NH Budget

We should praise our New Hampshire legislators for passing a real balanced budget. Give them extra credit for getting the governor to go along with it. The new budget reduces state spending by 11.7% from last year. These are real cuts. Real cuts occur when the agencies get less money than they got last time. Fake cuts (popular in government circles) occur when the agencies get less than they asked for. This budget has real cuts.
Much angst has been raised among democrats about cuts to worthy programs. In the real world, there is never enough money to pay for all the worthy programs. The programs cut are all worthy programs, but we just do not have the money to pay for them. We will never have to money to pay for all the things that would be nice to have.
The state only has so much money. It can’t get any more without raising taxes. We taxpayers are paying too much right now. We are facing layoffs; cuts in hours worked; a dreadful job market; increased gasoline and furnace oil prices; and increased food prices. We don’t have any more money to give to the state.

Swiss bomb shelters

According to the Journal, Swiss building codes require all new residential construction to have a bomb shelter. And, said shelter is supposed to be hard enough to ride out a 12 megaton nuke at 700 meters. Damn, that's hard. I don't think missile silo's are that hard.
Now that the cold war is over the Swiss are debating relaxing the bomb shelter requirements...

Patent Law revision

The US House just passed a law to revise US patent law. The Senate has already passed it's own patent law, so after the House-Senate conference resolves the differences, it will go to Obama for signature.
Speaking as someone who worked in new product development for forty years, the US patent system is research and development hostile. Develop something, get it into production and bingo, get sued. There is always some patent troll holding a vaguely worded patent with claims as broad as all outdoors demanding money. Things like "Use of computer to transmit data", or "Register customer's sale after one mouse click."
These are mickey mouse patents that should never have been granted, but they were granted, and now some lawyers use them to take money away from developers.
What we need is to tighten up the granting of patents, and make it easier to revoke the mickey-mouse patents that are out there.
What are we going to get? More welfare for lawyers. They want to change the US system from "first to invent" to "first to file a patent". This is good for lawyers, 'cause it requires every inventor to file an expensive patent as early as possible. Right now you don't have to file until the idea shapes up to the point that it has some economic possibilities. Under "first-to-file" you better file as soon as possible, lest the idea leak out and some troll files first. Result, lots and lots of patent applications. Plus, large companies with legal staff have it easier filing a patent than a small startup does.

Right to Work is dead?

Or at least in terrible jeopardy. As you may or may not remember, House Speaker Bill O'Brian scheduled an over-ride-Lynch-veto vote last week. Then it slipped. Then the speaker announced that the vote would be postponed until September.
Today's Wall St Journal carried the story but added that right-to-work in NH was dead. The Journal quoted some legislators as saying "I have a lot of Republican cops and firemen in my district. I don't dare cross them on right-to-work cause they might go and vote democratic on me."
Too bad. Right to work would bring new industry to New Hampshire. Companies won't invest in a state that lacks a right to work law. That's why the right to work states have shown better growth, both economic and population, than closed union shop states.

Home sprinklers defeated

The nation's fire men have been pushing for installation of sprinkler systems in all new residential construction. They pushed hard enough to get a sprinkler requirement into the national fire code a few years ago.
This requirement would jack up the price of a new home by $5000 and bring you tasteful chrome sprinkler heads in the living room ceiling. Political pressure from home builders and ordinary citizens got the NH legislature to pass a bill forbidding cities and towns from requiring sprinklers in new residential construction. Our governor, Lynch, vetoed the bill a few days ago.
Fortunately, the legislature was able to over ride the governor's veto yesterday and New Hampshire homes can remain free of mandatory and expensive sprinkler systems.
Now if we can only find the votes to override Lynch's veto of right-to-work.

Does spending kill jobs?

No, according to a Wall St Journal op-ed by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor of economics. We have to take this with a grain of salt, Mr. Blinder's arguments are difficult to follow and are strewn with oddities.
For instance, "But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows." Mr. Blinder fails to understand that jobs must create wealth, not consume it. Farming, mining, manufacturing, logging create wealth. Bridges to nowhere consume wealth. Might as well just pile the money in a heap and burn it for all the good they do. Government make-work jobs are just welfare dressed up pretty.
Or, referring to the Obama Porkulus bill, "How in the world could all that spending, accompanied by tax cuts, fail to raise employment?" Good question Mr. Blinder, where did all that money go, leaving us with 9.1% unemployment? It is obvious to a Princeton economist that so much spending absolutely must raise employment. Perhaps Mr. Blinder is so wedded to Keynesian economic theory that he cannot bother to look at real data, like the unemployment rate
Then he makes a favorable reference to Paul Krugman. That is a bad sign. In my estimation, Krugman is an idiot, despite his Nobel prize in economics and his perch on the New York Times op-ed page.
Blinder sums things up by saying that we need spending and tax cuts to create jobs but cuts and tax hikes to balance the budget. He never mentions that economic growth ( which we don't have) will balance the budget. He then offers a tricky tax credit (aka tax loophole) to encourage hiring.
Mr. Blinder has just earned a spot on my personal idiots list.

