Solar Power

Sunstorms, sudden solar flares, jets of ions swirling past the earth at relativistic speeds.  They pile into the earth's geomagnetic field and make it move.  The resulting moving magnetic fields induce humungous currents into the the electric power grid, transformers melt, circuit breakers pop, and the lights go out and stay out.  This horror story made today's Wall St Journal.  Page three, not the front page. 
   Oh really?  The power grid is harder and tougher than it used to be.  Back when I was a child, lightning from ordinary summer thunder storms put the lights out on a regular basis.  That doesn't happen anymore.  Only thing that puts the lights out now-a-days is a tree falling on the wires and breaking them.  The grid is hardened against lightning bolts (no mean feat).  And, it is hardened against over-current, otherwise known as short circuits. It has to be.  Plenty of ordinary accidents will short hot circuits to ground.  The resulting currents can melt expensive and hard to replace equipment in milliseconds.  To preserve such equipment, overcurrent protection devices sense excessive current and can switch expensive alternators and transformers off line faster than short circuit currents can melt them.  This sort of equipment is composed of tons of solid iron and copper and it takes time to heat that much metal hot enough to endanger the electrical  insulation, let alone melt metal.
   Granted, there have been scary solar events in the past.  The 1859 Carrington event caused the new fangled electric telegraph wires to shower sparks into telegraph offices across the world.  Impressed the bejesus out of the operators.  We have never seen a solar storm that strong since. In 1989 the province of Quebec suffered a blackout that was blamed upon a solar storm.  However no important equipment was damaged and the lights came back on within 9 hours.    
  

Trip to Harvard Square

Favorite Daughter  and her boyfriend came up to Boston to attend her high school reunion.  I drove down to spend a day in Harvard Square with them.   Going south thru Franconia Notch we have a repaving project in full swing, spending money.  That road was in fine condition, no potholes, before they started repaving it.  It's nice to have spare money to give to road contractors.  Then drove thru the road widening project on I93 south of Manchester.  That bit of four lane highway has been a pain-in-the-tail bottleneck for at least 25  years.  About a third of it is "widened" .  Except that the "widened" portions are still only four lanes wide.  Granted the lanes and shoulders are wider and the curves are gentler,  but we really needed to get six lanes in return for spending all that money. 
   Picked up Daughter and boyfriend and did both the Museum of Science and Harvard Square, both old sentimental favorite places for Father and Daughter.  Virginia bred boy friend was OK with them.  Wound up drinking Ballentine Ale at Charlie's Kitchen (about the oldest joint left in Harvard Square)  and telling stories.  Good time was had by all.

Words of the Weasel, Part 28

"Evolve".  We used to say "flip flop".

Congressmen need to "get things done"

This from John Hoeven (R-NorthDakota) on C-span.  We have to get things done.  The two things he wants to get done are the transportation bill and the farm bill.  Both of these are pure pork. We could dump them both and save $30-50 billion, just this year. None of this ten year savings baloney, we could save $40-50 billion THIS YEAR.
  The transportation bill sends maybe $15 billion a year of federal gasoline tax money to the 50 states for road building and commuter rail projects.  Better to let the states fund just the projects they need.  Let the federal gas tax expire. If the states need more money, let them raise the state gas tax.  We would be better off with out a federal transportation bill.
   And we would be better off without a farm bill.  Maybe family farmers needed federal price supports back during the Great Depression, but  not anymore.  Farms are mostly run by corporations like Archer Daniel Midlands, and corporations don't need subsidies.  Plus, why should farmers get federal payouts?  Why not retailers and manufacturers and loggers and miners and telephone companies and airlines and truckers and everyone else in the country?  Why should farmers get something that nobody else gets. 

   With luck, a bunch of new Congressmen will turn up in Washington and refuse to "get things done".

AdvertisementFail 2

TV commercial now running.  Woman comes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.  Inside is solid ice.  Solid ice fills the door trays, the shelves, everything.  The woman, barefoot and dressed in a filmy nightgown, takes a broom handle and starts chipping ice out of the the middle refrigerator shelf.  If the lighting had been a little better we could have seen thru the filmy nightgown. 
   Ah, this is an ad for frost free refrigerators.
   Wrong, they are selling jugged ice tea. 

Meet the Press does gay marriage

David Gregory assembled a fine panel of lefty newsies and they talked about gay marriage this morning, Obama and gay marriage, gays and gay marriage, never heard so much talk about gay marriage.
  Does anyone (voters in particular) really care?  Especially as marriage is a matter of state law anyhow? The president doesn't have much control.  Unless he wanted to lead a crusade to amend the Constitution.  Which probably would fail, cause Constitutional amendments need a super majority which just ain't there this year. States are split on it, some have recently legalized it, others (North Carolina!) have recently outlawed it.
   This voter cares about jobs, the economy, and the deficit.  Gay marriage is a distraction from the important issues.  

