How to tell fake news from real news

Graph department that is.  The Internet is awash in graphs claiming to show the growth, or shrinkage of all sorts of things.  Net Worth, employment, GNP growth, income inequality, and on and on.  The graphs typically show a bunch of colored lines, rising dramatically, and implying that something is getting bigger, or better, or worse, or something.
   Lies, damn lies, and statistics.  How can you tell a real and true graph from fake data trying to convince you of something that isn't true?
   These tricks may not work all the time, but they will weed out a lot of fake data graphs.
1.  Are both axes labeled?  With what they represent and what the units are (gallons, pounds, feet, furlongs per fortnight, dollars, whatever).
2.  Are the scale divisions of the axes uniform?  A graph with scale divisions every 10% except for a few on the end scaled out to 2%,1%, and 0.1% is attempting to bend the plotted curve somewhere.  Any graph with non-uniform scale divisions is trying to lie to you.
3.   Does the vertical axis go all the way down to zero?  I can take a straight line and turn it into a jagged mountain range if I expand the vertical scale enough.  If the vertical scale doesn't go down to zero, the graph is trying to make bumpiness bigger than it really is.
4.  If its a graph of something versus time, does the time axis go back before 2007?   Great Depression 2.0 started in 2007 and just about everything went down the drain that year.  A graph that starts in 2009 will show a steady increase as we pulled out of Great Depression 2.0  Same graph restarted in 1997 will likely show a great dropoff in 2007 and may show that things have not recovered to where they were in 2006.  Two different messages.  
5. Do the numbers at the extremes of t he graph make sense?   For instance I saw a graph claiming that of the top 0.1% income individuals in the country, 40% of them had not completed college and were out of work.  Somehow I just don't believe that. When I find one unbelievable data point, then I figure there are more that I don't find.  Put that graph into the damn lies category.

    I'm picky.  If a graph fails any one of these tests, I put in into the "damn lies" category.

Got a call from my old Alma Mater

It was a young female student, a senior, getting in some work for the alumni office, calling to thank me for a contribution I made a few weeks ago.  We got to chatting, about majors and the job market and how things were back when I graduated better than 40 years ago.  She thought things must have been better back then, especially after I mentioned that I had a job offer before I graduated.  I asked here what shw was majoring in.  "International relations" she said.  I refrained from saying anything while I thought to myself, "A real dead end major unless you want to join the State Dept or the CIA."  So I asked her if she had taken a course in computer programming.  "No, but I wish I had" was the reply. 
   After the phone call was over, I thought to myself, "There goes a nice young woman who is graduating with a major that won't help her get a job.  Let's hope she can marry the right guy."
   Lesson: if you are a student, or a parent of a student, you need to do some serious thinking about your college major.   The right major will get you a job upon graduation.  The wrong major and you are out of luck.  Decide now what you want to do for a living when you graduate.  Pick your major to make you employable in your chosen field.   Engineering (real engineering, chemical, electrical, mechanical, or civil) worked for me,  is fun to do, plenty of jobs, and decent pay.  The sciences, computer programming, business administration, and mathematics are also good bets.   
   Avoid the talky-talk "sciences" (sociology, anthropology, psychology, ecology) and anything with "studies" in its name (ethic studies, gender studies and so on). 
   If you just cannot stomach a STEM major, learn to write.  There is a tremendous demand for good English writing in business, industry, and government.  An English major or a history major will teach you how to write. 

Words of the Weasel Part 46

"What did he know and when did he know it".  The old Watergate cry.  Congressional Democrats are in full cry on TV this morning.  This is an accusation of thought crime.  And I don't believe in thought crime.  Liberty means the right to think anything you please.  Crime has to be action of some sort. 
  The proper questions  are "What did he do?  When did he do it?  Where did he do it? And what evidence do you have? "  To be a crime it has to be an action.  Thought (or knowledge) is never a crime.

