Divisions in the Republican Party

The TV newsies have been giving this one a lotta talk.   The newsies are saying that the "Establishment" and the rank and file party members are at odds with each other.  And that the breach is unfixable. 
  Well maybe so, maybe not.  There is an establishment, it's office holders at all levels, local state and federal, then party officials and workers, and activists.  The establishment really cares about winning, they are in it as a day job, they want to keep their jobs, and they don't care about making flashy but risky gestures or embracing ideologies.  They want to win. 
   They know that The Donald will loose, loose big, and take the rest of the Republican party down to defeat.  So they are against The Donald.  Which puts them at odds with The Donald and his supporters.  Just to put the establishment further onto the hot seat,  Ted Cruz, the alternative to The Donald, ain't their cup of tea either.  Ted is a man of strong ideological principles, he is a forth right Christian, and he is into flashy but risky gestures, such as doing a Federal government shutdown.  They fear they cannot cut a deal with Ted, that Ted will stand on principle and refuse to compromise.  So far, it looks like the establishment will back Ted, as their only alternative to The Donald and the lesser of two evils.  Better a hard to deal with ideologue than a flaming disaster. 
   And, the party rank and file isn't entirely agin this viewpoint.
   The sticky part comes when the nominee gets picked.  Trump voters will be upset if The Donald doesn't win, a lotta of other Republicans will be just as upset if The Donald does win the nomination.  The challenge to the Republican party, is to soothe all these ruffled feathers and get the offended voters to at least vote for the party, if not get out and electioneer for the party.   There are gonna be a lot of ruffled feathers and unhappy voters no matter which way the nomination goes.  At a guess,  the disappointed Trump people will be easier to soothe than the vast number of Republicans who detest Trump. 
   One healing gambit that the winner might use, is to offer the vice presidency to the looser. 
  

Going after salt

The FDA is planning/talking about  issuing new regulations limiting the amount of salt in food.  You gotta wonder about this.  Making rules for salt, or any other rules on food seems to be a legislative job, not a bureaucrat job.  The Germans brag about a medieval law on the purity of beer, still in force in Germany, but a real law, they didn't have bureaucracies in the middle ages.  I think the FDA is stepping beyond it's legal authority.
   And then there are recent scientific studies claiming  that salt ain't all that bad for you.  These are disputed, but then True Believers won't accept any thing that cast doubt upon their beliefs.  Lotta bureaucrats are True Believers. 
   My chemistry is weak, but it is clear that all sorts of biochemistry in your body needs just the right amount of saltiness to work.  The body has mechanisms to maintain the right salt level, one mechanism is appetite, when your salt level is low,  salt tastes better, when your salt level is high, less salt tastes better.  In the service, they issued us salt tablets on hot days when we were sweating hard. 
   One effect of the drive for lower salt, is to sharpen my eye in the store.  Original Recipe Stoned Wheat Thins, taste a helova lot better than Low Sodium Stoned Wheat Thins.  Both come in nearly the same packaging, you gotta look sharp to buy the good tasting ones.  On the other hand, down the canned soup aisle, I find the traditional Campbell's is just too salty for my taste.  The new fangled Healthy Request soup tastes better with about half the salt of Campbell's. 

That giant leak of off-shore tax dodgers

So far, all the low lifes exposed have NOT been Americans.  They got Putin and Assad and the premier of Iceland, and a whole bunch more, but no American names that mean anything to me.  This may change, but for the time being I can enjoy a little smugness. 

The Donald trashes NATO

We set up NATO shortly after WWII in order to keep the Soviets from gobbling up western Europe the way they did eastern Europe.  In those years the European countries were still all smashed up from WWII and pretty helpless against the USSR.  The NATO treaty was mostly D'Artangnan's cry from the Three Musketeers, "One for all and all for one".  It told the Soviets that the United States would resist any further takeovers in Europe.
   And it worked.  The Iron Curtain stayed where it was, and didn't move west.
   And in 1989 the Soviets collapsed, ending the threat for many years.  NATO kept going, doing a bit here and a bit there, helping out in Afghanistan.  Until we got Putin in the last few years and all of a sudden, the Russians are looking dangerous again.  Since Georgia and the Ukraine, and Syria, the Europeans can see a need for NATO, especially the eastern Europeans like Poland and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
   I dunno where Trump is coming from when he calls NATO obsolete.  It is an anti Russian alliance, which was needed in the 1950's and look to me like we still need it in the 2010's for the same old reason.  

Daredevil, the TV show

Youngest son is a fan and he played me one episode.  It's bad TV.  The camera man is into the very very dark look.  No lights on anywhere.  All the characters appear as black silhouettes,  no light on their faces, and I could not tell one from another.  Lotta hand to hand slugging matches, where none of the characters were recognizable.  Lotta fast cuts from one story line to another, and back again, with no point except confusing the viewers.  Nobody ever addresses anyone else by name.  At least the dialog was audible, but the camera work was so bad as to make the show painful to watch.

New villain, "Fossil Fuel Companies"

We used to call 'em oil companies, or "Big Oil" and they have been a punching bag since John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.  But we got a new name for 'em now. 

Is the MOM airliner single aisle or twin aisle?

Boeing is arguing this out internally right now.  MOM is Middle of the Market in case you had not heard.  Single aisle is a smaller jet liner say 180 to 200 seats.  Twin aisle is a substantially bigger plane, say 250 - 300 seats.  Right now, 2015, the airlines like smaller planes, and more frequent schedules to capture as many passengers as possible.  If they offer 3 or 4 departures a day of a smaller airliner, they are more more likely to all the passengers to be had on that city-pair.  If they only offer one departure a day of a bigger airliner, the passengers that want to depart earlier or later, are more likely to book with a competing carrier. 
  On the other hand, should over loaded airports like La Guardia impose departure limits (you airline so-and-so only get so many departures from here) then the airlines are likely to fall in love with bigger planes.
   Boeing is doing bet-the-company forecasting right now.