To look sharp that is. Poor Hillary, usually looks terrible on TV. Her hairdo needs work, her complexion shows her age, her choice of color is questionable (did you see the radioactive green suit she wore?) and her figure is also showing her age.
It's easier for guys. Shave and haircut (standard short guy's haircut) dark suit, white shirt, and red tie with regimental stripes. Well shined shoes. That is all it takes. The suit looks good in spite of figure defects ( look at Chris Christie), the color choice is limited to dark wool, so the guys don't get a chance to display their poor color sense. And, guys get pockets to carry their wallets, car keys, eyeglasses, and house keys.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
First Crusade
We had our peerless, and clueless, leader bad mouthing the Crusades the other day. He left out a few things. The Crusade was preached in response to a plea for help from the Emperor in Constantinople. The Emperor inherited the prestige of the Roman Emperors, and was held in much reverence thruout Western Europe. Another reason for launching the Crusade was the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem, followed by harsh treatment of Christian pilgrims who merely wished to visit the holy places. This was kinda dumb on the part of the Muslims, pilgrims don't cause trouble, and they often spend money. Beating up on pilgrims is like beating up on tourists today.
There were other reasons for Crusading, some of them religious, but then religion, the Church, was involved in everything in those days. The Church anointed the European kings, provided clerks and teachers, in fact operated all the schools, did all the marriages, did all the funerals, baptized all infants. The threat of Interdict, (shutting down all church operators) was enough to strike terror into the hearts of the Church's enemies.
Sure, the Crusades were religious wars, but so was everything else back then. The Crusades were not that much more religious than other medieval wars. Tough old William the Conqueror carried a Papal blessing, and a Papal banner across the channel on his invasion of Saxon England.
The First Crusade was a military success, due to incredible bravery of the Crusaders, combined with political disarray among the Muslim foe. The Muslims still remember that, and don't like to be reminded of the shellacking they took. Bad feelings have lasted for 900 years. The Geneva convention hadn't been invented yet, and military practices were much harsher back then than we would allow today. But even 900 years ago, Crusaders didn't burn captives alive. And Western European society and culture has made tremendous progress since the Crusading time, 900 years ago.
We should be proud of the bravery our ancestors displayed upon Crusade. We wouldn't do that sort of thing today, but back then it was pretty cool.
There were other reasons for Crusading, some of them religious, but then religion, the Church, was involved in everything in those days. The Church anointed the European kings, provided clerks and teachers, in fact operated all the schools, did all the marriages, did all the funerals, baptized all infants. The threat of Interdict, (shutting down all church operators) was enough to strike terror into the hearts of the Church's enemies.
Sure, the Crusades were religious wars, but so was everything else back then. The Crusades were not that much more religious than other medieval wars. Tough old William the Conqueror carried a Papal blessing, and a Papal banner across the channel on his invasion of Saxon England.
The First Crusade was a military success, due to incredible bravery of the Crusaders, combined with political disarray among the Muslim foe. The Muslims still remember that, and don't like to be reminded of the shellacking they took. Bad feelings have lasted for 900 years. The Geneva convention hadn't been invented yet, and military practices were much harsher back then than we would allow today. But even 900 years ago, Crusaders didn't burn captives alive. And Western European society and culture has made tremendous progress since the Crusading time, 900 years ago.
We should be proud of the bravery our ancestors displayed upon Crusade. We wouldn't do that sort of thing today, but back then it was pretty cool.
Exit Strategies
There are only two exit strategies from war. Victory or defeat. Take your pick. Last time, in Viet Nam, we chose defeat. It still smarts, forty years later.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Cutting a deal after calling him crazy.
Hard to do. The Obama administration released/leaked an intel document where in a buncha shrinks diagnosed Putin with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. They based the diagnosis on looking at pictures of Putin, which sounds a little flaky to me. But they did it and they released it to the public press.
Good luck trying to negotiate with Putin after calling him crazy in public. Either Obama is too stupid to understand the insult, or he doesn't care cause he doesn't plan on doing any more negotiations.
Good luck trying to negotiate with Putin after calling him crazy in public. Either Obama is too stupid to understand the insult, or he doesn't care cause he doesn't plan on doing any more negotiations.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Avoid getting Hacked
I'm talking about home machines or small office machines. Big company setups, like Sony, are a whole different kettle of fish. But for us home users, there are some simple things that will improve your odds.
1. Turn the machine off when not in use. It cannot catch a virus off the internet if it is powered down.
2. Never, ever, click on an email attachment. No matter who the email is from. Your best friend may have been infected by a virus, and virii, will use the address book in the infected machine to email themselves far and wide. Attachments can contain malicious code that executes as soon as you click. If you just have to see what is in the attachment, save it to disk, and inspect it with a low speed text editor, like notepad, or wordpad. Word itself contains a powerful BASIC interpreter that can do all kinds of damage when presented with malicious code in an attachment.
3. Run a virus scanner now and then. There are a lot of 'em. Avast is good, and so is malwarebytes.
4. Run Windows Task Manager now and then. Check the "process" window. Processes are programs running on your machine. There should not be more than 30 processes running. Check out strange processes, or processes that seem to be taking up too much CPU time or ram. Click on the CPU or Memory Usage columns and Task manager will rearrange the display with greatest CPU or Memory Usage at the top. Google on the names of ramhogs or CPU hogs to find out what they are. When you get a solid ID, such as "well known virus" go after it. Find it on disk and zap it. Find any references in the registry with Regedit, and zap them.
