Phone Banking, Then and Now

Years ago we did phone banking up here.  We did cold calls on friendly voters to urge them to get out and vote.  Back in the good old days, say 5 years ago,  most voters were happy to receive such a call.  Many of them were slightly flattered that the party cared enough to call.  The would pick up the phone and  answer our questions and chat. 
Not any more.  Last time I phone banked, the voters were hostile to the entire idea of getting called.  Most of 'em just hung up.  All of 'em indicated displeasure with the call. 
  I would normally attribute this change of attitude to telemarketers  fouling the nest.  But over the same 5 years the telemarketers have disappeared.  The "Do Not Call" lists have been effective.  Five years ago,  I would get two or three telemarketer calls a day.  Today, I don't get any.  I get calls from politicians and political parties, but no telemarketers. 
   Why the change in voter response to phone bank calls?  Beats me, but it's for real. 

Fighting Islamic Extremism

It's not all military.  Propaganda is very effective.  We ought to create an Arabic language TV news channel.  Broadcast it from satellites and stream it on the Internet.  Feature stories of IS brutality, what it's like to be a Nigerian school girl carried off by Boko Haram.  Some nice gun camera shots of smart bombs hitting right on target.  Human interest stories of Muslim families doing well in the United States. Some interviews with Muslim soldiers fighting on our side.  Other stories that help our cause.
    Take a good look at the old WWII BBC broadcasts.  The wartime BBC managed to establish a solid reputation even among the enemy for honesty and truth telling.  While remaining an effective pro allied slant.  We ought to be able to do as well today. 
   Then we ought to get Hollywood to do some useful movies.  If they can make Kim Jung Un look like an idiot,  they ought to be able to do the same to the Ayatollahs.  
   The medium is the message. 

It's easier for the guys

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. 

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. 
  

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. 

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. 

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.