JP Morgan takes a hit

On Friday  Jamie Dimon, honcho of JP Morgan Bank, admitted to taking  a $2 billion dollar loss.  That's quite a chunk of change.  The Washington regulators, itching to take control of all banks, are howling for yet more regulation to go on top of Dodd-Frank.
  Why?  You would think loosing $2 billion would sting anyone hard enough to prevent them ever doing it again.  Why turn our banks over to the tender mercies of federal bureaucrats?  Anyone think bureaucrats are smarter or more honest than bankers?
   Still secret, is just how Morgan lost all that money.  Presumably they were buying and selling things, and the price moved against them.  Either things they bought dropped in price, or things they sold short rose in price.  But we don't know what those things were.  Stocks? Bonds?  Greek bonds? derivatives?  credit default swaps?  Mortgage backed securities? Sub prime mortgages? something else? 
    Jamie Dimon turned up on Meet the Press this morning talking about it.  He admitted to still being a democrat, which made me wonder about his judgement.  David Gregory was too clueless to ask Mr. Dimon just what things Morgan bank took that loss in.
   Then Gregory turned the show over to some regulators who urged a total take over of banking "to prevent systemic risk".
    By which, they probably mean the risk of a huge bank failing and tipping the economy into depression.  That happened in 1929 and again in 2007.  In 1929 Keynes had not published yet, and the Federal Reserve and the rest of the government let the stock market crash unhindered.  In 2007  the government rushed in, spent $1 trillion to support the losing players, and the market still crashed and we haven't gotten out of Great Depression 2.0 yet. 
   If you really think this is a problem, the answer is simply to break up the biggest banks into smaller banks.  Pass a law saying that the big banks have to pay extra taxes.  Pretty soon all the big banks will spin off enough divisions to make themselves small enough to become virtuous small banks exempt from the extra tax.

Avengers

Went to see it last night.  The Jax Jr theater was pretty full even though this is the second weekend the Avengers has been in town.  For a Marvel Comic movie, it's not bad.  There are some good bits, like the incredible Hulk grabbing the snooty villain by the shirtfront and proceeding to pound him into the floor, wham , wham,. wham.   SHIELD's  flying base looks pretty good when making like a naval air craft carrier and floating in the ocean.  Then the lift fans turn on, water cascades over the hull and the whole thing becomes airborne.  So far pretty convincing.  Then the bad guys attack at 30,000 feet and blow off one of the four lift fans.  You would expect the thing to list into the missing fan, but it doesn't.  The 3-D is OK and it runs for a couple of hours. 
  Not bad, better than the Fantastic Four movies, but I'm not sure why it broke box office records on opening week.  It didn't seem THAT good to me. 

Downton Abbey At the beginning

I missed the early episodes on cable, but trusty Netflix just delivered a DVD with the first two episodes.  I watched one last night.  Pretty good.  Great sets, costumes, scenery.  Mediocre sound recording.  Dialog from a number of characters was unintelligible to me, due to mumbling mixed with strong Brit accents.  Makes the story hard to follow when you can't follow the dialog.   Some plot points totally obscure.  The Grantham's, or perhaps the Abbey, are burdened with "entaille"  some kind of medieval legal deal that causes unhappiness, gets talked about a lot, but I have no idea what it actually means.  Mary Grantham has an unsuccessful date with a young Duke of somewhere-or-other.  Lots of footage of the couple tiptoeing around the third floor servant's quarters in the Abbey, for reasons unkown, unless the Duke is looking for a spare room to have sex in.  Which seems out of character for 1912 upper crust Brits.  The romance doesn't work out, the Duke leaves early, to the annoyance of Earl Grantham, but the reasons for the breakup remain obscure to this Yankee viewer.  Doesn't seem to bother Mary too much. 

Hobbit Movie to play at 48 frames/sec

Way back when, say Thomas Edison's time, movies were taken at quite low frame rates, as low as 12 frames/sec.  That's what made the real oldies move funny.  You must have seen Charlie Chaplin walking funny.  The movie film back then was slow, insensitive to light, and needed a 1/12 second exposure time to get a good image.  By the late 1920's Kodak had improved the film, and the movie makers had improved the lighting and frame rate standardized at 24 frame/sec for theater grade movies.  You need standardization because the same movie is played at thousands of different theaters, each with its own movie projector.  All those projectors need to run at the same speed unless you want the movie to run too fast or too slow as it moves from place to place.  
   The eye is a biochemical device, and by electronic standards, it is slow.  It takes many milliseconds for an image to fade away.  If a fresh image is flipped up on the screen before the old image fades from view the eye sees it as a continuous image.  It was found by experimentation, that if the movies ran at 48 frames/sec  a smooth flicker free movie resulted.  Then some genius experimenter discovered that the projector did not have to advance the film at 48 frames/sec.  He set the projector to advance the film (change the projected image) at half the rate the shutter ran.  Test audiences loved it, and it saved a lot of expensive film.  Speaking as one who has enjoyed thousands of theater movies over the years, I can say the motion illusion from 48 frame/sec flicker and 24 frame/sec film advance rate is very good, realistic, and enjoyable.
   In the constant search for a new gimmick to draw bigger movie audiences,  Peter Jackson is going to try filming at 48 frames/sec for the new Hobbit movie coming out next year.  Stand by for a lot of advertising hype about how much better it will look on screen due to revolutionary technical advances.  But I ain't gonna believe that hype.  I'll go see the flick, 'cause I am a Tolkien movie fan, not 'cause of running more frames per second.
 

Underwear Bombers

Lots of talk about the latest underwear bomb (no bomber, just the jockey shorts).  Looking at it on TV, I don't believe that little amount of explosive could bring down an airliner.  Not enough bang.   It would do grievous harm to the bomber's reproductive organs,  making it impossible to enjoy the legendary 72 virgins in Paradise, but it ain't enough to bring down a Boeing.
   TSA will doubtless use it as an excuse to feel up more passengers.   If you have time to spare, go by air...