$3000 health insurance vs $12000 health insurance

Used to be, before Obamacare, you could purchase health insurance for your and your family for about $3000 a year.  It was "hospitalization only" insurance, it only paid if you got really sick and got put into the hospital.  Routine stuff, yearly physicals, taking the kids to the doctor for earaches and such, you paid for out of pocket.   The savings, $9000 a year, paid for a lot of trips to the doctor and a lot of yearly physicals.  If you had some money in your checking account to handle the routine stuff, hospitalization only made a lot of sense.  You were protected against catastrophe, at a price you could afford.
   The medical community detested hospitalization only.  It led to patients asking how much that recommended CAT scan might cost, and checking prices on pills and getting prescriptions changed over to cheaper drugs. 
   When they slipped Obamacare over on us, they remembered  how opposition from the medical community had killed Hillarycare.  They remembered those Harry and Louise radio commercials, and decided to get the medical community on board by giving them everything they ever wanted in Obamacare.
  And so, Obamacare outlawed hospitalization only insurance.  No more would medical providers have to explain how much treatments would cost to patients.  Since every thing was all paid for, patients didn't care what stuff cost.  While they were at it, Obamacare made all kinds of weird and wonderful medical scams mandatory and all paid for, like osteopathy.  The practitioners love it.   

In like Flynn

Some things I don't understand.   It's perfectly reasonable for Trump's national security advisor to talk to some Russians.  Flynn is an old intelligence guy, knows some Russians, and contacting our biggest international problem is a good idea.  Let 'em know that we won't nuke 'em, that we could make a deal, pass on a bit of sweetness and light, is always a good idea.  We aren't at war with the Russians, reaching out and schmoozing them is a good thing.  Far better than calling them names. 
   How did Flynn manage to get himself cross threaded with Mike Pence?  Just what was it that he failed to say, or "misspoke" ?  And why would a senior retired Army general officer not live up to the code of the services and tell the truth? 
   And, who in the intelligence world leaked the phone taps on Flynn?  And leaked them to the press, not just Congressional Democrats?  You tap a senior guy's phone and that's serious business.  When the senior guy finds out, he will retaliate.  Clearly Trump has a heavy duty leaker on the loose.  He needs to call a plumber ASAP.  
  

Words of the Weasel Part 45

"Border Tax".  A euphemism for tariff.  I listened to some talking head on Fox News spend five minutes explaining why Trump's proposed "border tax" was not a tariff.  Tariffs have been a hot subject thru out American history.  And the history books all use the word tariff.  We are doing our children a disservice to introduce a new  buzz phrase for an old old concept.
   Could it be that a century of free trade agitation has made people think that tariff's are bad for them?
   In real life, tariffs are good for domestic makers of stuff, for obvious reasons.  Tariffs are bad for everyone else because they have to pay more for stuff.  Everyone else is more people than the makers (both labor and company) of any one kind of stuff.  Since this is a democracy, it is reasonable to support free trade since more people benefit from a free trade regime. 

Father of Dodge Viper says it died because it ran out of reasons to live

Bob Lutz, product champion of the Viper, back some years ago, said the idea of the Viper was to have more power and go faster than anything else.  When Chevy put out some Corvettes that were even faster than Viper the car lost its reason for being.
   Piffle I say.  When the competition comes out with a product hotter than yours, it's time to soup up your product.  Chrysler just didn't want to spend the money. Or didn't have the money.
   If some car maker was looking for a new product, how about a sporty car that can handle driving in snow? I've driven Camaros and Mustangs, a lotta fun on a dry road but totally worthless after the first flake hits the road.  Up here in NH, people laugh at you if they see you driving a sporty car in winter.  Which cuts into the market for sporty cars.
  What someone ought to make is a sporty car that works in winter.  Fifty fifty front rear weight distribution is a good starting place.  Then it needs four wheel drive, with limit slip differentials fore and aft.  Maybe a built in ski rack that doesn't whistle at 65 mph.  Decent tires with rubber that sticks in snow.  They make 'em.  Plenty of defroster heat.  Good strong windshield washer to cope with the salt spray.  Bleed some engine heat to the washer bottle to keep it from freezing.  Outside thermometer so you can tell if that glittery black stuff up ahead is ice or just wet asphalt.   Give it some decent styling and I'd buy one. 

Ivanka Trump and her clothing line.

All I know about Ivanka Trump is what I see on TV.  She sure looks like a nice, good looking, pleasant, mother of three.  The sort of young woman any father would be proud to call his daughter.  And so, when Nordstroms and some other retailers drop her clothing line,  her doting father says a few words.  What does anyone expect him to say?  And Kellyanne Conway says a few more words, good for her. 
   The newsies are making a federal case out of this.  Which is one reason why polls show president Trump has more credibility than the newsies do. 

Can I trust US courts anymore?

