Head Shrinkers and the Goldwater rule

The Goldwater rule, goes back to 1964 when Goldwater ran for president against LBJ.  A bunch of shrinks opined in the public press that Goldwater was mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency.  In short the shrinks called Goldwater crazy.  Goldwater sued them for libel. 
   The American Psychiatric Association, after the election was over and the smoke had cleared, issued a rule that shrinks must not opine about the mental conditions of people they had not met and examined in person.  Which makes sense.  If you haven't examined the person yourself, what do you really know?
     And, in the few cases where you have examined the person, that makes you the doctor and the person your patient.  For a doctor to talk/write about a patient's mental or emotional state is a clear violation of ethics, common courtesy, and ordinary politeness.  Should my doctor  discuss my health, physical or mental, with anyone, I would be deeply offended, offended enough to find a more honest doctor ASAP.

Are burglars tele casing my place?

I get a lot of strange phone calls.  When I answer, all I get is silence.  So I hang up.  Are they calling to see if anyone is home?  So they can burglarize the place in safety?  Even though I have little in the place of worth to a burglar or a fence.  About the only worthwhile items are a seven year old Sony flat screen TV and a HP laptop. 

How can two ships collide 200 miles offshore?

Surely all ocean going steamers have radar in these days?  The Ramore Head, upon which I sailed to Europe in 1956 had a very good radar on her bridge.  Southwester, a 42 foot wooden sailing yacht, had a decent radar that could pick up ordinary buoys at a couple of miles when I sailed on her twenty years ago.
   Now we have video of a supertanker, engulfed in flames, 2-3 hundred miles off of Shanghai China. The newsies say she collided with a freighter carrying grain.  Were the bridge crews sound asleep?  Surely the radar on both bridges showed the other vessel approaching?   Chapman (Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling) has an entire chapter on right of way and rules of the road.  The Officer of the Deck is required to know all the rules by heart and follow them.  Both ships were far out to sea, free to maneuver in any direction without fear of running aground.
  So what really happened?
  For that matter we have never heard what really happened aboard those two Navy destroyers that collided with merchies last year.  

Wolff, Bannon, Fire and Fury

That's all the TV newsies are talking about.  I'm sure the book has lots of dirt on the Trump administration.  At this point nobody knows how much is real and true, and how much is made up.  All the newsies want to spread the dirt around to stick it to Trump.   Trump and his people say it's all fake news.  I don't see how we voters will ever know what's what.  And this voter doesn't care anymore. 
   I rate the Trump administration on things like GNP growth, unemployment decline, cutting my taxes, cutting regulations, getting Keystone XL going to lower my furnace oil cost.  Things that count in the real world.  It would be nice if the newsies spent more time telling us what's going on in the world rather than spreading rumors designed to hurt the Trump administration.

The Bering Land Bridge

A lot of talk about it.  The Bering Straits are shallow, and not all that wide, and it is thought that in long past times the seas went down and/or the land went up, and people and animals could cross from Siberia to Alaska dry footed.  A lot of speculation about how and when the Indians came to North America centers on when the land bridge might be open.
    What the land bridge enthusiasts forget, or perhaps never knew, is that man can cross the Bering straits by boat, given decent weather.  Say summer weather. The Eskimos used to cross regularly, up until the Soviets tightened up their customs enforcement after WWII and  started hassling any American Eskimos they caught on their side of the straits. 
     The Eskimos used skin boats, umiaks, to make the crossing.  Granted a skin boat sounds kinda flimsy, except the skins were walrus hides, a quarter of an inch thick and tough as fiberglass.  A umiak could carry a dozen people, and were strong enough to take the thrust of a forty horsepower outboard motor. 
    If today's Eskimos could make the passage, I dare say the ancestors of the Indians could make the same passage, about anytime they felt like it.  No land bridge required. 
    The recent publications about DNA analysis of an 11,500 year old Indian child from an Alaskan site all talked about crossing on the land bridge.  I maintain they could have come by boat, any summer. 

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

I have 9 inches of nice light powder on the railing of my deck.  And my deck is within walking distance of Peabody Slopes chairlifts.  It snowed all day Thursday.  No wind (despite weatherpeople predicting hurricane force winds) . So the nice new powder snow is still on the trails rather than blown off into the woods where it doesn't help the skiing at all.   Conditions are as good as it gets at Cannon.  Forecast is for cold over the weekend, so bring an extra sweater, a scarf, maybe even a face mask. 