Roger Clemens

Why is Roger Clemens  back in court?  Far as I know he is accused of using drugs to improve his baseball playing.  I don't approve, but why is this a matter for the courts?  We have a commissioner of baseball, who can  enforce major league baseball's rules against "performance enhancing drugs".  
  Let baseball enforce it's rules against drugs, by itself.

Raptors Rapping, F22 Hypoxia mystery

For mysterious reasons, pilots of the new F22 Raptor are suffering from hypoxia in flight.  Hypoxia severe enough to have caused one fatal crash already.   Since then the Air Force reports 11 more events, not quite as severe, but way out of line. Investigations of cabin air supply have not detected any toxins.  Now they are looking at ill fitting survival suits that might be cutting off circulation.   No solid cause, let alone a fix, has been found to date. 
   I never heard about anything like this ever happening on any other aircraft.

AdvertisementFail

So I'm looking thru a slick paper blow-in for Nikon camera's which fell out of yesterday's Wall St. Journal.  I like cameras, and would love to upgrade my worn plastic point-n-shoot to a big black Nikon with a lens the size of a manhole cover.  So I open the flyer and we have a Nikon point-n-shoot in five designer colors, with color coordinated carry cases.  Instead of a good zoom lens, which covers all bases, this little fellow has interchangeable lens, which is pretty fancy for a point-n-shoot.  The lenses are even color coordinated.  Pretty fancy price too, $700 for the camera.   There are just a few simple things the ad doesn't tell you about.  Such as batteries, cost of, type, recharger, battery life.  I'm guessing the viewfinder is electronic, but they don't say.   Nor do they give the number of pixels.  Does this baby have that really convenient automatic lens cap so you can jam the thing into a pocket without worrying about scratches and dirt on the lens?  My cheapy Kodak can do that, what about this really pricey Nikon?
  Next page they have some  $100 point-n-shoot's, fixed lens, 16 Megapixel.  And a total of eight different models, at various prices, but far as I can see, roughly the same performance on each model, despite a three to one range in prices. 
  Last page we get into the big iron, black, leatherette covered, professional grade camera's with thru the lens viewfinders.  These guys start at $549 and work up to $3000.  Wow, I could get into these babies for less that the color coordinated lady's model point-n-shoot.   They have a selection of mean looking lenses.  But the catalog doesn't say which lens fits which camera's, nor does it say the lenses have a universal mount that fits all camera's.  No word about batteries.  Nothing about the size and weight of these babies.  It's probably sizable but it would be nice to know how sizable.   No word about speed.  Digital camera's need a bit of time to digest each shot before they can take the next shot.  Would be nice to know just how much time is involved.  These boys can all double as video camera's, high definition video no less.   The flyer neglects to say if they do sound as well as video, and how the video comes out, VGA? HDMI?  USB?  some new interface that my computer lacks?
   In short, this flyer raises as many questions as it answers. It would be nice if there were some ad guys who knew something about cameras.

Read the charges aloud

The Guantanamo defendants were not co-operating at their arraignment.  One tactic was to demand that the charges against them be read aloud in court.  Not unreasonable really.  That took two and a half hours.  Wow.
Apparently the lawyers thought they were being paid by the word.  The charge sheet was 87 pages long. The ten Commandments themselves can be typed on a single A sized piece of paper.  Who needs 87 pages to say "this no good nick planned 9-11"?   Frankly having to sit around for another two and a half hours serves all the lawyers, and the judge, right.
  The reason to try KSM and his buddies, is to convince the rest of the world that they are guilty and they deserve every bit of what we are going to give them.  87 pages of  legal malarkey won't convince anyone, not even a bunch of Army officers serving as jury, let  alone the Arab street.  It only takes a few words to spell out why we want to execute these scumbags, and the arraignment is the place to say those few words.
  I'd say the prosecutors need to find some real lawyers, and the judge oughta be replaced on account of terminal stupidity.

"Austerity isn't working" sez Euro Lefties

Euro softies, (Greece, Spain, Italy, and now France)  are whining about "austerity".  Socialism has run out of other people's money.   The Softie countries are spending, and want to keep on spending, a good deal more than their tax revenues.  Since they joined the Euro, they can't print money, unlike the US.  More and more they cannot borrow the money, 'cause nobody in their right mind would give them a loan, for fear the loan won't get paid back.  The Germans are the only Euro country with real amounts of money, and the German taxpayers see no reason to give that money away to the softie countries. 
About the only things left are to issue IOU's like California did, or drop out of the Euro so they can print  the money they want to spend.  Nobody is talking about those alternatives.  So far, the citizens of the softie countries like the Euro because it holds it's  value.   They know that savings in lira or drachma or francs are worth less and less as time goes by, whereas savings in Euro's will be worth the same in the future.  What the future of IOU's is nobody knows, they don't talk about it.
   So,  the softie governments have to cut spending or run out of money.  This means laying off "workers" from the government payroll, canceling cost of living hikes, freezing wages, and squeezing down pensions.  Nobody likes this much.
   And nobody is talking about economic growth, which is the only way out.  Was I running a country (I'm not) I'd make a list of all the industries in my country and rank them by size.  Start with the big ones and see what could be done to make them grow.  Things like removing export restraints (ITAR regulations for instance), issuing needed permits, rationalizing the tax burden, making well educated labor available, encouraging research and development,  fostering competition,  improving transportation, lowering electric power prices, and publicizing quality control measures (things like Appellation Controlee and ISO 9000)

Sherlock

It's a new Masterpiece Mystery Theater offering.  I watched the first episode on PBS last night.  This Sherlock Holmes is right up to date, operates in 2012 London.  Trades the magnifying glass for a smart phone.  Watson is a blogger.  It was disappointing.  Holmes  talks funny (too fast) and comes across as a terminal nerd who dislikes people, the detective business, and is rude to every one.  We open with Holmes dispatching Watson to a crime scene with a laptop.  Holmes remains at Baker street and surveys the clues thru the laptop's webcam.  Weird. Irene Adler makes her entry in the nude, and even after putting on a few clothes she just doesn't click as femme fatale.   Why Holmes would want to get involved with her remains a mystery.
   I won't make any special effort to catch the following episodes.
   