Good question.  Seattle district court judge James Robart certainly doesn't believe in following the written law.  The 1952 law says the president has total authority to ban any immigrant or class of immigrants from entry to the United States.  Judge Robart ignored this and forbade the president from barring immigration from seven Middle East countries.  In short, the judge ruled in accordance with his personal political ideology and not in accordance with the law on the books.  Plus the two plaintiff states clearly lacked standing to sue the federal government. 
  What's worse, the 9th Circuit court of appeals backed him up.  So, we have the federal courts in the western part of the country making judgements based on personal prejudice rather than written law.  I wonder what they were teaching in law school back when these so called judges were doing law school.  Scary.
   So much for the procedural argument.  The substance of the issue is of only medium importance.  We don't get all that many immigrants from the seven middle east countries in Trump's executive order.  On the other hand, these seven countries are so screwed up from civil war or just plain collapse into failed states, that we cannot believe anything they tell us.  We ought to be vetting immigrants to weed out criminals and select for people who will become loyal and productive members of American society.  Vetting means contacting the authorities in the immigrant's home country to verify his name and home address, see how much schooling he has, see his police record, and so forth.  This only works if the home country has authorities in charge.  The seven countries on Trump's executive order are all  so war torn that we cannot find the authorities, and even if we find someone who claims to be an authority in an enemy country like Iran or Syria, we suspect that they would lie to us.  Surely an Iranian mullah who wanted to infiltrate an agent into the US would have no problem telling US authorities that "Yes Omar is a good boy, never been in trouble, good marks in school. Yada-Yada." 
   So, it's a twofer, the so called judges are wrong on the issues as well as procedures.  Very scary.

How much should that wall cost?

I'm not a great wall fan myself.  New Hampshire is about as far away from the Mexican border as you can get.  But ABC was just claiming that the border wall would cost $25 billion.  Which is rediculous.
The US Mexican border is 2000 miles long.  At 5280 feet to the mile, that comes out to 10 million feet in round numbers.  Chain link fence material, the chain link, fence posts, ties, and everything is about $5 a foot.  I looked it up on the internet. Let's assume installation is about the same as the cost of materials, so make it  $10 a foot, or $100 million to do the whole border.  That's a far cry from ABC's $25 billion.
    Actually, there is a bit more to doing it right.  To prevent people from digging under it,  we ought to put a solid concrete footing under the fence, all the way across.  That might cost another $100 million.  Then we need an access road on our side of the fence to allow the border patrol to get men to the site of an illegal crossing in a hurry.  It can be a dirt road, just good enough for a jeep.  And we ought to fly air patrols in Cessnas (not $1 millon UAVs) daily.  The real purpose of the fence is to stop vehicles from crossing, or at least to leave an unmistakable hole where someone crashes thru.   You need air patrols to spot the big  holes in time to get the border patrol in pursuit of the fence crasher before he gets away.
   Even with all this stuff  I'm thinking we could do the wall for less than $1 billion.
  

Adventures in Router Land

The virii and trojans and  ransomware are getting aggressive this year.  I decided to upgrade the firmware in my router.  Router is a $40 plastic box that plugs into the cable modem and offers WIFI and four internet connectors.  The router faces the raw internet, and needs to reject incoming messages that would take over the router and do evil.  The router acts as a firewall, and if it should be penetrated, the hacker has direct access to the Windows machines plugged into the router.  And Windows is like Swiss cheese, fully of holes.  If the tougher software in the router is compromised, the Windows machines are toast. 
   My router is a NetGear N300 purchased a couple of years ago.  I Googled the router maker name, model number and "firmware".  This gave me an offer to download new firmware.  On this particular router you can talk to it using your web browser.  You put in a special URL and the router picks up and displays a groovy little user interface.  From this I learned that my current firmware was v18 while the new downloaded firmware was v42.  Hmm, been a lot of patching of router code over the last couple of years.   The router offered an "upload firmware" function, which was sorta flaky.  I had to run it two or three times before the upload "took". 
   So, me router firmware is all up to date, which is the best I can do against the swarm of malware running around the internet.  Upgrading the firmware did not mess up any of my computer connections to the router.

Wall St Journal Pushes a Carbon Tax???