Sunspots

Lotta talk on the internet about a solar something-or-other concerning sunspots, or rather the lack of them. Some in climate "science" are claiming that a sunspot drought will save us from Global Warming.
Doubtful. Sunspots have been observed for some 400 years. They wax and wane on an 11 year cycle, and they do effect high frequency (2-30 MHz) radio communication. During sunspot maximum radio amateurs can work stations all over the world. During sunspot minimum they may have trouble working a friend in the next town.
Needless to say, amateurs pay a good deal of attention to sunspots. Right now we are at sunspot minumum, and it's the lowest minimum on record. Like zero spots visible, and we are late coming out of it. We should have a lot more sunspots right now than we do. Based on this sunspot drought some people are predicting an abnormal sunspot cycle. This has happened before, and no reason to believe it won't happen again.
There is little reason to believe that sunspots have anything to do with Global Warming. No weatherman will say that sunspots effect the weather, and climate is just long term weather forecasting. The climate "scientists" will say almost anything, you gotta watch them carefully.
We have about 30 years of satellite data on "the solar constant", i.e. the amount of sunlight falling on the earth. The satellites show about 1350 watts per square meter. If you look hard at the plots of satellite data, you can see the 11 year sunspot cycle, it's about plus/minus 1 watt/sq meter, that's a variation of like 0.1%. Weathermen and most reasonable people feel that is way too small to make any difference in weather.
But expect to see a good deal of talk about it on slow news days.

Mouse Guns.

New issue of American Rifleman has a review of the Diamondback DB380 pistol. It's an automatic chambered for 380 ACP, polymer frame, six shots. Looks like a mini Glock, a pocket pistol.
Somewhere in the writeup they mention the DB380 had seven failures-to-feed while they were testing it. Wow! Four failures occurred with hollow point ammunition and 3 with round nose full metal jacket ammunition. This negates a common excuse for failure-to-feed in automatic pistols, hollow point ammunition. Looks like the DB380 has about as much trouble with full metal jacket as it does with hollow points.

The authors of the review suggest (but don't guarantee) that this might go away after shooting the gun in for a while longer.

Sounds like a good reason to get a .38 snub nosed revolver.

Obama and the War Powers Act Part 2

Meet the Press went over the matter just this morning. Funny thing, the Republicans on the panel were more supportive of the Libya war than the Democrats. The Republicans both said something like "We wish Obama would talk up the need for Libya to both voters and Congress men. It's something that needs doing, but Obama ain't doing it right." Which has to count as more supportive than the Democrats on the same panel nattering about War Powers.

Obama and the War Powers Act

Ya gotta wonder about Obama. Basic lesson from history, if you want to get in a war you need support from the voters and from Congress. Lack of such support doomed the Viet Nam war effort. Congress passed the War Powers Act to prevent a gung ho president from dragging the nation into another Viet Nam war.
So Obama decides to intervene in Libya without going to Congress and asking for support (in effect a declaration of war). Dumb move. We been bombing the crap out of Quaddafi for two months, and the bastard is since there. And now, Congress is making noises about War Powers and disapproval, and cutting off funding.
Obama should have gone to Congress two months ago and gotten a resolution that whackng Quadaffi is in the national interest. It would have passed, Quadaffi is scum who is better off dead. But now, Obama may be wrapped around the Congressional axle for lack of forethought.

So why did the Roman Empire Fall?

The perennial question of ancient history. Many historians have chimed in on this one. The empire was, at its peak, immensely strong. At the center of the empire was the Mediterranean Sea, offering water transport to and from all points. The empire controlled the entire shoreline of the Mediterranean, which for the first time in history, put down the pirates. Pirates are not suppressed in blue water encounters with naval vessels, they are suppressed by taking over their home ports. The empire was the first to profit from widespread sea trading. Water transport was so cheap that the city of Rome fed its people on grain imported from far away Egypt. So what laid the empire low?
Perhaps it was the lack of a succession mechanism. When the emperor died, a civil war often broke out to determine the next emperor. Nothing saps the strength of an empire like a civil war. In addition to the killing and the property damage, the survivors are likely to adopt a life long "keep your head down" attitude and contribute as little as possible to keeping things running.
Then there must have been technological diffusion. In Julius Caesar's time (first century BC) the legions were far superior to the Gauls and the Celts and everybody else. The Legions knew about marching in step, staying in ranks, obeying orders, and they had better weapons too. Caesar tells of Gauls having to drop back from the front line, lay their bent swords on the ground, and pull them straight again. The legionary gladius didn't have this problem, due to superior Roman smith craft.
By say 300 AD, this superior Roman technology must have diffused out into the wider world, and the legions found them selves fighting barbarians who were as good as they were. Some of this diffusion must have come from the Roman practice of enlisting barbarians to fill the ranks of the legions. After serving a 20 year enlistment, the retired veterans must have known everything there was to know about Roman military art. Plenty of them must have returned home to where ever and passed on what they had learned.
There are other reasons, such as failure of the Roman tax base, that have been widely discussed by historians, the notions of repeated succession crisis and technological diffusion are my own.

Can Boeing sell the V22 Osprey?

