Talking to people with information on your opponent

Now that Mueller has fizzled out, the democrats are scratching around for something else to throw at Trump  (dump on Trump).  They are talking up a meeting at the Trump Tower in New York back in 2016.  A woman, later identified as a Russian agent, turned up, claiming to have some dirt on Hilary.  They listened to her.  They decided that her information wasn't good enough to use, or leak, but they did listen to her.  Which is perfectly normal.  When you are running for office, and someone offers dirt on your opponent, you listen to them.  You may decide, like the Trump people did, that the dirt isn't solid enough to use, but you want to know what is on offer.  Nothing wrong with this.  Except to democrats and the MSM (democratic operatives with bylines)

Words of the Weasel Part 55

Blanding down the language.  Must not offend snowflakes, or anyone.
Substance.  One of the most general nouns in English.  Any solid or liquid is a substance.  So now the newsies use "Substance abuse" or Substance abuse disorder"  in place of the more informative and straight forward "Drug Addiction".  Makes you think they are in favor of drug use. 

Rogue One 2016

There is talk about yet another Star Wars flick coming out for Christmas.  So I thought I might re watch the last batch of them, the later ones after the three "revival" ones of some years ago.  Started with Rogue One.  I had the DVD.  I saw this one live in theater, with my daughter, back in 2016 when it came out.  Medium speed for a Star Wars movie.
   No names.  Watched the whole thing and when the credits finally rolled, I could not think of any character's stage name.  Not like the good old days when names like Leia, Skywalker, Obi-wan, Vader, and Han Solo were on everyone's lips.  Major problem is no character ever addresses another one by name.  Secondary problem, junior sound men who aren't very good at their jobs and the dialog is often inaudible.  Good sound requires good microphone placement, good mikes, and actors who don't mumble their lines.  And good sound mixing.  They must mute the score and the sound effects when dialog is happening.  Anyhow, the sound in Rogue One was mediocre to poor.
   As bad as the soundtrack was , the camera man was worse.  It was 2016 and the cult of the unlit scene was raging thru Hollywood.   A good third, maybe a half, of the scenes were dark, so dark I could could recognize who was in the scene.  Just plain annoying. 
   And the writers missed a few good ideas.  Opening scene where slimy Imperial Count whats-his-face, dressed in white, swoops in to arrest the father, a high powered scientist involved in Death Star development, who has fled the project and is living on a remote farm with wife and young child.  Didn't get his name either.   If the old man is such a hot shot scientist, he should have brought some wonder weapon into play and vaporized Count whats-his-face, rather than submitting to arrest.
   Young chick protagonist acts a pretty good part.  Didn't catch her name either.  Handsome guy is OK but his acting is no better than ordinary.  The writers left out a scene that I would have enjoyed, a scene were the two of them get a chance for a quiet talk, uninterrupted by bad guys with guns,  where we hear what she thinks of him, and vice versa. 
   The was an A movie, huge budget, great box office.  But re watching it makes me understand why Hollywood is dying. 

75 miles of Mueller

Yesterday (Thursday, Mueller report release day)  I set out for Concord.  Turned on the car radio.  NPR talked about Mueller and his report, steady, all the way down, some 75 miles.  I'm tired of Mueller.  Surely something important has happened somewhere in the world?  All we get is Mueller talk.  The newsies love the Mueller story, it's easy to cover, since little has happened.  All the newsies have to do is sit down at the keyboard and pontificate.  That's easier than getting out of the office and talking to real live people.
  I hear the released report, after strikeouts, is still 450 pages.  I don't have the energy, or the interest, to plow thru 450 pages of legal gobble-de-gook.  It would be nice if some trustworthy newsie would do a nice evenhanded summary.  Trouble is, about the only newsies that I see as trustworthy are Brett Bair and Britt Hume.  Somehow I don't think either of them will take on the read-and-report-Mueller job.  Too tedious.  

NH Senate doings.

Senate session 18 April.  Started off with the Fast Track (consent) calendar.  18 bills, including HB 540 which sets up a complex deal to finance the Balsam project.  We pulled HB 369 off the Fast Track.  It allowed HHS workers access to the prescription drug monitoring program.  We felt it was a big privacy violation.  NH keeps a list of people obtaining opioid prescriptions largely so that doctors can check to see how many opioid prescriptions a patient has before writing a new prescription.  Needless to say, opioid prescriptions are something of a black mark with employers and others, so we ought to keep this information confidential.  Allowing HHS people access to it doesn’t help the patients, and may well hurt them. Five of the Fast Track bills were to set up more study commissions.  And then a quick voice vote passed all 17 bills left on the Fast Track.   

   Then we ran thru the 14 bills on the regular calendar.  Passed them all on voice votes.  Only bills of interest were HB365 which raised the amount of power a net metering generator can get paid for to 5 megawatts, up from 1 megawatt.  And HB 572 proclaiming second Saturday in June as Pollyanna recognition day.  Very important bill, trust me on this, cause Pollyanna was written by a Littleton author, and we put up a Pollyanna statue in front of the Littleton public library. 

 After all this heavy lifting we finished up and adjourned by 11:30. 

  

Fixing Win 10 shutdown failures

Fix shutdown failure.  15 Apr 2019

This problem has been with my laptop, Flatbeast, since a Windows update a year ago.  Flatbeast would not shut down all the way in software.  Right click on the Windows icon,( lower right hand corner of screen) select  "Shut Down or Sign Out"  and then select "Shut down" and Win 10 would tell you he was shutting down and the screen would go dark.  But the LED in the power button would stay on.  You could not restart with the power button.  Only way to get the machine running again was to hold the power button down for the count to 9, and wait for the LED to go out. 

Fix.  Turn off "fast startup".  Here is how.  Go to control panel.  Select System and Security.  Select Power options.    Select "Choose what the power button does".  Select "Change settings that are currently unavailable.  Uncheck "Turn on fast startup"  .

Finish up by clicking on "Save Settings".  Done.  Now clicking on shut down makes Win 10 really shut down.  Another Micro$oft "feature" fixed.

So how do you pronounce Buttigieg?

As in Mayor Peter Buttigieg just announced as running for president.  Seems like a nice young guy from what I have seen of him on the tube.  Me, I would pronounce his last name butty-gig from the spelling.  The TV newsies are pronouncing it Booty-judge which sounds better.  Poor guy must have taken a lot of flak over his name back in grade school.

Spring computer migration

I finally bought a new computer.  Trusty Desktop, a Compaq Presario SR 1750 NX, is ten years old, and is still running Windows XP.  My web browser and my anti virus and my TurboTax vendors all say they don't support XP any more.  It's time.  I found a used Dell Optiplex on the net at Amazon for $206 delivered.  Came with Win 10 Professional, the fast I5 processor, and acres and acres of RAM and disk space. Hardware is ten years faster than poor old Trusty Desktop.  The Dell keyboard has nice key feel.    Win 10 is so much slower than XP that the new machine is little faster than the old one.   Migration was sluggish.  My photos filled THREE DVD disks.  Thunderbird took most of the day to get working on the new machine.  The menu entry to point Thunderbird to your email file is deeply hidden and concealed beneath an obscure label.  And what little documentation Google found on the web is wrong. 

    I looked at my patch file from Win 10 laptop and put in most of them.  Some of them, mostly removing frill programs, were unnecessary on Win 10 Pro.  Most stuff is now working EXCEPT control C, control V. and Delete (strike out forward) doesn't work.  Web searching turned up a number of fixes, none of which worked.  Web fixes, re install keyboard driver and update keyboard drive didn't fix it.  I'm still working on it.  