Yesterday's Journal Op-Ed had a piece authored by James Baker and George Schultz.  Both of these guys have been Secretary of the Treasury AND Secretary of State.  So they have some experience.  They may not have any common sense, but they have lots of experience.  They claim that a $40 a ton carbon tax will clear our air and improve the economy.  They propose the revenues from the carbon tax be paid out to all citizens rather than going to reduce the deficit and pay the government's bills.  They think this payout will avoid the downturn that just socking everyone with a hefty tax hike will.   They make it sound kinda sweet, mentioning a $2000 a year refund to the average family. 
   What they don't mention, is that everyone will have to hike their prices to pay their carbon tax.  To put it in perspective, each time I fill my 275 gallon furnace oil tank, I'd get hit for $40 in carbon tax.  Call it $200 a winter.  
    And surely, avoiding a $40 a ton carbon tax would be a strong incentive for business to expand overseas, or anywhere outside the US just to avoid the tax.  That carbon tax will undo all the good work of frackers in getting the price of oil down. 
   And, they want to impose all this pain to reduce global warming.  We haven't had any global warming that you could measure with a thermometer for the last 19 years, and they want to sock it to me for global warming?  As I write this it is 14F outside with snow swirling in front of my windows. 

That $500 billion foreign trade deficit

According to today's Wall St Journal  that's how deep in the hole we are.  Our imports were $500 billion more than our exports.  In short, the rest of the world shipped $500 billion worth of goods into America and America shipped them zilch.  Since people don't like to ship goods and not get paid, presumably we sent $500 billion in cash to pay for this stuff. 
   $500 billion is a lot, even for a US GNP of $17 trillion.  And we have been doing this for at least 20 years, maybe more.  How does it work? 
   Do we merely print an extra $500 billion dollars?  The US greenback is desired all over the world, and we can probably get away with printing a whole lot of 'em before foreigners wise up and stop accepting them.
   Do we have some invisible export that earns us $500 billion a year?  Does tuition paid by foreign students to US colleges count as exports?  What about royalties for Hollywood movies, video games, pop music, Superman comic books, and other stuff? Does all that count as exports?   Do foreign stock purchases on the NYSE or NASDAQ count?
    Something else?
    The point is, we have been running humongous trade deficits for many many years and it keeps on running.  Somehow the international books get balanced and we don't run out of money.  It would be nice to know how this really works 

Jungle Book, Disney 2016

I missed this when it was in the theater in town some months ago.  So I Netflixed it this week.  It's a live action kinda remake of the old Disney animated one.  Neel Sethi plays Mowgli and does it well.  He is young,  cute, he delivers his lines well, he looks good.  He is about the only real live action actor,  the rest of the cast are CGI animals, all well done, nice fur, good voices, very huggable.  It is an enjoyable flick.  They manage to do a couple of scary scenes that I found scary even at my age.  They borrowed some songs from the earlier animated version.  Baloo and Baghera and Kaa are nicely done.  I liked it.  Any child over the age of six ought to love it. 

Shed another tear for poor old Sears Roebuck

Sears troubles are so bad that banks are leery of lending to Sears.  According to the Wall St Journal Sears investors had to pay $4.62 million in bond insurance (a credit default swap) to insure a Sears $10 million for five years bond.  That' $924,000 a year, or 9.24% a year.  That's pure usury.  Or, the investors view Sears as so likely to default that they don't want to risk their money. 

Trump Adminstration leaks

The TV is talking about them.  They believe the number of leaks from the new born Trump administration is excessive.  The imply (they don't have the stones to come out and say it) that the leaks are coming from Trump appointees jostling for position inside the new administrative. 
  I wonder about that.  The vast US civil service are Democrats to a man (or a woman)  They are fire proof.  We could not fire low level civil servants even after we caught them stealing stuff out the base warehouse.  I'll bet you cannot fire them for leaking, even if you could catch them at it.  Not when they can put gigabytes of data onto a single easily concealable thumb drive.  And they all have broadband internet at home.
   Judging from the hysterical response of Democrats to Trump, being shown on TV hour after hour, I bet a lot of those Democratic civil servants are just as rabidly anti-Trump.  And they plan on leaking to damage the Trump administration.  
   Dunno what Trump can do about that.  Civil servants are everywhere in the US government.  They are the typists, the IT guys, the administrators, the janitorial staff, the receptionists, and every sort of paper pusher.  And  they can see everything, especially if someone has it typed up.
   We may be in for the most transparent administration in history, where everything gets leaked, to the media, to the Congress, to the homeless in the streets.
   Transparency may be OK, but American allies are already reluctant to share intelligence with the Americans for fear it will turn up on the front page and the New York Times,  burning agents and undoing years of careful intel work.
   

Superbowl LI

First TV in months that wasn't all about Trump and the election.  Refreshing I call it.  Cliff hanger ending.  Go Pats. 

