What's good for General Motors is good for the country

So said "Engine Charlie" Wilson, secretary of defense back in the Eisenhower administration.  The statement caused a furor at the time.  Democrats went into a tizzy.  But in real life, things that helped GM, the largest corporation in the world in those days, were good for the country.  When things were good for GM, they hired workers and spent money on supplies, parts, and new construction.  All of which is good. 
   Trump's many enterprises are reasonably important to the country, not quite as big a deal as GM was back in the good old days, but big enough.  It could be said that what's good for the Trump operations is good for the country.  Democrats would howl, again, but it's true.  President Trump's actions that help the Trump business empire will help plenty of other businesses.  The newsies are yelping for Trump to do something, anything, to separate himself from the business empire he built.  I don't see this as a real necessity.   He has tweeted that he will turn the business[s] over to sons Eric and Donald.  Both of whom have expressed love, loyalty, and respect for their old man during the campaign.  I think both sons see the world about the same way The Donald does, and will run the Trump empire about the way The Donald would.  And would listen to anything The Donald might suggest to them.  After all they are immediate family and any President is entitled to talk to his immediate family, in confidence for that matter.  I'm OK with that. 

SpyHunter 4

A virus got onto my desktop.  It started putting a bunch of files with the extension .osiris on the harddrive.  Googling on osiris  informed me that Malwarebytes (which I have and use and trust) and something called Spyhunter (which I had never heard of before) would settle osiris's hash.  So, I gave malwarebytes a run, and sure enough, it reported some viruses, and zapped them.  So just to make sure, and to see what would happen, I ran Spyhunter.  Not so good.  It crashed once.  Then it ran and found a list of stuff it didn't like.  So when Spyhunter finished scanning, I clicked to make it zap the stuff it found.  Instead of doing what it was told, Spyhunter demanded I pay $40 for the fancier version of the program.
   No way would I do that.  I  used Windows Explorer and Regedit to search for the objects Spyhunter was objecting to.  No soap,  I could find neither disk files nor registry keys to match anything Spyhunter reported.  So, I uninstalled Spyhunter.  I cannot recommend that program to anyone.
   I still have a bunch of .osiris files on disk.  And a file demanding ransom to decrypt them.  I'll do some more research tomorrow. 

The Russians are hacking, the Russians are hacking!!

Yeah right.  We know someone hacked the democrats, 'cause their stuff turned up on Wikileaks.  That's about all we know.  We have no way of knowing who dunnit.  The hacker causes disk files to be copied out to somewhere on the internet.  For looking at the disk files afterward, you cannot tell if they were copied or not.  The only way we know the hack occurred is that stuff turned up on Wikileaks.  Even if we can find the Internet address (URL)  to which stuff was sent, that could be anyone.  Any hacker will sent hot stuff thru an internet anonymizer site that  keeps no records and forwards stuff tracelessly. 
   No matter what the MSM or CIA or FBI or other pundits say, we cannot know who did the hack.  We can have suspicions, but we cannot know.  The world has plenty of individuals, small groups, large groups, and countries capable of doing the DNC and Podesta hacks.  Especially as it didn't take much to do the hack.  From what I hear Podesta was clueless enough to fall for a phishing email.   Which is incredibly clueless of him.  
   The folks we hear saying the Russians did it don't know that.  They are saying so because they think it will help their political position.   Which is hard to understand actually.   Getting hacked shows the victims (hackees) as sloppy, ignorant, and clueless. 

Black Viper seems to be off the air

Black Viper, most useful and knowledgble  computer geek, the goto web source for taming Windows, seems to be off the air.  I get that "Sorry cannot find" message when I try his URL. 
   Anyone know anything? 