Apparently the US has bought about all the V22's it wants. To keep the Boeing production line open, and all the workers employed, Boeing is looking to sell the V22 tiltrotor to any foreign country with money. A lot of money, V22 is expensive. Much more expensive than helicopters.
According to Aviation Week, notes that "V-22's ship board accoutrements- including folding wings and electro magnetic hardening- account for nearly half the cost." Wow.
And "A particular headache for the V-22 has been engine on wing time, now averaging 100-200 hours in the harsh conditions of Afghanistan" Double wow. J-75 fighter plane engines gave 1000 hour service back in the 1960's.
Boeing has an expensive-to-buy and expensive-to-fly machine here. Good luck finding customers for it.

Protect electric power grid

Op ed piece in the Wall St Journal, decrying to failure of the government to "protect the electric grid" from hostile Chinese hackers.
Sorry, it is the responsibility of the power companies to protect their assets, not the government. All that is necessary is to make sure that control of generators and other machinery never goes over the public internet, and that Windows computers are never connected to the internet. They can even use cheap PC's so long as they run Linux and not Windows.
State public utility commissions should be asking their regulated power companies about use of the public internet.

There ougtha be a law

Against robo callers who ring your phone but fail to answer when you pick it up.

How GM sank, by Bob Lutz

Bob Lutz is a long time GM executive responsible for product development. He calls himself a "car guy", although the real GM car guy was Zora Arkos-Duntov the father of the Corvette. Lutz claims the bean counters are responsible. He describes what happened to Cadillac. Once upon a time Caddy was top of the line, best car out there. A new Caddy sold for maybe three times what a new Chevy sold for. Cost to manufacture a new Caddy was about the same as a new Chevy.
According to Lutz, GM decided to ramp up sales of Caddy, to sell more Caddies than Ford sold Lincolns. Production was increased, vast numbers of Caddies were sold to rent-a-car companies, who turned around and sold nice clean low mileage Caddies for less. Resale value of Caddy dropped, a lot, and used Caddies were so cheap anyone could and did buy them. People with money stopped buying new Caddies 'cause they were a dime a dozen, everybody had one. The lucrative new luxury car sales went to Mercedes and BMW.
Lesson not learned, a top of the line product has to be scarce, if you make to many of them, it stops being top of the line.
Then Lutz talks about Saturn. "despite some heroically mediocre cars there were at one time vast legions of happy Saturn owners." But Saturn was more than just a product, it was a whole car company with it's own engineering, personnel, dealership network, legal staff and so on. This massive overhead had to be paid for by the sales of just one compact car.
Lesson not learned, save money by consolidating the overhead operations.
This all comes from the Wall St Journal's excerpts of Bob Lutz's new book.

"We have turned this economy around"

The Democratic National Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, delivered this preposterous assertion on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday morning. This was too much for even the NBC moderator David Gregory, who called her on it, on air. It's so outrageous that Fox News is rerunning it today, just to make sure nobody misses it.
Either Debbie is totally clueless or she is deliberately lying. Either way it's a bad sign. How many other office holding democrats believe they have turned the economy around?

Quid Pro Quo.

The US needs, (or thinks it needs)to increase the national debt ceiling. Which we have hit. Treasury figures they run out of money beginning of August, say eight weeks.
Republicans are reluctant to do this. They are milling around, making ugly noises, but they haven't figured out what they want as a trade for raising the debt ceiling.
They could ask for ending farm subsidies, and abolishing the Agriculture Dept. They could ask for abolishing the Education Dept. They could ask for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. They could ask for tax reform. They could ask to abolish the EPA.
They ought to ask some damn thing...

We must be doing something right.

This website ranks NH first in freedom in the United States. What's no to like?

Greece, the debt bomb.

Apparently one of the things keeping the Greeks afloat, is the European Common Bank, who fears that a Greek default will crash some sucker banks that bought a lot of Greek bonds 'cause they liked the high interest rate. So the EU is trying to find support to loan the Greeks a wad of Euro's that the Greeks can use to pay off their bonds, which will save the sucker banks from big losses. In short, the ECB wants to transfer the losses from the sucker banks to the European taxpayers. There is a good deal of resistance to this idea among German taxpayers, and the resistance is rising daily.
Sooner of later something has got to give. The Greek government is still spending more than they take in taxes and covering the difference by borrowing. They owe something like 130% of GNP, which, to be real about it, they can never pay off. The EU bailout payments just push the day of reckoning into the future. Reportedly one IMF official uses the sound of a can being kicked down the road as his ringtone.
This is kinda like watching a bull fight, to see who gets gored first, the sucker banks or the taxpayers.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The news has been carrying stories of unprofessional conduct on the part of Obama appointed NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko. According to the Wall St Journal, Jaczko was appointed to kill off the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository. This was to make the Nevada greens happy and get them to vote Obama in 2008. Jaczko has been accused of various illegal and unethical actions by the NRC inspector general. The affair ought to be on TV this coming week as Congressional hearing get under way.
A couple of things one ought to know, that the MSM doesn't talk about.
First, the nuclear wastes, actually spend fuel rods from commercial power reactors, don't need a super expensive under mountain storage facility way out in the desert. Fuel rods removed from reactors are placed in pools of water (swimming pools essentially) on the reactor site. They are very happy there, and it's safe, and economical. They can stay there, just about forever.
Second, if we were to recycle the fuel rods, the problem would go away. The spent fuel rods are still 90% fissionable uranium. All that is necessary is to remove the 10% fission products and you have most of a new fuel rod, ready to go on producing more electricity. Most other nuclear countries recycle their fuel rods.
What we really have here is a political contest between the greenies who want to shut down nuclear power generation, and the NIMBY's who don't want Yucca Mountain to open up in their state.