Floating Fortress to bolster US Naval Power

Headline of a Wall St Journal op-ed on Saturday.  The writer, William Lloyd Stearman, long time National Security Council staffer,  laments the fact the the US has not done an amphibious assault since Inchon, way back in the Korean War.  He blames this on the existence of anti ship missiles that make it too dangerous to bring warships closer than 100 miles to land. 
   His solution a humongous 1000 foot long ship, displacing 125,000 tons, loaded with anti aircraft missiles and artillery, more artillery for shore bombardment, helicopter and VTOL fighter pads, and carrying Marines would be able to close up on the enemy coast, land the marines, and give them fire support.  "This ship could be designed to make it virtually unsinkable."  Yeah right.  This concept has been kicking around in various issues of Naval Institute Proceedings for years under the name of "arsenal ship".
  Sounds cool, but Mr Stearman seems to have forgotten WWII experience showing that if you put enough bombs and torpedoes  into the biggest ships, they sink.  Witness Bismark, Yamato, Roma, Prince of Wales, Lexington, Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Zuikaku, and many more famous capital ships.  
   To do an amphibious assault, first you need air superiority, air craft carriers and their air wings.  Once you have air superiority, you don't need an arsenal ship.  The aircraft take out the anti ship missile sites.  Then ships of ordinary size will do just fine. 
  I'm surprised that this guy was a National Security Council staffer for more than 15 years and has no better grasp of naval warfare than this op-ed shows.  

Lying to the FBI,

Should not be a crime at all, let alone a felony.  All the FBI has to do is interview/interrogate the victim long enough and they can catch him/her in a contradiction. Who can remember all the things they said during a long interrogation?  Just keep the interrogation up until the victim makes a mistake, and bang, you got him.  Lying to the FBI, a felony.  You can take the victim to court on that, even if you don't have any evidence of a real crime. 
   Far as I am concerned, we oughta get rid of lying to the FBI (or anyone else) as a crime.  Unless the victim is under oath, in which case false statements are perjury, the cops should be required to discover real evidence of real crimes (not thought crimes) in order to prosecute citizens.

Strange things in the modern Navy

According to Instapundit, the Navy ran a "climate assessment" survey aboard the two destroyers that collided with merchant vessels.  The surveys asked crew men about how short of sleep they were, how they felt about the ship, the mission, and the Navy.  And how they felt about their officers.  Basically the men reported being tired, overworked, and not too sure their officers knew what they were doing.
Wow.
I was an Air Force officer for six years back during the Viet Nam war.  USAF did not run surveys of any kind back in that day.  How the troops, both NCO's and enlisted men felt about me, my leadership, the Air Force mission, and fixing aircraft right was important to me.  I put in a lot of hours in my shops looking around and talking to the troops, likewise out on the flight line. I joined a stock car racing club the troops had organized.  I said nothing when the troops posted Lt. Fuzz cartoons on the shop bulletin boards.  I would not have benefited from or believed in a USAF survey.  I had seen how my troops had massaged the maintenance date reporting system to indicate that they were all working hard, and doing things right.  I would have figured the troops would respond to a survey with answers that they figured would do them good. 
  Gotta wonder about that Navy.  Competent officers keep in touch with their men and have a pretty good idea of what they are thinking.  They don't need "climate assessment" surveys. 
   The Navy has never given clear answers about how those two destroyers managed to collide with merchies.  Could it be that the entire bridge crew just fell asleep, letting the ship plow straight on under autopilot control?

Fantasy that the MSM keeps repeating

Fantasy #1.  Trump should/will fire special prosecutor Mueller.  Not likely.  Last guy to fire a special prosecutor was Nixon.  See where that got him.  Trump is smart enough to understand that. 
Fantasy #2   Impeach Trump.  The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress and simply won't allow impeachment to go forward.
The MSM would do the country more good if they stopped pushing fantasies.