Treasure Island

Just yesterday I caught a favorable review in the WSJ.  So I watched it last night.  It's a made for TV miniseries on the SyFy channel.  It's good.  We all know (or ought to know the story) so I won't say much about it.  The cast were all pretty good.  Jim Hawkins was a bit older ( looked to be 18 or 19) than is traditional, but well acted.  Long John Silver gave up his traditional long greasy locks for a whiffleball haircut.  The pirates were convincingly villainous.  And best of all, this version of the great sea story actually went to sea.  So many Treasure Islands are filmed on dry land, with nary a wave slopping on deck, or a sail being hoisted.  For this one they have a real sailing vessel, a big top sail schooner, just right to be the Hispaniola.
   All in all, a fine production.  Keep an eye on SyFy, they ought to rerun this if you missed it.  It didn't get much publicity or netbuzz,  I only heard about it yesterday in the Journal, after the first episode (with Donald Sutherland as Captain Flint) had aired.    

"Corporations are not People" sez Obama

I heard that this morning on NPR.  I forget the exact wording, but Obama made it plain that he detests corporations and will play catchup on their backsides any time he can.
   The bulk of us Americans are stakeholders in America's corporations.  We work for them, get paid by them, hold their stock, build up our retirement savings thru them, and get our health care from them.  Corporations provide food, clothing, shelter, fuel, transportation, entertainment, and all those material things that make American life what it is.  American wealth, power, prestige, and well being come from our corporations, they sure don't come from the Obama Administration.  American corporations are a powerful force for good in the entire world. 
   And our president hates them.

Are We Selling Ipads or Infinitis?

Hard to tell.  The Infiniti (it's a Japanese SUV) ad shows a guy using voice recognition to speak with the car's computer.  He has forgotten his anniversary and the computer makes amends by  making reservations for two at a fancy restaurant.  While on the move.  Pretty slick.  I'm not sure if an Ipad is that clever, surely my XP running desktop ain't that smart.
   But, we are selling a car in this ad, not super smart smart phones.  If that kind of electronic smarts is commercially available, I don't want it built into my car.  I want it in a portable, fit under the arm package, that I carry into work.  I don't want to leave that clever an electronic assistant out of doors in an unheated company parking space.  I want it with me. 
    And, the Infiniti ad didn't talk about engine displacement, brakes, handling, cargo capacity, fuel economy, fitting skis or bikes or plywood onto the roof,  rear seat amusements for kids, you know, real car stuff.  Does any one still sell cars? 

Farewell to American honor

A Chinese dissident, let's call him Shades,  breaks free of house arrest, makes it to the US embassy for protection.  Pusillanimous US diplomats turn the poor slob back over to the Chinese.   That's probably a death sentence for him and his family.   We need to rewrite our national anthem.  Strike out that line about the home of the brave. 

Motor Tricycle

The Can Am Spyder Roadster.  It's getting heavy ad play on Fox.  It's not a product that I would touch with a ten foot pole.  When I get the urge to sample the breeze on the road, I want a real motorcycle.  On a cycle you can lean into the turns, and with good rubber on a dry road, you can out turn anything else on wheels.  No way are those tricycles going the lean into a turn, corner one too hard and it rolls over.  Which is hard on the head even wearing helmets.   Despite the heavy ad play, I have yet to see one on the road around here.

$2K is cheap for health insurance

The TV newsies have finally caught on.  Under Obamacare, a company is better off paying the $2000 per worker penalty to Uncle rather than paying $12000  to buy that same worker a family health care policy.   This has been obvious to everyone but newsies since they passed Obamacare 2 years ago.   Companies would be able to offer the workers $10000 extra in pay, give Uncle $2000 and come out even.  Workers could arrange to put the extra money into a tax free Health Savings Account and use it to pay for private health care
   I heard one TV newsie speculating that companies would keep offering health care in order to retain valuable employees.  Right.  With 8 to 10 percent unemployment, any company can fill any amount of openings in a couple of days. 

Blowing and raining pretty hard

We have a storm moving thru the Notch.  Lot of rain, and the wind is really howling around the house.

WSJ Op-Ed gets it right

"How Big Banks Threaten our Economy" title of an op-ed by Warren A. Stephans in the Monday WSJ.   Stephans says that a mere FIVE banks hold half of all the bank deposits in the entire country.  Wow.  Should one of those babies fail, an humungous amount of tax payer money would be required to make the depositors whole again.
   There is no reason to have banks that big.  Big banks get into trouble and go broke just as often as ordinary sized banks.  In fact, big banks are more bureaucratic, move slower and are more apt to have empty suits running them.  Smaller banks are leaner, faster, and more careful.  Problem is, when a really big bank goes down, a lot more people get hurt.
   And when you get to something as big as AIG, it's just too big to manage.  AIG was put together by a very capable banker named Hank Greenberg.  Hank was a financial genius and managed to keep AIG running pretty much single handed.  AIG did well until New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer targeted Greenberg in 2005.  Spitzer made a lot of wild accusations in the press, finally filed some charges, which he later dropped.  But Spitzer  panicked the board of AIG into firing Greenberg.  After Greenberg left, AIG spiraled down into catastrophe.  Just before the end, AIG was playing the credit default swap market (pure gambling) hoping for a big win to bail them out.

