Ravens

How big does a black bird have to be to be a raven instead of a plain old crow? I just had a black bird that musta been better than foot long from beak to tail strut down the middle of the road in front of my place. Surely that is too big not to be a raven?

Sprngfield

The great model train show that is. It's so great that I drove down, some three hours, and so as not to miss anything, I got up early and had the Mercury on the road at 0600. It was still pitch dark, sun rise didn't happen til 0700 and by that time I was over on I91 headed south at 80 mph. Sunrise was lovely and surprisingly brief. Lasted about ten minutes and then it was daylight.
By the way, I don't believe all that stuff about crumbling infrastructure crying out for money. I91 was pot hole free, fresh black asphalt, not too much traffic. Not like New York which is a state of potholes.
The show was huge. It was in the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. It filled four big exposition halls with running train layouts and vendors selling all things railroad, from striped engineer hats to railroad lanterns to $1000 brass steam locomotive models. My feet managed to survive all four halls and five hours. They filled up all the open land with parking. I saw plates from NJ, NY, MA, CT, NH, Quebec and Ontario. Like maybe a third of the plates were from out of state. Crowd was easily in the 100,000's. The aisles were jammed, mostly with seniors of my generation and grandchildren. The kids were all well behaved, well dressed, and skinny. If there is a childhood obesity problem you couldn't prove it by this crowd.
A fun day, and the cat was overjoyed to see me when I got back.

Poor Cannon

Bad weather for skiing. It blew hard all last night, rattling the windows, with a trace of snow. But now it warmed up to nearly 40 F and its raining. Bad for the skiing.

Circustime on CNN

Caught last night's debate on CNN. Arrhg. It was a circus, complete with steam calliope, three rings of newsies pontificating, and a truly clueless ringmaster.
The ringmaster was Woof Blitzen, a sawed off little guy who doesn't shave and has oatmeal for brains. He managed to get Mitt and Newt to trash each other on stage, it took Rick Santorum to point out that they both sounded like idiots while doing it.
Give me debates on Fox any day.

Then they got going on NASA. None of the candidates had a clue about the real issue. Since we scrapped the shuttle, we cannot get astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) except by paying the Russians. That makes it a Russian Space Station, since the Russians control all access. We have two commercial boosters (Space-X 's Falcon and Atlas V) that have plenty of boost to loft capsules full of astronauts and supplies up to the ISS . So does NASA use a well proven and paid for existing booster? No way. NASA started an expensive new booster program (Constellation) and managed to spend every penny they had before Congress shut the program down. Since then NASA has been completely wrapped up in turf wars. We should just flat build a capsule, pop it on top of a Falcon or an Atlas V, and launch. NASA seems incapable of doing this. So cut NASA out of the picture and let a contract to Space-X or Lockheed to get on with the job.
None of the candidates understood these issues.

Bo-o-ring!

Obama's State of the Union that is. Ran for an hour and a quarter, promised pie in the sky for nearly everyone without ever getting into specifics. Never used the words "Keystone XL", "deficit", "Solyndra", "Iranian nuclear weapons", "cap and trade", "capital gains", "global warming", or "health insurance".
Raved on and on about ending tax breaks for corporations that "ship jobs overseas". Strange, I never heard of THAT tax break before. It probably exists only in the minds of Democrats.
He got a lot of standing ovations. I could not be sure on account of the camera angle, but it looked like only democrats stood up to clap for him.
There is a republican slam video going around showing clips of Obama saying the same damn thing at his State of the Union speech this year, last year and the year before. That pretty well sums it up, this guy has run out of ideas. And a good thing too.

TSA hassles Congressmen

Back when I was an Air Force officer, USAF doctrine on Congressmen was very firm. Treat them with courtesy and respect, get them any information they ask for right away, fly them anywhere they want to go, and furnish them with an official car and a driver. Be nice.
Why? Two reasons really. The Air Force is the armed force of a democracy, it is under the control of the civilian government, and Congressmen are that civilian government. Showing respect to a Congressmen is like showing respect to the flag. Plus, Congressmen write the Air Force budget, treat them properly and the service might get more funding next year.

Now we come the the TSA, who hassled Senator Rand Paul the other day. TSA apparently doesn't believe in showing respect to anyone, let alone Congressmen. And they are stupid enough to think they are immune to budgetary reprisals. That is an atrocious attitude for the security forces of a democracy.

Health Care according to me

My concern is that the US spends entirely too much money on health care. We spend twice as much as any other country on earth, 19% of our GNP. For spending twice as much, the health in the US is no better than any other country. In short we spend twice as much and get less than other countries.
Health care does not create wealth, it consumes it. Health care spending does not produce goods or services than can be sold, exported, or consumed. The US cannot compete against foreign countries when US products bear a 19% markup to pay for the workers health care, and our foreign competitors only pay 10%. Manufacturing is "outsourcing", moving overseas, in order to avoid ruinous US health care costs.
Why is US health care so expensive? Simple. For the majority who have health insurance, it's all paid for. The providers, facing cost increases, merely raise their fees. The patients don't care, they don't have to pay for it, that's what insurance is for. So why not do that extra CAT scan, just to be sure, do that extra doctor's office visit, do some extra blood work, it's all paid for. I remember Uncle Remus, where Brer Rabbit claimed to be making a dollar a minute. My doctor does better. My last yearly office visit cost my insurance company $500 for fifty minutes. That's ten dollars a minute.
If patients had to pay for health care out of pocket, a lot less money would be spent. Insurance is needed to cover the big stuff, because the big stuff can cost more than a house, and few people have that kind of money. But the routine stuff, yearly physicals, children's earaches and sore throats, a few stitches here or there, most of us can handle out of pocket. You used to be able to buy "hospitalization only" policies for $3000 a year, as opposed to "everything is covered" policies that cost $12000 a year. With the $9000 savings you can do a lot of routine stuff. And, since it's your money, you will bargain for fees less than ten dollars a minute. Obamacare outlawed those, all that is legal now is the $12000 covers everything policy.
Competition would bring down the price of health insurance. If insurance companies were allowed to sell policies nationwide, policies would cost less. Up here in the northwoods there are only TWO health insurance companies selling policies. If we could buy our insurance from any company in the US of A, we could find better prices out of state.
Competition would bring down the cost of medines. We ought to be able to buy pills from any decent first world country, like Canada, England, Japan, or pick your favorite. We can't because US drug companies have wined and dined the FDA into forbidding imports, so that they can charge ridiculous prices ($2 a pill) to US patients.

Too bad none of these made the Wall St Journal 's list of "crucial" health care issues.