Words of the Weasel. Part 48

"Prioritize".  New word from Democrats.  I think they are trying to say "increase funding"   If that is what they mean, they ought to just say "increase funding" out loud. 
"Close tax loopholes"  is a Democrat phrase that means "Hike taxes". 

The Dr Blasey-Ford hearing

It got off on time, 10 AM, and ran until 2 PM.  I watched it all.  Dr Blasey-Ford was clearly uneasy about the whole thing.  Her voice was husky, on the verge of tears thru out.  Her hairdo was unbecoming, and served to hide her face behind  long locks of blonde hair.  I had to wonder if she, a senior college professor, looked and sounded that bad in front of a class.  She repeated the story about Brett Kavanaugh groping her and attempting (but failing) to rape her at a teen age house party in Maryland 35 years ago.  She didn't offer any new details.  I do think she believed what she was saying.  Cross examination did not expose any contradictions.  She made no goofs in testimony.
   On the other hand, the incident is 35 years old.  Everyone's memory is unreliable going that far back.
   A lot of Democratic senators were still calling for an FBI investigation.  I don't think that would prove anything.  No  physical evidence  has survived that long.  I would have my doubts about any witness testimony after all these years.
   Senator Diane Feinstein  did not offer any explanation as to why she sat on Dr. Blasey-Ford's letter until just two weeks ago.
   All of the witnesses Dr Blasey-Ford mentioned refused to back up her story.
   Judge Kavanaugh is next up.  We will see how he does.  

Investigation of a 35 year old party cannot prove anything.

Christine Blasely Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh are 35 years old.  No investigation at this late date will prove anything.  Witness memory after 35 years is suspect.  Many of us have firm memories of things that never happened.  For instance for years I remembered graduating high school out of doors, in the Greenwood theater.  At my 25th reunion, my classmates all told me that it had rained that day and graduation had been held indoors.  How many other firm, but false, memories do witnesses have after 35 years?  And how much does anyone remember about 35 years ago?  I am not sure even where I was living 35 years ago.  It doesn't matter what an investigation turns up in the way of witness stories, I will have suspicions of all  of them.  
  Which makes the calls for an FBI investigation stalls.

The US Constitution does not require separation of church and state.

First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;  
Establishment is an old fashioned word that we don't use hardly at all anymore in America.  Back in 1789 establishment was enjoyed by the Church of England in England.  You had to be a member of the Church of England to receive a commission in the Royal Army or the Royal Navy.  Catholics, Quakers and others were banned.  You had to be a Church of England member to be crowned as king, or ruling queen.  And a number of other goodies were reserved for Church of England members only.  In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the Congregational Church (Puritan's they had been called for many years) was established.  I'm not exactly sure just what bennies were reserved for Congregationalists in colonial Massachusetts, but Massachusetts did not "disestablish" the Congregational church until maybe 1808 if memory serves. 
   At Constitution time there were a number of large and influential churches doing business in North America.  Congregational, Quaker, Episcopal, Methodist, Catholic, and others.  It was an easy decision on the Founder's part to prevent endless lobbying, back stabbing, and wheeling and dealing by saying that no church will get the bennies of being established.  Massashusetts was required to disestablish the Congregational Church. 
   In short, the establishment clause merely puts all churches on equal ground, no church gets special bennies for their members.  It does not call for separation of church and state, it calls for treating all churches alike. 

Cars and features that Detroit ought to offer.