Picking your college major

Everyone has to pick a college major, English or history or French or chemistry or so on and so forth.  Colleges usually ask you to commit to a major by the end of sophomore year. To do this important choice right, you have to have some idea as to what you are going do to make a living after graduation.  Except for the very lucky and the very few who are independently wealthy, or stand to inherit some real money, you gotta make a living.  You will spend much of your time, for the rest of your life, making your living.  Life will be better and happier if you like your career choice.  When we are little kids we all have ideas of what you want to be when we grow up, a fireman, a railroad engineer, a pilot, a nurse, a cowboy, etc.  By the time we get to college, a lot of us have no idea what we want to do for a living after graduation. 
   Get over it.  Do some research.  Start with friends and family.  Ask them what they do at the office.  Read up on the career.  Read some biographies, see if  what they did sounds interesting.  Pick a career that will be fun to do.  Temper the fun to do with some practicality,  being a Hollywood actor is good fun, but the competition is fierce and your chances of making it work are low. 
   After you have thought about your career, pick a major that makes you employable in that career field.  Colleges offer a lot of majors that are of no use what so ever in any field at all.  For example, gender studies, black studies, just about any kind of studies, sociology, art history, anthropology,  won't get you a job, anywhere.  Political science won't get you a job in business or industry, although it helps if you plan to go to law school, or into politics, or both.  All the STEM subjects  are good for employment. 
   College is expensive, you owe it to yourself to come out of college employable at something. 

NH Senate Ed Committee hearings 9 April

Tuesday, Ed Committee hearings.  We heard four bills, none of them very important in my view.  There was HB 689, a bill to set up a system of educational savings accounts for most, perhaps all students in New Hampshire.  The state would kick in $250 per kid.  This would be funded by a $100 per account tax on brokerage houses.  This is enough to drive most brokerage houses out of state.  Advocates claimed that kids with an educational savings account were seven times more likely to go to college than kids without.  Tied in with the savings account deal was a requirement to teach “”financial literacy” starting in SECOND grade.  I asked about that, when I did second grade we were still learning to add and subtract.  How do you teach balancing your checkbook, or discuss how interest hurts you on loans and helps you on savings (when the banks pay interest on savings, which few do today). 

Next was HB 489 setting up rules and procedures for children to change schools.  The system in HB 489 seemed unobjectionable.  I asked why we needed this bill this year.  Surely kids have been transferred over all the years the Republic has stood.  Why do we need to re write the rules now?  No good answer was forth coming.

And yet another fund creeps out of the woodwork.  There is a “Public School Infrastructure Fund”.   HB 357 would extend the life of this fund.  From the testimony, the money has mostly gone to hardening school buildings against school shooters. 

And another house keeping bill that should have been handled administratively.  Apparently the state collects as stores higher ed transcripts, in case the higher end institution goes out of business, graduates will still be able to get a couple of their transcript.  The state has been keeping the transcripts forever.  HB356 would let the state throw the transcripts away after 40 years.  We amended that to 50 years. 

  So fresh bills all heard, we went into executive session and declared previously heard bills HB 357 HB 171 HB 356 and HB 719 ought to pass. 

   I went to the afternoon senate commerce committee meeting and spoke in favor of HB 540, a deal to finance restarting the Balsams resort up in Dixville Notch.  The entire North Country is in favor on account of the jobs and the tourists involved.   After hearing all the testimony, Commerce voted it Ought To Pass 5-0 and put it on the Fast Track calendar, which means to bill is almost sure to pass the full senate. 

  And for my last trick of the day, I testified in favor of SB 138 over in the House.  This bill would grant degree granting authority to Signum University, a small new startup offering courses over the internet.  I have spoken with the Signum people, and they mean well, they are not a diploma mill. 

   It was snowing north of Concord.   I 93 was unplowed and slippery.  I spun out, did a 360 and wound up in the ditch.  Luck was with me, I didn’t hit anything, car was unbend, and I was able to pull out backwards onto the shoulder.  It got worse; snow was 3-4 inches deep at Plymouth. 

737 MAX, the engine swap that become a nightmare

The Boeing 737 is the plain vanilla single aisle airliner that flies most airline routes, the ordinary routes that don't, will never, generate enough traffic to fill up a bigger plane.  It's been in production for decades.  Under competitive pressure from Airbus, Boeing decided to do an engine swap on the trusty long serving 737.   Metallurgists have come up with better hot section metals over the years, the better metals allow the engine to run hotter, which gives better fuel mileage, as much as 10% better.   And, Boeing and the FAA promised that the re-engined 737 would fly just like the good old 737 and not require retraining pilots to fly the new aircraft.
   The new engines are good, and do deliver better fuel economy.  They are also bigger, so much bigger that they almost drag  on the runway.  Which means the new engines mount lower beneath the wings.  Which means you get a stronger nose up motion when the throttles are advanced.  Boeing, with FAA approval, decided to modify the autopilot to apply some nose down force using the trim tabs to make the 737 MAX fly like the good old 737.   And something went wrong, and two brand new 737 MAXs dove into the ground right after takeoff, killing all on board.   Aviation Week hasn't told us just what went wrong, but two smoking holes in the ground are enough to convince most of us that something is wrong. 

NPR talks about lowering drug prices

NPR did this piece a few days ago.  They described a number of complex deals that might or might not work.  They totally failed to talk about one simple act that would lower US drug prices a lot, right now, and it is 100% legal. 
   All we have to do is allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, Canada, Britain, the EU, Japan, probably some others.  Drugs are cheaper overseas because the national health authorities are permitted to bargain over price.  The US medicare and medicaid are not allowed to bargain, by law they have to accept whatever price big pharma asks.  Result, a lot of drugs, many of them manufactured in the US, are a lot cheaper overseas, like half the US prices.  If we allowed import, we could take advantage of those lower prices here at home.
   FDA will cry and scream, but they don't get to vote.  They will claim that foreign drugs haven't been inspected, and their makers haven't been  harrassed by FDA.  Far as I am concerned, if the authorities in any reasonable first world country think the drugs are good enough for their own citizens, I think they are OK for US citizens as well.
   Big pharma would go into orbit.  but they don't get to vote.  They do spread a lot of money around in DC, and they would threaten the pols with a cutoff of  "campaign contributions/bribes".  The intelligent pol would vote his district, and with some support from the MSM, the districts would be in favor. 
   That NPR totally ignored this issue is a measure of either their ignorance, or big pharma has got to them.

Migrating Thunderbird Email to a new computer

I wanted to bring years of  Thunderbird email, addresses, mail folders, macros to sort incoming email in the proper folders, lotta stuff over to the new computer.  Thunderbird keeps all this stuff in “profiles”, disk files, stored in each users space.  This way each user of the computer can have his own email, address book and all that other stuff.  The executable Thunderbird code is kept in Program Files (86), but the mail and address data are kept in a folder name Thunderbird in Documents and Settings in XP renamed Users in Win 10.  The Thunderbird profiles are folders in the Thunderbird folder. Along with a key file named profiles.ini.  Profiles.ini has a pointer to the profile that Thunderbird has been using.  There may be more than one profile, but the one you want to move to the new computer is the one Thunderbird is using at the minute.  The other profiles are older ones, or ones copied in from other computers, or just plain obfusticators.  No matter, bring them all over to the new computer.  I assume you understand how to move files from computer to computer using flash drives or CDs or DVDs or network connections.  Assume the new computer is running Win 10.  Put the Thunderbird folder in the users/your name/appdata/roaming/ directory on Win 10.  Copy the entire Thunderbird directory. 