Are cats trainable?

Perhaps, and with great difficulty.  I have a closet, full of exciting smells from leather boots and shoes, small and dark.  Stupid Beast loves that closet.  Last week she nipped inside when I wasn't looking.  I closed the closet door on her.  I didn't miss her for half a day.  When I did notice a lack-a-cat I checked her favorite nap places and then opened the closet just to check.  Out she popped.  Clearly happy to escape the closet.
   This morning, I open same magic closet to get out a pair of pants.  Stupid Beast slipped right in when I wasn't looking, and so I closed the closet door.  But, I opened it again to get something else a few minutes later.  And Stupid Beast popped right out.  I believe she had learned that spending half a day in the closet was hungry and thirsty work. 
  

 

Are the Senate rules democratic?

We have been hearing a lot of talk lately about Senate rules.  One that I never heard of before surfaced last week.  In attempting  to block "advise and consent" of president Trump's cabinet, the Democrats walked out of the committee meeting and claimed that the committee could not vote on the cabinet appointee unless there were some Democrats present.  That's a new one on me.  The next day the Republicans dredged up some rule that said they could too vote.  And so a couple of cabinet appointees made it thru the committee votes to stand before the entire Senate, sometime now.
   Then there is an older Senate practice, which allows any single senator to "place a hold"  (a veto) on any judicial appointment.  Somehow, letting a single senator veto any judge strikes me a profoundly undemocratic.
   Then we have the filibuster.  This practice was started in the 1950's by Democrats.  It came from a Senate rule that allowed unlimited debate.  Once a senator has the floor he can keep on talking as long as he can draw breath.  Democrats would filibuster to block civil rights legislation in the bad old days.  For the really big cases they used to bring in cots to give exhausted senators a bit of rest. Filibusters became so notorious that sometime in the early 1960's the Senate created the "cloture rule".  Under cloture rule, a supermajority (60 votes) sufficed to take the floor away from a windbag filibusterer and move on with Senate business.  As time went on, to avoid the tedium of waiting for Senator Windbag to become obnoxious, they dispensed with th need for Senator Windbag to actually take the floor and keep on babbling.  Now any senator can merely declare he wants to filibuster something, and that something is blocked unless and until they dredge up 60 votes to impose "cloture".  The effect is to require a supermajority to pass anything of substance thru the Senate.
   And then the Senate gives the majority leader the right to personally veto anything.  The majority leader sets the Senate agenda.  Any bill he dislikes, just never appears on the agenda.  Poof and it's gonzo.
    I'm thinking it's time for a housecleaning on Senate rules.  

$130 million a year to UC Berkeley? A third of Berkeley's budget?

I heard these numbers on TV yesterday.  US taxpayers give UC Berkeley $130 million a year.  This is one third of Berkeley's yearly budget.
If true, this is appalling.   It makes UC into a US government college, run by the Feds, indoctrinating the students with whatever party line the Feds want.
   Someone will say that the $130 million is support for research.   When they do, I would ask to see the results of all this research.  What new products are on the market incorporating UC Berkeley research results?  What textbooks have UC Berkeley research results printed in them?  In short, what has all that research money produced?  Other than salaries for tenured professors?
   I doubt that Berkeley can match the results of the old Bell Labs, who invented the transistor, discovered the cosmic background radiation, performed the Davidson Germer experiment showing that electrons had a wavelength like photons.  These are just the few things I remember from a long ago physics course.  There are doubtless more successes to Bell Labs credit.  Too bad the anti-trust people killed off Bell Labs in the 1970's.  

Update:   This morning's Wall St Journal says Berkeley receives a lot more money, like $400 million in research grants and $200 million in student loans.  

The UC Berkeley riots.

Some good TV video of "protesters" dressed in black and wearing masks, smashing plate glass shop windows.  This has got to be off-campus, no college campus I know of has shops with plate glass windows. The cops report NO arrests were made.  Translation: The cops were egging them on. 
   Maybe 'cause the cops are afraid of getting in trouble if a "protester" resists arrest? 
   Maybe 'cause the cops are as anti Trump as the students?  Does anyone believe that?? 
   Maybe 'cause their superiors told the cops to cool it?  And who might those superiors be?? 
   Maybe the cops feared the "protesters" would kick the s**t out of them if they interfered?? 
   Maybe something else? 
   Who knows?