Simvastatin will kill me?

NHPR got my attention this morning when it ran a piece about the FDA bashing the anti cholesterol drug Simvastatin. I happen to be on Simvastatin, so that story struck right home. The FDA spokeman was strongly against use of Simvastatin and said it should have been taken off the market years ago. There are many other drugs that are better. Well, yes there are, namely Lipitor. Trouble is, Lipitor costs $3 a pill, Simvastatin costs $0.13 a pill at Walmart.
So I googled to find out what is going on. FDA ran a big study, 6000 people using the big 80 mg dose of Simvastatin and 6000 people using the smaller 20 mg dose. Less than 1 percent of the 80 Mg users came down with a rare muscle ailment that I never heard of. Less than 0.1 percent of users of the smaller 20 mg dose suffered from the same ailment. Well, that's statistically significant. The FDA gave no information linking the difference in risk to the drug, as opposed to underlying conditions in the patient. Patients taking the 80mg dose are doing it 'cause their cholesterol counts were higher and needed a stronger dose of Simvastatin to control it. Could be that patients with higher cholesterol counts are more vulnerable to the rare muscle ailment, but we will ignore that.
Checking my medicine cabinet I find I'm taking the 40 mg dose, not the 80 mg dose, so I'm OK there. Plus, rare muscle ailment usually strikes within a year of starting Simvastatin and I've been on it for longer than that.

CEO of Government Motors calls for gas tax hike

Story is here. Aren't you glad to have your tax dollars bail out this company? Also note the comments on this article, most of them are in favor of the proposed gas tax hike.

Pilot Error

Last year Air France flight 447 disappeared over the south Atlantic. No distress calls, just gone. After a year long search of deep sea bottom, the wreck was located and the flight recorders were recovered from 10,000 feet. They must build 'em right cause after a year on the bottom of the ocean, they still work.
The flight recorders reveal that the aircraft, cruising at 38 thousand feet, had the autopilot suddenly trip off line, leaving the pilot[s] to hand fly the aircraft. This they failed to do. The aircraft went nose up and stalled. And stayed stalled, the pilots never pushed the stick forward to put the nose down, gain airspeed and fly out of the stall. The stall warning horn went off, but the aircrew failed to put the stick forward. The aircraft, stalled, fell from 38 thousand feet (seven miles high) and hit the sea.
This is really hard to believe, 'cause everyone knows about stalls, and everyone knows you push the stick forward to recover from a stall. There were three pilots on the flight deck, and not one of them came up with the right answer.
Contributing factor to the accident, the pitot tube iced up, which caused the indicated airspeed to drop to 60 knots. This is why the autopilot dropped off line, it is smart enough to know that the plane won't fly at 60 knots, something must be wrong, and it wanted the pilot to take over. Unfortunately the pilots could not fly the aircraft either.

Cybertage, large scale

Aviation Week has a couple of dramatic pictures. The first shows the new power room of the Shushenskaya hydro electric plant. Huge, slightly curved room, big windows, spotless concrete floor with eight turbines neatly set out.
Second photo shows the same room after the accident, the place is wrecked, concrete floor torn apart, turbines and generators ripped apart and hurled into corners.
How did this happen? A plant employee used a network to remotely and accidentally activate an unused turbine with a few errant keystrokes. This created a water hammer that flooded and then destroyed the plant and killed dozens of workers. This happened back in 2009 in Siberia.
The obvious conclusion is that cyber hackers could make the same thing happen deliberately.
Which is why control of electric power generators should NEVER be done over the public internet, and should NEVER rely upon Windows computers.

Ads slowing the net

I click on a web site, and wait, and wait. Firefox flashes up a running display of all the websites visited on the way to the blog I clicked on. All ad sites. I gotta wait for all the ads to load before I get to see the content I cared about.
There is an opening here, for a web site to claim faster than the average site. All it has to do is display content first and ads second.

Development cost at SpaceX one tenth of NASA.

Aviation Week says SpaceX developed and launched the Falcon 9 heavy lift rocket booster for $390 million. For comparison NASA used the NASA-Air Force Cost Model computer program to estimate the same job and found the computer estimated cost to be $4000 million, ten times as much. The cost savings are attributed to SpaceX program management technique.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden said "They don't spread things all over the country the way that NASA and defense contractors tend to do. They're very focused in two locations in the country. They bring everything in-house. They have no subcontractors, so everything comes to them."
NASA post Shuttle plans are up in the air. They ought to just purchase the Falcon 9 off-the-shelf to boost crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Congress wants NASA to develop their own heavy lift booster to keep the vast Shuttle workforce employed. The Obama administration wanted to drop the NASA heavy lifter development and concentrate on deep space missions. So far the three sides have not agreed on a policy, so things are just drifting. Meanwhile the US is paying the Russians something like $25 million a ticket to take US astronauts up to the International Space Station.