   Now you need to get the Thunderbird code, the executable, onto the new computer.  I would just download the whole thing from the Mozilla website (Google will find it for you).   That way you get the latest code.  If you are migrating off something really ancient like Win XP, you want the latest version, which they probably have not been making available to ancient OS’s.   Run the new Thunderbird.  It will pop you to a new accounts page.  Cancel that.  Click on the nameless “Bars” button to get to the Thunderbird functions.  Click on Help.  Click on Trouble Shooting.   This displays a bunch of obscure data about Thunderbird.  Go to “Profile Folder”.  Clicking on “Open Folder” opens a window with explorer.  Navigate to the Thunderbird folder on the new machine’s hard drive, the folder that contains profiles.ini.  This points Thunderbird to your profile.  Then exit Thunderbird.  Count to ten.  Start up Thunderbird again.  Navigate  Help/Trouble Shooting Info like you did before.  Check “profiles” the very last entry.  Click on “about: profiles” and you ought to see Profile Home pointing to the Thunderbird folder you brought over from the old machine. 

This ought to be all you have to do to get Thunderbird to see your old email, your email addresses and start working like it always did. 

 

NH Senate session 27-28 March.

Senate session 27 AND 28 March.  Heavy load this week in the Senate.  We met in the afternoon of Wednesday and then all day Thursday.  Thursday session ran until 8 PM.  Crossover day is bearing down on us and we must deal with all the senate bills before crossover day. 

    For Wednesday we passed 24 bills on the Fast Track (consent) calendar in one quick voice vote.  That left 11 bills on the regular calendar, none of which struck me as very important.  The democrats passed SB 267, the reveal student names bill 13-10.  This bill is symptomatic of deeper problems in the testing business.  The yearly assessment test is so tricky that only the test vendor can score it.  So they send the tests out to the vendor.  We have state law on the books requiring student privacy and so they remove the student's names from the tests and replace them with code numbers.  Thru some blunder or other they can only match up 80% of the code numbers with students when the tests come back from the vendor.  So the Ed department wanted to solve this problem by just leaving the kids names on the tests.  I think we need more straight forward tests that can be scored by the home room teachers.  The other ten bills we passed were routine.  That got us up to only 4PM so we tackled another 5 bills.  And tabled all 5. 

   Thursday we started at 9AM, an hour earlier than usual and ran until 8 PM. Arghh.

We had 42 bills on the calendar.  Highlights.  Passed SB 100 which forbids questions about criminal background checks on job applications.  You can ask the applicant about criminal background during the job interview but not on the application.  Democrats passed SB 8 requiring a redistricting committee.  Not a terrible idea, but the state constitution clearly says redistricting shall be done by the legislature.  Lotta constituents feel strongly that this should have been done by constitutional amendment rather than just an ordinary bill.  I agree with them. 

   The democrats voted to drop the requirement to have a NH driver's license and NH plates in order to vote in New Hampshire (SB67).  This is part of their plan to allow out of state college students to vote in New Hampshire because college students mostly vote democratic.  Me, I think you ought to live in New Hampshire in order to vote in New Hampshire.  Anyone who lives in New Hampshire has a NH driver's license and NH plates.  Other wise they are visitors.  Always glad to see visitors, they bring money, but I don't think they should be allowed to vote in New Hampshire. 

   SB97, fiercely opposed by my constituency, passed on a voice vote.  But we watered it down so it is harmless now.  All mention of critical care hospitals and a 15 mile radius was removed from the bill.  The urgent care clinics just have to get a license like every other health care facility. 

   SB7, the motor voter bill was pushed thru by democrats on a roll call 13-10.  This bill will register to vote anyone who visits DMV for a license or plates.  Far as I am concerned any citizen who doesn't bother to visit town hall to register BEFORE the election is so unmotivated that we don't want their votes.  I guess the democrats think young drivers will vote democrat.

   And some science fiction bills.  SB 216 to set up a New Hampshire council to approve auto driving vehicles safe to allow on NH roads.  Total waste of time.  There will have to be a single national auto driving car safety commission to test and certify auto driving cars as safe.  Detroit cannot afford to submit their auto driving cars to 50 separate state safety commissions, there will have to be a single national commission or we won't get auto driving cars to market.  And SB 283 about voting machines and ballot scanners.  We ought to be voting on paper ballots. They cannot hack paper ballots over the internet.  And you can recount them.  You check a ballot scanner by hand counting a stack of ballots.  Then feed the stack thru the scanner.  If the scanner's count doesn't match the hand count, the scanner is broken.  No legislation required. 

  SB 213 which would limit liability of campground owners got tabled on a roll call vote 12-11.  Lotta campground owners in my district tell me they are getting sued by campers who stumble over stones in the dark. 

   And a final budget buster, SB 263 which would permit school students to sue the school if they think they have been discriminated against by the school or at the school.  Welfare for lawyers.    No definition of discrimination  No age limits.  Can a kindergarten student sue?  Any court awards will come out of local taxpayer's hides. And the money will all go to the lawyers. 

Mueller report driving the TV newsies bananas

All the TV newsies have been talking all weekend about the Mueller report.  Mueller released it to the Attorney General late Friday afternoon.  They say ( without having had access to the report, yet) that it exonerates Trump.  Barr, the attorney general, released a very short summary Sunday afternoon that backs that up, sort of.  The democrats were hoping the Mueller would provide them with ammunition for an impeachment of Trump.  I think they are disappointed, although they might press ahead with impeachment anyhow.  Lot of heavy duty pols  from both parties  are calling for the entire report to be released to them, and the press, ASAP.  Probably a good idea, just to settle the matter.  To me, the idea that any American would cooperate with the Russkis is absurd. 

Getting ready for high school

Regardless of whether your high school starts in 9th grade or 10th grade, you want to start thinking about what you want to do to make a living after you graduate high school or graduate college.  Probably you don't have a clue.  I didn't at that age.  But you want to think about it.  Talk to people about their jobs.  Read up.  But unless you are born into a lot of wealth, you will have to make a living doing something after you make it thru school. 
   Since you probably don't know what you want to do yet, you want to keep your options open. One large option is a career in  Science Technology, Engineering, or Math  (STEM).  It can be fun, I did electrical engineering myself, it was a lot of problem solving, customer contact, lab work, software coding.  Beats selling real estate or used cars.  STEM jobs pay well and you will stay employed, layoffs are very rare.
   To do a STEM major in college, you have to take integral calculus freshman year.  The STEM courses are all taught with calculus, if you don't have your calculus you simply cannot understand the coursework.  To take integral calculus, you have to have already taken trigonometry, two years of algebra, and preferably plane geometry.  You have to take these in high school.  You gotta start taking the algebra in 9th grade.  Plane geometry (Euclidean geometry) is not absolutely essential, but it is very useful.  You learn how you can start with a few simple ideas, use some logic and prove some remarkable theorems, using nothing but pencil and paper.  And the proofs are intellectually satisfying, after doing a proof, you know it's true.  This entire concept is so valuable that the plane geometry course is well worth it. 
   Right now, as you start high school, you probably don't know what you want to do to make a living after school.  It is a shame to lock your self out of all the STEM fields because you didn't take the required math courses in high school. 

