociology, anthropology, and some others won't get you a job anywhere.
   Then, get the college catalog, and make a list of all the courses you need to take for your chosen major.  The senior level courses will all require you take some lower level courses, prerequisites they are called.  Make a spreadsheet, enter all the courses, in the order you have to take them.  Add up all the credits and see if it is enough.  Check for booby traps, like courses that are only offered one semester.  Miss getting into that class when it is offered, and you can loose a whole year.  Neaten up the spreadsheet and print it out. 
   Now you are ready to meet your college guidance councilor.  He will be a junior faculty member, who has about a hundred other students assigned to him, and courses to teach, research to do, and papers to grade.  He cannot afford you much time.  He views the job of his department as training new professors to teach in his department.  When discussing majors, he will probably push you toward majoring in his department.  Listen politely, but you don't have to take his advice.  Show him your spreadsheet and  ask him if it looks correct.  If he offers suggestions or criticism, take notes.  Check your notes against the college catalog.  Make sure you have the current version of the catalog.
   One further thing you have to do, namely get into the courses you need.  Popular courses are mobbed and not everyone gets in.  The college has a day when course registration opens for each semester.  Know that day.  Get down to registration first thing on the first day and you improve your chances of getting into the courses you need. 

$75 million worth of cruise missiles.

That's just the replacement cost of the ordinance expended.  About 100 cruise missiles at $750,000 apiece.  Does not count fuel costs, dollars per flying hour, pay for the troops, operating costs of all the warships used, etc. etc.
Let's hope the Syrians get the message better than they did the last time we did this.
We cannot make idle threats.  Once we make a threat (draw a redline) we have to mean it, and carry out the threat.  If we are not prepared to back up our threats, we should not make them.  The Syrians used poison gas, and so we had to follow thru on the threats we made the last time the Syrians used poison gas. 
  

Isolationism caused WWII

In between the two world wars, America went isolationist.  We came to believe that the first world war was a big mistake, we should never have entered it, and we should never again get sucked into a European war.  America withdrew from Europe. 

    And then Hitler came on the scene.  He gained control of Germany in 1932, and by 1936 he felt strong enough to start causing trouble in the international scene.  All of Europe, even including Germany, was still in shell shock from World War I.  Both the British and the French feared to oppose Hitler in the early days when he could have been deposed fairly easily.  Without Hitler, Germany might have thrown her weight around for a few years, but she would not have started WWII.  Nobody in Europe wanted to go thru another world war, they had had enough of that in the First World War. 

   If France and Britain had at the very first, the Rhineland takeover in 1932, mobilized their armies, and marched into Germany, they could have easily defeated the 100,000 man army which was all the Versailles Treaty allowed Germany, occupied the country, deposed Hitler and put him on trial for crimes against humanity.  But, neither the French nor the Britons did anything, partly thru fear of kicking off another world war, partly from fear that they would loose, and partly from domestic political problems.  If, America,  by this time a Great Power, had told the British and the French that the US was 1000% behind them, and had dispatched troops to Europe, a division or two would have made the point,  and had stood forth in the League of Nations and  condemned German violation of the Versailles Treaty, then something might have been possible. 

   Well, that didn't happen.  American isolationists forced the US to put on the turtle act, don't move, retract head and feet into shell, and do nothing.  With no US backing, the British and the French lacked the stones to take on Hitler when they could have beaten him with ease. 

     We can see and hear isolationists coming back to life today.  Last time they caused a world wide catastrophe.  What can they do this time?

We are gonna miss Paul Ryan

He is one of the very very few Congresscritters who was well educated, well informed, and had a good store of commonsense. He studied the issues and worked to get his issues passed into law, as opposed to the ordinary chucklehead Congresscritter who is only good at bad mouthing his opponents in he press. In short Paul Ryan had his head screwed on, nose to the front. 
  We are gonna miss him. 

Zuckerberg does OK on TV yesterday

He managed to avoid a pissing match with anyone.  Getting into a pissing match always makes you look petty.  He was glib, never at a loss for words.  He sounded reasonable.
   He mostly managed to avoid saying anything of substance.  Lot of those "use-up-airtime-and-say-nothing" phrases.  He said he would be OK with regulation but never said just what sort in regulation he would favor.  He did put on coat and tie for the TV hearings.  He got full time live coverage on Fox, he was on for hours, without any of those network voice overs calling him a crumb bum.  He avoided making any yes or no answers.
   My assessment.  Zuckerberg is slick.  Made a few mea culpea's.   Avoided getting pinned down on anything.  Probably plans on keeping Facebook on the same path it has been on.  And his stock is up 4%.
   I plan to continues to limit my Facebook posts to pictures of my cat, pictures of my children and grandchildren, pictures of snow storms, comments about the weather.  When I get the urge to make a political rant, I'll do it on this blog.  

Regulating Facebook???

Supposing that our noble Congresscritters could agree on a bill, and that Trump would sign it, how would that work?  Facebook's data resides on Facebook's computers, under the control of Facebook IT people.  Even if they gave the regulators the run of their server farm, how would the regulators be able to find anything, change anything, or even figure out was was happening?   Inquiring minds want to know.
   Me, I don't think it can happen.  Who gets to see how much of Facebook's data trove is solely under Facebook's control, and Facebook can keep all transactions secret.   Pass all the laws you like, hire as many well paid regulators as you like, and Facebook is still running the show, the way it wants to run it. 
   If I knew of a competing website that offered the chit chat and picture posting opportunities that Facebook does, I'd switch, and talk all my facebook friends into following me.  Instagram perhaps? However, at this time, building up a competitor against Facebook' s market dominance would be tough.