Firstly, Detroit should not be abandoning the market for sedans.  That's just turning a huge slice of the market over to Japanese and Korean companies.  Granted, there is more mark up in big SUV's and pickup trucks, which makes it easier to turn a profit.  But there are a helova lotta people who just want something to drive to work.  Most families have both husband and wife working outside the home, which means they need two cars.  One car only needs to get a single individual to and from work.  A small four door econobox is plenty.   The other car can be a SUV big enough to hold the entire family, kids, luggage, skis, lunch.  One key to a competitive sedan is distinctive styling.  The old VW Beetle was distinctive , not especially handsome, but nobody would ever confuse it with a Toyota.  
   Another small sedan that would sell is one that could bring sheet goods home from the lumber yard and furniture home from the auction.  Perhaps a lift off top?  A really stout factory roof rack?  A hatchback with a lift off top?  As a hauler, it only needs to work in good weather and short range, on secondary roads.  Interstate performance with a load is not required.
   Features I would like to see:  Power windows with a master "Close them all" switch.  Switch to just work, and not require putting the key in the ignition.  Even better would be a button on the key remote that would close all the windows while you are sitting on the deck.  In summer I like to leave the car windows open to prevent the car from becoming an oven when the sun shines on it.  It would be nice not to have to put one shoes, find the keys and go out to the driveway to roll the windows up in the evening. 
  An outside thermometer.  Up here we want to know if that black patch up ahead on the road is just a puddle or black ice. 
  A plug to let your Ipod play back on the car's speakers. 

Bathing Suit. At a teen age house party?

Kinda strange, but that's what Dr. Christine Ford said she was wearing at that infamous party 35 years ago.  I can remember a goodly number of parties back in my teen age years.  I don't ever remember a girl showing up in a bathing suit, other than summertime beach parties.  They wore jeans, tight fitting jeans, even low cut tight fitting stretch jeans.  Short shorts.  Short skirts.  Tight sweaters.  Halter tops.  No bathing suits. 
   Makes me wonder. 

AVG Antivirus. Thumbs Down

The Microsoft Scammer called again.  This time he claimed my computer was issuing improper messages over the internet.  I recognized his voice, he calls regularly, and I had some fun calling him names.  After the scammer went away, it did occur to me that it had been a while since I ran a virus scan on Trusty Desktop.  Next I found that good old Malwarebytes, my anti virus of choice, no longer supports Windows XP.  Arghh.  Some net cruising brought me to AVG antivirus.  It downloaded, it scanned, it didn't find anything.  After the scan run, things seemed a little slower.  Task Manager showed three or four new tasks, sucking up RAM and CPU time. 
   Worse was to come.  I booted up next morning and clicking on desktop icons no longer  worked.  Task manager showed some AVG component hogging all the CPU time. Task Manager could no kill the offending AVG process.
Install and Remove Programs from Control Panel didn't work.  Deleting the AVG file directory in Program Files didn't work.  Deleting from MS-DOS didn't work either. 
    A little web searching with Duck Duck Go showed me that I was not alone.  It did point me to a special AVG remover program, written by AVG themselves.  That worked.  Good riddance to AVG.  It is a RAM hog and a CPU hog that is active and slowing my machine all the time.  At times slowing to the point I thought it was broken. 

He said She said

The last minute smear on Judge Kavanaugh is showing legs, at least for the TV newsies.  There ought to be a statute of limitations, 35 years ago is a long time.  Me, I cannot even remember where I was living in 1983, or was it 1984.  The accusation of attempted rape comes from a lefty California college professor, of whom I never heard of before.  Kavanaugh has been in public life for 30 years, he has been back ground checked and found clean, he has a lot of testimonials from women who worked for him or went to high school with him.  So when Kavanaugh denies the attempted rape ever happened, I find him believable. 

Snow White and the Huntsman 2012

Some how I missed this one back in 2012 when it came out. Netflix brought it to me last night.  I should not have bothered.  What little plot the movies might have had was never shown to us in the audience.  In fact there was almost no dialogue for any of the characters.  No one addressed another character by name, making it hard to keep every one straight.  If the Huntsman had any romantic feelings for Snow White he never showed them.  Likewise Snow White doesn't display any romantic interest in anyone.  She falls in with a band of forest bandits, like Robin Hood's men, all of whom are over age, overweight, and balding.  It is never clear just what they expect from Snow White, or what Snow White expects from them.  A long scene has Snow White fleeing the Evil Queen's troops, on foot, thru the forest, while wearing a full length ball gown.  Would have been core convincing if the long skirt had got torn off on thorns,
   This flick is two hours, too long for the material to carry it.  Cameraman does alright, manages to turn the lights on before filming.  Puts the camera on a tripod. 
   Too bad.  With a decent scriptwriter this could have been a fun medieval fantasy romance. 

