The internet is NOT secure, Anyone knows that.

Anyone except the TV newsies that is. Big story running today about internet traffic being diverted thru servers in China. Oh the horror.
Note to newsies, the public internet is PUBLIC, and anyone in the world can see the traffic. It's the World Wide Web. Putting anything on the web is same as posting it on the bulletin board down at your town supermarket. If you don't want to share it with the world. don't put it on the web. This goes for email, Facebook, Google, and just plain web cruising. If you don't want the whole world, including your employer, the IRS, and every noisy neighbor in the world to know, don't but it on the net.

What goes around, comes around

Obama comes home from Korea with a bit of egg on his face. He wanted to sign a Korea America free trade pact, but he wanted a few last minute changes and the Koreans balked.
Chickens are coming home to roost. George Bush negotiated the Korea free trade agreement back in 2007. But in 2007 the US Senate, of which Obama was a member, refused to ratify the agreement. Unions objected and the democrats caved to them.
Now, three years later, Obama wants to ratify Bush's old agreement, but with a couple of last minute changes that the Koreans didn't like. So, Obama comes home with bupkis.
What's worse, the original agreement, which the Koreans would have signed, is quite favorable to US automakers. It liberalized the Korean auto emissions standards to allow US built cars, that met US emissions standards, to be sold in Korea. The "minor change" Obama wanted, was a retention of a 2% US tariff on Korean cars. The Koreans are selling lots of cars with the 2% tariff, and/or building their cars in Kentucky, and the 2% tariff makes little difference in the number of Hyundai's sold here in competition with Government Motors.
For this insignificant tariff, Obama gave up a real opening of the Korean auto market to us. There are plenty of Koreans with money who would love to own a real Detroit car, say Corvette, or Cadillac, or Ford Explorer, just like they see in the movies. Right now such cars cannot be imported to Korean because of emissions laws. The Koreans were willing to essentially waive their emissions standards and allow Detroit iron in. And Obama didn't understand how important this is.
Stupidity can be embarrassing.

No pain spending reductions

Newt Gengrich on NBC this morning said the he and Clinton had balanced the US budget for years without inflicting enormous pain upon the voters. Today, the Democrats (progressive tax and spenders, all of 'em) protest that Federal spending reductions just can't be done because of the pain involved.
I think Newt is onto something here. Just reducing health care spending from 19% of GNP to 9.5% of GNP (a feat every other country in the world has managed) would free up a river of money that would solve the deficit problem.
Could it be that the Democrats are attempting to keep their tax and spend policies in place by predicting intense pain if they are not continued?

Northern Pass, Power to the People,

The Northern Pass project will run a new high voltage power line down from Quebec to Franklin NH. It will bring in 1200 Megawatts of clean Canadian hydropower to New Hampshire. Quebec has a vast surplus of hydropower which they have been exporting to the US for better than 50 years. Hydropower is a green as it gets, no CO2 emissions, no coal mines, no oil spills, no nuclear waste, freedom from fuel price hikes. Long as it keeps raining, we have juice.
To bring jobs to the North Country we need to offer reliable and low cost electricity to industry. No company is going to put in a plant without good electric service at a reasonable price.
The new power line will largely follow existing power line rights-of-way which mitigates the unsightliness. Big power lines are an eyesore, but adding a second set of towers side-by-side with an existing power line doesn't make much difference. A pair of side-by-side power lines is no more unsightly than a single line. We already have the single line, making it a double line doesn't change things much.
After much advocacy from anti-electric-power advocacy groups, the National Institutes of Health published a comprehensive study of the safety of electric power lines in 1999. The furor over power line electromagnetic fields was started in 1979 with the publication of a report linking leukemia to power line exposure. This study was inconclusive, and the effect reported was small. Numerous follow up studies failed to resolve the matter one way or another. Some studies showed no effect, some showed a small effect, and many showed different results depending upon the method used to measure intensity of the electromagnetic fields. These studies were all statistical, counting the number of cases of leukemia and using statistics to decide if the number of cases was abnormally high. Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics.
No laboratory experiments on animals has ever shown adverse effects from the electromagnetic fields around power lines. The science of physics and of chemistry shows no mechanism by which electromagnetic fields could alter the biology of humans or animals. The NIH report concludes that the risk from power line fields is unproven, probably non existent, but cannot be totally discarded because of those few statistical results.
Electromagnetic fields drop off rapidly with distance. A simple calculation shows the fields from your house wiring are as strong as the fields from a power line at the edge of the cleared right of way. So, even if there were some adverse effects, just keeping off the right of way keeps you safe.
So, in view of the great economic benefits (1300 construction jobs, $2.5 million/mile added to the tax base), the savings in fossil fuels, and carbon emissions, the Northern Pass project ought to go ahead. We need the jobs, we need the juice, and it's as green a project as there is.

Carnivale Cruise Lines

I gotta wonder how that Carnivale liner lost all power from an engine room fire. Did they have sprinklers in the engine room? Why does not a ship of that size have two engine rooms? Both with sprinklers.
We should be thankful that no one was hurt.

TARP prevents the sky from falling

Some people think that Wall St is the entire US economy. It's an easy thing to believe if you work on Wall St. For instance, Henry Paulson, Bush's secretary of the treasury was a long timer Wall Streeter, prior president of Goldman Sachs. Or Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, academic whiz kid specializing in the history of the Great Depression and prior head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Two senior guys, steeped in Wall Street saw the sky falling in October of 2007. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, AIG ran out of money, Merrill Lynch (remember them?) went bust and got bought. These two guys feared that failure of the big boys would bankrupt everyone else on the Street. Street trading is incestuous, everyone trades with everyone else. If the biggies go bust and default on their debts to the smaller players, the small guys might go bust too. To Bernanke and Paulson, widespread failure on Wall Street might wreck the US economy and trigger off Great Depression 2.0.
So, being men of action, Paulson and Bernanke went to the Democratic Congress and said in effect, "The sky will fall on Tuesday". Congressmen believed them, and $750 billion TARP was passed to bail out the losers.
The alternative was to let the more foolish Wall St players to go broke as a warning to others. They tried this with Lehman Bros, and it was scary.
With hindsight, I think we should have let more Wall Streeters, the ones that didn't (still don't) understand the difference between gambling and raising capital to finance economic expansion, go under. It's clear that a lot of Wall Street business, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, and secondary mortgage trading is pure gambling. And I see no reason for taxpayers money, my money, to bail out gamblers who go bust. The economy doesn't need gambling.
Back three years ago, it was a harder call. Seeing famous old time Wall St firms go bust was scary and the urge to "do something" was strong. So something was done. The downside is everyone thru out the entire world now believes that the US government stands behind all the big Wall St firms. Which allows those firms to take bigger risks and borrow more than if lenders worried about them going broke ("counterparty risk" they call it). And makes us taxpayer liable for humongous debts everytime some Wall St executive makes a dumb bet.

Ask the right questions

The TV news is going crazy with the California missile launch story. They have been quoting the Navy, the Pentagon, NORAD, Boy Scouts of America, just about anyone, saying "We don't know nothing".
Questions they ought to ask.
1. Was this launch detected on radar?
2. Was the launch flash seen by missile warning satellites?
3. What is the predicted impact area of the warhead?
4. Did the payload achieve orbit?
5. What was the launch position? And when will we have ships and planes there?

Of course, a bunch of klutzy J school graduates wouldn't know any thing about it.