Real jobs vs Govt Jobs

Real jobs.  Take a manufacturer for example.  They make valuable product.  Proceeds from product sales pay the work force, buy raw materials and parts, pay the bills, and buy production machinery.  If the product is a good one, sales increase, the factory expands, more people are hired.  The money that sales brings in, goes right out again, increasing demand for food, clothing, housing, raw materials and so on. 
Govt jobs.  Take a bureaucrat for example.  They don't produce anything valuable.  There are no proceeds from sales.  The bureaucrat's pay is money taken away from the citizens by way of taxes.  The citizen's could have spent that money just as well as the bureaucrat does.  The more bureaucrats the government hires, the more money it takes from working citizens.  Government workers are a drag on the economy, they consume but they don't produce. 
  And yet, lefties will tell you that government hiring is required to "get the economy going".  I heard that a couple of times over Christmas. 

Words of the Weasel, Part 35

Vegetative Barrier.   Why can't they just say "hedge"?

Rootkit.bout.cidox.b

Nasty virus.  Lovable daughter, who is up for Christmas, was web surfing on my machine. One website she surfed thru infected my trusty Compaq 1750 NX
.  It's nasty.  It slows down the boot, slows down loading programs, slows down the internet, freezes the mouse, and crashes the whole machine erratically. 
   It's a rootkit, which means it hacks out a piece of hard disk to live on that is not part of the Windows file system.  This means that Windows, and Windows tools like Explorer cannot even see it on disk, even if you knew where to look. 
   I tried Anti Malware Bytes (that crashed before it finished) Spybot Search and Destroy, Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool,  and Regclean without any luck.  But Kaspersky's TDSSKiller nailed it, or at least crippled it a lot.  Trusty Compaq is now running mostly normal, although there are moments of sluggishness that make me think the damn thing is still active. 
   Damn Microsoft for making Windows so vulnerable.  Damn virus writers.  Writing a virus ought to be a felony punishable by stoning to death in the public square.
  

Gunfight at the OK Corral

1957, classic Western.  Some how I got thru the 50's without seeing it in theaters.  So while surfing Netflix for something to watch, I clicked on it.  It's got Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.  Douglas does the gambler/gunfighter role beautifully.  His suits are well tailored and pressed, he drinks too much, he mistreats his long suffering mistress.  Lancaster's role is plainer, he is just the principled lawman.
   Then it has DeForrest Kelly in a bit part. He isn't on screen very long before a Clanton shoots him dead. And we have Dennis Hopper as the youngest Clanton brother.  Burt Lancaster tries to talk him into giving over his gun, but he makes a sudden move and Kirk Douglas shoots him dead.  Both of these guys will have much better roles in coming years.
  It's long.  2 1/2 hours.  And somehow in all that screen time, the director fails to really show why the Earps, lawmen all,  band together to shoot down the Clantons.  Yes, the Clantons shoot some friends, and relatives of Wyatt's but the film doesn't really blacken the Clanton's rep and it doesn't really show why high principled Wyatt Earp gets into extra judicial killings.  And there are some scenes missing.  After Morgan Earp gets gunned down in the street, we don't see the funeral, with weeping friends and relatives, and we don't see Wyatt Earp with tears running down his cheeks swearing eternal vengeance on the Clantons.  In short, the director doesn't show motives and emotions behind the central conflict.
    Sets and costumes were first rate, nice score, a theme song and all.  The various western towns all had one helova lotta giant cactus growing on every street corner.  But now that I've seen, I can say I didn't really miss much by not seeing it in the '50s. 

Green Christmas

Two days ago I had a foot of new snow on the front lawn.  Today it's green grass (marred by snow plow scars) again.  Yesterday was terrible, rained all day, temperature right at the freezing point.  It made walking treacherous.  Today it's chilled down to 20.  Skiing at Cannon has suffered.  Coming back thru the Notch you could see a lotta grass coming up in the middle of the trails. 
  Forecast is for a hard freeze, down below zero, tonight.

Innumeracy on NHPR

NHPR ran a horrible story this morning.  About some frightful disease with a strange name (Crap A?) that I had never heard of before.  This disease causes dementia, blindness and death  It can be detected in infancy by some fancy bloodwork, and New York state now requires all newborns to be screened for this disease.  Fortunately the disease is very rare.  Unfortunately the test has a high rate of false positives, and the treatment is heroic, dangerous, and not very effective.  A case could be made that running these tests causes untold misery and suffering to the parents of the false positives, and does not save very many children, since many of them die under treatment.
   Saddest of all,  NHPR failed to report any of the numbers that would enable voters to reach a sound conclusion.  Such as number of newborns tested, number of true cases detected, number of false positive cases, number of children who survived treatment.  Numbers.  Newsies seldom report numbers because most of 'em have to take their shoes off the count higher than ten.

The Economist waxes lyrical over Bowhunting

This is the Christmas edition of the Economist, extra thick with lots of punditry.  They had a three page article on the joys of  bowhunting  in America.  They quoted Teddy Roosevelt, they talked about a hunting trip in Wisconsin, about legalizing cross bows.  Hunting is good for the ecology, helps cull excess deer, all sorts of good stuff. 
   But only if done with a bow.  Using a gun is unsportsmanly, crass, and bad for the environment.  Only the archer is a pure hunter.   I suppose this represents the anti gun opinions of the Economist.