5. Music download sites are virus infected.
Good luck.
1. Turn the machine off when not in use. It cannot catch a virus off the internet if it is powered down.
2. Never, ever, click on an email attachment. No matter who the email is from. Your best friend may have been infected by a virus, and virii, will use the address book in the infected machine to email themselves far and wide. Attachments can contain malicious code that executes as soon as you click. If you just have to see what is in the attachment, save it to disk, and inspect it with a low speed text editor, like notepad, or wordpad. Word itself contains a powerful BASIC interpreter that can do all kinds of damage when presented with malicious code in an attachment.
3. Run a virus scanner now and then. There are a lot of 'em. Avast is good, and so is malwarebytes.
4. Run Windows Task Manager now and then. Check the "process" window. Processes are programs running on your machine. There should not be more than 30 processes running. Check out strange processes, or processes that seem to be taking up too much CPU time or ram. Click on the CPU or Memory Usage columns and Task manager will rearrange the display with greatest CPU or Memory Usage at the top. Google on the names of ramhogs or CPU hogs to find out what they are. When you get a solid ID, such as "well known virus" go after it. Find it on disk and zap it. Find any references in the registry with Regedit, and zap them.
5. Music download sites are virus infected.
Good luck.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Funding Homeland Security Dept
Part of the recent budget deal, that funded the Federal government until September, was to stiff arm the Dept of Homeland Security, over Obama's legalizing 4 million illegal immigrants by executive order. Homeland Security needs to get more funding authorized by the end of February (this month) or shut down. The idea was to defund Obama's massive amnesty program. Obama went along with this, and signed the budget deal, probably figuring that Homeland Security would eventually get it's funding, after some political posturing in Congress.
Some parts of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard being the shining example, deserve funding 'cause they do a lot of good. Other parts like the Secret Service need heavy duty reform. Yet other parts, like the Science and Technology Directorate, we could probably do without. And the Transportation Security Agency ought to be disbanded. We don't need federally funded goons groping women as they board airliners.
And, Homeland Security does the federal flood insurance program, a terrible money sink, that pays off landowners who build on flood plains. They get flooded on a regular basis, paid off, they rebuild on the same site, get flooded again, get paid off again. No commercial insurance companies will touch flood insurance because of the massive and predictable losses. The government picked it up because of the wailing and crying from the real estate community, realtors, builders, and banks.
Hopefully, Congress will fund the needed parts of Homeland Security and give the unneeded parts a severe haircut.
Some parts of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard being the shining example, deserve funding 'cause they do a lot of good. Other parts like the Secret Service need heavy duty reform. Yet other parts, like the Science and Technology Directorate, we could probably do without. And the Transportation Security Agency ought to be disbanded. We don't need federally funded goons groping women as they board airliners.
And, Homeland Security does the federal flood insurance program, a terrible money sink, that pays off landowners who build on flood plains. They get flooded on a regular basis, paid off, they rebuild on the same site, get flooded again, get paid off again. No commercial insurance companies will touch flood insurance because of the massive and predictable losses. The government picked it up because of the wailing and crying from the real estate community, realtors, builders, and banks.
Hopefully, Congress will fund the needed parts of Homeland Security and give the unneeded parts a severe haircut.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
$250 million for Commuter Rail to Manchester
They are still talking about this down in Concord. As late as the 1960's there was rail service to Manchester and Concord. It was abandoned in the '60s 'cause nobody was riding the train. Manchester is only about 25 miles from Nashua, so they are talking about $10 million a mile to fix up the abandoned right of ways. That's pricey. And that is just to get the track into useable shape. Actually operating the trains is more money.
The NHPR piece mentioned an estimate of 600,000 riders. Which sounds like a lot, but one person riding the train to work daily for a week counts as 10 rides, five inbound in the morning, and five more outbound in the evening. There are about 200 working days in a year, so divide that 600,000 tickets sold by 400 and and you get about 1500 actual people who use the train every day. That ain't many people to justify spending $250 million on trackwork.
No mention of schedules, how fast the train would go. There is fairly decent bus service to Manchester and Concord right now. No mention of what the fares might be, or if the train trip would be faster than the bus.
No mention of the fact that most of the commuters down I93 to MA are working out on 128, where the train doesn't go. You need your car to get to the company parking lots off 128. Not that many people have jobs in downtown Boston.
The NHPR piece mentioned an estimate of 600,000 riders. Which sounds like a lot, but one person riding the train to work daily for a week counts as 10 rides, five inbound in the morning, and five more outbound in the evening. There are about 200 working days in a year, so divide that 600,000 tickets sold by 400 and and you get about 1500 actual people who use the train every day. That ain't many people to justify spending $250 million on trackwork.
No mention of schedules, how fast the train would go. There is fairly decent bus service to Manchester and Concord right now. No mention of what the fares might be, or if the train trip would be faster than the bus.
No mention of the fact that most of the commuters down I93 to MA are working out on 128, where the train doesn't go. You need your car to get to the company parking lots off 128. Not that many people have jobs in downtown Boston.
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