Still Not Impressed

I caught the impeachment hearings on  the radio while driving up to Berlin, and back from Berlin this Friday.  About an hour each way, so I heard maybe two hours of chit chat.  The committee had Marie Yavonovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine, on deck.  She never said anything of substance.  Every statement was bland, and qualified, heavily.  She spoke in a voice so wimpy and indecisive that I judge her unfit to be an ambassador to anywhere, in fact unfit to push a broom.  Don't understand how she ever got appointed ambassador.  She felt (never said directly) that Trump forced her out of her ambassadorship.  For which I say, good work, badly needed housecleaning.  We don't need anyone that wimpy and indecisive representing the United States of America. 
   Bottom line, in two hours I never heard the witness said anything about Trump doing anything bad at all, other than getting her fired that is.

I watched the public impeachment hearing today. Not Impressed

They did a lot of talking, about process and procedures, and secret diplomatic back channels.  The diplomatic witnesses were questioned about their backgrounds, and they were impressive.  Top 1% of his class at West Point, infantry company commander in Viet Nam.  And a good deal of other stuff all good sounding. 
   They never got down to brass tacks.  Like reading the transcript of the famous telephone call aloud.  Or discussing other matters that might convince me, or others, that Trump has got to go.   Or testimony from the famous whistleblower (Eric Ciaramella???).   Chairman Adam Shifty was fairly objectionable.
   I'm thinking that the Democrats don't have anything on Trump, at least not anything that is all that serious.  Watergate this is not. 

DACA, Why didn't Congress deal with this years ago???

DACA, I forget just how the acronym works, but it was/is an Obama policy of leniency toward young adults brought into the US as small children, by parents who are/were illegal immigrants.  Obama asked Congress to do something but Congress doesn't pass laws anymore and the DACA bill never happened. 
  Me, I feel for kids brought into and raised in the US from early childhood.  They are now old enough for high school and college, old enough to enlist, and they are on Mr. Migra's hit list because they are not citizens, don't even hold a green card.  For the vast majority of them, who have stayed out of trouble with the law, are gainfully employed, paying taxes, married, raising children, hold honorable discharges from the armed forces,  they sound like solid desirable citizens to me.  Let's naturalize them.  We need more good solid citizens to keep the country running.  It takes many tax paying citizens to pay for just one druggie drawing welfare. 
   Anyhow, the Trump administration isn't behind DACA, and revoked much, maybe all of the Obama executive orders that created DACA.  And the matter is now going to the Supremes. 
    This should not be happening.  We should have insisted on the CongressCritters passing a DACA bill.  This kind of policy ought to be set in law by Congress, it should not set by presidential say-so (executive orders) or by the Supremes.  We need to get on the CongressCritter's cases and insist that they stop messing around, and pass a reasonable DACA bill. 

Let's hear it for paper ballots. Down with voting machines.

I have been saying this for years.  Here we have a computer scientist saying the same.  Voting machines are merely ordinary desktop computers running a "Look-at-me-I'm-a-ballot" program.  They are vulnerable to all the hacks and malware that Windows computers are vulnerable to.  Plus, since voting machines are all stored together at city hall in between elections,  a determined agent can get his hands on them and always crack them.  A patched ballot program that discards say 10% of the votes for one party can tip any election.  They don't leave a paper record, all the votes are recorded in their internal memory and can be erased.  There is no way to do a recount.
   Whereas the good old paper ballot is secure against hackers coming over the internet, or carried on thumb drives.  They can be saved and recounted.  If the poll workers whine about the effort to hand count them all, they can buy ballot reading machines that work like the test grading machines used in schools.  I remember the teachers using test grading machines back when I did elementary school, and that was a long time ago. 

Capitalism makes us all rich.

  America runs (mostly) on free market capitalist principles.  And it works.  We have plenty of food, fuel, clothing, new cars, electronics, housing, electricity, clean running water, movies, schools, roads, every material thing imaginable.  We have it.  The socialist countries go hungry. 