We oughta do something to help the Iranian protesters

The Iranian mullah government is hostile to us, supports terrorism world wide, and thanks to Obama, will have nuclear weapons shortly.  Anything we can do to make life hard for them we ought to do.  They are having some anto regime demonstrations.  We ought to assist the demonstrators
Favorable publicity on the net, the MSM, radio and TV is good.  We need to make contact with Iranian dissidents inside Iran.  That could be difficult since I don't believe we have diplomatic relations with Iran.  We need to tell CIA to get some agents inside Iran, even without embassy cover and diplomatic immunity. 
   Political dissidents can use money, weapons, internet access, passports and visas, airline tickets, satellite antennas, cell phones, xerox machines, lots of stuff, that we have and aren't all that expensive, compared to say a single new F35. 
  

How much infrastructure do we need??

New Hampshire has kept it's roads and bridges in pretty good shape over the years.  Much better shape than New York.  Right around my place in Franconia, which is pretty rural, the state has replaced two smallish highway bridges on secondary roads for being really old.  Aside from the stalled widening project on southern I93, the rest of the state is in quite passable shape.  We haven't fallen into the railroad track black hole yet, despite the best efforts of some commuter rail enthusiasts.
  And we have enriched a lot of road contractors over the years.  I have been driving I93 from Boston to NH ski country since the road first got started.  The first asphalt was put down in the 1950's, and they had it finished all the way to Cannon Mt by the late 1960's.  It was built to the Interstate highway standards of the 50's and 60's, four lane divided highway, good for 70-80 mph.  I drove up and down it for skiing for decades. 
   Then sometime in the 90's Interstate standards were tightened up.  More clearance and longer sight distances required.  And so, a lot of contractors got nice jobs blasting back all the rock cuts from the Mass border to Franconia notch, making the cuts wider.  Did not make the road wider, just the rock cuts. And there are a LOT of rock cuts going thru the White Mountains  The same rock cuts I had been driving thru, with no problems, for 30 years, were now wider, and a lot of contractors got richer, but it didn't make I93 any better for drivers.  It did soak up quite a bit of infrastructure money.
   And then the infrastructure spending folks decided that we needed huge electric signs, to show helpful messages like "Drive Safely", and "Snowfall expected, Plan ahead".   Really essential those messages are.  The signs probably cost $100,000 apiece and they put in half a dozen of 'em. 
   And then more infrastructure signage.  We now have big, cute mileposts, every 0.2 miles.  I drove I93 for 40 years without cute mile posts so close together that you can see one from where ever you are.  I figure each sign cost a couple a hundred dollars, installed.  I93 is about 100 miles long, that's 500 mileposts, and $100,000 for the lot.  Really essential infrastructure that was.
   I think we ought to dump federal infrastructure spending, the Highway Trust Fund.  And drop the federal gasoline tax that finances it. Let the states decide what infrastucture is worth paying for, and let them raise the money for it.  They can hike the state gas tax to raise the necessary money.
  Anyhow Trump is talking up an infrastructure spending bill. All the road contractors and the state highway departments love the idea.  Trump is thinking there is a chance that he can get the Democrats to vote for it.  Faint that chance is.  But "bipartisanship" is a many splendored thing. 
   Far as this taxpayer is concerned, we have plenty of infrastructure.  All it needs is routine maintenance, plowing, mowing, culvert cleaning, and the like, and the states can handle that.
  

I wonder why they turned back in mid flight?

United Airlines I believe it was.  They got off the ground and four hours into a flight from California to Japan.  Someone discovered that one of the passengers on board, was supposed to be on another flight.  Apparently some screwup at the airport, the guy showed a valid boarding pass at the gate. Only it was a boarding pass for another flight.  So the air crew decided to turn back to California.
   I wonder why.  Doing that created a full plane load of angry passengers, angry because they had been stuck on the airplane for better than eight hours (four hours out, four hours back) and hadn't gotten any closer to their destination.   They could have continued on to Japan and had Japanese air port security deal with the problem after they landed.  They could have duct taped the guy if they had thought he was about to detonate a bomb in his underwear.  What ever they feared he might do, he had four hours in the air back to California to do it.  Pressing on to Japan would have taken about 8 hours, but if you can handle the guy for four hours back to California I don't see why they could not have handled him for eight hours on to Japan.
   So much for passenger relations.