Robert Gates gives a farewell address

Gates, the out going defense secretary made a few remarks, reported upon
here
He bemoaned the Pentagon procurement system but without offering either an explanation of what is wrong with it, let alone how to fix it. This is unfortunate, so I will attempt to lay out the real procurement problem, gold plating.
Gold plating is the tendency to specify the platforms be equipped every new gadget imaginable, kinda like ordering a new car fully loaded. Take an example from ancient history, the C-5 transport plane. This design goes back to the 1960's. At base, the C-5 was to be the biggest transport that could fly using then new and much more powerful jet engines. It had double the engine power of the contemporary C-141 which yielded a whale of a plane. Flying cargo, including big cargo, to and from real airports (ones with concrete runways) it would have been a very useful machine to have.
It was the first transport aircraft big enough to actually get off the ground carrying a real Army tank, not a light weight "airborne" tank, but a main battle tank, the M1 Abrams. The Army was overjoyed, and began to have visions of future air assaults. The paratroops jump in, capture some bean patch behind enemy lines, then the C-5's swoop in and unload the tanks. Presto, you have a real armored division operating at some strategic spot with complete tactical surprise. Trouble is, landing a whale of an airplane, with a 50 ton tank inside it, on dirt runway doesn't really work. The wheels sink in and the whale is stuck, and blocking the runway. Nothing, not even a tank, is going to tow a stuck C-5 anywhere. It might tear the nose gear off, but it won't move the C-5. Or die hard enemy defenders drop a mortar round on the C-5 as it's unloading and again you have the runway blocked with a blazing and unmovable whale.
To support the "land on dirt runway" requirement, the C-5 was equipped with a fantastic landing gear of 28 wheels. Truly ingenious design solved the problem of retracting this forest of wheels. To go with the 28 wheels, it needed 28 disc brakes, 28 anti skid sensors and an anti skid control box smart enough to figure out which wheel[s] needed less brake pressure and which needed more. I watched a C-5 land at Altus AFB back in the '70's. Touchdown was smooth, followed by flying rubber as some tires blew. At debriefing the aircrew said "Fairly normal landing, we only blew three tires". Antiskid had managed to lock up some of the wheels, and sliding the locked tires along the concrete runway wore right thru the tread.
Then came the requirement for "truck bed loading height", which means having the cargo deck at the height of an ordinary Army truck so cargo pallets could slide off the C-5 onto a truck, no forklift required. Sounds benign. Trouble is, after you get a huge plane that low to the ground, you cannot rotate for takeoff because the tail scrapes on the runway. To solve this problem, the fantastic landing gear was redesigned to "kneel", lowering the entire C-5 to the ground, and then later, jacking the whole plane up high enough to take off.
Then they added a "Maintenance Data Computer" which didn't do much, an unnecessary nose loading door to go with the tail loading door, and a bunch of other stuff that I no longer remember at this remove in time.
Now the C-5 had all the stuff everyone wanted in it. But adding stuff made the plane heavy, heavier than the specification allowed. Lockheed was driven to incredible lengths to trim the weight down to meet spec. This included making the brake rotors (all 28 of them) out of beryllium. Beryllium costs more than gold. When everything else failed, Lockheed made the aluminum skin thinner. This would have fateful consequences later in the C-5's life.
The contract was "firm fixed fee" for a an initial production run (Run A) of 52 C-5's. Lockheed lost barrels of money on each plane it built. When it came time for a contract for the next 52 airplanes (Run B) Lockheed held out for a price that let them earn a little money on each plane. That price was stiff. So stiff that one Air Force general said "I'll haul the troops in gooney birds before I pay that kind of money". His view prevailed, there was no Run B. The 52 C-5's of Run A were all there ever were. They are still flying.
Lessons that should have been learned. Don't specify things that aren't absolutely necessary to accomplish the primary mission. The C-5 was good at moving vast amounts of stuff to and from real airports. Spec'ing in dirt field operation and truck bed loading turned a good airplane into a hangar queen, and sent the cost thru the roof.
These lessons probably have not been learned to this day.

Why it's nice to get home from a trip

Reason 1. A good night's sleep, with cool breeze flowing thru the open window and no roar of city buses or warbling beeping car alarms. Sleeping in DC or Brooklyn is hot and airless, you are wet with sweat in the morning. Before air conditioning, Washington DC was considered a hardship post by diplomats. I agree with that.

Reason 2. The grass was on the warpath. I cut it just before I left, but given a week unmowed it was 6 inches tall. Give it another couple of days and it would have been too tall for the mower. May is grass growing month.

Reason 3. Aid and succor to Stupid Beast. I left the cat with a niece to Cat's dismay. Niece had a 2 year old, a newborn, two strange humans and a beagle. Cat was demoted from being The Cat to just another pet. Plus she is a very conservative cat, disliking pick up's, laps, riding in cars, and new people. Faced with a household of picker uppers, petters, and strangers was a trial. She lost weight, going from a tubby 20 pounds down to a shapely 16 pounds.
Cat was overjoyed to get back to the regular house, the familiar rugs and furniture. She started purring immediately and remained grateful for all of two hours after coming home.

