Note to foreign governments

To make a deal with the United States you have to push thru a treaty, ratified by the Senate.  Otherwise you don't have a deal.  As the Iranians are finding out.  Obama knew he could never get the Senate to agree to the Iranian deal, so he never sent to to the Senate for ratification, which means it is not a deal binding upon the United States.  And probably Obama knew that the Iranians would never agree to the kind of terms that the Senate would ratify.  So Obama settled for a not-treaty scrap of paper that was only good as long as Obama remained President.  The ever sucking up newsies gave Obama the same good publicity as if he had gotten a real treaty, which was all Obama really cared about. 
   Anyhow, if you don't get a treaty ratified by the Senate, you don't have a binding deal.
   The real trick will be to get the Europeans and Boeing to forgo all those sales to Iran.  The Iranians have good money from crude oil sales to buy a lotta stuff.  They want to buy a flock of jetliners from Boeing (many $billion in sales) and about the same number from Airbus.  Plus a lot of other stuff.  It's gonna be hard to get everyone to forgo all that Iranian money.  

Turning point in history 1782

The American Revolution is just won.  The British have capitulated and will sign a peace treaty giving the Americans just about everything they fought for. 
   Thirteen Colonies, now thirteen independent sovereign states.  Each one possesses a state government, state courts, a state code of law, an army, a navy, a state establishment that runs things to their liking and wants to keep it that way.  They all have conflicting claims to western lands, their original charters tended to claim all the land clear out to the Pacific Ocean.   Each new state, born in battle, has plenty of reasons to want to retain every scrap of their hard won liberty.  Each new state was plenty big enough by the standards of the 18th century to be an self sufficient independent nation. 
   How did these thirteen independent states manage to bury their various hatchets and form the Union?  It helped that they all spoke the same language, and had fought side by side against the British.  It also helped that they all correctly viewed Britain as a super power, who was just itching to get even for loosing the Revolutionary War, and the slightest sign of American disunity would bring the Redcoats back in force.
   As it was, each American state had to give up important pieces of sovereignty, like the right to have armies and navies, to negotiate with foreign powers, to levy tariffs against each other,  and accept laws passed by the new Federal government.  Somehow, they managed to come up with a long lasting deal, the US Constitution, that they all bought into, and which has lasted to this day.  They could have so easily got into a large variety of petty squabbles or not so petty squabbles like slavery, and all gone home mad and determined to go it alone.  Which would have seriously changed history.  

Gina Haspell for CIA director

She is Mike Pompeo's choice to replace himself.  She is a new name to me.  Apparently she is an old CIA hand, been with the agency for 30 plus years.  Actually worked in the field, collecting intelligence, rather than being a paper shuffling desk weenie back at Langley.
   Democrats have been trashing her because some of the intelligence she gathered came from vigorous interrogation of,(possibly waterboarding of) Al Quada prisoners back right after 9/11.   I'm perfectly OK with this, it shows she was actually gathering intelligence rather than opining without facts.  Or leaking to the NY Times.
  If I was going to criticize Ms Haspell, I would ask her about her views on past CIA disasters, such as the failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, their prediction that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, their prediction that the Iranians had stopped  their nuclear weapons program, the Valerie Plame case, and leaking the story of Bin Laden's satellite phone to the New York Times.  Bin Laden must read the Times too, after the satellite phone story broke, Bin Laden got rid of his  phone and ran Al Quada by messengers.  This probably extended his life by five years. 

Facebook's New "feature"

In the last few days, Facebook began placing tags on news articles that they force onto your Facebook feed.  Click on the tag and you get a short writeup containing the name of the source  of the article (useful) and Facebook's opinion of that source.  For Breitbart News, their opinion went on for two lines calling Breitbart right wing extremists and screwballs.  Neutral it was not.
  Question for Facebook.  If you think Breitbart is alt right trash, why do you push Breitbart articles onto my Facebook feed?

Ford wants to drop out of the car business

Ford announced this change of course last week.  They are going to concentrate on pickup trucks, SUVs, crossovers and similar stuff.  They will keep making Mustangs and one new sedan design.  But Fiesta, Focus, Taurus, and a couple of other econoboxes will be dropped. 
   Ford didn't give reasons for their plan.  At a guess, they like the higher margin in pickups and SUVs as opposed to the close to zero margins in the little econoboxes.  At the time, I thought it was short sighted to abandon the bulk of the car market to the Japanese.  I think the big boys, Ford, GM, and Chrysler/Fiat need to compete head on for a share of the biggest part of the car market.  Driving to work, or anywhere, the bulk of the vehicles I see on the road in my part of the USA are little econoboxes.  There may be be much margin in econoboxes, but there is real volume.
   Now this week some new info comes to light.  According to the Wall St Journal, both Honda and Toyota are having trouble moving their Accords and Camrys, despite new redesigns on both models, and excellent reputations going back many years.   And on Saturday, an article speculating that the sedan as a product is going away for ever, just like the station wagon did. 
   Hmm.  Maybe Ford is onto something? 

$130K Bimbo Hush Money

Did anyone, for even a minute, think that Trump's lawyer paid off Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket?  $130K may be pocket change to billionaires like Trump, but for ordinary folk like New York lawyers, $130K is real money, far too much to just kick in out of friendship. 
   Apparently it's a big surprise to the TV newsies.  They have been talking about little else ever since Rudi Guliani said that Trump reembursed the lawyer for it yesterday.  I mean, what else did you think happened?  

Speed up your computer. Uninstall Avast

Computer had been getting sluggish and flaky.  So bad that I dared to run ComboFix, world's most aggressive anti virus.  Combo Fix didn't find much, but it did demand I shut down Avast's active virus scanner, 'cause it was interfering with ComboFix.  The only way I could find to shut down Avast was to uninstall it.  The Avast uninstaller whined a lot and took forever, but it did get Avast off the machine. 
   After killing off Avast, Trusty Desktop is perceptibly more lively.  He is an older machine, but he has a 2.19 gigahertz processor and nearly a gigabyte of RAM, not too shabby, even today.  He is still running XP, which is leaner and meaner than the later Micro$oft offerings. 
   These virus scanners hook onto the network port, and inspect every packet, in coming and out going,  which slows your internet a lot.  It was really showing up running Firefox.  Downloads were flaky, and Firefox would freeze for long enough to irritate the bejesus out of me.  Getting rid of Avast cleaned up a lot of that.

Those questions for President Trump

The ever clueful  New York Times is the source for the list.  It might have been leaked from the Mueller investigators (doubtful)  or Trump's people (somewhat more likely) or just invented out of clear blue sky by the NY Times people (highly likely).  I notice a senior Times editor just left the Times, could it be over inventing fake news?
   The questions that I saw are kinda awful.  Totally vague, which allows the prosecutors to bear down and take the interview anywhere they want.  Lots of "what did you think" questions,  which is fishing for a thought crime.  Covering vast stretches of time, which makes it hard for the target to remember everything he said or did going back 10 and 20 years.  And opens the target up for perjury charges should he misstate or misremember any picayune detail. 
   Was I Trump, I'd hold out for written questions, asked in writing and replied to in writing.  And I get some very clever lawyers to go over each answer with a fine toothed comb to weed out any booby trap answers.  

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.