President Trump picks a new Supreme

Honestly, I had never heard of this guy Gorsuch before.  All I know about Judge Gorsuch comes from president Trump's fulsome introduction last night on TV and some kind words from Bill O'Reilly and Charles Krauthammer later in the evening. 
   Let's hope Judge Gorsuch sticks to his word, given on TV last night, to judge according to the written law, as understood by those who wrote it at the time they wrote it.  The liberal notion of a "living constitution" is just propaganda advocating the courts to make up new law from the bench.  It's a totally undemocratic notion.  In a democracy, new law comes from the elected legislature, not appointed judges.  Over the years, liberals have used the courts to pass laws that never would have passed a legislature.  Some of them were disasters or disgraces.  Dred Scott started the Civil War.  Plessy vs Ferguson was a disgrace for a half century.  Roe vs Wade touched off a culture war that lasts until this very day.  
   Getting Judge Gorsuch approved by the Senate looks to be real circus.  I'm gonna get me some popcorn and watch the clowns.  

Wow! Trump immigration policy makes big waves

As I get the story, Trump announced the ban on immigrants/visitors from seven African and Middle East countries Friday night.  By Saturday, someone[s] had organized sizable demos at the big airports, LAX in particular.  That's quick work.  How did they do that? and who is they?  Did "they" put the word out on social media?  If so, what media?   I'd join up with that media just to keep in touch with what's going on.  Did "they" use a telephone tree to call all "their" members?  Did "they" take out ads in the newspapers?  Is it possible to get a newpaper ad out that quickly? 
   Or did "they" have foreknowledge, from a leak somewhere in the Trump administration, so they could have more time to get the demo's rolling?
    And, are all those demonstrators going out with their signs just because they still hate Trump? Does anyone actually favor immigrants from pest holes like Somalia?
    The noble MSM are missing a lot of angles to this story. 

$2107 each for a handgun?

Seems very pricey.  But that is the price the government is willing to pay for the new Sig Saur handgun that will replace the current unloved M9 Beretta.  The Sig will be made in New Hampshire, a good thing as far as this NH resident is concerned.  It will be chambered for 9mm Luger which is standard world wide, despite a lot of shooters feeling that anything less than .45 ain't enough for serious work. 

Microsoft Update stopped working

Microsoft Update had been working happily on my aging XP desktop for some years.  I have trusty desktop set to notify me of updates rather than just zap them in automatically.  Now and then I run Microsoft update by hand from Internet Exploder.  Today Microsoft Updates started and then choked up with an error message about how it could not access the internet.  Hmm.  And it popped up a network diagnostic button which I pushed figuring it wouldn't do any harm.  Network Diags trundled for a while and then reported that my firewall was blocking ports 80 (http) 443 (https) and 21 (FTP).
  So, hit "Settings" and then Microsoft Firewall.  And punch a button marked port.  And type in the three port numbers (80, 443, and 21).  Firewall complained about port 80 claiming it was already present.  But it accepted the other two ports.  And then Microsoft update started to work. 
  For all this hacking, Microsoft update did not find any serious updates for me.  I browsed the non serious updates and decided than none of them would do my any good. 
   Still wondering what happened.  Did Microsoft tighten up Update so that it needed the HTTPS port? Did some passing virus turn the ports off by way of defending itself?  Should I get a better firewall? 

New Hampshire GOP holds its annual meeting

I'm a delegate so I went.  Had to get up at 5:45 to get down to Derry by 8 AM.  It was snowing lightly in the Notch.  I managed to get up my driveway and out on the road just before the town plow plowed me in.  I93 was a tad slippery up in the Notch but dried out nicely by the time I got to N. Woodstock. 
   It being the annual meeting, many of us, yours truly included, wore coat and tie.  It being New Hampshire, a lot of people showed up in blue jeans and hunting shirts.  Meeting was called to order at 9.  The only real business to address was election of the State Chairman.  Somehow this took all day, we didn't get adjourned until 2:30.  Lot of people got tired and left early. 
   There was the usual opening exercises, Governor Sununu gave a short speech, all the reports (treasurer, bylaw committee, etc) were read.  This lasted til 10, and then trouble decended.  Somebody got 9 or 10 changes to the party bylaws onto the agenda.  The changes were poorly written, few of us delegates could understand what the bylaw changes meant and they started out with a confusing voting system were a yes vote was actually a no vote.  They gave up on that after first amendment sucked up a half an hour before getting voted down.  Another couple of hours was consumed voting down the rest of 'em, all except one, which authorized paying a salary to the state chairman.  That passed cause most of the delegates could see that state chairman is a full time job, and few people can do a full time job without a salary.  Real people have bills to pay. 
   Then we got to voting in new officers, treasurer, asst treasurer, secretary, asst secretary, vice chair, area chairs, and finally, we voted in Jeane Forester as state party chairman.  That got us up to a little after 2PM and then we called it a day and adjourned.  I got back home just around 5PM.  Stupid Beast was glad to see me. 