NH Senate session 21 March

Thursday 21 March.  Regular Senate session.  Not as bad as last week, we only had 40 bills to deal with.  We managed to get done by 3 PM.  Which was good, I was able to get up to Lancaster in time for the Coos County Republican committee meeting.  That ran until 9:30 PM and I didn’t get home until 10:30PM.  Long day. 

   Senate session got off to a good start by passing the Fast Track (consent) calendar of 13 bills in one quick voice vote, no debate.  One surprising exception.  A fairly harmless bill SB 42 to declare applejack as the official New Hampshire state spirit was pulled of the Fast Track calendar and thrown onto the regular calendar.  Usually this kind of bill declaring state flowers, state birds, state just about anything are quickly passed because it makes their sponsors happy and nobody else cares.  Applejack was not so lucky.  The Democrats debated this bill for a half an hour at the end of the day, speaking about the hazards of alcohol, the case for New England rum, and a bunch of other trivia.  Total waste of time. 

    Now for the main event, the regular calendar.  We opened with SB10, the minimum wage bill.  Introduced by Senate President Donna Soucy.  Jeb Bradley spoke eloquently against it. This is a job killer.  Up here in Littleton, far up in the North Woods, the retailers are already automating in anticipation of a $15 minimum wage.  McDonalds, Applebee’s; Wal-Mart, and Lowes are pushing us customers to learn how to run the bar codes thru the scanner.  Kiss that entry level jobs goodbye.  SB 10 backs the minimum wage down to $12 an hour, but it is still a job killer.  Democrats rammed it thru on a roll call 14-10.  That’s all the Democrats voting yes and all the Republicans voting no. We spent a half an hour on this turkey.  Maybe we can get the Governor to veto it.

    Then my bill SB 150 to allow all out of state health insurance companies to sell in New Hampshire was voted Inexpedient  To Legislate on another roll call vote 14-10.  Democrats claimed that the insurance department would not be able to control them, that the out of staters could offer lower cost policies that lacked some of the mandatory coverages of Obamacare and some other stuff.  The way to lower the costs of healthcare is competition.  Right now we have only TWO insurance companies licensed to sell in New Hampshire.  Not much competition there. 

   And we revived casino gambling SB310.  Three fellow senators urged me to vote to revive it and so I did, reluctantly.   It got Ought to Pass 13-11.  Probably the house will vote it down.  This bill has been kicking around for 10 years that I know of.  It always promises fantastic tax revenues.  And it gets voted down every time (so far). 

   We have been kicking a lot of cans down the road.  We have tabled 16 bills before this session started.  We tabled 10 more on Thursday.  Let’s hope that table is strong enough to hold up under load.  It is not clear to me what will happen to these tabled bills.  They might be allowed to die quietly and out of sight.  They might be waiting for the finance committee to decide if we can afford them.  Stay tuned. 

   And we voted SB 309 which restores the stabilization grants to state schools Ought To Pass 24-0.  Stabilization grants are an obscure school funding deal, going far back in history.  However, the schools in district 1 (my district) need the money badly.  So do plenty of other districts.  I said exactly that during the floor debate.  Unfortunately, after voting OTP, the democrats moved to table the bill.  If it ever gets off the table it will do good. 

What happened to Sears Roebuck?

Well, they are dead or dying, I think we all know that.  But what killed Sears?   The Wall St Journal had a longish piece on Sears on Saturday.  It was a collection of comments by eight ex Sears people, some of them pretty high up, remarking on Sears collapse.  Too bad none of them wrote about what went wrong.  They all expressed sorrow but none of them gave a coherent story explaining what happened.  Too bad.  I miss Sears.  I noticed just this morning that the little mini Sears we used to have in Littleton is gone.

NH Senate Session 14 March

Senate session, Thursday 14 March.  88 bills on the calendar.  Session ran until 10 PM.  I didn’t get home til nearly midnight.  They promise worse is coming.  We knocked off 18 bills on the Fast Track calendar with one voice vote.  We bumped SB 143, dealing with state aid to special ed students off the Fast Track calendar into the hurley burley of the regular calendar ‘cause it involved a LOT of tax payers money. 

   We had a few good bills and a lot of bad bills. For good bills we passed SB 266 which makes state aid to education cover kindergarten students on the same basis as grades 1-12 and redirects the Keno revenue from kindergarten to school building aid.  That passed 24-0 on a roll call vote. 

   We passed suicide prevention training for students and teachers 24-0 on a roll call vote.  We are loosing all too many students to suicide.  We need to let all students know what suicide is, and what they should do or who they should contact should they find that a friend is contemplating suicide.  Certainly back when I was in grade school I would confide a lot of stuff to my closest friends than I would to teachers or parents.  And back then I had no idea what suicide was or what to do should I learn of a friend thinking about it.  

   We passed SB 306 establishing a housing board of appeals to which builders and developers could go after a build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere (BANANA) planning board refused to grant a building permit, especially a building permit for workforce housing or affordable housing.  Way things are going, without the housing board of appeals nothing will get built anywhere is the state inside of five years.  SB 306 passed on a voice vote, no nays were heard. 

     And now for the bad bills.  The democrats voted SB 135 and SB 301 thru.  Both bills raised the business profits tax a lot.  Like $37 mil a year.  Most of us know that last year was a very good year indeed and this year is shaping up nicely.  GNP growth is up, unemployment is down, stock market is up (mostly) and taxes are down.  Out in the real world, where I come from, it is generally accepted that the good economy of last year was caused by tax cuts, both federal and state.  In the not so real world of the Senate, democrats believe they can raise taxes without stalling the economy.  Nobody out in the real world believes that.  Anyhow the democrats have voted in heavy duty tax hikes.  Hopefully the governor will veto them. 

   The democrats passed SB7, the motor voter bill on a roll call 14-10.  This bill would register anyone to vote who registered a car or obtained a driver’s license.  If you are a driver you are a voter, zap.  Me, I think the voters ought to go to town hall and register BEFORE the election.  Far as I am concerned, any voter who lacks the motivation to get out and register himself is so unmotivated that we don’t need his vote. 

   And the democrats passed SB 249 to allow state house employees to unionize.  We really really needed that.

   They also passed SB 71 allowing the state to interfere in the party’s delegate selection.  I believe the two parties ought to select their delegates anyway they please, without any state interference.  No matter, the democrats pushed this turkey thru 14-10 on a roll call. 

   And we had some Mickey Mouse bills. SB 133 about definition of emergency vehicles.  We need this?  We all know that flashing lights and a siren mark an emergency vehicle.  And SB 275 requiring the state to replace the entire fleet of state vehicles with battery operated vehicles by 2039. 

Life in the NH Senate

I have been posting the goings on in Concord on my campaign Facebook page.  Lately Facebook has gotten flaky and refusing to accept my posts.  So I'm going to start posting them here as well.

Tuesday, 12 March.  Ed Committee hearings.  Started off at 9 AM with SB 267 bearing the suspicious title of “Relative to the release of student assessment information and data”   New Hampshire Dept of Ed requires yearly testing (assessment) of all NH students.  The tests are sent off to the test provider to be graded.  State law currently requires that student’s names, birth dates, addresses, and other identifying information be kept confidential.  So the schools erase the student ID info from the tests before sending them off and replace it with an ID number.  Thru some bungle or other, the tests come back, scored; the Dept of Ed admitted that only 80% of numbers matched up with children’s names.  The Ed folks wanted to just leave the children’s names on the tests to solve the bungle.  Just great.