The Night of the Living Car Alarms

Spent the night in Brooklyn, on the way home to God's Country. It was warm, (actually it was damn hot) we had the windows open, hoping for a breath of air. All night long it went, beep beep beep, dong, dong, dong, one damn car alarm after another. No sooner than one would shut up, the next would go off. Loud and louder. Pain in the tail.

Mufflers for city buses

Been staying at daughter's place in DC, right off 14th St. It's noisy from the traffic. The cars are quiet, with only a slight hiss from the tires. The city buses are humungously loud, all from engine exhaust noise that a decent muffler would silence. Your car needs a decent muffler to get an inspection sticker. Cities would be pleasanter places if the inspectors got as tough on the buses as they are on private motor vehicles.

Rand Paul Takes 2nd place in NH.

Read the headline here. This is true but somewhat misleading. Mitt Romney was first with 32% and Paul had only 9 percent. A more honest headline might have been "Romney increases lead in GOP primary."
Could it be the writer is pro Rand Paul?

More museum pieces

The Smithsonian has a huge hanger full of airplanes out at Dulles Airport. All the stuff that won't fit in down at the mall is packed in here. They have a space shuttle, an SR 71, the first Boeing 707, a P38 Lightening, a P40 Warhawk, an F105 Thunderchief, a couple of Migs, a SPAD, a super Constellation, a Boeing 307, and some incredible German planes from WWII. There are nearly 200 planes inside the place. If you are a plane buff you have to see this one.
They have a really strange German fighter with two engines, one in the nose and one in the tail. Each engine had 2000 hp, so the plane was pretty hot for a piston engined job. I'd read about that one, but never seen one, apparently the Smithsonian has the only one to survive WWII.
They also had a F35, the brand new joint strike fighter that is so new it isn't even in squadron service yet. Plane becomes a museum piece before it becomes operational.

Museum pieces

We (son and I) did the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The air conditioning is nice. They had a lot of neat old things like antique vacuum cleaners, early electric motors and generators, steam engines, cars. No planes, those are all over at Air and Space. The curators must be on a super greenie tear. No lights in a lot of cases making it impossible to see the stuff in the case and/or read the tags. Surely the US of A can afford the electricity to light museum cases.
The curators also have a bit of trouble writing tags. They have a groovy old telescope hanging from the ceiling. It's all polished hardwood and brass, about 15 feet long. The tag talks about Maria somebody-or-other famous woman astronomer who used this gadget at Vassar and is credited with discovering a comet. Didn't bother to say if the telescope was a reflector or a refractor, how big the mirror or lens was, how it was aimed and tracked, whether it could do photography. We learned a lot about lady astronomer Dr. Maria somebody-or-other of Vasser but little about the telescope hanging from the ceiling. Maybe they should have had her hanging from the ceiling, properly stuffed of course.
Then it can make you feel old. In the electric gadget display they had a pair of electric socks. I can remember when my father gave my mother just such a set of battery powered socks. In the GM sponsored automobile display they had some classics, including our old family car, an '88 Dodge Caravan. 22 year old son commented that it made him feel old to see the family car in a museum.

When he got there the conductor told him

One more nickel. Charlie couldn't get offa that train. Had to use the super modern electronic fare systems on both the New York and the DC subway. What a pain. The machines don't make change, they have a tendency to take your money and not issue a ticket, they break down a lot causing long lines.
And, they keep the change. I had to feed the machine with a $5 each time. The actual fare is supposed to be $4.50, but the system keeps the fifty cent change. I don't get it back. Nice little fare hike.

Back on the air?

Blogger just suffered another whoopsie. I have not been able to log in to post to my blog since Tuesday. One of the blogger support sites http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif said they were working on it. After waiting a day or two I did some more web surfing and it was suggested to clear my cookies. Which I did from within Firefox. Try Tools->Options->Privacy and do clear all cookies. That let me log into blogger.
I would have dug into the matter earlier, except that Blogger died earlier this month and it took some days before it came back to life. I figured this was more of the same. Plus I'm traveling and don't get to blog all the time. Anyhow I'm thinking about getting my very own URL and blogging from there. I've been using blogger 'cause it's easy to get going, and it used to be reliable. After two outages in one month, Blogger is looking much less reliable.

Becoming a Veteran Parent

With the college graduation of my youngest child yesterday, I become a true veteran parent, one who has raised 'em,loved 'em, and gotten 'em all thru college. I done my duty and now I can relax. Whew.
Graduation from Brooklyn Poly Tech was not held on campus, instead we subwayed down to the Lincoln center at 66th street, an hour ride each way. And very few seats. We only got two tickets, so Mom and Dad went; siblings, uncles, and aunts had to watch it on U-Tube.
The graduates at this engineering school all had names like Gupta, Patel, Wang, Lee,and Nguyen. Very few Smiths, Jones, Clarks, or Johnsons. Operation of America's industry will be in the hands of the children of recent immigrants. Children of the older Anglo Saxon families are not bothering to learn engineering. Let's hope they can find jobs in this economy.

