Two silly ideas heard on Fox

Silly idea #1. Since gasoline tax revenues are flat or down, 'cause of less driving (when you're out of work you don't drive to work) and masses of electric cars (when did I last see an electric car on the highway?) let's start a "mileage tax" on all cars. Bad idea. if you just have to have more money, raise the gasoline tax. But, the public is agin that idea, and if the public is on the alert, they will be agin a mileage tax too. They didn't say, but I assume a mileage tax would work by reading your odometer when you get your inspection sticker. Actually they do that now, and I don't know what they do with the information.
Silly idea #2, This from Ben Stein. "I don't know what I would have done differently from Obama about the economy."
Well Ben, I can think of a few things. Use the $800 billion porkulus bill to buy real things that would have stimulated the real economy. Instead all the money went to helping state governments meet payroll. Approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Put GM and Chrysler thru real bankruptcy, divvy up their assets in accordance with the law instead of handing them all over to the UAW. Reform the patent office, which has stopped technical innovation in its tracks. Don't waste taxpayers money on black holes like solar, electric cars, Solyndra, and wind energy. These are never going to work, they are just money sinks. Don't do Obamacare, which has raised labor costs by a huge and unknown amount, stalling hiring all over the country 'cause no employer dares hire anyone, 'cause they can't afford the healthcare costs, or they can't figure out what those costs will be. Drop the ethanol for motor fuel boondoggle. Let oil drilling leases in the Gulf, off the east coast and off the west coast, off the Alaska coast and on oil sands in the west. Use Antitrust law to break up the biggest and stupidest banks, AIG, Citibank, BofA for starters. Shut down Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac before they wreck the world economy again. And prosecute their officers. Fund some science fiction projects like hydrogen fusion. Repeal Sarbanes Oxley and Dodd Frank. Shut down the EPA. Stop farm subsidies. Get the Feds out of the highway construction business. Let the states build the roads with their own money. Reform the corporate tax code and regulation to encourage business to operate in the United States. Shut down the SEC, repeal all their regulations, burn their files and prosecute their officers. SEC was started after Great Depression I to prevent Great Depression II. They have failed in that mission, so let's get rid of 'em to save money and free up industry.

Words of the Weasel Part 29

Transparent. Originally a property of glass, like you can see thru it. Now its an all purpose feel good property of various policitical wheeling and dealing. "The negotiations were transparent" is supposed to be a good thing. In fact just about any deal is OK so long as it is "transparent".
Right.
Armed robbery is transparent. Give me some money or I put a bullet into you. Can't get much more transparent than that. But I don't have to like it.

The nanny state comes to Havard.

According to this, Harvard students are required to get permission from the dean to throw a party.
Damn. I attended two different colleges back in the day, and we never had to get permission from anybody to throw a party.
Good luck Harvard students.

USAF to go for $550 million bomber

They haven't figured out what the mission is, or what the thing will look like, or what they are gonna call it, but they have decided on the price. They have decided that it will be sub sonic (good call). Well at least it's less than the $2 billion for the B-2. This price declaration means that it will cost at least $550 million. Once you say how much you are willing to pay, count on the bids coming in right at that number.
The Aviation Week article is full of skeptical observations about USAF's terrible track record on contract costs, starting with the F-35 which was estimated at $35million back when the program started 20 years ago, and is $80 million now. And the tanker disaster, and the lightweight fighter fiasco. Certainly my old service has done more major bungles than successes over the last 20 years.
And there was a lot of wailing from subcontractors about how the cost target would be achieved by leaving off all their gold plated "systems". Unfair they say, leaving all this stuff off the bomber will mean other aircraft have to carry out those missions. Me, I don't have a problem with that. If the "low cost" bomber can destroy its targets, and live to tell the tale, it's done good. It doesn't need to do reconnaissance mapping, or serve as an airborne Internet relay station, or as VIP transport, or do electronic eavesdropping. It just needs to penetrate enemy defenses and hit the target. For extra credit it can get its crew back to base alive.
It's sort of too bad that the greatest penetration aid of all is unusable in the post cold war environment. The nuclear tipped Short Range Attack Missile (SRAM) could reach out 100 miles and vaporize those pesky fighter bases, radars and SAM sites. The B-52's carried lots of them in rotary launchers. Unfortunately we don't use nukes in the 21st century, and plain old TNT doesn't pack enough punch to do much of a job.

A Strong Majority

That's what Obama said on TV. He was saying that the Supremes should not overturn Obamacare "because it passed the Congress with a strong majority".
Yeah Right. Every one knows that Obamacare just squeaked by with a bare handful of votes. When Obama calls that a "strong majority" I, and a lot of other people, think he is telling a falsehood. Very uncool to have a president that tells falsehoods.
Plus, unconstitutional is unconstitutional, doesn't matter how many Congresscritters liked it. The Supremes have overturned plenty of laws since Marbury vs Madison, all of which passed Congress with a much greater majority than Obamacare had.
Which ever way the Supremes go, I hope they can do better than 5 to 4. When the nine top lawyers in the country cannot agree on what the law really is, and the four losers write opinions calling the five winners idiots, it doesn't breed respect for the law or for the Supremes among the citizenry. And that's a bad thing.

Every age rewrites history to its own liking

I'm reading "The Isles, a History" by Norman Davis. He is something of a fruitcake, and spends a lot of words discussing how the mean old English oppressed the noble "Celtic" races, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, going right back to the beginnings of history. But he has some modern myths to propagate as well as serving as a scourge of the Sassenach.
Davis is discussing the Vikings and their impact on England. Which was considerable, at its high point the "Danelaw" covered half the country. There is the interesting question of why the Viking appeared so suddenly out of nowhere. They first struck the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793. Prior to 793 nobody in England had heard of them. Davis says,
"The central puzzle... is to know why, after an age of passive isolation...The answer obviously has something to do with a serious ecological imbalance....Historians refer to changes in climate..."
How PC of Davis, it's all due to global warming, Viking cook fires added to the CO2 level in the atmosphere. Yeah, Right.
More likely, the Viking shipwrights didn't learn how to build a ship seaworthy enough to cross the North Sea until 793. Heh, there is a first time for everything. There is a lot of art in building a sailing vessel that can reach across the wind and beat up into the wind. You need enough keel to keep the ship from sliding sideways under the press of sail. You need a sail that can be trimmed in to fore and aft, and you need the mast placed just right. Too far forward and the force of the wind pushes the ship's bow down wind overpowering the rudder. The far aft, and the opposite happens. The Vikings built the hull from long planks (strakes) and they overlapped the planks and riveted them together. This sophisticated construction ( we call it monocoque today) gave an immensely strong and light hull, but required a lot of hand made iron rivets and a set of really big clamps to force the planks tightly together so they could be riveted.
We have a few ship finds from before the Viking age, (Sutton Hoo for instance) and it is clear that these vessels were pure rowboats, no keel, no mast or mast step. They might have been good enough to cross the English Channel in nice summer weather, but crossing the North Sea is much harder.
As late as 1066, Duke William's invasion fleet had to wait months for a south wind to carry them to England. Translation, the Duke's hastily built ships (we can see them abuilding in the Bayeux Tapistry) were only fit to run before the wind. Tubs like that would never hack it in a North Sea storm.

We got two inches. Most since October's 8 inches

Heavy, very heavy. It looked so wintery last night that I lit the fireplace. And it's April. We ain't supposed to get snow in April.