   It gets worse.  I asked why the tests were not graded by the home room teacher and be done with it.  The Dept of Ed representative explained that the tests were administered by computer.  If the child was doing well, the computer would switch to more difficult questions.  If the child was doing poorly, the computer would switch to easier questions. In short no two children got the same questions on the test.  This is not right.  It is unfair to give some kids easier tests and some kids harder tests.  After hearing this, I am convinced that the entire NH yearly testing deal is corrupt, and should be scrapped. 

   Didn’t bother anyone else on the committee.  In executive session they voted the bill Ought To Pass 3-1.  I was the one, everyone else was perfectly happy with the bill and the testing protocol. 

   Next was SB 137 which wants to set up special certification of school nurses by the Dept of Ed.  In addition a nurse being licensed to practice in New Hampshire, she had to get “certified” by the Dept of Ed.  Job security for some Dept of Ed bureaucrats.  Plus, what does Dept of Ed know about the practice of medicine?  Never mind, in executive session we voted it Ought To Pass 3-1.  Again I was the one. 

   Finally we got to a bill that I submitted to authorize Signum University to grant degrees.  Signum is a startup.  It is an internet deal, I have talked with the Signum people and they sound real to me, not just a diploma mill.  They specialize in English literature (Tolkien) and Germanic philology.  The Tolkien part makes them OK in my book, I first read Tolkien in middle school, I read it to all my children, and I still occasionally read it to myself.  Anyhow we voted Ought To Pass 4-0. 

  

Ethiopian Airlines crash

It was a brand new Boeing 737 MAX, the same plane that Lion Airlines crashed a couple of months ago.  In the Lion crash, it is believed that the autopilot got into a snivit and thought the plane was stalling.  It took control of the stick, pushed the nose down to get out of the stall, and flew the aircraft into the ground, over the strenuous objections of the crew, who pulled back on the stick as hard as they could.  Aircraft hit the water, killing all on board.   This Ethiopian crash looks like it might be the same problem.  It's too early to be sure, we have not had time to read out the cockpit recorders, but it sure looks suspicious.  The Lion air crash investigation is not complete, and they have not issued any fixes to the 737 MAX based on that disaster, yet.
   The 737 MAX is the well known 737 which has been flying for decades.  The MAX part is a re engine mod, putting on bigger, more powerful and more fuel efficient engines on a well proven airliner. The anti stall feature in the autopilot is a reaction to the Airbus crash in the south Atlantic a couple of years ago.  In that disaster the entire flight crew, three qualified pilots in the cockpit, failed to recognize they had stalled the aircraft and failed to pull out of it.  The plane hit the water, all on board were killed, and it took a couple of years of searching the ocean bed to find the flight recorders and figure out what had happened.

Wall St Journal is OK with stock buybacks

We been hearing a lot of talk from both left and right about the evils of corporations buying back their stock. Like talk of banning the practice. It's not that corporations need the stock, they can print new stock certificates for nearly any amount of money for pennies, cost of paper and ink.  It's not like buying raw materials or building new factories.  It is believed that buying up the company's stock will raise its price, supply and demand, make the stock scarcer and its price will rise.
   Saturday's WSJ editorial came out strongly in favor of  allowing stock buybacks.  They didn't give any numbers.  The traditional way for a company to raise the price of its stock is to declare a big fat dividend, Which is paid to all stock holders and can be expensive for a company like GE with a zillion shares outstanding.  The idea behind stock buybacks is you only have to pay off the investors that actually sell their stock, rather than all shareholders.  Might be cheaper that way.  The WSJ didn't give any numbers supporting that idea.
   On the other hand, the main reason companies want to boost their stock price is to reward executives with stock options.  I had a stock option once, with Bernie Gordon's Analogic, and it paid off like crazy.  On the other hand, if the company wants to pay off a hardworking successful CEO, they can jolly well vote him a cash bonus. They don't have to manipulate the stock market to reward successful executives. 
   And, you would think that companies could find constructive things to do with extra cash in the till rather than doing stock buybacks.  Like new product development, new factories and distribution centers, improved manufacturing techniques to lower product cost, more publicity and advertising, buying up competitors,  stuff that would increase their income. 

What will it take to get the Jewish community to vote Republican?

Obama was not a supporter of Israel.  This new rep Omar from Milwaukee is a friend of Palestinian terrorists and no friend of Israel. So is Alex Occasional Castro. The US Jewish community ought to wise up and dump the Democratic party for the Republican party.  The Republicans are long time friends of Israel, and reliably against  antisemitism in all its forms. It was Trump who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem.  It was the Republican party that led the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  The Democrats pander to their black supporters who are antisemitic at heart.

Beat the Press brings on Cohen

In case you hadn't noticed, the democrats have had Micheal Cohen, Trump's long time lawyer and fixer, testifying in front of Congress.  Even Fox News carried the hearings live, for hours.  Today, Sunday,  Chuck Todd on Beat the Press summarized the testimony, actually Todd reran video clips that he thought would hurt Trump the most.  I watched.  Actually, I didn't think that any of the things Todd showed were particularly bad, evil, or even just crude.  Todd showed a clip about Trump knowing about an upcoming Wikileaks dump of Hillary's damaging emails. So?  This is a violation of what?  Then there was a lotta talk about Trump trying to build a hotel in Moscow.  So?  To build anything in New York you gotta pay people off.  I'm sure it works the same, maybe worse, in Moscow.   And more talk about a meeting in  New York with a Russian agent who claimed to have dirt on Hillary to share with Trump.  So?  If I am running for election and anyone turns up dirt on my opponent, I'm gonna listen.  As I heard the story, the Trump people decided that the dirt on offer was fake at the first meeting with the agent  and didn't buy.  Not so dumb. 
   In short, Todd's best picks from Cohen's testimony failed to convince me that anything was out of order.  I am OK with Trump, but I would not describe myself as a true believer.  If the Cohen testimony doesn't convince me, it won't convince any of the Trump base voters. 
   Too bad the MSM wastes all that press coverage on a nothingburger story, rather than informing us of what is really going down in Washington. 

Lost Wax Casting, ancient technology, still in service

The process goes like this.  Make a wax version of the desired part or artwork.  Then cover the wax master  with clay.  The clay was fired (like pottery) to make it hard and tough.  In the firing the wax melted and ran out.  Then molten metal was poured into the clay mold and allowed to cool and harden.  When cool, the clay mold was broken off and you had a shiny new part or art object.  And no mold parting marks.  Aviation Week claims the lost wax process is 5000 years old.
   Today we call the process "investment casting"  and a lot of key aerospace parts are still made that way.  In fact Aviation Week was complaining about a lack of investment casting capacity  slowing production in the aerospace industry.   One key part made by investment casting is the turbine blades for jet engines.  The tougher you can make the turbine blades, the hotter you can run them which gives better fuel mileage, which translates into better range and better carrying capacity.  Modern turbine blades are very tricky, they have cooling passages up the center, they are cast from secret alloys involving a lot of nickel, and who knows what else, and they are cooled slowly and carefully so that they come out as single crystals of metal.  Some one commented "There are nine countries in the world that can make nuclear bombs, but only two, the US and the UK, that can make modern jet engine turbine blades."