Newsies love the Veepstakes

Endless TV time talking about who will be Romney's VP.   It's a simple topic, easily understood by journalism school grads.  It doesn't mean much, this election is a showdown on Obama and Obamacare, doesn't much matter who Romney picks for VP.  Romney won't say anything until the right time, because there is no gain in announcing his pick early.  This story doesn't need any research, all you have to do is get one or more talking heads on camera to pontificate. 
   But the newsies think people will watch stories on the Veepstakes, the stories are easy and cheap to do, and so we get a lot of them.

If Obama had balls, he woulda taken Bin Ladin alive

They could have done it.  Jumped Bin Ladin and loaded him into a chopper.  Alive, he surely had intelligence that we needed. Nobody would whine about waterboarding Bin Ladin.   A patriotic judiciary (any of those left around?) would have put Bin Ladin on trial, on TV, in an orange jumpsuit and shiny handcuffs.  We could have done some good work convincing the rest of the world that Bin Ladin is a no-good-nick who deserved what we were gonna give him. 
  But Obama didn't want to take a chance on bat brained US judges turning Bin Ladin loose on a technicality, so he told the SEALS to whack him.  Courageous that is.

Coulda Woulda Shoulda

Watched Meet the Press this morning.  New Democratic line.  " Romney would not have OK'ed the Bin Ladin raid."   Really.  And how do you all know that? 
   Then there as a lot of stuff about how fearless and brave Obama was for OK'ing the raid.  I don't buy much of that either.  What really happened is some operational types (shooters) decided that  they knew where OBL was and they thought they could hit him.  They went up thru the chain of command to get approval.  They obviously made a good enough case to convince  the chain of command to let them go ahead. 

How Europe is dealing?

The weak Euro countries found that no one would buy their bonds, not at an affordable rate anyhow.  All these countries had to sell bonds 'cause they were spending more money than tax revenues were bringing in.  They all started wailing and crying, 'cause not paying wages and pensions really upsets people.  Some of the small ones got bailed out (Iceland, Ireland, Greece)  The bigger ones are so big that nobody, not even Germany, has that kind of money.  
   So the European Common Bank gave everyone a Christmas present last Christmas.  The ECB is like the US Fed, in that it can print Euro's.  As many Euro's as it likes.  So ECB offered European banks the opportunity to borrow (at low rates) some trillion or more Euros.  The Euro banks lapped it up, and borrowed all the Euro's offered.  This made the banks happy, they had cash in the till.  It made ECB sorta happy in that every bank in Europe owed them money, and less happy 'cause putting a trillion Euros into the economy makes prices of everything go up. 
    So, with freshly printed Euros clogging their cash drawers what do the European banks do with the money?  Well, they didn't make loans to industry to expand production.  No, they bought up Euro government bonds, 'cause the governments were offering really fat returns, AND under Euro accounting rules, government bonds, (sovereign debt) are "risk free" (governments always pay their debts 'cause they can always raise taxes to get the money).   Banks don't have to hold cash in reserve for risk free deals.  They can loan it all out, and get higher returns.
    Apparently a trillion Euros doesn't go far these days.  In the 90 days since the great Euro loan, all of it was spent.  And now it's gone, and the weak Euro governments are still in a jam.  They are still spending more than they take in, so they HAVE to sell bonds lest their checks bounce.  Other than Euro banks, nobody else wants to buy shaky looking Euro bonds.  The Euro banks are out of money again, and the Euro economy is not growing at all.
   Good luck, you're gonna need it over there.

Winter hangs tough in the North Country

It's snowing up here, again.  And I was going to do some more lawn work.  Guess I'll wait til the snow stops.

"Revered institution"

Used by an NPR radio commentator about the Secret Service.  I wonder what planet that reporter comes from.  The Secret Service used to be thought of as competent and brave, but not revered.  The US Marine Corps is a revered institution,  the Secret Service is merely OK.