   Part of our plenty comes from the free market regulating how much of each thing should be produced.  If we don’t have enough of something, the price goes up, and people produce more of it.  If we have too much of something, the price goes down, and people produce less of it.  This works, and we have just the right amount of everything.  The Russians used to have a bureau in Moscow that set production quotas for the entire country.  They never got it right, and the Russians were constantly plagued with shortages or surpluses.  There are so many different things needed by a modern industrial economy, nuts and bolts, gasoline, corn, spark plugs, broccoli, automobiles, etc, etc,) that no bureau can keep track of all of them, let alone figure out how much of each to produce.  The free market system, working on supply and demand gets it right automatically, no central bureau required (or wanted).

    The second thing about capitalism is that it puts its money into the right things.  Society only has a limited amount of capital.  Just operating a business, let along starting one up from scratch, requires capital.  Here we raise that capital by borrowing from banks or selling stocks and bonds.  Investors and banks put their capital (money) into things that look like they will turn a profit, and refuse to loan to things that look like losers.  Being that we have a lot of banks, and a lot of investors, they mostly get it right.  Capital is available for successful enterprises like Apple and Amazon.  Losers like Sears cannot get any.  We direct our limited capital into the right things and don’t waste it on boondoggles. 

   And finally we offer incentives for hard work.  Starting up a new business is a lot of hard work.  The entrepreneur has to put in 60 and 70 hour work weeks for years and years before it pays off.  He has to work so hard that he endangers his marriage, looses touch with his children and his friends, develops ulcers.  People, guys mostly, only put themselves thru this sort of ordeal because they can see a handsome reward, maybe not as handsome as Bill Gates, but at least enough to put all their kids thru college.  And without all these entrepreneurs working their hearts out we would be much poorer. 

    I am hearing that the youngest generation wants to convert to socialism, which is just a nicer name for communism.  Those kids are either misinformed, or just plain stupid.

Good old daylight savings time. Set all the clocks, watches, VCR's, car clocks, clock radios, back one hour. I don't dare turn the hands backward on my 100 year old Tiffany mantle clock that was a wedding present to my grandmother. I stop the pendulum and wait one hour and then start it up again. Cable box set himself back all automatically. So did the clock radio. Laptop running Win 10 set himself back all automatically. Desktop, also running Win 10 did not. I had to set him back by hand. I wonder what made that happen.
   We ought to stay on daylight savings all year round.  Up here, in winter, there is not enough daylight to drive to work, work an 8 hour shift, and drive home all by daylight.  You either drive to work in the dark, or drive home in the dark.  Of the two, I would might rather drive to work in the dark, I am more awake in the morning, it gives me a good virtuous feeling being up before the sun. Driving home in the dark is a drag.  

New York has gotta be crazy

Donald Trump announced that he was changing his residency to Mar a Largo in Florida so he doesn't have to pay New York taxes.  And the New York governor AND the mayor of New York city got on TV to say "good riddance Donald Trump".  Dumb move.  Donald Trump was a maga tax payer. I haven't seen his tax returns, but he must have been putting serious money into New York, both state and city. 
   Say goodby to some serious tax money New York.  You ought to be sad to lose a prominent citizen who has a lot of money.  Even if you don't like his politics.

Congressional Democrats are bungling impeachment

Impeaching a president is very unusual and requires really strong evidence, shared with all the voters to succeed.  In all the long history of the American Republic we only tried impeachment three times, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton.  Only the Nixon impeachment succeeded.  Nixon resigned the presidency before the Senate acted, but I will count that as a successful impeachment.  I surely do remember the build up to Nixon's resignation, hours and hours of Congressional testimony on TV, the Saturday night massacre, John Dean, the tapes, Judge Maximum John, and many more.  All this had me, and the rest of the country convinced that Nixon had to go.
   Let is look at today's impeachment against Trump.  Congressional hearing conducted in secret.  Unnamed witnesses, a highly unreliable committee chairman, no House vote to impeach or even to investigate.  Nothing that is gonna convince the average voter that Trump has to go.
   The voters need the strongest and clearest evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors" before they will go along with impeachment.  If the voters are not onboard, they will remember in November, and vote stupid Congresscritters out of office.  The more intelligent Congresscritters know this.
    The democrats ought to be doing Trump's impeachment like Watergate, lots of TV, lots of public testimony, lots of publicity everywhere.  All I can figure is that they really  don't have anything on Trump.  

Al-Bagdadi snuffed last night. Good show.