USAF manages the KC-46 tanker contract

The KC-46 tanker job should have been a straight forward contract.  Take a well proven airliner which has been in production and flying for decades, take out the seats and install fuel tanks, plus an air-to-air refueling boom in the tail.  No high risk new technology.   Piece of cake, right?
   Well, first the Air Force decided that it knew more about how to wire an aircraft than Boeing did.  Air Force insisted that Boeing re do all the aircraft wiring "to bring it up to Air Force standards".  Good cost enhancer that was. 
   And then, the Air Force wanted a fancy remote vision system, rather than a plain old reliable glass window, to let the refueling boom operator see his boom and steer it into the receptacle of the receiving aircraft.  Now Air Force is complaining that the remote vision system  lacks contrast and looses detail when the receiving aircraft is backlighted by the sun.  (Beware the Hun in the Sun).   For the last two years USAF has refused to accept new KC-46 tankers 'cause of  the remote vision system and 40 brand new KC-46 tankers have piled up at Boeing's  Everett field.  Now, the Air Force has agreed to accept the aircraft, but they will withhold $28 mil per aircraft until the remote vision system is fixed. 
   How to screw up a simple procurement.   Way to go USAF. 
   Note: I am a USAF veteran. 

Green New Deal, or New Green Deal

Speaking as an electrical engineer, let me address one part of the Green New Deal, electric power generation.  We need to keep the power on for customers, all night, and all day.  "Alternate energy" (windmills and solar cells) won't do that.  For example, I live up in the north country where it gets very cold (20 below) and stays cold for days.  My oil burner won't run without electricity.  Should the power go off, my heat goes off, and my pipes will freeze after a couple of hours.  Lots of industrial processes, from traditional ones like baking bread to high tech ones like fabbing semiconductors need the power to stay on while the batch, be it loaves or LSI semiconductors is in the oven.  If the power quits while a batch is in process, that batch is ruined.  Loss of a batch of loaves is a loss of hundreds of dollars, loss of a batch of semiconductors is tens of thousands of dollars.  Plenty of other batch processes will be ruined if the power fails while the batch is in process.
   Solar cells stop making electricity when the sun goes down.  Which happens every evening.  Windmills stop making electricity when the wind stops blowing, which happens less predictably, but often enough. My house is high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I get plenty of dead calm days.  In fact it's a dead calm as I write this.  A power system based on solar and wind will suffer frequent power outages, like every night.  Which is unacceptable, except for those who advocate a return to the Hiawatha life style, teepees heated by wood fires. 
   The greenies have poisoned the waters concerning nuclear power.  We have built dams on all the rivers.  Just the middle sized Connecticut river has six power dams on it starting with Moore Dam in Littleton.  If we want the power to stay on all night, we need to burn natural gas.  Fortunately we have plenty of natural gas.  It's becoming a waste product of fracking.  Out on the Bakken they are paying people to take the gas away.  Natural gas is out competing coal in the power generation business.  
   So, Alexandra Occasional-Castro's call for elimination of fossil fuel ain't gonna happen, not unless we put up with power failures on a daily basis. 

Better double check your yearbook, while you are in the school

A 30 year old yearbook is causing Virginia governor Northam all sorts of grief today.  Lesson to all graduates,  better double check your year book page while you are still at the school.  Remove anything that might cause you grief in the future, should you be successful in your career.  I would recommend strongly against gag photos, photos in any kind of costume, nick names, any kind of sexting, any kind of political remarks.  Keep it down to a professional portrait of yourself, honors, sports played, club memberships, good simple stuff that will look good 20-30 years in the future. 

MAGA hats show support for our president and the administration

Which is a good thing.  Americans ought to support their president.   As a symbol, the Make American Great Again slogan was created by the Donald Trump campaign in 2016 as part of his effort to win the election.  The acronym and the hat were created a few weeks later.   The MAGA hat means support of the sitting president, nothing more.
   There has been plenty of opining on the tube about the MAGA hat representing racism, white supremacy, un-Americanism, Satan worship, and other malarky.  That's all a crock.  We elected Donald Trum p to be our president in 2016.   To see high school students wearing MAGA hats is a goodness.  The current administration, under attack from the media and the democrats, needs all the support it can get. 

900 year New England temp record meets Shannon's sampling theorem

A post in Phys.org claims to have used a new method to find and plot the temperature recorded in the bottom of a deep Maine lake.  They perform some unspecified analysis of a chemical that I have never heard of to determine the temperature of long ago.  They don't explain this bit of chemistry at all.  They claim to have taken 136 measurements over some 900 years of lake bottom sediments.  And they claim to have discovered previously unknown temperature variations of 50-60 year duration.
Good paper,  the authors feel they have made a breakthru.
I think they have not taken enough samples.  Temperature in Maine can get up to 90F in the summer, I've been there, I know, and Maine winter runs 20F with cold snaps down as far as -40F.  And  this temperature variation, 70 to 130 degrees, happens quite regularly, summer and winter happen every year.  So we only take 136 samples over 900 summers and winters.  Suppose our samples hit mostly summer for a few years?  Bingo, a heat wave wave, global warming strikes early.  Suppose our samples only hit winter for a few more years in a row?  Bingo, a mini ice age.  
   To do this right, you have to take at least two samples for every year.  That's Shannon's Sampling Theorem, you have to sample twice in the period of the highest frequency  in the signal you are sampling.  If you don't take enough samples, you get aliasing.  That is what causes the wheels of the stagecoach to start turning backwards as the stage gathers speed on the way out of Deadwood.  The movie camera samples the wheels 24 frames per second.  When the wheel spokes move too much in between camera frames, the wheel appears to move in reverse. 
   This paper claims to find 10  different 50-60 year periods of heat or cold.  Since they are not taking enough samples, they could well be seeing an alias.  Their samples  just happen to hit summer for a long stretch of years, or just happen to hit winter for a long stretch of years.  That's aliasing, and will show you imaginary hot spells and cold spells.  Just as imaginary as the stagecoach wheels running backwards.
  About the best you can do with this under sampled data is divvy it up into convenient slices, say 100 years each, and take the average over each 100 year slice.  Then you can look for temperature changes from century to century. 

Microbrewers hung up by the Shutdown

According to today's Wall St Journal, micro brewers need approval from some federal bureau or other before they can market new brews or new labels.  The brewers have thousands of gallons of suds sitting in tanks, waiting for that bureau to come back to work and do their paperwork.
   Sounds like a severe case of micromanagement to me.  I don't see why brewers, or any other company, except maybe drug companies,  need federal bureaucrats to approve labels, recipes, packaging, or anything else.  If the customers don't like the new recipe or label or whatever, they will stop buying the product.  That ought be enough to keep the brewers and other companies  making good stuff. 

Drug Pushing Robo Callers and the Opioid Crisis

I am getting a phone call every other day now.  It's a robocaller who starts out asking if I am feeling any pain, and goes on to point me toward a pain clinic that will prescribe any kind of happy pill I might want.  I wonder how many opioid addicts get started by such drug pushing robocallers.  For that matter how many opioid addicts get started at those pain clinics, like the one that opened up here in Littleton a year or so ago?  Anyone have any numbers on this?

Near Money and the federal deficit.