Rape is a serious crime

And should be dealt with by the police and the courts.  Not college kangaroo courts.  The college kangaroo courts have a nearly perfect failure rate.  Most students condemned by such bodies sue the college.  And a lot of 'em are winning.  Colleges would be ahead if the real criminal justice system handled cases of rape and "sexual assault" on campus, at least they won't get sued over the decisions of a real judge.  For students, the regular criminal justice system is fairer than anything a bunch of "college administrators" can do. 

Your Congress at work

Congress is voting to outlaw the selling of meat from cats or dogs.  We really really need this.  Every grocery store in the land has a meat case just stuffed full of dog and cat steaks.  People grill them every weekend.  Serious problem here, deserving of Congressional attention.
   Some how the nation has endured since 1789 without this absolutely vital law.  In actual fact nobody feels good about eating beloved house pets, and so it just doesn't happen.  No law required. 
   Just another reason to throw the bums out in the coming November elections.

California law to require 100% renewable energy

The deadline in the law is 2045,  27 years into the future.  If CA sticks with this, doesn't water it down when they discover how expensive it is, they are talking about putting in enough solar and wind generation to carry the entire load of the state.  Trouble is, solar panels don't give juice after the sun goes down, and windmills don't give juice when the wind doesn't blow. 
   Which means, CA will have to maintain in operating condition, all the real power plants they have today, AND pay for building and installing renewable energy plants sufficient to carry the state wide electrical load, during daylight and when the wind is blowing.  At night, and on calm days, the real power plants will have to keep the lights on  state wide. 
  In short, CA is planning to spend enough money to install statewide renewable energy plants with capacity to power the entire state.   Figure this will cost as much as the real power plants CA already has.  This amounts to paying for two sets of electrical plants, one real, one renewable, instead of one.  Which will double the costs, and then double electrical bills. 
   Of course, CA may back off after it becomes clear how expensive this is gonna be.  They have 27 years in which to waffle. 

First Amendment, why we have it

Been a lotta talk about the first amendment on the media, TV and internet lately.  Lotta things said, most of 'em valid.  "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press."  But none of them gets right down to the meat of the matter.
   The meat is simple.  Without the first amendment, the government can call any speech it doesn't like treasonous, blasphemous, disloyal, seditious, unAmerican, or other bad name and zap, speaker gets jailed, which shuts him up.  The founders believed in democracy, by which they meant every man could speak in support of his political ideas without fear of government reprisals.  And without free speech, we don't have a democracy.  

Saving money on healthcare

America spends 19% of GNP on healthcare.  That is twice as much as any other country in the world.  After spending this ridiculous amount of money, our health, as measured by infant mortality and life expectancy, is no better than other first world countries.  That also means that American products are 19% more expensive than they might be, just to pay the workers health care.   Here is my list of things we ought to do about the health care cost crisis.
1.  Allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, like Canada, the EU, and Japan.  Many US rip off priced drugs can be bought overseas for half their US prices. 

2.  Allow competition in the health insurance business.  NH could pass a law saying that any American health insurance company, licensed in any state of the union, can sell health insurance in New Hampshire, no more paper work required. 

3.  Clamp down on the malpractice racket.   We could pass a law stating that prescription, manufacture, and administration of any FDA approved drug or device is never malpractice, even if the FDA later withdraws their approval. 

4.  Stop prescribing so many opioids.  The Wall St Journal says that 80% of Medicaid patients in West Virginia and Kentucky are getting prescriptions for pricey opioids.  Which gets the patients hooked on heroin when the opioid prescription runs out. This is a mixed issue, part federal, part state, part medical profession.

