Adaption in Dandelions

My least favorite weed.  My tactic is to bend over and pluck them up by the roots. No herbicides.  So much of my lawn is greenery other than grass, I fear that weedkiller will  give me vast barren patches.  Druther have green weeds than bare dirt.
   I start early and pluck each yellow blossom as I see it.  I figure the early plucking prevents the early weeds from reproducing and overwhelming the poor grass.  My lawn has fewer dandelions than many of my neighbors.
  Ever notice that the dandelions sprouting in the woods, back of the house, edge of the driveway grow tall and proud and you can get your hand around them and pluck 'em easy.  Whereas the ones in the path of the mower grown really low down to the ground and are harder to pluck?  How does a newly sprouted dandelion know how low to grow?    I mean these are annuals.  Even if a dandelion was smart enough to remember the mower, these are newly sprouted just this season.  No over winter memory.  The low growers were growing low before the first mow of the season. 

Obama's IRS reaches out for small fry

After taking on the Tea Party and the AP, the IRS has enough manpower to threaten audits of very small fry way out in the boondocks.  Tyler Drummond,  nice young guy, fresh out of law school (graduated last year). Unmarried, no stock ownership, no home mortgage, has been doing odd jobs while looking for work.  (He finally found a legal job down in Concord)  Reported income on his 2012 1040,was well below the poverty level.  He got a letter threatening him with an audit.  We all figure that happened because Tyler has been active in politics up here, working hard to elect Republicans. 
   Same thing happened to Littleton Growth with Common Sense, a small civic group that lobbies the Littleton zoning board to allow new businesses to build in Littleton.  This is a tiny group, probably less than a dozen members active enough to get to meetings, working on the most local of local issues.  They don't have any money worth mentioning, Littleton is a small place and works on personal friendships, not campaign contributions.  But Obama's IRS has the time and manpower to threaten them with an audit.
Big Brother is in charge here.

Things are tough all over.

The Economist declares the entire world to be in recession.  GNP growth world wide has been falling since 2010.  World wide purchasing manager's book to bill ratio is only a couple of percentage points above contraction level.  They go on to moan about how things are particularly bad in Europe, but maybe the Americans will pull the world out of the ditch.  But they don't count on the Americans too much.  "It does not seem ready to resume the role of consumer of last resort".   Surprisingly for a magazine so full of good advice for everyone, they have nothing to say about how to drag the world out of the ditch. 

First mowing of the grass

I did it, front and both side lawns.  That gets my exercise done for the day.

Sibelius Shakedown

Obama's secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sibelius, has been calling CEO's of industries her department regulates asking for money, "voluntary donations", to fund Obamacare.  Congress has refused the funding and so to bypass Congress, HHS is atempting to raise the money "privately".
    Imagine your phone rings.  It's Ms.Kathleen Sibelius, or perhaps its Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sibelius.  You take the call.  She asks you for money.  What do you say?  Knowing that bureaucrats under her command can make your life and your company's life, a living hell. Real voluntary that donation is.
   Someone on NHPR said this was OK as long as Ms Sibelius  didn't use here title over the phone.  As if anyone in the health business wouldn't know who she was. 
   It may be legal, but it sure is tacky.  Most people call it blackmail. 

Benghazi, where was the air support?

Benghazi has been getting plenty of air time on Fox News anyhow.  All the talk is about 12 rewrites of Susan Ricet's talking points,  and who failed to call it terrorism.
   The real issue.  Where was the air support for the Benghazi consulate.  We could have had fighters overhead within two hours and heliborne infantry within four hours.  Where were they?  Who ordered the Tripoli rescue force to "stand down"?  Was it General Carter Ham, commander of Africom?
   Let's face it, bureaucrats will ignore security warnings.  Pearl Harbors will occur.  But to fail to send support to Americans under attack in Indian country is in excusable.  I want to know who hung our men out to dry, and I want him fired.

  
 

"Sorry, I probably won't hire you"

Title of a Wall St Journal opinion piece.  The author, president of a New York ad-tech company, was saying that candidates who couldn't program a computer were in his opinion too poorly educated to consider for a job. 
  I tend to agree with him.  I learned FORTRAN programming in college, and it was the reason I got a number of different jobs over my career.  Over the years I became fluent in C, C++, PDP-8 assembly language, PDP-11 assembly language, Z-80 assembly language, BASIC, 8086 assembly language, Modula-2, 68300 assembly language, Pascal, and SPS-81 DSP assembly language, and probably a few others that escape me just now.
   Ability to program kept me gainfully employed and my family supported for forty years.
   Certainly programming is a  much more worthwhile college subject than gender studies, black studies, sexual studies, sociology, political science, peace and justice, art history, education and underwater basket weaving.
   Getting a computer program to work means you under stood the problem correctly, (easier said than done) and were able to express the solution clearly and correctly in an obscure artificial language.  An unforgiving language that will do evil things for a single misplaced punctuation mark.  A person who can do that, is able to write a proposal, or a specification, or a user's manual that worth someone's time to read.  With some practical programming experience a person can estimate the degree of difficulty of a new product development project, and may have a chance of understanding what the technical people on the project are saying.  When I'm hiring and I have a choice between a programmer and a non programmer I'm gonna hire the programmer 'cause programming demonstrates real thinking ability which a gender studies major does not.
   A pity that few college graduates bother to learn to program while they are in college.  Fortunately programming can be picked up by self study.  You get a book, you download the necessary compiler, and you work the homework problems.  Coding is fun, like woodworking, oil painting, or video games and only ordinary levels of motivation are required to get pretty good at it.  A good reason for picking C, is the existence of  a really marvelous book, "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie.  Paperback, it's only 3/8 inch thick and contains everything anyone will ever need to know about C, and it's all written in real English.