NASA. Lost in Space

Or somewhere.  Having phased out the Space Shuttle and flown surviving orbiters off to museums, NASA finds that we have no way to get astronauts up to the International Space Station.   NASA is buying tickets to the ISS from the Russians, at $20 million a seat. 
   Sometime we ought to have our own transportation into space.  We have two good booster rockets, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and  the United Launch Association's Atlas 5.  Both rockets are real,  have flown many missions, and have plenty of power to boost a minivan load of astronauts up to the ISS.  But NASA and Congress (Senators Kay Bailey Hutchenson and Richard Shelby)  are "investing" in yet a third rocket booster, the "Space Launch Vehicle" (SLS).
   This is a black hole money sink.  The SLS offers nothing that the existing Falcon and Atlas boosters don't already have.  But a new rocket will require dozens of test flights and years of fiddling around.  A rocket is made up of a zillion parts, all of which get really stressed hard during flight.  Despite the best efforts of the engineers,  a few of those zillion parts will break and the rocket will be destroyed.  Only after figuring out what broke after each rocket failure, and beefing it up,  for the next flight, can we then find the next part that will break under load.  By experience, we know that it takes 20-40 disasters, before a good flight is achieved. 
   Falcon and Atlas have aready gone thru all this pain, the weak spots have been found and fixed, and both of them fly dependably now.  That cost a lot of money.  Now that we have two working boosters, NASA should use them. 
   Instead, NASA pushed by a pork loving Congress, and full of the good old Not-Invented-Here syndrome is pouring taxpayer money into an unneeded third booster.  The same money would move more cargo  using existing boosters.
  Then we have the same trick going on with crew capsules.  SpaceX has already flown their Dragon capsule and NASA wanted to fund private development of a second capsule.  Instead, Congress wants NASA to develop inhouse the "Orion" capsule.   Again NASA ought to use the existing flight tested Dragon capsule just because it's ready and it works. 
  Granted, capsule development ain't as hard as booster development.  Boosters have to handle tons of explosive cyrogenic fuels, withstand  fierce thrust, and provide perfect autopilot performance.  If anything goes wrong the explosion is in the kilotons of yield range.  Capsules just have to hold air, and hang onto their heat shield.  Much easier engineering proposition. 
   Want to bet some gutsy contractor would be able to fly astronauts to the ISS right now, using an existing booster and the existing capsule?  And do it for less than the Russki's are charging for a SINGLE astronaut flown to the ISS?  All it would take is some funding. 

Ivanhoe

It started out as a best seller historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, written in the early 19th century.  I encountered the tale as a Hollywood movie starring Taylor and Taylor as a small child.  Robert Taylor, tall dark and handsome, played Ivanhoe and the much more famous Elizabeth Taylor played Rebecca of York, the "other" love interest in the story, completely eclipsing who ever it was who played Rowena, the Saxon heiress.  The movie had jousting, fighting, siege of a castle by Robin Hood, and a climatic final trial by arms on horseback between Ivanhoe and Bois Gilbert, to save Rebecca from a capital charge of witchcraft.  The movie made a vivid impression, and although I didn't see it again until the dawn of the VCR age, I remembered every scene, and most of the dialog.
   Many years later the BBC did their own Ivanhoe.  It was longer, (two DVDs instead of one) and much more sophisticated than the Hollywood costume drama from long ago.  Naturally as a died in the wool fan I rented it from Netflix and watched it.  Interesting.  First thing I noticed is that the BBC version demanded very close attention to follow the story at all.  All the characters dressed about the same, in gray and brown, and the men all hid behind  flowing full beards making it hard for the viewer to tell one character from another. The women wore no makeup, and were nowhere near as pretty as the Hollywood actresses.  Technicolor it was not, the film was processed by one of those arty labs that specializes in turning color into black and white.  At least the camera man used a tripod to steady the camera, and the sound man made the dialog audible over the score.
   I think Hollywood did a better movie than the BBC.
 

Mistresses now a Federal Offense

The trial of John Edwards starts today.  Edwards is accused of having a mistress and paying serious money to keep her comfortable and discrete.   Don't get me wrong, Edwards is a sleaseball, taking up a mistress while his wife is dying of cancer, and doing all this while running for President of the US.
  But, used to be, sleaseballs merely got bad press and shunned by society.  Now it's a federal offense with serious jail time.  I'm so glad we had all that campaign finance reform to allow the feds to prosecute politicians for keeping mistresses.

NPR dislikes Amazon

Still listening to the car radio. Long piece on NPR about how Amazon is destroying the publishing business.  Some discussion of the Justice Dept suit against Apple and the big publishers alleging price fixing.   The NPR speaker claimed that Justice was handing the book business over to Amazon.  More unclarity followed.
    NPR claimed that the average literary fiction book only sold 200 copies a YEAR.  Wow.  Even at $30 a copy, that's only $6000 in sales, not enough to pay for setting type.  Apparently genre fiction, romances, science fiction, westerns, and adventure novels are doing much better than "literary fiction".  Could it be that  "literary fiction" is boring stories about loser protagonists?  I haven't bothered to read "literary fiction" since Hemingway died, and that was a long time ago. 
   Could it be that the old line publishing houses, all bought up and merged by a bunch of suits, simply can no longer find and print worthwhile new authors?  I'm thinking of  Tom Clancy, writer of a dozen best sellers, who had to go to the Naval Institute Press to get his "Hunt for Red October" published.  None of the regular publishers had the brains to snap up this promising new author and publish his book.  Could it be that Amazon can undercut all the old line publishing houses, which don't seem to be able to do anything except print books from their old line of established authors? 

Does the FDA have to approve EVERYTHING?

Listening to NPR on the car radio today.  A medical guy was describing an off the wall procedure which had worked well in some cases.  It did not involve the use of commercially marketed drugs at all.  But, the voice over commentator at the end of the piece said something like "This innovative procedure won't go anywhere until the FDA approves it."  
   Excuse me.  I thought a license to practice medicine granted to the right to treat patients.  In this case the treatment worked.  I fail to see where the FDA has any authority to approve , disapprove, or demand more paperwork on a procedure that does not involve prescribing any sort of drug. 
   

