Drug Overdoses

It's getting bad.  This year death's from drug overdoses exceed deaths from car accidents.  Car accidents have been running around 50,000 deaths a year, for a long time.  By way of comparison, total deaths from the entire Viet Nam war are only 50,000.  Ten years of war in the jungle didn't kill as many as car accidents killed in a single year.  And now deaths from drug overdoses have risen to the same appalling level. 
   The MSM don't talk about why the increase in drug deaths.  Could it be, Obama's Great Depression 2.0 threw a lot of men out of work?  And the depression and poverty caused by unemployment drives a lot of guys to drugs and suicide?  You don't hear the MSM talking about that.  Doesn't fit The Narrative.
    You do hear a lot of talk in the MSM about setting up "drug courts".  Dunno about that.  Seems like we need drug treatment programs more than courts.  We got plenty of plain old courts.  Most judges are intelligent enough to sentence first offenders, even if they been doing a little dealing to feed their habit, to drug rehab rather than jail.  Everybody knows that jail is bad for people.  First offenders come out of jail in worse shape than they went in. 

No bailouts, Let 'em sink. Nobody too big to fail

Dear old Uncle Sam has gotten into the habit of bailing out big companies that get into trouble.  GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG are the most flagrant examples.  The usual excuse is that allowing a big boy to go belly up will scare the market, causing a lot of other big boys to croak.  Causing a lot of money to be lost. 
   And, we passed a law, Dodd-Frank, which makes bailouts policy.  Dodd-Frank  sets up which companies will get bailouts, how much.
   The real problem with bailouts, is they urge on crazy behavior.  In no-bailout world, company management is pretty careful about the risks it runs.  If they do something really risky, and it fails, the company is toast, they and everyone in the company are out of work, the investors loose everything.  All around badness.
   But when Uncle Sam says he will bailout companies, all bets are off.   Now management can do all those crazy things, and if they fail, the company survives, they keep their jobs, and the investors are untouched (mostly).  No pain.  And without pain, nobody learns anything.  No pain, no gain.
    We ought to repeal Dodd-Frank.  We ought to make it real clear world wide that we don't bail out nobody, and we need to carry thru, and actually flush some loser down the drain, just to make the point.
     To run a capitalist society, which has made us all rich, you need capital.  We cannot afford to flush capital down the drain doing mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps,  futures trading, derivatives trading, and all those other risky gambling games they run on Wall St.

New Canadian government drops F-35

The new government in Canada, with whats-his-name Trudeau has fulfilled a campaign promise to drop out of the F-35 program.  Canada was going to buy 65 fighters at something like $80-90 million a piece.  That's going away.  The F-35 program people are smiling and saying the program is still on track.  Right.  And every air framer in the world is hustling salesman to Toronto peddling fighters. 

More on Long Range Strike Bomber LRS-B

According to Aviation Week, it is going to be another flying wing, like the B2, only about half the size of the B2 to get the costs down.  They say the rather short range (2500 miles) comes from the "Tank on the way in, Tank on the way out" tactic.  Tankers to stay 500 miles off the enemy coast to be safe from SAMs and fighters.  Aviation Week has a map showing the LRS-B being able to reach everywhere inside China.  And they think Northrup Grumman got the job 'cause of their B2 experience, and that Lockheed Martin has the F35 contract, and Boeing has the KC-46 contract. 

Cis

As in cis-gendered.  New one on me.  First ran across the term/prefix while web surfing.  Finally looked it up and apparently it means "not trans" as in "not trans gendered"  The trans gender activists felt the need for a word to apply to everyone who is not in their group, i.e. regular people.  If you are doing a culture war, it helps to have a word for the enemy.
   In the real world then cis-gendered means girls who think they are girls and want to grow up to be women, and boys who think they are boys and want to grow up to be men.  In short,  kids who lack psychological hangups about their sexuality. 
   Why does the invention of this new trendy word bother me?

Dune, Frank Herbert, the 2000 miniseries

This miniseries was the second attempt to bring Frank Herbert's huge novel to the screen.  It's not bad, it's at least as good as the 1984 movie.  The the long three episodes allows a fuller development of Herbert's long and complex novel. Sets and costumes are good, which can be expensive in a science fiction movie.  Casting is metza metza.
   William Hurt gives a fine performance as planetary Duke Leto Atreides.  Too bad Frank Herbert killed him off early in the book.  Alex Newman is less satisfying as Paul Muad'dib.  He is too old, too tall, and too burly.  Paul Atreides was written as a teen age boy, somewhat small for his age, and lightly built.  Which gave a tug on the heartstrings as his beloved father is killed and Paul must pick up the load of being a planetary Duke before he is fully grown.  And Paul has to meet both fremen and imperial enemies, hand to hand in gladiatorial duels, and prevail by speed and cunning.  Reading the book, you root for the smaller younger lighter Paul to survive each deadly encounter.  Watching the miniseries there is no doubt that Alex Newman is taller, stronger, and buffer than his opponents.  You know he is going to win the knife fight just by looking at him.  In the book, young Paul Atreides does an enormous amount of coming of age.  In the miniseries he enters the action fully come of age. 

Graduates of "research universities" earn more than liberal arts colleges

This from today's Wall St Journal.  Well, we sorta knew this, graduates with real engineering degrees earn more than graduates with art history degrees.  It's been a cliche that engineers make good well paid husbands.  For numbers, liberal arts graduates pegged out a $50,000 a year ten years out of college where as "research university" graduates made $65-70K at the median.  All of them made more than $50K.
    The Journal article skated over a couple of key points.  The never did define what they mean by "research university".  That's a new one on me.  I assume they are thinking of places like MIT, Georgia Tech, and CalTech.  Place which mostly grant engineering degrees and have strong STEM programs.
   Then they didn't pin down liberal arts.  Do they group the talkie-talkie majors (gender studies, art history, ethnic studies) or the wannabe sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc) in with the traditional seven liberal arts (English, foreign languages, history, mathematics, music, art, philosophy). 
   The traditional seven liberal arts ought to lead to better jobs than the talkie-talk majors and the wannabe sciences.