Deathly Hallows

Of course I went and saw it. I've seen the previous ones, I have the books, alledgedly purchased for the children, but I read them too when no one was looking. It's all good fun.
It's a Harry Potter movie, pretty much like the others. The cast is a year or two older than the last time. Emma Watson / Hermione is very pretty. She has an interesting face that looks lovely when photographed from the right angle, but plain photographed from the wrong angle. For most of the movie they are wearing "urban grunge" the fashion statement of the ugh-oh's (2000-2010). The two boys just look baggy and wrinkled wearing this stuff, but Emma always looks slim and elegant. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) has grown up to be fairly handsome, more so than Rupert Grint (Ron) has. Rupert's hairstyle did nothing for his appearance. He needs to find a better barber if he wants to stay in pictures, after the last Potter movie that is.
It's long, 2 1/2 hours. Even at that length, it would be hard to follow if you hadn't read the book, and in fact read it fairly recently. It follows the book quite closely, but there is little dialog to clue the unread into what is going on.
For one reason or another, my favorite scene from the book was omitted. Hagrid and Harry are airborne, in/on a motorcycle, with Death Eaters in hot pursuit. Hagrid pushes a button on the handlebars, the cycle emits a great flash and cloud of smoke from the exhaust. Right there, in mid air, the smoke solidifies into a stout brick wall, into which the Death Eaters crash at Mach 0.5.

Giving thanks for small favors

Broadband just got broad again. I'm on a Time Warner cable modem and band width sucked. I couldn't play a U-tube video with out constant pauses waiting for more video to trickle in from the cable.
Time Warner just fixed something. UTube now plays like a champ.

Three can keep a secret. If one of them is dead

The Great Wikileak has the TV news baying for the head of Julian Assange. Along with pseudo intellectual arguements about freedom of the press. Although hanging Mr. Assange out to dry isn't a bad idea, it's a side issue.
The real issue is the astounding foolishness of our government, putting zillions of secret documents on line, and allowing access by everyone in the government. Information sharing they called it. Classified is not information to be shared. That's why it's classified. The way you keep secrets secret is by not telling them to everyone. That's the "need to know" doctrine. And by not putting them on line in the first place. The real villains are the idiots who created the great classified database, and the Cabinet secretaries who signed off on permitting their department's secret documents going into the database.
With all the classified in the US government on line, one disgruntled PFC was able to carry a quarter million documents off base on a single CD. If all that classified had been real paper, locked in real safes, in secure locations, the PFC wouldn't have been able to move that much paper to the door, even with the aid of handtruck.
Let's see if the government is bright enough to do the right thing, namely destroy the classified database. Wipe all the disk drives, invalidate all the passwords, take the file pointers off the net. Classified should not be kept on computers, it is too easy to steal.
By the way, how long do you think your computerized medical records will stay confidential when the US State Dept cannot keep its classified off Wikileaks? Are we all looking forward to seeing our operations, prescriptions, X-rays, and doctor's opinions shared with our employers, our insurers, the media, and all the nosy neighbors?

Robin Hood with Errol Flynn

It surfaced in the $5 a DVD bin at Walmart. It's an antique, 1938. Talkies are only 10 years old. The Technicolor process was new that year. It's still entertaining. The colors have lasted, still bright. Lots of derring do, chases on horse back, sword fights, quarterstaff fights, non stop action. Characters are divided into good guys, bad guys, and love interest (Olivia deHaviland as Maid Marion). Claude Rains is a convincingly nasty Prince John. Basil Rathbone takes a week off from being Sherlock Holmes to be Guy of Gisborne.
Given the age of this flick, it's darn good. Better than the Kevin Costner version from a couple a years ago.

Computer security? do we have any?

US traitor Bradley Manning, while an Army private managed to access a zillion secret army documents and feed them to Wikileaks. Now it appears he was able to access 250,000 state department secret documents and they are appearing on Wikileaks at this very moment.
There are a few questions I'd like answered. Such as how does a low level Army enlisted man gain access to State Dept classified? And how does he gain access to so much of if? What ever happened to "need to know"?
Who issued this traitor a security clearance?
Why is all this classified on computers anyhow? It would be more secure if just one copy was hand typed using a manual Remington office typewriter. And the one copy kept in a safe somewhere.
As of this writing, the Wikileaks site is off the air due to a distributed denial of service attack, but the ever patriotic New York Times is going to publish the juicer items tommorrow.

"Bush Tax Cuts"

The subject of much talk, and a blizzard of disinformation. The real choices facing Congress are three, Raise taxes on all Americans, raise taxes on higher earning Americans, or don't raise taxes on anyone.
Does anyone think raising taxes on everyone will get the country out of Great Depression 2.0?
Does anyone think raising taxes on people who have serious money to invest is going to get us out of Great Depression 2.0?
Keeping everyone's taxes where they have been for the last 10 years is better than any kind of tax hike.
Even better would be to cut taxes. Worked for Bush. Might even work for Obama.

Of course raising taxes helps pay the vastly increased spending of the Obama administration.

What to fear in Korea

The current Shoot-Ex on the Korean border is a sign of weakness of the North Korean government. North Korea is attempting a power transfer to the third member of the Kim family. This guy, Kim Jung whats-his-face is a perfect zero. Nobody knows anything about him. Whether he has the stones required to run the nastiest dictator ship ever is unknown. North Korea is dirt poor, unable to feed its people, and yet maintains a humongous army, builds nukes and missiles. There has gotta be a LOT of unhappy campers up there. The rifle carrying privates in the North Korea army all come from somewhere, have family that is going hungry, and might not obey an order to fire on civilians. Nobody really knows.
In short, North Korea could come unglued, overnight. The army and police stop obeying orders, and what little national economy they have comes to a stop. People start dying for lack of food and water.
In this case, South Korea would be under enormous pressure to do something. Lot of South Koreans still have kin living in the North and they will demand their kinfolk be saved. So the South Korean army will drive north in trucks full of food and water and peace flags waving from bumper mounts. If it were just up to the Koreans, things would settle out, the north would become part of the south. But the Chinese won't like this.
China likes having North Korea. It gives them a border shared with a pliable client state. It lets them poke a stick at the Americans and get them all hot and bothered, at little cost to themselves. The idea of having a pushy economic rival, who is hand in glove with the Americans, on their border is anathema to China. To prevent this, the Chinese will send in peacekeepers.
Now we have the People's Liberation Army and the South Korean Army cruising around the same turf. The possibility for nasty shooting incidents is very great. We don't want to think about escalation. The PLA is very big and formidable, but so is South Korea, and the South Koreans have that American connection. A lot of Americans, like myself, have been to South Korea over the years, and brought back very favorable impressions of the Korean people. The Koreans have been loyal and faithful allies for 60 years. The US government would be under great pressure to back up the South Koreans. And that could lead to hostilities between the US and China, which is not a good thing.
I don't know just how to avoid a catastrophe here, but I can at least see the dangers involved.