So here I am in Brooklyn

Youngest son is graduating tommorrow from Brooklyn Polytech. I drove down. Spring has just barely taken hold in the up country, but down in the lust lowlands, it has arrived. I took in the Connecticut Trolley Museum on the way, to break the 7 hour drive. The Trolley's have a parking problem, the place was all parked up and people were parked up and down the road. The local cops were running around threatening to tow every single car. I wound up parked at a strip mall a mile away and took a shuttle bus. The Trolleys had one vintage open seat car in like new condition, varnished wood gleaming, brass polished, paint bright, and giving rides. And a half a dozen fixer-uppers in the car barn. I took some pix and then pressed on. Gas is $4.25 in Connecticut, up from $3.89 in the northwoods. Took the Hutchison River Pkwy all the way to the Whitestone bridge. Traffic backed up on the Whitestone tolls and remained back all the way to Brooklyn. One good reason to retire to New Hampshire.

The Massey Mine explosion

Massey Energy Company's big branch mine in West Virginia suffered a massive explosion that killed more than 20 miners and destroyed the entire mine. This was about a year ago. Massive finger pointing ensued. Miners, the union, and the mine regulators blamed the company, the company claimed it was an unforeseen act of God.
Yesterday a blue ribbon panel appointed by the state governor issued a report. NHPR offered an unsatisfactory summary, a few sound bites, and no meat. We want to know what specific act[s] of omission or commission caused the disaster, and the NHPR summary said nothing substantive. I did a bit of web searching and was unable to find much better.
There ought to be regulations about gas alarms and mine ventilation. Was Massey in compliance with those regulations? Are the existing regulations stiff enough? Inquiring minds want to know.
Statements like "The company put production ahead of safety" tell us nothing, they are just partisan sound bites.

"Dialogue"

Obama was giving his daily speech, this time at the State Department. He explained that the entire secret of fixing the Bahrain problem was "dialogue". The audience of cookie pushers gave him a big hand for that one.
Too bad so many people believe in "dialogue". Talking only works when the two sides have something in common that they wish to preserve. When the sides hate each other's guts, and have like or nothing in common, remember old Otto von Bismarck.
"Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood."

Herman Cain polls FIRST in Iowa

The headline says it all. Article here. I like Cain.

UAV or manned aircraft?

Aviation Week has a nice cover story on the AT-6, a newish light fighter. It's a single engine two place turboprop that looks pretty much like the classic WWII P51 Mustang. Such an aircraft is much cheaper and has better loiter time than a pure jet. So long as it never encounters enemy jet fighters, it's good cheap air support for your ground forces.
The Aviation Week article doesn't talk much about those issues. They do a lot of talking about the "network centric" features that allow rapid data transfer. Not that I would buy a fighter plane to do rapid data transfer, I buy fighter planes to put ordnance on target. Then they enthused about the "intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance" (ISR) capabilities, in simple words you can load camera pods on the wings and do photo recon with it. That's nice, and versatile and all, but that's not the reason I buy fighter planes.
Then they opine that something like this can be superior to UAV's, which is true. Two sets of eyes in a cockpit is better at spotting ground targets than any amount of camera pods.

America's Most Wanted List

With the recent unlamented demise of Osama Bin Ladin, the FBI's ten most wanted list got updated, according to the Wall St Journal. The top slots are filled with Islamic terrorists, but the last slot is Daniel Andreas San Diego. Mr. Diego is a US citizen and is wanted for animal rights terrorism. He is accused of bombing two companies, Chiron a vaccine maker, and Shaklee a maker of vitamins and shampoo. Mr. Diego objects to the use of animals in testing their products.
Does this mean that animal rights terrorists are the next bad guys, after we deal with Al Quada?
How tough can animal rights terrorists be, compared to Al Quada? Could this be the famous light at the end of the tunnel?

Natural Gas to power trucks.

Article on same in today's Wall St Journal. T Boone Pickens and the natural gas industry want a federal subsidy for the purchase of natural gas burning trucks. United Parcel just purchased 48 tractors (the engine and driver part of an 18 wheeler). The standard diesel version costs $95,000, the natural gas burning version costs $195,000. UPS managed to wangle a $4 million dollar subsidy from Uncle Sam to defray expenses. They also said the company won't buy any more natural gas burners without more subsidy.
Some thing is wrong here. A natural gas burning engine is about the same as a diesel engine. It should cost about the same to make. I can see paying a little extra, say 10%, but paying twice as much is a rip off. If we should be so stupid as to put in a subsidy, we will be subsidizing rip off artists.
Natural gas is cheap compared to diesel fuel, like half the price. For an 18 wheeler, which gets 6 miles per gallon, and does a lotta driving, natural gas will save money, assuming you don't get ripped off buying the truck in the first place. Subsidies are not required.

Words of the Weasel. Pt 19

I saw this on Congress.org

By Frances Symes

"Tax expenditures are revenue losses attributable to provisions of tax law that allow for special exclusion, exemption, or deduction or provide for a special credit or deferral of tax liability. The associated loss in revenue totals is estimated as equaling around $1 trillion each year."

