Egypt to go Islamist

Apparently Egypt is going the way everyone, yours truly included, predicted. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist extremist group older than, more extreme than, and just as violent as, Al Quada, is going to control the Egyptian parliament. This comes from an Egyptian who is likely to become president, which means he has a fairly good idea of what's going down. The Muslim Brotherhood has been around since the 1920's when it worked to drive the British out of Egypt. It has survived severe prosecution by Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarik. They are the group responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. They are survivors, and they are the only organized political party in Egypt. There is nobody to resist them.
Once in power, the Muslim Brotherhood will make trouble for Israel, impose Sharia law on the population, prosecute the Christians (10% of the population) and team up with Iran to cause trouble for the United States.
Egypt is important. It is the center of the Arab world. Cairo has the same prestige in the Arab world as New York City has in the real world. Egypt sets the tone, writes the books, makes the movies, prints the newspapers that go all over the Arab world.
Aren't you so glad that Obama called for Mubarik's ouster?

Soldering Iron

I needed a real soldering iron (150 Watts) to do some brass bar stock. These are pretty much obsolete, no store up here carries them anymore. You can get soldering guns in that wattage, but the biggest irons are little 30 watters intended for semiconductor work.
So, what do you do when it is not sold in stores? Simple, E-bay. Some one on the Bay had a carton of cheap ass 150 Watt irons from China. Couple a bucks for the iron, $9 shipping and handling. So I ordered one. It came in after a week.
It's Chinese, and it's cheap ass. The packaging has some amusing Chinglish on it.
"It's normal for heating elements to have a slight fever with smoke after the first electricity, they'll disappear after 10 minutes." "Thermo elements and iron head are strictly prohibited to be demolished or replaced when iron is in electricity." "Mada in China."

Unregulated Tattoo Ink

Monday must be NPR's day of woe. After the autism piece, they ran a second piece about the dangers of unregulated ink used to tattoo humans. They dropped the amazing statistic that 30% of Americans have tattoos (really?) and then bemoaned the lack of government regulation of tattoo ink, and by implication regulation of the entire tattoo business, probably with an eye to shutting it down.
Now I don't hold with tattoos myself, I think they are dumb looking, and likely to cause infection, but if others want to tattoo them selves, it's none of my business, and none of the government's business.

The rise of Autism

Long piece on NPR this morning claiming that autism is much more widespread than thought. They did a study in a Korean city and declared that better than 2% of the children in the city were autistic. They went on to explain that a large number of cases were discovered even though the unlucky children had been doing well in school and not in difficulty.
The piece did not explain how these "hidden" cases of autism were detected, nor how bad the situation was.
I reflect upon a couple of young boys I know, who seem like perfectly ordinary boys to me, but whose mothers both informed me that the they were autistic.
Is autism becoming the new Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a diagnosis beloved of teachers, because it releases them from responsibility for the child's academic difficulties?

Leaf Day

In the high mountain passes of New Hampshire, the trees are putting out leaves, finally. Hurray.
Let's hope it doesn't snow on them.

Upstate NRA dinner

National is right on the ball, and forwarded my name and contact info to the local NRA organization, and they invited me to attend their dinner Friday night. So I went. It was held in the Littleton Elks hall. About 100 people turned up, all ages from two, thru teen age, thru old geezers like me, and a fair number of girls considering the nature of the event. Dress was informal, I was overdressed in coat & tie.
The event consisted of talking, eating, and auctioning. They auctioned off a raft of cool stuff to raise money, including a fair number of firearms. Two guys from NRA national turned up, which is not bad considering the remoteness of Littleton, NH from most of the US of A. On the other hand, 100 votes is enough to tip a lot of elections up here, and most of the 100 people present were NRA members. Who will probably pay close attention to NRA recommendations about who is and who is not, a supporter of the right to bear arms. I know for a fact that Charlie Bass, our current US rep, owes a lot of votes to a letter the NRA mailed to all New Hampshire members just before the 2010 election.
Gives one some appreciation of the effectiveness of the NRA as a lobbying organization.

Firefox 4

My Firefox has been nagging me to upgrade to V4 for some time now. I googled Firefox 4 and failed to turn up any bad reviews of it. So I upgraded today.
Be golly, Firefox 4 is faster than 3.6. I'm getting less "site not found", and when I click on a site it comes up faster. This is good. It promises a world of head spinning inprovements, about which I don't care much, but it is faster, about which I do care.