Tchaikovsky's Nut Cracker Suite

They put it on in Littleton NH last night.   It was the local dance school doing it.  The venue was the old Littleton Opera House, a groovy old building from the 1880's, newly restored to it's original glory, period woodwork,  nice paint, and at the insistence of the state building department, structurally beefed up to prevent it from sliding into the Ammonusuc River.   The real reason I, and youngest son, got out on a cold dark night was  that my grand niece Amelie, age 7, had a part in it.  It was a big hit.  At least 300 people in the audience, a lot of small children, undoubtedly younger siblings of cast kids.    The audience completely parked up the Opera House lot and the town lot behind the Jax Jr movie theater.  A bid deal for a smallish up country town.
    And it was a nice show for an amateur cast.  Fair number of grown up cast members, who had the bigger parts.  There were tutus and point shoes, and most of 'em could dance en pointe.  Costumes were colorful. All the kids got parts.  Music was recorded but they had a pair of very decent speakers that nicely filled the house.  Minor drawback, the portable dance floor wasn't very solid, and the grownup dancers made really loud thumping noises dancing upon it.  Kinda spoiled the lightness and bounciness of the dance when you could hear the floor complaining of the weight.
   Classical music isn't dead yet.

Trump picks military officers for cabinet

Because only the best go into the military.  I did a six year tour in the Air Force.  The airmen I served with were absolutely top notch people, intelligent, motivated, loyal, hard working, dependable.  After my Air Force tour, I worked in civilian industry for forty years.   Working in the high tech companies out on Rte 128,  I never had a workforce as good as I had enjoyed in the Air Force.  I had a lot of good people in industry, but the Air Force had better.
   I see Trump picking the best people he can find.  Of course many of them are military people, because only the best go into the military.

Remember Pearl Harbor

It changed the course of history.  Up until Pearl Harbor, isolationists in America had succeeded in keeping the US out of WWII, despite the unanimous opinion of the American establishment.  In December 1941 the Nazis were well on their way to conquering the world.  They had invaded and occupied Norway Denmark, Holland, Poland, Belgium, and France.  Britain was on the ropes, they had fended off the Nazi air attack in the summer of 1940 by the skin of their teeth, but were in no shape to do much more.  The vast Red army, locked in combat with the Wehrmacht, had suffered defeat after defeat, loosing hundreds of thousands of men in German encirclements.     By Pearl Harbor time the Germans had reached the suburbs of Moscow.  Had Moscow fallen, Russian resistance would have collapsed and Adolf Hitler would rule all of Europe from the Channel to the Urals. Had the isolationists kept America out of the war for another year or two, Hitler might have won.  It was a close run thing.
    Isolationism disappeared in the smoke of Pearl Harbor.  Americans were outraged and to a man demanded their government do something about it.  Which the Roosevelt administration pr0ceeded to do. 
    The Japanese, with the exception of Admiral Yamamoto, totally misread the situation and
American intentions.  The Japanese war aim was to conquer China, plus a few other things, but China mostly.  The Japanese economy was dependent upon American exports of gasoline and crude oil and scrap metal.  The Americans disapproved of the China invasion and embargoed those crucial exports.  The Japanese were faced with collapse of their economy (production of warships, war material, aircraft and all the rest needed to maintain a war), or backing off, with the intolerable loss of face that would entail.  They never thought about going elsewhere for raw materials.  Sumatra, not far away, had enough high quality crude oil production  to run Japan thruout WWII.  They could have just muscled their way into Sumatra, acquired the needed oil.  The Americans would send diplomatic nastygrams to Tokyo, but the US isolationists would not have permitted anything more. 
   Instead, Japan thought that a devastating attack, one that knocked out the US fleet, would cow the Americans into making terms.  Partly this mistake came from a  Japanese leadership had no conception of the resources at America's disposal.  In Japan, things were so tight that building a single new battleship required contributions from school children (lunch money) and years of scrimping and struggle.  In America Roosevelt could pick up the phone and say " We need ten new battleships as soon as possible.   The contract will be cost plus.  Start work now".  And ten new battleships, plus carriers, destroyers, liberty ships, submarines, and everything else would slide down the launching ways and join the US fleet.  Japanese leadership simply did not understand this.  They thought that sinking all the Pacific Fleet battleships would cripple the Americans forever. 
    It didn't.