5. Bring back “hospitalization only” policies.  Back before Obamacare forbade them, you could buy a regular, covers everything family plan for $12,000 a year.  Or you could buy a $3000 a year hospitalization only policy that only covered things bad enough and expensive enough to put you in the hospital.   With the $9000 a year saving, you can pay for a lot of yearly physicals and childhood earaches.  For ordinary people, with a little money in the checking account, hospitalization only is a good deal.   

Kavanaugh hearings off on snarling and backbiting

The hearing has senators interrupting senators,  members of the audience screaming at the top of their lungs.  Democrats moving to close the hearing because the truck loads of documents about Kavanaugh already delivered are not enough, they want to see 100,000 more documents.  You would think the Kavanaugh's published rulings as a judge ought to be enough to figure out where he is coming from.  Now they are off letting all the Senators on the committee have their say. That is expected to take the rest of the day.  I'd be more interested in hearing what Kavanaugh has to say, but that doesn't happen until later this week. 

Difference between Democrats and Republicans

Democrats are the party of more free stuff.  Republicans are the party of the taxpayers. 

US Civil Servants don't deserve a pay raise.

They don't do much, they cannot be trusted, they cannot be fired, no matter what, and they are overpaid.  Trump wants to cancel their pay raise.  Good for him. 

Yahoo admits to snooping all emails going thru its site

Email is forever.  If it embarrassing, revealing, and anything you would mind posting on the bulletin board at the local supermarket, DON'T put it in email.  Yahoo has just admitted to snooping email on their site, and it would not surprise me that others are doing it too.
   If it is a company email, and your company gets sued, they will demand to see all the emails from every one.  So don't bad mouth customers (or anyone else) never discuss pricing, never discuss technical shortcomings, never discuss anything that might make your company liable.  Sensitive topics should be handled face-to-face, away from phones.  
   Next job interview, figure they can see all your email, going way way back, all your facebook postings, everything you every put on the net.  Sexting can be really really embarrassing.  If its a good hot pic, a lotta guys will pass it on to their buddies.  It never goes away. 
   For that matter they can see all your medical records now that Obama forced the doctors to keep patient medical records on computer. 

Federal Money given to secure NH electoral system.

Well, I'll take the money, money is nice, I can always find something to spend it on.  But we can secure our election system with two simple steps, no money required. 
1.  Use paper ballots, everywhere, every time.  They cannot hack a paper ballot over the Internet. 
2.  Secure the voter registration lists.  That list upon which the poll workers check off your name as you vote.  If the list is destroyed, or altered, bad things happen.  Legitimate voters will be denied ballots,  illegitimate voters will be given ballots.

In this PC age, every thing is kept on computer.  There was a time when the voter registration list was kept by town clerks, using pen and paper.  We could go back to that, but all the poll workers would scream and cry and threaten to hold their breath.  Since we seem to be stuck with computers, we can at least take some obvious security measures.  The computer[s] upon which the voter registration list is kept shall NOT be connected to the public internet (or the telephone network).  The computer[s] shall be kept in a locked room, with the keys restricted to a very few people.  All floppy disc drives shall be removed and all USB connectors snipped off.
   A paper listing shall be made periodically and stored off site.  An electronic backup (CD-ROM) shall be made periodically and stored off site.  Each time a new backup is made, it shall be compared with the previous backup to see if any changes are reasonable. 