Actually, it is too bad that we didn't take him alive.  He doubtless knew a lot of things that we would like to know.  According to the TV news this morning Bagdadi wore a suicide vest which he detonated before he could be captured.  But the plan was good, helicopter in some troops to take him alive is better than using a Predator drone to snuff him with a Hellfire anti tank missile.   
   I like taking out the enemy higher ups.  Strikes me as more civilized than killing a lot of plain foot soldiers just because we can. 

Wood chip electric power plants in New Hampshire

The State of New Hampshire published “Study Pursuant to New Hampshire Chaptered Law 156:228 (2017), subtitled “Study on the economic viability of renewable portfolio standard Class III biomass electric generation resources in New Hampshire”.  Good lawyerly title to obfusticate understanding.  Dated 21/1/2018. 

  The executive summary contains a couple of just plain weird statements.  “these resources are less flexible than intermittent renewables.”  This is foolishness.  The biomass plants can come on line when needed, say after dark, or on calm windless days.  That’s flexible in my book.  Solar goes away at sundown, which is when most of us need our electricity, to run the lights, cook dinner, run the TV.  Wind goes away when the wind stops blowing, something that happens pretty regularly up here.

   “While biomass is a major market for low grade wood, it is not the only end use.”  Oh really?  And what might be another volume use for wood chips now that the paper mills are gone?  

  Interesting figures provided.  Each of the 6 bio mass plants used nearly a quarter million tons of wood chips a year, 1.36 million tons altogether.  That’s a lot of wood.   At 50 tons per truck load, that’s like 5000 truckloads per plant over the year.  Pretty heavy truck traffic for most places.

    Discussion of hit to the NH economy from killing off the biomass plants.  They only count the plant workers, say 500 men, as losing their jobs.  No mention of all the loggers who cut the wood chips.  I would expect at least as many loggers as electric plant workers to loose their jobs too.  Jumps the 500 job losses to at least 1000. 

   The report shows the New Hampshire wholesale price of electricity at $35 a Megawatt Hour.  Or $35 per 1000 kilowatt hours, or 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour.  I have to pay 20 cents a kilowatt hour at my home.  Somebody is making a killing.  I’m getting robbed.  It also drives industry out of New Hampshire.  Companies always check electric rates before moving to anywhere. 

Crapware comes back to life

I have been trying to speed up my Win 10 laptop.  I believe most software is evil and the machine will run better if unnecessary software is removed.  Unfortunately, good old Windows Update keeps reloading stuff I kill.  I keep a log of things I have done to Flatbeast, the laptop, just incase I need to do them again.  Couple of years ago I  killed of IaStorDataSvc, a RAID drive support some-thing-or-other.  Flatbeast is a laptop, doesn't have RAID drives and never will.  And I zapped Bonjour, an Apple network thingie the Itunes wants.  I don't have an Ipod, don't plan to get one, don't run Itunes and so it was adieu to Bonjour.
   Well, this morning I noticed that both of these turkeys were back and running.  Must have been Windows Update.  Thanks Micro$ofties. You make my day.  Fortunately both turkeys are easy to kill, Add/Remove Programs does them nicely.

The great debate.

  I caught it on CNN.  The democrats didn’t do themselves as much damage as they did last time.   The all came out for square for impeaching Trump.  None of ‘em gave any reasons, they just called him names.  They are all in favor of hiking taxes.  No discussion of why they might need the extra money, but they all want to hike taxes.  They all claimed only “the rich” would have to pay more.  They are all in favor of an “assault weapons” ban.  None of ‘em bothered to tell us what makes “assault weapons” so much more dangerous than deer rifles, or how one might tell the difference between deer rifles and “assault weapons” or why all this “assault weapons” ban talk when most shootings are done with handguns.  More talk about mandatory buybacks, voluntary buybacks, and mandatory background checks with out any discussion as to what these things might be.  Most of ‘em are in favor of “Medicare for all”.  None of ‘em talked about eliminating company and union (private) health insurance.  They all thought Trump did wrong by letting the Turks into Syria and abandoning the Kurds.  There was no talk about DACA immigration reform, border walls, or driver's licenses for illegal immigrants

   In short, I didn’t see much difference between any of them.  I think if Trump fails of re election, any one ‘em as president would put the economy back in the tank, outlaw private ownership of firearms, and stir up more domestic racial tension. 

   The TV moderators were fairly rude to the candidates.  They need to have a name sign on each of the podiums so we can tell who is speaking. 