The Last Jedi 2017

Went to see it at the Jax Jr in Littleton.  Good crowd, it's been playing at the Jax for a week or more, but there were a lot of people who either had not seen it, or were seeing it a second time.  It was reasonably OK, better that the prequels in the '90's, not really as good as the original three.  I have been seeing Star Wars movies for a long time.  I saw the first one, the night it opened in Boston back in the '70's, so I'm gonna see this one.
   It had a LOT of light sabering, spaceship to spaceship duels, strange CGI creatures, explosions, pretty much constant action.  If the movie had a plot, I never understood it.  Maybe that is how they cover up the plot holes.
  They had Carrie Fisher, who looked older than the hills, and Mark Hamill, who didn't look much younger.  Daisy Ridley was back as Rey.  She did good, she looked slim, and tough.  She had a glare that could stop a clock at fifty meters.  Her costume included clam digger pants that did nothing for her looks.  The fixed that in the last reel.  She didn't get any memorable lines, but she done good.  They had three First Order bad guys, a really evil looking emperor, a nasty general, and Kylo Ren, a Darth Vader wannabee, who has a thing for Rey and kept turning up when Rey wasn't expecting him.  These guys all dressed in black and did a lot of evil.
   The Rebel Alliance has lost a lot of strength in this one.  There was a time when the Alliance could muster a fleet of a hundred or more ships for a mission against the Death Star.  In this flick the Alliance has been reduced to a single star cruiser, completely surrounded by dozens of  First Order star destroyers.  
   Rey has found Luke Skywalker, who is all sorts of old, and snarly too.  At first Luke refuses to help at all.  Then somehow, I never did understand just how, Rey converts him to the Alliance cause.  Luke gives Rey lessons in the Force which make her scary powerful.  In the last reel we see Rey doing stuff even more amazing than the time Yoda hoisted Luke's X-wing fighter out of the swamp purely with the Force.
   They introduced some new stuff, including scenes from a hoity toity Las Vegas type casino.  They had a lot of fun inventing costumes, makeup and hairstyles for the casino patrons.  A much higher class place than that dive on Tatinooe  that won't serve their kind in here.
   The movie had three story lines running side by side,  Rey and Luke Skywalker, Rose (a new character)  and Finn, Leia and Poe Dameron (another new character).  The movie jumped back and forth between the story lines with abandon, which is maybe why I never understood that plot.  They had another one of those camera men who turns the lights out on the set and films in the dark.  PITA.  And it is LONG, better than 2 1/2 hours.
   For dyed in the wool Star Wars fans, like me, it's a must see,  For ordinary people, not so much.

Do we need a US Space Corps?

We have an op-ed in the Wall St Journal pushing for one.  Me, an old USAF veteran, I'd think my old service would be over joyed, highly motivated, and more than capable to take on any space defense or offense programs.  I doubt that we need a another government organization to preform the mission, whatever that mission might turn out to be.
   Right now we have a flock of recon satellites, the GPS nav satellites, weather satellites, and a bunch of comm satellites up there.  If an enemy shot them down we would miss them, a lot.  And shooting down a satellite than travels in a highly predictable orbit, in plain sight of ground radar, is fairly easy,  compared to shooting down an ICBM, which we claim we can do now. 
   Trouble is,  there isn't much a satellite can do to defend itself.  And there isn't much that a "anti-anti-satellite" weapon could do either.  Best I can think of is to use ICBM's to vaporize the launching sites of enemy anti-satellite missiles, which is really really an act of war.  Some kind of hi tech shoot out above the atmosphere might get passed off as a trivial border incident, but nuclear weapons detonating on your soil cannot be. 
    So despite the need for defending our satellite fleet, I don't see what anyone, a hypothetical Space Corps, or the good old USAF can do about it, given today's, or even tomorrow's, technology. 
  

The US must be doing something right

Chinese "birth tourists" are going to Saipan to give birth on US soil to give their children US citizen ship.  Saipan is popular because we allow visa free entry for Chinese and Russian citizens, since 2009. This can cost a Chinese family as much as $50,000 for hospital and doctors fees, air fare, and bribes. 
   I'm impressed that Chinese families value US citizenship for their children that much.  We must be doing something right here in the USA. 

Merry Christmas to all

It's gonna be a white Christmas up here.  We have snow on the ground, just got 8 more inches yesterday, and another 8 inches is forecast for Christmas day.

Bitcoin bubble bursting

According to Business Insider, bitcoin has dropped to $11,000 today, down from $19,000 a few days ago.  This ought to be fun to watch.