Exemptions, Deductions, Credits, aka Loopholes

Doing your own personal income tax is a zoo. Took me a couple of days, with computer assistance. It's all the damn loopholes, exemptions, deductions, and tax credits that make it a mess. If we got rid of ALL the loopholes, doing your taxes would be simple, just use a calculator to figure a straight percent of your income. Get rid of all the picky definitions of who's a child, single, married, married filing separate returns, head of household. Pay the same whether you are married, single, divorced, what ever. Get rid of deductions for mortgages, medical, state and local taxes, the works. Get rid of credits for electric cars, energy saving furnaces, foreign taxes paid. children raised, tuition paid, houses bought, and money earned if you have children.
Just tax the income, don't try to give tax breaks depending upon how you spent it. If we dropped all the loopholes, we could drop the rates down to 15% for the average taxpayer. Charge the wealthy a little more, charge the poor a little less.
Put H&R Block out of business.

Enlisting Robots

The Army is experimenting with a four legged walking robot. Looks pretty much like a mechanical mule. Can pack 340 pounds and has a range of 12 miles, and a speed of 4 mph. It's autonomous, able to find it's own way, does not need a driver.
Looking at the picture, I keep wondering if it is any better than a real mule. It certainly won't be as quiet, what with an engine racketing away.

I remember Dick Clark

Fondly too. Way back when American Bandstand was in it's second season, it was THE TV program. I was attending a boarding school near Philly. The lounge at Boy's End had one black&white 21 inch TV set, a table model mounted on a shelf high on the wall. Channel selection was a majority rule thing and late afternoons the channel was ALWAYS channel 6 WFIL American Bandstand. For 10th 11th and 12th grades. I'm sorry Dick Clark died, a little part of America died with him.

Speculators! Evil, evil evil

Obama is blaming gasoline prices on "speculators" and wants to "invest" $52 million of our tax money in fighting them. Wow.
It used to be, in the United States of America, that buying stuff and selling stuff was legal. We have commodity exchanges to facilitate buying and selling of pork bellies, wheat, gold, oil, and a bunch of other stuff. Anyone can see that oil is getting scarce, and Obama is working to make it even scarcer. If you took a course in real economics in college, you know that when things get scarce, the price goes up. This ain't rocket science.
So plenty of people are buying oil , expecting the price to rise, and they to make money. That used to be legal. Still is legal far as I know. Ought to legal even if Obama doesn't like it. Freedom we call it, freedom to buy and sell as we please. Should not need a government OK to buy and sell anything, anytime.
This is also called speculation (boo hiss).
Druther have a few speculators make some money than not be able to buy any gasoline at all.

"End Cheap Oil" says a Kennedy

The Daily Caller quotes an email from Joe Kennedy III saying “The cycle that allows cheap oil to trump tough choices has to stop.”
Wow. Talk about a brain made from solid reinforced concrete. Does Kennedy think that oil is cheap, or has been cheap anytime since 1973? When is the last time young Joe paid for a tank of gas? And expensive oil is good? For anybody?
Kennedy is running for Barney Frank's old congressional seat down in Massachusetts. Maybe he can lose to a Republican?

Bondholders get special bankruptcy deal

Jefferson County Alabama declared bankruptcy last year. Wall Street was left holding $3.14 billion of country bonds to finance the sewer system. And now Wall St is whining (and suing) because the bankrupt county wants to stop paying the bondholders.
Why do Wall St banks think they are entitled to payment when others go unpaid? What makes bondholders more important than anyone else? Why should not bondholders take a haircut after lending ridiculous amounts of money to a borrower that clearly cannot repay it. The bond sales amount to about $5000 for each resident, man, woman and child, in the county. No way they are ever going to pay that off. Should not the banks take a haircut for stupid lending?

How can you tell when a politician is lying?

Simple. Whenever they make ten year forecasts of anything, but especially tax revenues and government spending. Nobody knows what things will look like ten years from now. But they stick with the 10 year forecasts because ten years from now, nobody will remember how ridiculous their forecasts were. Make a one year forecast, and even the newsies will remember what it was, and dump on you if the forecast was wrong.

Nobody knows what medical care costs.

So I'm doing the bills. Arrgh. I open an envelope from Humana health insurance. Recent doctor's visit, just routine, blood pressure, some stethoscopy, some lab work. According to the insurance company the doctor billed $399 and insurance only paid $135. The insurance company didn't say that I owned a further $264.
Then further down the stack of bills I get to the doctor's bill. It agrees with the insurance company about the $399 billed. but the doctor shows the insurance paying more and I only own $26. Which is all right with me, $26 is a whole lot better than $264.
But somehow after all the insurance claims forms unwind, and the paper pushers are finished mucking around, $238 has just gone away. Bank error your favor. OK by me.
Only thing is, it makes forecasting things like Obamacare costs kinda worthless.

To set the record straight, I'm with Ann Romney

Raising children is very important work. The future of everything rests upon the next generation, and nuture is a least as important as nature. Good child raising creates good future adults. When Ann Romney says she raised five boys, I have a lot of respect for that. That's harder to do, and more important than doing paper work in some one's office building.
The Obama people's recent slam on child raising by mothers is a not-so-subtle slam at the importance and dignity that out to be attached to child rearing. Support motherhood, it's truly important.

I did my Civic Duty, all day yesterday.