The Legend of Tarzan 2016

This flick hit the theaters back in July 2016.  Publicity work must have been pretty bad, I never heard of it until I did a search for "Tarzan" on Netflix.  I'm an old Tarzan fan, got started reading my father's collection of Tarzan novels in grade school.  I have seen most, perhaps all, of the Tarzan movies and TV shows going all the way back to the Johnny Weissmuller movies.  This was a medium speed Tarzan movie, not great, but watchable. 
   The cast were names I had never heard of, but they did a reasonable job working against a faint to flaky plot and really terrible continuity situation.  The movie starts up with a very British lord John Clayton in London, does flashbacks to a boy Tarzan being raised by Kala the she-ape deep in the jungle, pops back to the present (1890) flashes back to a young Tarzan whipping Kerchak hand to paw, pops forward to the same young Tarzan meeting Jane, and so it goes.  The flashback scenes are cute and all, but the constant flashing back and forth is confusing, and when laid on top of a weak plot yields a confusing movie. 
   The soundman was only fair to poor, a lot of Jane's lines were unintelligible to me.  The cameraman is still  turning the lights off, yielding a pure black scene with just a hint of  someone's white face floating around in the blackness.  They have a lot of pretty nicely done CGI animals, lions, great apes, wild buffalo, elephants and suchlike.  They have a stern wheel river steamer that looks pretty good although it is almost certainly CGI.
   Tarzan is properly ripped, has a good six pack abs. He looks a little too skinny for the part, I expect Tarzan to be built like Schwarzenegger.  This Tarzan doesn't really look strong enough to rassle with great apes and live to tell about it.  We don't see Tarzan without his shirt until halfway thru the movie, and he never does get down to the traditional loincloth,  he is wearing pants right up the the end of the flick. 
   Jane is nicely played, young, beautiful and tough.  She spits in the bad guy's face, and later escapes from the bad guy's river steamer by diving over the side into crocodile infested waters, while still wearing the ankle length white dress she was wearing when captured.  We never learn just how she avoided or dealt with the crocs.  We see her climbing out of the  muddy river with the white dress now stained river-mud-color.  A few scenes later the dress goes back to being white, and still later back to river-mud-color.
   Overall, not too bad, at least for us dyed in the wool Tarzan fans.  

Waterboard 'em enough and they will say anything you want

Interrogating prisoners is something of an art.  Coercion, whether the 3rd degree methods of modern police to real old fashioned medieval torture,  is a deal between the interrogators and the subject.  Talk and it will stop hurting.  Most subjects understand this.  And, most subjects want it to stop hurting, and so they talk.  They will lie their heads off and say anything the interrogators want them to say.
   For criminal police work, where all they have to do is make the subject say " I confess" this probably works.  For military intelligence work where we want the location of enemy troops, supplies, other assets, or operational plans,  or names of leaders and agents, targets for airstrikes, success of past attacks, or size of military units, it's not so effective.  The subject, under duress, will invent answers to the questions.  This defeats the purpose of interrogation, by filling the intelligence files with nonsense.  
    So I am not in sympathy with president Trump's call to waterboard more subjects.  I don't think you get useful intelligence this way.  CIA used to have some pretty good interrogators.  They got Khalid Sheik Mohammad to sing like a canary.  Then came the great CIA shakeup over black sites, waterboarding, VHS tapes of interrogation. I wonder if CIA has anyone left who can interrogate effectively.  Or would dare to do so from fear of prosecution.
   What we ought to do is take more prisoners.  Obama liked killing 'em rather than taking 'em alive, probably to try to empty out Gitmo.  Seal Team Six had Bin Laden at their mercy, they had plenty of airlift, they should have cuffed him and flown him out.  Rather than calling in an airstrike, send troops in by helicopter to capture alive as many as possible.  Take the prisoners to Gitmo and grill 'em medium rare.  Do fancy televised trials for the higher ups like Bin Laden.