Vote a straight Republican ticket.   

Words of the Weasel Part 55

Passed away, or just plain passed.  You ought to say died.  Passed is a euphemism intended to blunt the pain of  death and dying.  Death is painful, always has been painful. We ought to say what we mean, and we mean died when talking about someone who died or is dead.  Say it, died.  dead.   

What is California doing wrong that NH is doing right?

Out in Cali they turn off electric power, closing schools and businesses and putting the traffic lights out. That was supposed to prevent wildfires.  Then California just had yet another heavy duty wild fire that destroyed 85 houses.  We never do that here.  When the power goes out in NH it means a tree has fallen on the wires.  I never heard of an NH power company deliberately shutting off the power.  Nor do we have wildfires burning down houses.  We have plenty of woodlands, but they don't catch fire.  Is it better forestry practices in NH?  Is it more rainfall in NH?  Why does California burn down in the dark and NH goes about normal life and keeps the lights on? 

Cosequin for cats

I took my senior (14 year old) cat to the vet this summer.  She had been limping and gimping as she walked, or slinked around the house and I thought a visit to the vet might do her some good.  She is a good cat and I am fond of her.
   The vet said my cat was in good health and recommended I give her Cosequin for cats.  It has been advertised on TV and after a few weeks I think the stuff has done good things for my cat.  She has been able to jump up on furniture that she hasn't been able to handle for years.  She goes out more.  She doesn't limp as much.  The stuff is $30 a bottle but she is a good cat and I am fond of her and I can afford $30 a bottle. 

Drum beating for abolishing the electoral college

The electoral college is a deal in the US constitution concerning election of the president.  It's been there a long time, since the original ratification of the Constitution in 1789.  The founders intended the electoral college to equalize the power of large states and give small states (like New Hampshire) a stronger voice  in presidential elections.  There have been a few presidential elections, most recently 2016, where the winner in the electoral college received fewer popular votes than the loser in the electoral college did.  Trump for example.
   Since 2016 a push to dump the electoral college and go with a straight popular vote has arisen.  Even Youngest Son is in favor.  As a citizen of a small state, I am against the idea, because New Hampshire gets to exert a lot more influence in the federal government than it would in a straight popular vote deal.  For instance the NH first-in-the-nation  presidential primary is important, all candidates have to show themselves in New Hampshire and  pass muster with the New Hampshire electorate, a patriotic, well informed, and fair minded bunch.  In a straight popular vote setup only primary elections in big states (California, New York, Florida, etc) would count. 
   Anyhow the "popular vote is all" people got my address and mailed me an 8.5 by 11 inch, two inch thick, five pound trade paperback urging the "popular vote is all".  Massive it is.  I don't plan to read it, I am against the idea.  I wonder where this outfit got my name and address.  It was addressed to "The Hon. David Starr".  I only got elected NH senator less than a year ago, so they must have done some research fairly recently. 
   Anyhow, Long Live the Electoral College. 

We need to outlaw robocalling

We could do it with a state law.  Or a federal law if you thought the Congress would ever vote on anything. Many state legislatures are still interested in constituent service, unlike our noble Congresscritters. 
   Step 1 of such a law would be to require the telephone companies to implement a spoof proof caller ID system.  Today's caller ID can be easily spoofed by robocallers and spammers.  Making caller ID spoof proof would give us voters and small chance to not answer calls from numbers we never heard of.  Penalty of say $10,000 to the phone companies for each spoofed caller ID incident.
  Step 2 of such a law would define the felony of robocalling.  Placing a cold call to anyone and giving a pitch for any product or political party, candidate, or idea is robocalling.  Playing recording or speech from electronic devices to the victim is robocalling.  Uttering false hoods such as claiming to be calling from the IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, or any other  institution is robocalling.  Persons who place the call, who speak to the victim, who maintain or service the robocalling equipment are all robocallers and subject to the penalty of law.  People who support the robocaller[s] with workspace or money are guilty of robocalling.
Step 3 of such a law would spell out penalties for convicted robocallers.  I would suggest five years in jail for the first offense, and ten years for repeat offenses. 
  There is still a good deal of work to do, namely catching robocallers, after passage of an anti-robocalling law, but we must have the law making robocalling a felony before we can expect law enforcement to do anything about it. 

