Winter is coming

Mt Lafayette from the Mittersill Inn driveway.  Took this picture two days ago.  It snowed on the deck that night and it stuck up on the mountain.  Notice that leaves have not all fallen yet.

Drive away bill payments

Paying the bills on a rainy Sunday.  I open the bill from Time Warner Cable.  (cable TV & broadband). Inclosed is a nice form letter explaining that they changed my account number, for the convenience of their computer wienies. 
   And would you be so kind as to redo all the paper work for your credit card payments 'cause when the new account numbers go into effect, credit card payments to the old account number will no longer be accepted.  Likewise if you are paying by electronic funds transfer.
   Right.  I'll drop everything and go thru all that again.  Real Soon Now
   Fortunately I still pay with old fashioned paper checks so I don't have  to bother.
   I wonder how many payments Time Warner will never see because their computer wienies were too lazy to program the new bean counting system to use the old customer account numbers.

  

Scam. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT)

A legal US tax scam.  All a company has to do is convince the IRS that they are in the real estate business, at least that a lot of their business is real estate, and presto, chango, NO US CORPORATE INCOME TAX.
Nice deal if you can get it.  Right now a cellphone operator, American Tower is trying to become a tax exempt REIT on the basis that its cellphone towers are real estate.  In line behind American Tower are data center operator Equinox (they own a fair number of big buildings full of computers) and bill board company Lamar Advertising (billboard are real estate).
   This tax scam is essentially unfair.  Business is business and all businesses ought to be taxed alike.  No special deals for special business.  The REIT scam sucks money out of everything else and pours it into real estate.  Which might be why a real estate bubble caused Great Depression 2.0.  We would be better off to have investors decide where to put their money.  They will pick things that will make money (and employ workers).  The REIT scam is  picking winners and losers via the tax code.
   Romney and Ryan might be willing to repeal this ugly bit of tax favoritism.   

Ryan vs Biden last night

A slug fest.  Biden was a lot feistier than Obama and I scored the event as more even than last week's showdown.  Biden was rude, smirking, laughing and interrupting.  Color him obnoxious.  Ryan was cool, polite, knowledgeable, a nice civilized and polite man I'd happily invite  home for dinner.  Biden can go eat at McDonald's.
  The moderator asked stupid questions and interrupted too much.  Give me Jim Lehrer anytime.
  Both guys presented arguments for their sides, but they kept quoting "facts" that I had never heard of  to bolster their arguments.  Being something of a political junkie who follows this stuff, I figure any fact I never heard of before is likely made up on the spur of the moment.  Bogus.   

Four Careers are Toast

I watched the Darrel Issa hearings yesterday.  He had four State Dept people on the dock, two field guys who were on the ground in Libya and asked for re enforcements well BEFORE the legation was attacked and burned.  The other two were Washington desk wienies who had denied the requests for reinforcements.
The field guys reluctantly admitted under direct questioning that Washington had not given them anything. The desk wienies claimed that they had given the field guys "full support".
   Figure the State Dept bureaucracy will deal with these poor guys.  The two field guys will be dumped on for confessing to embarrassing facts.  The two desk wienies will be dumped on for not being more evasive under questioning.  All four of them can kiss off any thought of promotion in the next 100 years.
   The atmosphere was tense to the point of Chairman Issa offering his committee's protection to the two field guys against State Dept retaliation.   

What to Cut? Item 5 BATFE

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,Firearms and Explosives.  These are the guys that brought us Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Fast and Furious.  They are federal police, with arrest powers, badges, and guns and little discretion.  When they cause a major mess (Ruby Ridge and Waco) they have to call in the FBI to bail them out.  They have a history of harassing  and entrapment of firearms dealers, gun show customers, and ordinary gun owners. 
   We would be better off without these feeders at the public trough.  State and local police make the great majority of all criminal arrests.  We don't need armed federal policemen to collect liquor and tobacco taxes from legitimate manufacturers.  Smuggling and bootlegging untaxed cigarettes or liquor is a violation of state law and evasion of state taxes which state police forces are well motivated to pursue. 
  BATFE has a budget of $1.12 billion a year.  Small compared to farm bills and transportation bills.  But you know what they say, "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money."
   More competent and better balanced agencies like the FBI and the IRS could handle the few legitimate duties now handled by BATFE. 

What to cut? Item 4. CIA

The trouble with CIA is that it is all too often wrong. They told Eisenhower that Fidel Castro was an agrarian reformer. They failed to predict the breakup of the Soviet Union, even after the fall of the wall.  They told George Bush and Colin Powell that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were a slam-dunk.  In actual fact, Saddam didn't have a nuclear program, which we found out AFTER invading the country.  They didn't  have even a single agent on the ground inside Saddam's Iraq.  CIA attempted to destabilize the Bush Administration by creating the Valerie Plame affair.  CIA agents still work out of embassies, which is like hanging a "kick me" sign on the back of your trench coat.  CIA announced  the Iranians did NOT have a nuclear program, just in time to scuttle some proposed sanctions.  CIA leaked the story about NSA listening into Osama bin Laden's satellite phone to the New York Times.  It took CIA ten years to finger Osama bin Laden. 
   With a track record like this, who in their right mind would believe anything CIA reported?
   Besides, America's best intelligence comes from NSA (who intercepts enemy communications) and the Air Force (who flies recon satellites). 
   CIA's budget is famously secret.  CIA appropriations are disguised somewhere deep inside the federal budget, so we don't know just how much money they spend each year.  But what ever they spend, it really ain't worth it, 'cause what ever CIA produces is suspect, 'cause it comes from an outfit with a long and well documented history of brain death.