Obama has gone of TV damn near every day talking about Egypt. He ought to stop. All he does is anger the Egyptians, undermine a loyal American ally, encourage Islamist crazies, and make him self, and the United States, look clueless.
Speaking of clueless, take Director of National Intelligence Clapper. He said on TV that the Muslim brotherhood is secular, and eschews violence. Right. Tell that to Anwar Sadat, gunned down by the Muslim Brotherhood while reviewing a parade. Tell me about the secular nature of Muslim Brotherhood offshoots Hamas and Al Quada. Clapper needs to be fired, quickly.
And just as I write this, Obama is back on TV, talking about Egypt, trying to tell the Egyptians to be good and democratic and other fatherly things that must be infuriating to Egyptians. The US is not Egypt's father.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Town Budget, Franconia
Getting ready for town meeting next month, the Franconia selectmen released the town budget for next year. The meeting was attended by town employees and a handful of citizens. Essentially, the plan is to spend pretty much what was spent last year, give or take a some chicken feed amounts. Line item budget totals $1.36 million. With capital improvement projects, the library and the transfer station added in, the town budget gets up to $1.99 million.
Out of this budget, the big items are:
Police $283,221
Highway & Streets $364,894
Recreation Programs $105,211
Transfer Station $252,696
Items that will draw or should draw comments at next month's town meeting are:
New police cruiser $27,200. A Crown Vic to replace one that is only three years old with only 80,000 miles on it.
Transfer Station $252,696. This seems like a lot of money for a fairly simple operation that is only open half the time. Some justification of costs would be nice.
Dispatch Lines $28,883 I believe this is 911 emergency call support. It seems awfully expensive for just an answering service.
Town vehicles $112,350 There are Capital Reserve Funds for 15 town vehicles, which soaks up quite a bit of money.
Out of this budget, the big items are:
Police $283,221
Highway & Streets $364,894
Recreation Programs $105,211
Transfer Station $252,696
Items that will draw or should draw comments at next month's town meeting are:
New police cruiser $27,200. A Crown Vic to replace one that is only three years old with only 80,000 miles on it.
Transfer Station $252,696. This seems like a lot of money for a fairly simple operation that is only open half the time. Some justification of costs would be nice.
Dispatch Lines $28,883 I believe this is 911 emergency call support. It seems awfully expensive for just an answering service.
Town vehicles $112,350 There are Capital Reserve Funds for 15 town vehicles, which soaks up quite a bit of money.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Strong temperature inversion
The weather folk had predicted bitter sub zero cold over night. Early this morning my kitchen thermometer read a chilly PLUS 11 degrees. Car started trouble free, and his thermometer dropped from the toasty PLUS 29 degrees in the garage to PLUS 11 degrees as I pulled onto Rt 18 (Three Mile Hill Road). I cruised down hill into Franconia some 1000 feet below my place at Mittersill. At the bottom of the hill in Franconia it was MINUS 5 degrees. We had a 16 degree temperature inversion in merely 4 miles. That's strong.
NOAA keeps temperature records over the whole world gong back to the 1600's when the thermometer was invented. By the 1980's they had some 14,000 stations reporting. Then in 1990 occurred the great purge, some 7000 stations were dropped. I have to wonder what dropping all those stations did to the world average temp, when we have a 16 degree temperature difference over a distance of only 4 miles.
NOAA keeps temperature records over the whole world gong back to the 1600's when the thermometer was invented. By the 1980's they had some 14,000 stations reporting. Then in 1990 occurred the great purge, some 7000 stations were dropped. I have to wonder what dropping all those stations did to the world average temp, when we have a 16 degree temperature difference over a distance of only 4 miles.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
What's worse a virus, or the anti virus?
Dunno. It's been a long long time since I had a virus. But I had antivirus just yesterday. It started out virtuously enough. I decided to do a virus check on the laptop. It's been a long time, so each of my antivirus programs updated itself, and its database over the internet. After each update, a lengthy scan. Two hours in one case. I ran my favorite three, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and AVG. All are freebies available for down loading. No virii were detected by any of the three.
Next morning, I booted up to check email and do some websurfing. Boot was ultra sluggish, and loading Thunderbird took so long I though the machine had crashed. Hitting Ctl-Alt-Del brought up the Windows task manager, which revealed that a "process" named AAWsomething-or-other was hogging as much as 100% of my CPU time. Some hackers had "improved" Ad-Aware to always load a real time scanner at boot time. This baby is supposed to check traffic one the internet and alarm when it sees a virus slipping into your machine. That's nice and all, but it slows the machine down too damn much. So, uninstall AdAware.
Next day, machine is still running slow. Task Manager shows a bunch of "processes" named AVGsomething-or-other are active. Must be real time scanners installed by AVG. So, uninstall AVG.
Today, boot up, and draw a couple of scary error messages at boot time. One message said "Cannot find a file with a name that starts with AVG". So much for a clean uninstall. Then it started Firefox to run a survey from AVG asking why I had uninstalled AVG.
So, now I am running almost barefoot. I still have firewall up (ZoneAlarm) but no realtime scanners and no disc scanners. I don't do file sharing, I don't insert strange media (flash drives, floppy disks or CD's), the router has been doing a good job as firewall, and I have autorun turned off. The desktop has run bare foot and virus free for more than a year. Lets see if laptop is as lucky.
Next morning, I booted up to check email and do some websurfing. Boot was ultra sluggish, and loading Thunderbird took so long I though the machine had crashed. Hitting Ctl-Alt-Del brought up the Windows task manager, which revealed that a "process" named AAWsomething-or-other was hogging as much as 100% of my CPU time. Some hackers had "improved" Ad-Aware to always load a real time scanner at boot time. This baby is supposed to check traffic one the internet and alarm when it sees a virus slipping into your machine. That's nice and all, but it slows the machine down too damn much. So, uninstall AdAware.