Who is that masked whistleblower?

The democrats want to keep the identity of their Ukrainian telephone call whistle blower secret.  They are talking about having him (her?) testify using an electronic voice distorter and wearing a mask. 
  That ought to give us all a good warm feeling that this whistle blower is telling the truth.  It will look really strange on TV too.
Rots of Ruck  Democrats.

Leaf Season in Franconia Notch

The Mittersill Inn from the lower part of Hubertus Ring Road

The Mittersill Inn driverway

A really red tree on Three Mile Hill Road

The Cannon M Peabody Slopes driveway.

Very bright tree at Peabody Slopes.

Bright trees on Three Mile Hill road

Bright tree at Mittersill.

Finding password. How deep can Windows bury something?

I managed to knock out my internet connection the other day.  I had been troubled by a wireless modem that failed to connect automatically upon power up.  I dug out the documentation on the wireless and found the CD with the wireless driver on it.  And a bright red label reading Stop!  Insert CD first!.  I didn't remember doing that when I just plugged the modem into a new-to-me Dell Optiplex 900. So I tried it, stuck in the CD, and all sorts of things happened.  And my internet connection went away. 
   Quite a bit of fiddling and running the Windows troubleshooters and clicking on every box on all the screens that showed up finally this morning got me to a screen that showed the router's password.  All the wireless routers come with a factory password burned into their PROMS.  I suppose the user can change the router password, but few of us do.  Anyhow, the password, smoothprairie295, was misspelled.  I fixed that and bingo, Internet came back.  Dunno how the misspell got into Win 10, but while trying to get internet back I went to a lotta places and typed in a lotta stuff. 
  Anyhow, this is what I had to do to reach the password screen.  You may want to do this when you bring home a new computer or want to get a house guest's computer to work on your internet.

Right Click on the network icon on the taskbar
Click on network and connections setting
Open Network to Internet Setting 
Click on Change Adaptor Setting
Right click on your network device icon
Click on Status
Click on Wireless Properties
Click on the Security Tab
Click on Show Characters.

And now we are deep enough.  Took me a long time to go this deep.  Should you need to know your password, and you forgot to write it down, that's what you have to do to retrieve it from Windows.

$2000 for Samsung Galaxy Fold Smartphone.

Wow.  My HP laptop was only $300 at Staples three years ago.  My lightly used Dell desktop was only $200.  $2k for a smartphone seems like a lotta money.  It is cool, I think.  The thing unfolds like a book, the screen has a fold in the middle.  Gotta wonder about screen life.  How long does it take for a fold line in the screen to become permanent? 

American Flag flies in Hong Kong

Wall St Journal had a photo of Hong Kongers waving American flags above a piece on "unrest" in Hong Kong.  I was touched that a people on the far side of the world, under attack by their communist government, would find inspiration in the American flag.  I guess what America stands for still has meaning around the world. 

Words of the Weasel Part 53

Accountable.  As in " hold him accountable".   In real life accountable means to express mild disapproval in cases that call for indictment, trial, and 20 years in slam. 

The great Ukrainian telephone call kerfuffle

The TV news has been talking about nothing else for several days now.  The Democrats are calling impeachment.  The Republicans are not saying much.  I have not seen a good believable write up of what really happened. I have seen a lot of highly partisan write ups, from both sides, and I have trouble believing any of them.   Impeachment is going to make it impossible for Congress to do anything else for months, maybe years.  Impeachment talk won't go away until November 2020.   I tend to think this is a tempest in a teapot, a revival of the Mueller report, but going for impeachment makes it more serious.  It ought to do Biden some harm, the stories of Hunter Biden taking a $50,000 A MONTH salary from a Ukrainian firm are disgraceful.   Far as I can tell public opinion is still out on this great telephone kerfuffle.  I have no idea where it will eventually settle. 

Another great business name, Night Line Legal

Night Line Legal, they are getting air play, for some lawyers advertising for plaintiffs.  Sounds as reputable as Midnight Auto. 