Education for STEM subjects

Wall St Journal ran a op-ed about this yesterday.  The authors criticized American schools up one side and down the other.  But, their complaints didn't resonate with me.  The trashed both science and mathematics education for being "fifty years out of date". They trashed computer science for just teaching software and not teaching anything about the electronics that make the CPUs tick.  And they plumped for teaching "discrete mathematics" starting in sixth grade.
   The "fifty year old" slam doesn't mean much to me.  Isaac Newton laid out the foundations of physics 400 years ago.  They taught it to me in high school and I found it very useful through out a long career in electrical engineering.  I know the modern physics, quantum mechanics and Einstein, but most practical problems in the real world can be solved with plain old fashioned Newtonian physics.  Every kid ought to learn them.
    Knowing how computers work inside at the transistor level is useful, especially if you are going to design computers, but software is a large field, employs a lot more people that hardware design, and I know a lot of very decent programmers who have zero knowledge beyond software.
   They also push for teaching "discrete mathematics" ,a new term to me.  Boolean algebra is what we use for digital design, but unless the student knows ordinary algebra, Boolean algebra won't mean much to them.
   My prescription for better education is simple.  Merely require all high school students to take one year of physics, a year of chemistry, and a year of biology.  Even if the student has no desire to take a STEM major in college, they need some basic science to understand our increasingly scientific world.
   Plus, it should be the duty of all teachers to make sure high school freshmen under stand that they have to take the right mathematics in high school if they want to get into STEM majors in college.  All the STEM majors require integral calculus, and many require differential calculus and transform methods.  If the student isn't ready to take integral calculus freshman year in college, he is out.  All the STEM courses have calculus as a prerequisite.  You have to get your calculus in freshman year so you can take the STEM courses sophomore year.  Which means the student needs to have algebra, geometry,and trigonometry  under his/her belt during high school.  The integral calculus course won't mean anything if you don't have the prerequisites. 

Yesterday a 79 mph curve, today it's 30 mph

Yesterday the newsies were saying the Amtrak train was going 81 mph into a 79 mph curve.  This morning NHPR is reporting the curve was posted for 30 mph.  Either the curve did a lotta shrinking over night (unlikely) or yesterday's newsies got it wrong.  If the Amtrak train was doing 80 mph thru a 30 mph curve, that pretty much explains how the train came off the track.
   Some questions the newsies are too ignorant to ask.
   The "new" line the train was operating on.  How new?  Most railroad right of ways had track laid on them back in the 1800's.  Was this a brand new right of way, bulldozed out last year? Or was it an old line brought back into service?  How many years ago was the track laid?  What kind of ties were used?  Prestressed concrete ( which lasts forever) or traditional cresoted wood (which rots out over the years)?  Amtrak will run passenger trains over really crummy track.  At White River Junction VT, the wooden ties are so soft and rotten that you can pluck the spikes out with your fingers, but Amtrak runs over it.  What shape was the track in, really?
   If the curve was really a 30 mph curve, how was the train crew supposed to know?  Especially as this was the inaugural (very first) run.  Were there trackside signs like on the highway.  If so were the signs actually in place?  If the crew was supposed to look in their time table, or look at some electronic device in the cab, how were they expected to know when they approached this tricky curve?  It was dark, and this crew had never been over the line before.
   It's been reported  that $181 million was spent bringing this line into service.  For $181 million I would expect them to straighten out sharp and dangerous curves.   Just what was all that money spent on?  Who was the contractor, and what kind of experience did they have in building railroad lines?
  
 

$22 million for a UFO study??

The newsies have been talking this one up.  The Air Force had a UFO project going with a $22 million budget.  This ain't news.  The Air Force has had UFO studies going since 1948 (Project Blue Book).  There was the Condon report in the 1970's.  UFO's were first mentioned in the public press in 1947, so a 1948 Project Blue Book is getting right with the times. 
  And, when people see UFO's they tend to telephone someone, and someone is usually the Air Force.  Or other agencies refer callers to the Air Force.  And a lot of people see UFO's.  I saw one myself years and years ago in Franconia Notch NH.  For that matter I was on the flightline in Duluth MI the night we scrambled nuclear armed jet interceptors against a UFO that showed up on SAGE radar.  So there are a lot of reports, and the Air Force, as a good bureaucratic organization, feels a duty to do something with all those reports, if only to file them.  
   So I don't find the latest $22 million UFO study to be unusual.  The Air Force has been doing these studies for better than 65 years.