Money goes back to King Croesus of Lydia, 595-547 BC.   In his time money was precious metals (gold or silver, sometimes copper) stamped into coins of uniform size and purity.  Coins made commerce easier, you could do a deal by simply counting the coins,  prior to that,  you had to find a balance and a set of trusted weights and weigh the gold or silver in order to do the deal. 
   In those days there was not much that could be done to alter the money supply, short of a silver or gold strike.  The Athenian fleet that crushed the Persians at Salamis was built with the proceeds of a rich silver strike on Athenian soil.  More commonly kings would debase the coinage by adding lead to the silver or copper to the gold.  But they could not debase the coinage so far that the coins looked funny, which was probably in the order of 50%, which is the same as doubling the money supply.
   Paper money was invented in the middle ages, after Gutenberg invented printing.   The obvious benefit was there was no shortage of paper and the king could print as much money as he needed to meet payroll when times were tight.  The drawback to paper money is a lot of people distrust [ed] it.  As late as the American Revolution the printing of Continental dollars to finance the war was controversial and there is language in the Constitution forbidding the states to "make Anything but Gold and Silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts"
   Paper money finally won, certainly because huge amounts of money were needed to run the huge new economies that came out of the Industrial Revolution.  There just isn't enough gold and silver to make the vast modern economies work.  We also learned that printing too much money reduces it's buying power.  When I was a child ice cream cones were 5 cents, comic books were 10 cents, and gasoline was 28 cents.  Now ice cream cones are $2.50, comic books are $4-$5, and gasoline is $2.80.  In short the buying power of the US dollar has gone down by a factor of ten over my lifetime. Any money in bank accounts is only worth a tenth of what it was worth 60 years ago. 
    Now we come to my college economics course,  using Samuelson as a text,   Samuelson wrote about "near money" by which he meant government bonds.  He wrote that issuing a bond was just about the same as printing new dollar bills.  Consider the US T-bill.  It is backed by the full faith and credence of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth with an enviable record of never welshing on its debts.  There is a bond market, where the bond can be converted into real cash on any working day,  Holding a bond is nearly as good as holding cash, plus you earn interest on the bond.  So Samuelson called government bonds "near money". 
   Now we get the point.  When the federal government is short on money, ("runs a deficit") it sells bonds  to raise the cash to meet its bills.  Which is just about the same as printing dollar bills.  It's inflationary,  Printing money is why the value of the US dollar has dropped to a tenth of what it was when I was a child.  Printing "near money: works about the same. 
  So far, despite humongous deficits run up by Obama, and the humongous bond sales to make payroll, the inflation rate has remained under 2%.  Dunno how that  happens, but is has. 

"Technology" in place of a real wall

We tried that once.  I was in Thailand back during the war.  We tried to close the Ho Chi Minh trail.  It was a real foot path, running from North Viet Nam, down thru Laos, to South Viet Nam.  The Viet Cong got all their supplies back packed down the trail.  It took a lotta comrades with back packs to equal what we brought to our troops using a single Army truck.   The trail ran under triple canopy jungle all the way.  You could not see it from the air.  The jungle canopy was so thick that when we dropped 1000 pound bombs we could not see the leaves even ripple when they exploded on the ground. 
   So, we dropped sensors up and down the trail where we thought it ran.  We brought in a squadron of big four engine C121 Super Constellation  recon aircraft to fly up and down the trail reading all the sensors, which were mostly microphones.  The plan was to have the Connies call in air strikes when ever they detected anything on the trail.  All they ever picked up was some monkeys, screaming at each other, and some water buffalo crashing thru the underbrush.  Never detected any comrades for us to bomb. 
   Now I am hearing Democrats on TV saying that "technology" is better to secure the southern border than a plain old wall.  Every time I hear that it reminds me of closing the Ho Chi Minh trail with "technology". 

Beat the Press goes up against the Shutdown

Host Chuck Todd spent much of his hour ait time wailing about the government shutdown.  Strange.  They have been shut down for two weeks and I haven't missed them at all.  My mail is getting delivered.  I don't expect a refund check from the IRS, so they can stay shut down forever far as I am concerned.  I don't fly much so I don't care about the TSA. 
   Far as I can see, things are working with some 800,000 civil servants off the job.  Maybe we could keep on that way and save some taxpayer money.  These people get paid far better than they would in the private sector, far better than most of my constituents in Coos county, they have first class medical benefits, first class pensions, and they are all democrats.  My sympathy for them is limited.  If they run out of money they can go out and get a real job in the private economy. 
   And, if the Congress had done their duty earlier this year, and passed the federal funding bills like they are supposed to, the government would be open right now. 

The Last Kingdom 2015

It is a TV series for 2015.  I netflixed the first disk.  It is a historical drama, Vikings vs Saxons in 900 AD England.  I watched episode 1.  I don't think I will bother with the rest of them.
   They hired the worthless cameraman from Game of Thrones, the one who turns the lights out on set before filming.  Some black on black scenes, and all the scenes so poorly lit I could not tell one character from another.  Plus everyone dressed alike,  identical outfits of furs and grey homespun.  We see the protagonist start off as a 12 year old Saxon heir to an important Saxon noble family.  He gets captured by and raised by the Vikings.  We see him as a 12 year old, and suddenly a time jump and he is a young man.  Uhtred serves more as a target for abuse, both from his Saxon family and his Viking adoptive family than a real protagonist.  If Uhtred has a mission to accomplish, or a quest to go on, you couldn't prove it by me.   His relationship with a girlfriend is pretty tentative, we never hear the girlfriend's name.   

Beware *.mov files

A new piece of malware places files with names like AB1234.mov on your hard drive.  They are badness, and clicking on them, to see what is in them, crashes my XP computer.  A quick search with Explorer found 11 of them.  I zapped them all.

Aquaman 2018

Saw it down in Lincoln last night.  It's long.  2 & 1/4 hours.  It doesn't move very fast.  Lots of really pretty CGI work creating Atlantis under water.  Lots of combat, chases, smashing and crashing.  Much of the movie is underwater down in Atlantis.  The underwater bit is convincing, the actor's hair waves gently in water currents, they float in the water, feet not touching the floor.  Lots of battle scenes, actors riding huge unlikely sea beasts.  When the sea beasts take enough hits from energy weapons they burst into flames, under water, which is a little confusing.  There is a plot,  Aquaman must retrieve a lost magical trident.  We only learn this halfway thru the movie.  Aquaman's girlfriend Mera has really outstanding bright red hair.  Brighter and redder than anything I ever saw on stage or in real life.  I kept wondering how they did that.  Was it a superior hair dresser?  A wig?  Digital retouching  with a professional movie maker's version of Photoshop?  It was striking no matter how they did it.  Nicole Kidman played Aquaman's mother, starting by falling in love with Somebody-or-Other Curry, a Maine light house keeper.  She is as cute as Mera.  Nobody addresses anyone by name in the movie, I had to go to IMDB to find the stage names. 
   The camera man did turn the lights on, and all the scenes were watchable, no black on black mystery scenes.  Sound man was adequate but not great.  The guy who did Spiderman was better, but I caught most of the dialog.
    Lots of hand to hand combat, fighters tossed each other tremendous distances, landing with a hard crash that ought to have killed an elephant, but everybody bounces right up and goes for another fall.  Atlantians (except Aquaman) wore armor and carried energy weapons.  Aquaman was into tridents and the bare chest look. 