Spectre, a Daniel Craig Bond Movie 2015

It's been out a few years, I have seen it before, but I Netflixed it just for old times sake.  It's a perfectly watchable Bond movie.  Daniel Craig plays as good a Bond as any of them, tough, humorless, relentless, and a lady killer.  The special effects are good, for openers Bond shoots a couple of bad guys thru an upper floor window.  By the time every one's gun runs out of ammunition, the entire multi story Mexico City building collapses.  Not bad for some small arms fire.  And Bond manages to shoot Blofeld's helicopter out of the air using just a hand gun.  Bond's handgun is bigger than the puny Walther PPK that shows up in most of the earlier Bond movies.  Looks to be a Smith and Wesson or Sig Saur 9mm automatic. 
   The script writers have some continuity problems.  We have Bond in London, getting chewed out for exceeding his authority in Mexico City by blowing up a couple of bad guys without proper paperwork.  Next thing we know, Bond, with a brand new Aston Martin DB10,  much sleeker and lower than the DB-6 he drove in back in Goldfinger, is in Rome.  How he and the car get from London to Rome is not even hinted at.  Did he drive the Chunnel? Or put the car on a Channel ferry? Just a short clip showing Bond and the Aston Martin  doing either would have been helpful to us viewers.  Apparently Bond does intercontinental travel instantaneously, like magic.  He and the Bond Girl get from Rome to North Africa, and then back to London from North Africa all instantaneously,  Never a clip of him boarding an airliner. The Bond Girl is cute, as all Bond Girls are.  I never picked up on her name watching the movie.  I had to look it up on IMDB.
   Filming in 2015, three years ago, the annoying "Shake the Camera" style of camera work was gone, but the "Film it in the Dark" style is fully there.  Lots of night action, with the lights out, where I could not tell Bond from Blofeld. Not as bad as Game of Thrones, but annoying.  The sound man was only fair, I missed some of the more breathy dialog. 

Farewell John McCain

TV just reported his death this evening.  We will miss him.  I was in South East Asia with the Air Force the year McCain got shot down over North Viet Nam.  That year my unit, 343 Tactical Fighter Wing, lost a plane a day, for the first 90 days I was in the wing.  It took enormous courage to climb into the cockpit and fly into North Viet Nam, and our pilots did it every day.  So did John McCain.
   Years later, John McCain, campaigning for president, came to an event at the Littleton VFW.  I and my brother were there.  It was winter, the place was full of shaggy people, all wearing parkas and snow boots.  When John McCain entered the room, every one stood up for him as a mark of respect.
   Over the years I have been to a lot of campaign events, for a lot of presidential candidates, and I have never seen another man get that mark of respect that we gave John McCain just automatically. 

Why Communism/Socialism/Democratic Socialism is a disaster

Historically, all this started with Karl Marx, a writer back in the mid 19th century, say 1850 or so.  In those days, and on continental Europe especially, there was a serious discrepancy in wealth.  The workers got little, the owners, capitalists, got a whole bunch more than the workers.  Marx felt this was unfair.  His solution was to share the wealth equally.  The state would own all the means of production, from steel mills, railroads and farmland, down to corner bodegas and restaurants.  The state would set equal wages for all.  Marx wrote all these ideas in his book "Das Kapital" which was widely read. 
   The messy part of Marx's plan is how the state obtains owner ship of nearly everything.  The owners resisted this idea strongly.  In Russia it took a massive social revolution in 1917 to bring this about.  Owners, kulaks the Russians called them, were liquidated.   Massive propaganda efforts and a powerful secret police were used to overcome resistance of kulaks.  Kulaks, entrepeneurs, who escaped liquidation fled the country.  Taking their ideas and initiative with them.
   Production sinks under socialism because the highly motivated entrepreneurs are gone.  Since every one gets paid the same, nobody is motivated to work hard, since there is no reward for hard work.  Starting a new business is forbidden by law.  You can see this in Soviet Russia, even today, 30 years after the fall of communism.  You can see it today in Venezuela.  "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" was a cliche from Soviet times. 
   The only real difference between Communism and Socialism back in the day, was how the party would obtain power.  Communists believe they should obtain power by revolution and force of arms.  Socialist believe they should obtain power thru political action and the ballot box.  Once in power there is little difference between them.
  Modern "Democratic Socialism" is mostly undefined, especially by its advocates, say Bernie Saunders, Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren and their followers.  The followers are looking to a regime of more free stuff, and the leaders are looking for political power.  Elizabeth Warren was talking about the federal government taking over all of big business, which sounds pretty Marxian to me.