I was a delegate to the NH Republican yearly meeting (not the convention, this just elects party officers, not candidates. I set the alarm clock for 6 AM, and got the Mercury on the road heading south by 7:30. The meeting was in Meredith, scenic little town in the Squam Lakes (On Golden Pond) country. Mid April is before the season, so no boats, tourists, or summer people. The leaves are just beginning to open down south of the Notch, so it was a pretty drive.
The event was held in a school auditorium, a small one. According to the signs the place was only good for 420 people. It was pretty full, and into this small room we had the political leadership of the entire state. State Reps, State Senators, three of our four Congresspeople, town and area chairmen, it was the leadership of the dominant state party.
It's the north country so it was a kinda shaggy bunch. The older guys, yours truly included, wore dark suits and ties. Lot of guys did the coat bit but omitted the tie. Then we had guys show up in jeans, T-shirts, shooting vests, full beards, pony tails, blue blazers with khaki slacks. Colorful but not very fashion conscious. As usual the girls dressed better than the boys.
The program opened with good old fashioned get-out-the-vote stemwinders from our Congressmen, our legislative leaders, and our candidates for guv'nor. Bill O'Brian, speaker of the house, got the most applause. This took us up to noon, and a break for pizza.
After lunch we settled down to some serious wrangling over bylaw revisions. After the revolt against Jack Kimball last year, they wanted to tighten up procedures for succession and removal of officers. Apparently the Kimball affair got pretty messy, all though the mess was fairly well contained, and all the survivors wanted some new tight bylaws to back them up should anything like that ever happen again.
Then we proceeded to the only contested election of party officers. The office was national committeeperson, a person to go to the national committee and lobby to retain our first-in-the-nation primary. For candidates we had Juliana Bergeron, and Pam Tucker. Both had declared weeks before and snowed me under with emails urging their election. Pam even bothered to call me on the phone. Juliana has been around for a while and has a lot of support from party people. Pam is a newer face, newly elected state rep, who is close to Bill O'Brian. Bill made her nomination speech, which carried a good deal of weight with everyone. Then we had two last minute nominations from the floor, Joe Dupre (sp?) and Skip somebody-or-other, the quy who does the GraniteGrok website. So we voted, on printed ballots, and it then being 3 PM on a lovely day, I left, before the votes were counted, figuring that I could find out who won from the papers. Stupid Beast was overjoyed to have her human return to pet her.
Not so much luck on papers. Nothing on the Union Leader website, nothing on Granite Grok, yet.

Manhatten to go with Pork Ribs

Manhatten, a simple to mix American cocktail. Two jiggers of bourbon whiskey, a jigger of sweet red vermouth, a couple of Marachino cherries, four dashes of Angostura bitters. Use a short glass, mix the booze in the glass, and add all the ice that will fit. Very smooth, and you don't want to mix a second one of these.
Goes good with pork ribs.

Pork Ribs, My recipe

Very yummy. Real pork ribs, as opposed to nice tender pork chops, need a bit more cooking than chops do. You want to braise ribs in liquid for an hour or two, and then brown them on the grill or in the fry pan if it isn't grilling weather.
Ribs can be cheap, I picked them up for $1.71 a pound for 1.75 pounds, enough for four. I made up my secret sauce, equal portions of brown sugar, soy sauce, whiskey, and mustard. I ran short of soy sauce, so I added some Worcestershire sauce. Equal parts, say like a quarter cup. Mix the secret sauce in a large mixing bowl, and then add the ribs to marinate for an hour or so.
After a good long marinade, put them in the oven at 375F for an hour and a half. Pour the marinade into the roasting pan so that the ribs are deeply immersed in the secret sauce. After and hour and a half the ribs will be tender.
To develop the flavor, brown them, either on the grill or in an iron fry pan on stove top. I did 5 minutes a side in he fry pan.
Very yummy, and I have left overs for tomorrow.

Upcountry Republican Shindig

The Grafton County Republicans threw their annual Lincoln Reagan Day dinner at the Indian Head "resort" last night. Indian Head is right up into Franconia Notch. It got started in the old days, even before skiing, when people just came up from the summer. It tried to compete with the Old Man of the Mountains with a observation tower and gave a view of a mountain ridge that looked like a humungous Indian staring up at the sky. It still has a nice banquet room with a fine view of the White Mountains.
Everyone was there. We had NH Republican state chairman Wayne McDonald. We had Grafton County Commissioner Omer Ahearn. We had Executive Councilor Ray Burton. We had two candidates for governor, Kevin Smith and Ovide Lamontagne. For the windup speaker we had Senator Kelly Ayotte. Kelly spoke at some length and spoke very well, much better than the politicians speak on TV.
Things got rolling when the bar opened at 5:30. Lots of meetings and greetings. By 7 PM everyone was sufficiently lubricated to sit down to eat dinner. Lots of good political talk. By 9:30 the speeches were all done and people started home. Fortunately it was a warm dry evening, better than other such affairs where we had to drive home in snow and sleet.

Norks in Orbit

The North Koreans have been milking the TV news for coverage of their upcoming rocket launch. If they launch and put a satellite into orbit, they will gain enormous amounts of respect. A rocket good enough to throw a satellite up is good enough to throw a nuke anywhere on earth. Say like into Washington DC.
Fox TV has been calling the North Koreans a nuclear state. That is an exaggeration. The Norks have run two tests, both of them fizzled. Yield was so small that observers waited to detect airborne radioactivity before announcing that a nuclear test had occured. Clearly the Norks haven't figured out how to make a fission bomb that really explodes. They have undoubtedly made some engineering changes to their bomb, but until they can run off a test with the same yield as leveled Hiroshima 65 years ago, they ain't a real nuclear power.
The Japanese and the South Koreans are seriously worried about a North Korea with missiles, and have threatened to shoot it down. This is a gutsy move. If they shoot and miss (fairly likely) they just look foolish and loose more face than if they just send nastygrams to the North Korean foreign ministry.