Beat The Press does global warming today

Host Scott Todd started off the Sunday show by saying, "We are not goi9ng to discuss the science (that is settled) or give deniers a voice"  Translation "Ye shall believe in Global Warming and why are you not sacrificing to it?"  Well, I believe in thermometer readings.  Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS for short)  maintains a database of every temperature reading going right back to the invention of the thermometer.  I downloaded the whole schmeer.  It was old fashioned, data in fixed length 80 byte records, no separators, clearly a file going back to punch card times.  I wrote a simple data swabber in C to convert the old GISS data into comma separated variable format acceptable to Excel.  Plotted in Excel, the data shows that global warming leveled off 19 years ago.  Not a peep since 1999.  So, no I don't believe in global warming since it doesn't show up to thermometers.  I am an engineer, I believe in instrument readings. 
   The show went on.  They gave Governor Moonbeam a lot of air time. He spent it ranting against Republicans who fail to sacrifice to global warming.  The gist of the show, we need a good stiff "Carbon tax" to curb the burning of fuels.  And politicians who fail to vote to tax their constituents to support the holy cause are sinners.

HIding "Libraries" in Win 10

Micro$oft decided to clutter up Explorer with the concept of "Libraries".  They musta had a lot of software weenies hanging with nothing to do.  A library shows up in Explorer and looks pretty much like a file folder.  Win 10 comes with four built in libraries, Documents, Videos, Pictures and one other.  Although a "Library" looks like a file folder, it is not really a file folder, it's a collection of shortcuts.   If there is any use for "libraries" I have yet to discover it. 
I was able to clean up my explorer display by going to "View" and then "Navigation Pane" (far left and lower down)  Uncheck "Libraries" and bingo, most, maybe all of the duplicate file entries go away.  Making it much easier to find files.  Since Micro$oft assigns ALL your files to one of the four "libraries" it blesses you with, then ALL your files show up TWICE in Explorer, a PITA.

Now, if I could find a way to make Explorer search the ENTIRE hard drive, I might really have something.

Game of Thrones Season 7

I think this show is wearing out.  Too bad, it has been fun.  They killed off too many of the interesting characters.  About all we have left are Denarys and Arya.  The camera man is still on his turn-the-lights-out kick, producing totally black scenes, and a lot of scenes so poorly lit I cannot identify the characters in the scene.  The sound man isn't doing very well.  I cannot catch a lot of the dialog.  They would do much better with the soundman from the newest Spiderman flick,  I could understand every line of dialog  the spidermen spoke.  Why cannot Game of Thrones do as well?  So far in season 7 they are bracing for the attack of the White Walkers from north of the wall.  John Snow is trying to cut some kinda deal with Denarys and her dragons.  Some great scenes of flying dragons spouting fire on enemy infantry and barbecuing them all.   We don't see much of Denarys' Dothraki horde, although she has finally gotten them to Westeros. I got a couple of more episodes to watch, but so far nothing much has happened.  Things move slowly.  

Half the history books look like political rants

I am Christmas shopping at Gibson's bookstore in Concord NH.  They have been in business a long time, and now occupy a fine big new building right on Main St.  Good stock.  Lots of books.  I am browsing the history shelf.  It struck me that at least half the books called history had titles and dust jackets suggesting either a political rant or a strong lefty slant.  I wonder where the schools are going for textbooks these days.  No sign of Morison and Commager, the college level go to US history book when I went to college.   Or Bruce Catton.  Or Shelby Foote.  Or Winston Churchill.

Buck passing, finger pointing, and Gov'mint shutdown

Congress is supposed to fund the federal government by passing appropriation bills, one for each department (defense, state, treasury, HHS, etc).  Congress did manage to pass a few appropriation bills this year, but appropriation bills for a lot of paper pushing departments never got passed.  And so they are furloughing their civil servants just in time for Christmas. 
   Let's blame that on footdragging by the Democrats and obstructionism by right wing Republicans.  But if Congress had done its duty, we would not be having a shutdown right now.  The Democrats like to wait til the last minute and then pass a "continuing resolution", one giant bill funding the whole federal government.  The one giant funding bill is so big that nobody understands it, anything goes into it,  and there are plenty of hiding places for juicy pieces of pork.  Where as an appropriation bill for just one department can be understood (with a lot of study) and once understood, can be changed to give Congress some control over what each department can do.
   This time the TV tells me that 75% of the government has been funded, and thus stays open.  Only 25% is shutting down.  The list of shutting down departments they flash on the TV screen seems to be mostly departments that don't do anything for citizens, and which we could do without, for ever.  It's a little tough on the civil servants who are gonna miss a pay check at Christmas time.  On the other hand, civil service jobs pay better and have better benefits and retirement than private sector jobs.  And civil servants are mostly Democrats. 

Congress lacks the stones to vote to keep the government open

Both House and Senate, facing important votes to keep the government running and fund President Trump's border wall, have failed to vote on the bill[s].  Instead they have been conducting meaningless "procedural" votes.   The one in the Senate has been stalled, killing any Senate business for 4 hours now.  A real vote is a vote to pass or kill the bill on the floor.  Procedural votes don't do that, they soak up time, they give legislators the opportunity to vote one way on the "procedural" vote and the other way on the real vote, so they can tell their constituents  both yes and no, I voted for it on the procedural vote and against it on the real vote. 
  If the government shuts down, blame it on totally opaque Congressional procedures that failed to bring the needed legislation to a real up or down floor vote.   Lack of stones.

Wall Street Wails over 2.5% interest rate from the Fed.

The Fed bumped interest rates up by 0.25% to 2.5% overall.  The Dow Jones dropped 400 points and every pundit is crying that the Fed is killing the recovery and throwing the country back into Great Depression 2.0.  Right.
   6% has been considered a proper interest rate, going back to  medieval times.  I remember my first house mortgage at 7 and 1/8th, way back in the 1970's,  thinking at the time that I had a pretty decent mortgage rate.   Far as I am concerned all the weeping and wailing  over 2.5% is coming from modern snowflakes.    Bring on that global warming and melt those crybaby snowflakes. 

Spiderman, the Spiderverse

Saw this yesterday in Lincoln with youngest son.  Its long.  It moves slowly.  The animation and art  work is good, fine images.  Give the video folks a few more years and we will not be able to tell live actors from CGI actors.  Aunt May is very convincing, in a few more years they will be able to slip her into a live action movie and we could not tell that she was not acted by a human.  Sound man does good, I could understand all the lines.  Camera man (CGI artists?) done good, all the scenes are properly lighted.  It's animation all the way, no live actors at all.  
    Miles some-thing-or-other, is the teen age protagonist.  He is drawn as black or Hispanic.  He serves mostly as a punching bag thru out the film.  He doesn't seem to have a mission, he doesn't do much, he gets dumped on, he seldom  acts for himself.  He has an impenetrable relation with his father (a cop) and an uncle who alternates between family member and masked villain.  The artist doing Miles should have made him cuter, more like the ultra cute but nameless Spider girl.
   Plot is strange.  Some kinda inter dimensional door opens and Spidermen (and girls) from a dozen strange dimension turn up, including Peter Porker.  
   Only diehard Spiderman fans need to see this flick.  It's too long and slow moving for  kids.

Bimbo payoffs are now campaign finance violations???

Paying off a bimbo to keep her mouth shut is kinda slimey, and NOT an indicator of good moral character, but it ain't a campaign finance violation.  Even  Alan Dershowitz  agrees with me on this point.  Why this Cohen character, former fixer for Donald Trump, is pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation 'cause he cut the check[s] to one or two bimbos is a mystery to me.  You would think an experienced lawyer/fixer would put up more of a fight in court.  And for that matter,  I'd expect Donald Trump to do more than he has to keep an old buddy/fixer out of jail.