Shed a tear for Sears Roebuck

The Wall St Journal reports that Sears is selling its Craftsman brand of tools to Stanley/Black & Decker.  And Sears is selling off a bunch of stores, both Kmart and Sears, and borrowing wads of money.  Sounds like poor old Sears Roebuck is not long for this world.  Too bad.  Way back when, (1950's) Sears was the biggest US retailer, with good big stores in every town and every mall.  Back in the day, Sears was best known  as a hardware store, Craftsman tools and Kenmore kitchen appliances.  As a young hot rodder in the the 50's,  when I had a  1/2" drive Craftsman socket set and sets of Craftsman wrenches (open end, box end and combination) I was set in the tool department.  Craftsman was a good as you could get, with the famous "You break it and we will replace it free" guarantee.  In my home shop today, most of my tools, hand and power, are still Craftsman, many of them still running happily  and going on 50 years old.
  Dunno what happened to Sears to sink it so deep.  I suppose a lot of Walmart's and Target's  and Lowes' and Home Depot's growth has been at Sears expense.  Sears used to sell nothing but house brands, Craftsman,m Diehard, and Kenmore being as well regarded as anything on the market, with J.C. Higgins, Silvertone,  Homart, and Dunlap being not so great.  Sears used to give a lot of floor space to clothing, but I never remember Sears clothing being all that cool. 
   Somewhere I suppose there is a business book describing how Sears went down the drain, but I  haven't seen it.
   

Cyber Hacking Congressional Hearing.

It was carried live on Fox News.  We had Sen John McCain, Whatshisface Director of National Intelligence and a cast of 1000's.  After three hours, nobody had said anything important, or even in real English.  They all agreed that we need more cyber security without ever mentioning Windows, the OS with  a big "Hack Me" sign taped on its back.  Thanks Micro$oft. 
   And we have Obamacare forcing doctors to computerize patient's medical records so that they can be hacked more easily.

Right to Work will bring jobs to NH

Now that NH has a Republican governor to sign a right-to-work law, maybe we could pass one.  Why do we care?  Simple.  No Right to Work, no corporate investment.  No factories, warehouses, ternimals, help centers, nothing.  If the state isn't right to work, companies go elsewhere.  NH needs investment to create jobs.  Every June, we see all our new high school and college graduates leave the state to find decent paying work.   I'll grant that NH has a low unemployment rate, but that's largely because the unemployed, being hard working New Hampsters, leave the state to find work, rather that drawing welfare.
    To create jobs, we need someone, corporations mostly, to build factories and other facilities.  And we need to attract corporations to expand in NH.  If we passed right to work, we would be the ONLY right to work state for 500 miles in every direction.  There has got to be companies that need a facility in the Northeast.  If NH was right to work, all those facilities would be built in NH. 

Disappointment: Museum of the American Indian

The Smithsonian opened this one a while ago, but it's still pretty new in my book.  The building architecture is strange, no style known to me, does not suggest any sort of Indian architecture, an odd colored yellow stone facing, a fine location right on the Mall. 
   Collections were mediocre to poor.  The Inca floor had only a few nondescript earth colored pots.  A lot of stuff from the twentieth century.  Dating was vague.  The older things were all dated 1432-1547.  The modern stuff was mostly dated 1960-2000.  You would think they could date things more closely than +/- fifty years.  And the curators flunk spelling.  They spell Inca with a K.  Consistently.
   And it's pretty political for a museum.  As everyone knows, there are a lot of Indian groups with grievances against the white man.  A lot of such groups had posters or even whole displays supporting their points of view.  Your tax dollars at work. 

Shoot down the NORK missile launch?

Pudgy NORK dictator Kim Jung whats-his-face is threatening an ICBM test launch of a missile that could reach the US with a nuclear warhead in a few days. 
   Today's Wall St Journal suggests that we ought to shoot it down.  The Journal would have a Navy Aegius cruiser standing off shore put a SAM thru the NORK missile as it boosts up. 
   Not a bad idea.
   If I was doing it, I would have an Air Force AC-130 gunship orbit the launch pad and ventilate the NORK missile with 20mm Vulcan cannon fire.  This would need some fighter escort against NORK fighters, and some Wild Weasel support against NORK SAMs, but it's doable.  The strike force could assemble out to sea, over international waters, and fly into NORK airspace only after intelligence positively located the missile standing on the pad.  North Korea isn't all that big and a strike force flying at 400 knots can be anywhere inside North Korea in no time at all. 

What to do about Obamacare?

Obamacare is a disaster.  The costs it lays on business has stalled hiring, stalled expansion, and generally slowed the economy.  Obamacare is one of the reasons for the miserable 1% growth of GNP in the Obama years.  GNP growth used to be 3.5% back before Obama.  Obamacare along with some other misguided Obama policies knocked it down to 1%.  That's not enough growth to offer employment to match our population growth let along reduce unemployment and raise wages.
   And, the US spends too darn much on healthcare.  We spend 19% of GNP on healthcare, where as all the other countries in the world only spend half that.  And US health is no better than many other countries who spend much much less.  This means that US exports have to be priced 19% higher than direct manufacturing cost, just to pay for the workers healthcare.  Whereas our international competitors, places like Japan, the EU, South Korea, even Canada, only have to mark their products up 9.5%   That's a crippling price disadvantage in the marketplace.  And it drives US companies to move operations overseas to avoid US healthcare costs. 
    The Obamacare law is some 10,000 pages long.  Nobody can read 10,000 pages of legal gobble-de-gook and understand it, even if it doesn't drive them mad.  Trump needs to repeal all 10,000 pages just to eliminate surprise clauses springing to life and doing badness.  Modifications or amendments are a slippery slope that open the door to all sorts of crookedness.  Trump needs to kill the whole thing, root and branch.  If there are parts of Obamacare that people want to keep,  pass them as new laws and Trump will sign them.
   Most Americans (say 80%)get their healthcare insurance thru their employers, or from Medicare after they retire.  Obamacare only helped the self-employed, and the medium poor, the extremely poor get Medicaid.  First thing to do is to increase competition by allowing interstate sale of health insurance.  Any insurance company, based in any state, should have the right to sell insurance in all 50 states, WITHOUT doing any paperwork anywhere except in their home state.  Right now, to sell insurance in any state, the insurance company is required to do a couple of tons of paperwork for the state "regulators".  For small rural states (like NH) most insurers just don't bother, the market ain't that worthwhile.  Which is why we only have two companies offering insurance up here.  Allow interstate sales and we would get more choices and better prices.
   Then to curb drug price ripoffs, $800 Epipens and $100 pills,  we need to allow duty free import of drugs from any first world country, Canada, the EU, Japan and places like that.  Any drug the authorities of a first world country have approved can be imported, even if the US FDA hasn't approved them yet.  FDA will scream and cry, and so will big Pharma, but too bad. 

Did Snowden have a "Need to Know"?

You gotta blame NSA for first of all, not checking Snowden's background before issuing him a security clearance.  You would think a simple background check would have turned up evidence of flakiness.  Back when I got a Top Secret clearance, the FBI followed up and interviewed my references.  I do remember going back to my high school reunion and running into old Fred Swan, teacher of physics, swim team coach, and all around decent man.  Fred says to me, "Did you know the FBI has been around asking about you?"   I wonder if they did the same for Snowden.
   Second of all, for granting him access to so much stuff.  We used to have a doctrine of "Need-to-Know".  You didn't get to see classified material unless you had a clearance, AND, a need to know the information. 
   Seems like NSA gave Snowden free run over all their classified.  And I never did hear just what Snowden was supposed to be doing on the job.  Other than passing every thing to the Russians.