Congress finds a new out

They are going to impeach Trump, or at least talk about it even if they lack the stones to actually do it.  This will tie Congress up for the rest of this year, and maybe a good slice of next year.  They won't deal with any of the things they ought to be dealing with.  Immigration, copyright and patent reform,  passing spending bills before the end of this fiscal year, dropping the magical 50 mpg CAFE standard, allowing import of medicines, eliminating boutique gasoline blends that make it illegal to ship gasoline from one state to another,  allowing sale of health insurance in all 50 states, shutting down the highway trust fund now that the interstate highway system is finished, and rolling back political correctness on campus.  And probably more stuff that escapes my memory right now.
   Not that Congress was doing any of these things, they have more fun trashing Trump.  And, now they have the impeachment thing to occupy all their time and energy.  The excuse this time is a telephone call between Trump and the newly elected president of Ukraine.  Apparently Trump mentioned young Hunter Biden drawing $50K salary PER MONTH, in Ukraine and maybe it should be looked into.  Congress has been running an investigation on TV all day talking about procedural issues, like which computer system the transcript was saved on.  Apparently there is not much in the way of actual wrongdoing or unethical conduct, so they talk about procedure. 

Global Warming according to the Economist

Got my new Economist in this morning's mail.  Cover is a clever climate graph, so clever that I had to read the article to understand the graph.  Anyhow the Economist graph shows global warming only starting in the 1990s and getting really hot in the 2010's.  .  Everything is cool  from the beginning of time (of graph) (1850) until the 1990's.   Trouble is, that is wrong.  NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has temperature records going back to the invention of the thermometer ( late 1600's).  I downloaded the records some years ago and graphed them out with Excel.  Global warming flattened out in the 1990s and has remainded flat to this day.  Dunno where the Economist got their data, but there is a publicly available database from a reasonably reliable institution that does not support the Economist's colorful cover graph. 

Things Detroit ought to do

   They ought to put an outside thermometer in every car.  They are not expensive, the sensor can be had for a couple of bucks.  And some software to read the sensor, scale the answer into degrees F, and display it on the digital dashboard.  Software is free. 
   They ought to give us back a dimmer knob for the dash lights.  My current car, a Buick, has a daylight sensor that looks for sunlight and when it fails to find any it figures it is nighttime and dims all the dash lights.  It gets things wrong, a lot.  Just pulling into a parking garage is enough to make it think its nighttime, and then it makes everything on the dash, the clock, the radio, all the instruments, too dim to read.  A good old fashioned knob that you turn by hand to set the brightness of the dash would be a blessing.
   They ought to make the digital dash readable.  Mine shows everything in a single tiny display which hides behind one of the spokes of the steering wheel.  It has 5 push buttons to select which is displayed, oil pressure, battery voltage, coolant temperature, mileage, fuel economy, etc, etc.  The display is so small I cannot read it wearing my driving glasses.  Better would be good old analog gauges, the kind with a needle in them, all on the dash all the time.  And mark the dials with green for normal operation and red for trouble.
   Then it would be nice if they made a sporty car that can be driven in snow.  The current sporty cars, Camaro, Mustang, Challenger, are so bad in snow that people laugh if you turn up with one at a ski resort.  Or for that matter just in Littleton NH, the locals figure anyone driving a sporty car is a flatlander.   

Let's not get cocky, but...

I think the Democrats have shown enough crazy at their debates that Trump will get himself re elected.  We don't want "medicare for all" sucking down $10 trillion tax dollars and we like our good private or company or union health plans.  We don't want Beto taking our AR15s away, Hell, we don't want Beto taking our Daisy BB guns away. We don't want to give up driving our cars, we want to keep out houses heated.  Fracking has done us a lot of good and we want to keep on doing it.  The whole Green Nude Ell thing sounds like returning to the Hiawatha live style.  Who wants to go thru a New Hampshire winter living in a teepee?
   Now what we need to do is keep control of the Senate and regain control of the House.  To which end we have four democrat Congresscritters from NH.  None of them has done anything good for NH since they got elected.  We ought to vote them all out of office.  Both reps and one senator are up for re election.   We have Republican candidates and we ought to get out and support them.  We have Don Bolduc running for US Senate against Jeanne Shaheen.  We have Steve Negron running for one house seat against Anne Kuster.  We need someone to run for the other House seat, against Chris Pappas.
   If we could get out the votes and send a Republican delegation to Congress next year, that would really get New Hampshire some good publicity.  And help get some action out of Congress. 