In the Air Force we always had backup generators

Apparently the civilians at Atlanta airport did not.  When their power went out, they shut down, closed the field for landings and takeoffs.  That's not right.  There could have been an airliner low on fuel needing to land right now, before the tanks went dry.  It could have been after dark with airliners on final approach, following the runway lights, which suddenly go dark
  The Air Force always had engine driven generators on base, enough to run essential stuff, the runway lights, the tower and its radios, the instrument landing system (ILS), the ground controlled approach (GCA) radar, the beacon, the nav aids, TACAN and VOR, and some flight line lighting.  We could fly even with a power outage.
   I think the civilian airports ought to be required to do the same.  Having a huge airport go dark and shut down with out warning is dangerous.

Trump Tax plan hits "the rich"

 All though the top rate ($500,000 and up) drops from 39.6% to 37%, the next rate, 35% used to start at $425,000. Under the Trump tax plan, you hit the 35% bracket at $200,000. In short a whole bunch of reasonable well off taxpayers got boosted up into the 35% bracket, whereas under current law, they paid 32%.   The really rich save 2.6% but the quite well off get hit for 3% more.
   The middle class ($38,701 to $93,701) get a 3% to 4% cut.
This is just looking at rates, I did not figure in the effects of doubling the standard deduction.  

How to tell an advanced economy when you see one

Simple.  Advanced economies can export automobiles to the United States.  All others have to import cars from the few advanced economies that can make them.  This year only Germany, Japan, and South Korea make the cut.  Over the years the British, the French, and the Italians dropped out of the US car market.  The Chinese are clearly thinking about getting into the US market but they are not here, yet. 
   That's a remarkably small list.  Nice thing is that they are all three solid US allies (now). 
   The British had a nice US export business in sports cars in the '40s and '50s.  Road and Track magazine was started for sports car owners, owning mostly Austin Healey, Jaguar, MG, Morgan, and Triumph sports cars.  The imported sports car business finally began to fade in the '70s partly due to competition from Ford Mustangs, and partly due to the truly awful reputation for flakiness that British quality control (or lack of it) created.  "Lucas, Prince of Darkness" was the slam directed at British electrical systems (all built by Lucas).  The Italians had the same problem, Fiat was said to stand for "Fix it Again Tony".   The French tried to sell the Citroen DS-19, a distinctively styled car, very low, tail lights mounted on the roof, and an enormously complex hydraulic system that was virtually unrepairable.  Later they tried with Peugeot sedans.  I can remember car pooling out to Raytheon with a guy who drove a Peugeot.  In the winter he had to open the hood, remove some strange engine part and bring it inside to keep it warm so the car would start at 5 PM.

Flying a V2 rocket out of wartime Poland

This story comes from Antony Beevor's  "The Second World War".  The Polish resistance found a V2 rocket that had crashed in the Polish marshes.  The resistance got to the V2 before the Germans, took it apart and spirited it away.  The resistance contacted their Allied support in Britain, and a specially modified C47 transport was flown into Poland to fly the V2 rocket back to England for examination by Allied scientists.
   That must have been one awful hairy flight.  From Britain to Poland was just about the limit of a Gooney bird's range, even with extra fuel tanks.  The flight path either had to cross Germany, which was crawling with fighters and antiaircraft guns, or fly around Germany, presumable over the Baltic sea.   Find a landing strip, big enough for a C47, in the dark, with no electronic navigation aids.  Then they had to get the V2 rocket inside the Gooney bird, a tight squeeze.   And they had to find gasoline in Nazi occupied Poland to refuel the Gooney bird for the return trip.  And get off the ground before the Germans arrived to arrest them all.
   All  in all, flying a B17 to Schweinfurt, or a B24 to Ploesti would be less dangerous. 

Chromebooks for children

Article in the Wall St. Journal yesterday.  What sort of computer to get for a 12 year old.  Answer: a Chromebook.  Looks like a laptop, does NOT run Windows, and costs $300-$400. 
  Not cheap.  I bought a brand new HP Pavilion laptop running Windows down at Staples a little while ago for $300. 
   And for a 12 year old?  I can remember doing a lot of stuff when I was 12, all of it a lot cooler than websurfing on a laptop.  Fishing, skiing, bicycling, electric trains, building tree houses, playing guns with the neighborhood kids, toy soldiers, plastic models, wood working in Dad's shop, hiking, shooting bow and arrow...