Next day, machine is still running slow. Task Manager shows a bunch of "processes" named AVGsomething-or-other are active. Must be real time scanners installed by AVG. So, uninstall AVG.
Today, boot up, and draw a couple of scary error messages at boot time. One message said "Cannot find a file with a name that starts with AVG". So much for a clean uninstall. Then it started Firefox to run a survey from AVG asking why I had uninstalled AVG.
So, now I am running almost barefoot. I still have firewall up (ZoneAlarm) but no realtime scanners and no disc scanners. I don't do file sharing, I don't insert strange media (flash drives, floppy disks or CD's), the router has been doing a good job as firewall, and I have autorun turned off. The desktop has run bare foot and virus free for more than a year. Lets see if laptop is as lucky.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Egypt Part 3
Listening to NHPR this morning and I heard this from "an administration spokesman".
"Our objective in Egypt is to secure free and fair elections."
Oh really? That statement is guaranteed to raise hackles across Egypt. All Egyptians hear that as "The United States wants to impose a government upon Egypt." Not diplomatic, to say the least.
The United States should be saying "We respect the right of the Egyptian people to choose their own form of government". That is the only proper thing for a democracy to say about foreign governments.
Now, you know and I know that the United States really wants a stable, decent, secular government in Egypt, one that will maintain the peace treaty with Israel, co-operate with the US, and improve the lot of the mass of Egyptian people. It would be nice if elections caused this to come about, but we cannot be fussy. Last time we did "free and fair elections" over there we got Hamas (offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) in charge of the Gaza Strip. We certainly don't want Egypt taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood is the outfit that killed Anwar Sadat 30 years ago. Today the Brotherhood is the only political organization in Egypt, if elections were held today, they would win. In fact if elections are held in September, the Brotherhood may well win.
If the Egyptian power structure (mostly the Egyptian Army) can cut a deal and make it stick without too much breaking of heads, we are happy. We care about results more than we care about process.
Let's hope the Obama administration understands this.
"Our objective in Egypt is to secure free and fair elections."
Oh really? That statement is guaranteed to raise hackles across Egypt. All Egyptians hear that as "The United States wants to impose a government upon Egypt." Not diplomatic, to say the least.
The United States should be saying "We respect the right of the Egyptian people to choose their own form of government". That is the only proper thing for a democracy to say about foreign governments.
Now, you know and I know that the United States really wants a stable, decent, secular government in Egypt, one that will maintain the peace treaty with Israel, co-operate with the US, and improve the lot of the mass of Egyptian people. It would be nice if elections caused this to come about, but we cannot be fussy. Last time we did "free and fair elections" over there we got Hamas (offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) in charge of the Gaza Strip. We certainly don't want Egypt taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood is the outfit that killed Anwar Sadat 30 years ago. Today the Brotherhood is the only political organization in Egypt, if elections were held today, they would win. In fact if elections are held in September, the Brotherhood may well win.
If the Egyptian power structure (mostly the Egyptian Army) can cut a deal and make it stick without too much breaking of heads, we are happy. We care about results more than we care about process.
Let's hope the Obama administration understands this.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
County medical insurance
Back to the county commissioners meeting. The HR guy said that the county's medical plan was up for renewal. And the insurance company was talking premium hikes. I asked the HR guy how many bidders he had. "Just one" he replied. "It's a sole source procurement. One company didn't even submit a bid when we asked." Which means we taxpayers are about to get robbed again. The way you keep costs down is you have multiple bidders and go with the low cost bid. When there is only one bidder, hold onto your wallet.
This is something Concord could fix. We could pass a NH law allowing health insurance companies with a valid license from any state in the union to sell insurance in NH. That would give us more bidders. The few New Hampshire insurance companies would bitch and moan, but Grafton County could get a better deal.
This is something Concord could fix. We could pass a NH law allowing health insurance companies with a valid license from any state in the union to sell insurance in NH. That would give us more bidders. The few New Hampshire insurance companies would bitch and moan, but Grafton County could get a better deal.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Right to Work
The state legislature held public hearings on a New Hampshire Right to Work law yesterday. A LOT of people attended, so many the hearing was held in the legislature's hall, the biggest room in the state house.
The Union people were out in force. Even without the buttons, you can kinda tell who the union people are. Beer bellies are the giveaway.
Testimony was intense. The union people see right to work as destruction of their unions and get very passionate about it.
Over the course of the hearings a figure of 7 to 10 percent union membership in the state was offered and everyone seemed to accept it.
Industry likes right-to-work states. In New Hampshire, we need more industry. Our young people are leaving the state to find work. We have a terrible unemployment problem. We have a tax revenue shortfall. More industry would solve all these problems. Becoming a right-to-work state will bring more industry into New Hampshire.
Right to work will bring industry to offer good factory jobs. The benefit of more jobs in the state far outweighs a small inconvenience to the small portion of New Hampshire citizen who are union members.
The Union people were out in force. Even without the buttons, you can kinda tell who the union people are. Beer bellies are the giveaway.
Testimony was intense. The union people see right to work as destruction of their unions and get very passionate about it.
Over the course of the hearings a figure of 7 to 10 percent union membership in the state was offered and everyone seemed to accept it.
Industry likes right-to-work states. In New Hampshire, we need more industry. Our young people are leaving the state to find work. We have a terrible unemployment problem. We have a tax revenue shortfall. More industry would solve all these problems. Becoming a right-to-work state will bring more industry into New Hampshire.
Right to work will bring industry to offer good factory jobs. The benefit of more jobs in the state far outweighs a small inconvenience to the small portion of New Hampshire citizen who are union members.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)