Not so. "Tax expenditure" is democrat-speak for the amount of money that could be raised if they hiked taxes.

Alternate Energy at Mittersill.

Sounds better than just stacking firewood doesn't it. Here we have a full cord dumped on the lawn. I could have paid K&K Brooks, my wood supplier, to stack it, but I'm cheap, and the exercise is good for me.




Here we are half way done. I can hear the grass rejoicing as each piece of firewood is lifted off, allowing the grass to straighten up and see the sun. For all that work, the pile doesn't look much smaller does it?



All done. Only took me three days, counting Sunday which rained all day so I didn't stack much. That will keep the fireplace burning for the next two winters. It's green, but it has the rest of the year to season, it will burn OK by Christmas and burn really well next winter.
By the way, Blogger kinda sucks at placing photos and text. It insists on putting the text next to the wrong photographs. Sorry about that.

The world oil market is a futures market.

We have countless democratic pundits on the air, in the media, claiming that increased oil drilling in the US won't bring down gasoline prices. They say it will take too long to bring new production on line, and there won't be enough of it, and oh dear oh dear we will just have to tough out $4 a gallon gasoline.
This is all malarkey. The oil market is a futures market. Users of oil (refiners mostly) sign deals to take delivery of oil from producers. The price they agree upon is based on what they think the price will be in the future. If they think prices are going up, they will pay a little more to get their needed crude. If they think prices might be going down, they will postpone signing a deal, hoping for a better price next week.
Should the market become convinced that the Americans are serious about bringing new oil to market, the price will fall. Obama made a speech the other day promising to increase production. Trouble is, nobody really believes him. The market figures Obama is just talking to make political points. They think Obama is too deep in hock to the greenies, who hate production of damn near anything, to actually do anything to increase oil production.
As for timely, the industry could get production from the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" (ANWR) flowing down the Alaska pipeline in less than 12 months. The much ballyhooed ANWR is just another piece of frozen tundra above the Arctic circle. There is a zillion square miles of tundra up there. We will never run out of frozen tundra.

Morning at the shooting range

Finally got out to shoot my new rifle. Put the Marlin 30-30, targets, ammunition, tape measure, patching tape and binoculars into the car and drove out to the range. Weather was flaky, threatening rain, but it didn't. I set the target up 100 yards out. Doesn't seem like very far, but upon returning to the firing position, that target looked awfully small.
The Marlin, a classic from the 1950's, has an action smooth as glass, and a beautiful even trigger pull. This is the first time I've shot centerfire rifle since training for Viet Nam back in 1967. I squeezed off a string and then peered down range thru the binoculars. No luck, my eyes cannot see bullet holes at 100 yards even with 7 power binoculars. So I walk down range and take a look. Not too shabby. All the rounds are high, but inside the target, grouped inside a 7 inch circle. So I adjust the sights one notch and try again. Must have been the wrong way, the string goes clean over the target. Zero holes. So, I adjust the sight one notch the other way, try again, and I get a 4 inch group, a little high, a little right, but inside the target. And this with iron sights.
The Marlin has impressive report and a solid recoil. 30-30 is clearly enough cartridge to deal with anything I'm ever going to encounter in New Hampshire. The gun buffs don't say much about 30-30, 'cause it is so established, and what's to say about it? I looked up the ballistics, 30-30 isn't as powerful as the WWII rifle cartridges like 30-06, but it is a good deal more powerful than the ammo used by modern assault rifles like the M16 and the AK47.
After burning thru $30 worth of brand new 30-30 ammunition I switched guns, tried out my Ruger 10/22 on same target. My first try gets a 9 inch group and my second a 13 inch group. Net result, I can shoot the heavier 30-30 somewhat better than I can 22. Might be the shorter barrel on the Ruger, might be the heavier trigger pull on the Ruger. The Ruger trigger is smooth but heavier than it might be. Might also be after a couple of hours on the range I'm getting tired.
So, better luck next time. I still have two rifles, lying on the kitchen table, needing cleaning.

Words of the Weasel Part XVII

Subsidy. Sen Chuckie Schumer uses subsidy where he should say "tax break". There is a difference. A subsidy is a cash payment from Uncle Sam to a favored industry. It can be spent, on inventory, wages, rent, tooling. It's real money. A tax break is different. It only pays off after the industry makes money. You cannot buy stuff with a tax break, you have to earn real money first.
Of course Chuckie knows this, he uses subsidy because it sounds worse. He's manufacturing a sound bite.

Global Warming caused Mississippi floods

At least that's what NPR was pushing this afternoon. This isn't true, the Mississippi has been flooding in springtime since the end of the last ice age. This one river drains the entire center of North America, of course it's going to flood from the spring snowmelt. This year's floods are much worse than usual, about as bad as 1937. The floods work terrible hardships upon the people living along the river.
I find it distasteful to hear NPR pundits using this disaster to push their narrow political agenda. After blaming global warming they moved on to blame federal funding cuts, something about a single weather satellite not getting replaced on schedule. Talk about single issue politics.

Are we back on the air?

And, my last, terrible witty post seems to have vanished, at least for now.