Thoughts on gun control

Gun control, every one’s favorite topic since all those terrible shootings in the last few weeks.  Democrats in Congress are all hot to pass new gun control laws, whether we need them or not.  Remember that Democrats have wanted to outlaw private ownership of firearms for many years now.  This looks like their opportunity. 

   They are pushing an “assault weapons ban”.  Trouble is, there is no difference between “assault rifles” and deer rifles.  In short, an “assault weapons ban” would become a ban on all guns.

   And then they talk about the “gun show loophole”.  I bought a gun at a gun show a while ago.  I, and everyone else, had to wait on the “instant background check” which took about an hour and a half.   Background checks are required at gun shows except for antique black powder guns.  

   And they are talking about toughening up the background checks.  Dunno just what that means, but I suspect it could get really ugly.

    The gun control people are saying that some guns, “military grade weapons”, “AR-15’s”, are more dangerous than other guns and we can make progress by banning the more dangerous guns, hence the push for an “assault weapons” ban.  This is wrong.  All guns are lethal.  Deer rifles are just as lethal as “assault rifles” In fact many states won’t allow deer hunting with AR-15’s, they don’t think the AR-15 is powerful enough to kill a deer cleanly. 

9/11 eighteen years ago.

Does not seem that long ago.  I was at work, Analog Devices in those days.  I brought our lab TV out into the main aisle so everyone could watch.  We were stunned.  I remember later all the vehicles driving around with American flags flying off them.
We do need to remember that we, Americans, have enemies out there that want to kill us all.  They got 3000 of us eighteen years ago. 

Effective new car advertisement

I was web surfing and I bumped into a Cadillac ad on The Hill.  Curious to see what the new Caddies look like, I clicked on it.  They have about 5 or 6 models.  Hard to tell them apart.  Models don’t have names anymore, just numbers, all starting with XT.  They have an XT4 and an AT5 and some other ones.  The only model that still has its name is Escalade, the big SUV.  Escalade was the only model that gave a price, horsepower, and some other info.  The other XT models just had photos, except for XT4 and XT6 which lacked photos entirely.  Stylists worked at giving all the XT models a family resemblance, they all have the same grille, and the same fore and aft creases in the sheet metal, the same nose down fanny up in the air look.  None of them have much of a trunk anymore.  Most of them are higher than traditional Caddies.

   Who ever put this ad together just googled for luxury cars and put the search results in the ad.  So right below the Caddy listing we have listings for all the competition, Lincoln, Mercedes, BMW and so on.  That’s not how I would do a Caddy ad.  

  I am an old Caddy owner.  Had a 99 Deville sedan once.  It was a nice car, lots of power, plenty of room, 27 mpg.  I ran it up to 140 K miles.  At that point the NH road salt finally managed to rust the entire rear axle off the car, and nobody wanted to fix that, so I traded it.  None of the new 2020 Caddies looked very attractive to my eye. 

Wall St Journal ranks US colleges.

The Journal ran a long piece today listing the top 500 US colleges.  I looked thru the list of names, looking for colleges that I and my family attended to see where they ranked today.  Looks like we all attended pretty highly ranked colleges.  

1 and 2.  Harvard and MIT.  I lived 9  years in Cambridge MA , used to rent to Harvard and MIT students,  walked both campuses, very scenic.
7     Brown University in Providence RI.  I applied there, many years ago.  Did not get in.
9     Cornell in Ithaca NY .  My cousin Andrew graduated there.
12   Johns Hopkins, Baltimore MD.  My daughter graduated there.  Majored in international relations, minored in Russian, both stood her in good stead when she did a 2 year tour with the Peace Corps in Kirghistan.  
15   Columbia NYC  My brother and his daughter (my niece) both graduated  there.
24   Wellesley, Wellesley MA.  My mother graduated there.
30   Tufts, Medford MA.  My sister in law graduated there.  Her older daughter, my other niece also graduated Tufts.
35    Middlebury, VT  my other brother graduated there.
91    Franklin and Marshall, Lancaster PA.  I graduated there.  BA in history
148  University of Delaware, Newark DE.  I graduated there with a BS in electrical engineering after my 6 year tour in USAF. 
176  St Olaf College, Northfield Minn.  My brother in law graduated there.
217  Drew University Madison, NJ.  My oldest son graduated there. Majored in theater.
237  Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY.  My youngest son graduated there, BS in Mechanical Engineering.