God Speed Mary Tyler Moore

The TV is carrying news of her death at age 80.  She put on a lot of really good TV in her day.  I watched a lot of it.  There isn't anything nearly as good on TV these days.  God Speed.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

DACA is an Obama executive order to the immigration folks to ease off deportment of young illegal aliens who were brought into the US by their parents when they were small children.  The Wall St Journal runs two letters to the editor today, one advocating that president Trump continue the policy, and one advocating ending it. 
   Cool and all.  But isn't this a matter for Congress?  Someone ought to submit a bill to Congress to make DACA the law of the land.  I'd expect it to have a good chance of passage.  And then the argument would be over. 

Chuckie the Schumer wants 6 hours of "debate" about Mike Pompeo

Debate used to mean a contest of ideas between two opposing parties, for example Lincoln and Douglas.  What Chuckie wants is six hours on national TV to trash Mike Pompeo in the hopes of weakening President Trump.  And Chuckie found some obscure and anti democratic Senate rule (the Senate has a load of 'em) to force the Senate into giving him six hours. 

Mortgage backed securities in the news again

You would think after they caused Great Depression 2.0 that we would have clamped down on mortgage backed securities.  Apparently not.  Top item on the Friday Wall St Journal.  "Bonds backed by certain risky single family mortgages topped $1 trillion for the first time in November amid warnings about that corner of the housing market." 
$1 trillion is very serious money.  The US GNP is only $17 trillion. 
And mortgage backed securities are just flat dangerous to the world economy.  The "backed" part is pure moonshine.  All the seller of mortgage backed securities promise is that the mortgage payments will be used to pay off the bonds.  But, if the mortgages stop paying, the bonds go bust.  That's what took down the entire world financial system in 2007-2008.  A disaster which we still haven't recovered from.  Before Great Depression 2.0  our GNP grew at 3.5% a year.  Since Great Depression 2.0 GNP growth has been 1% a year.  That's eight years of poverty. 
   To sell a mortgage backed security a financial  house has to buy up a batch of mortgages from the likes of Countrywide and Freedom Mortgages.  Who are happy to sell, turning mortgages  (promise to back in the future) into cash right now.  And, they are happy to write subprime and NINJA (no income, no job, no assets) mortgages, so long as they can find suckers to buy them before they default. 
   Basically we should not allow the sale of mortgages.  If the mortgage lender know they are stuck with the mortgage forever, they will be more careful about who they write mortgages for, since they will own them.  And as a homeowner,  I am not happy with the idea of my mortgage falling into the hands of God knows who, who can stick it to me in a dozen different ways. 
   Mortgages are good deals for the lender.  They are backed (really backed, not moonshine backed) by real property, if the borrower defaults, the lender gets the house.  The borrowers are strongly motivated to keep up the payments lest they find themselves out on the street.  It's simply to assess the risks involved at the time you write the mortgage.  You inspect the property to see if the property is worth more than you are gonna lend on it.  You interview the borrowers and check their credit history, and see how much they are earning.  You don't write a mortgage when the monthly payments are more than 25% of the borrowers income.  Pretty simply stuff. 
  

Donald Trump vs the MSM. Who will win?

President Trump understands that the MSM is out to get him.  They have a giant megaphone, and with only a few honorable exceptions, they all speak with one voice.  They don't like Donald Trump, and they plan to make his term as president as miserable as they can. 
   President Trump has been pretty vigorous in trashing the MSM for dishonesty and slanted stories.  He understands publicity and public relations as well as they do. The presidency is still a bully pulpit.   He understands that mud sticks.  When they smear you, you have to say something, the public isn't going to forget the smear.  If they don't hear the target defend himself, they assume he is guilty.  They assume that an innocent man will defend himself against the smears, no defense, and the guy is probably guilty.  Trump understands this, and had defended himself vigorously, and so far, it has worked for him.  His twitter account is smoking hot, and it puts President Trump's views in front of the entire nation, and the MSM does' get a chance to slant or edit his views.  The MSM has been bitching about Trump's tweets because they cut the MSM out of the game.  It's like FDR's famous fireside chats in the 1930's.  Roosevelt's words went nationwide unedited and unslanted. 
    And the MSM has damaged it's credibility during last year's campaign.  Now, few Americans believe what they see on TV or read in the papers.  When Trump slams the MSM, the voters are inclined to believe him.
   I don't see a truce coming.  I think we are going see a head on collision between the President and the MSM.  There is a fair chance the MSM will loose.