Jungle Book, Disney 2016

I missed this when it was in the theater in town some months ago.  So I Netflixed it this week.  It's a live action kinda remake of the old Disney animated one.  Neel Sethi plays Mowgli and does it well.  He is young,  cute, he delivers his lines well, he looks good.  He is about the only real live action actor,  the rest of the cast are CGI animals, all well done, nice fur, good voices, very huggable.  It is an enjoyable flick.  They manage to do a couple of scary scenes that I found scary even at my age.  They borrowed some songs from the earlier animated version.  Baloo and Baghera and Kaa are nicely done.  I liked it.  Any child over the age of six ought to love it. 

Shed another tear for poor old Sears Roebuck

Sears troubles are so bad that banks are leery of lending to Sears.  According to the Wall St Journal Sears investors had to pay $4.62 million in bond insurance (a credit default swap) to insure a Sears $10 million for five years bond.  That' $924,000 a year, or 9.24% a year.  That's pure usury.  Or, the investors view Sears as so likely to default that they don't want to risk their money. 

Trump Adminstration leaks

The TV is talking about them.  They believe the number of leaks from the new born Trump administration is excessive.  The imply (they don't have the stones to come out and say it) that the leaks are coming from Trump appointees jostling for position inside the new administrative. 
  I wonder about that.  The vast US civil service are Democrats to a man (or a woman)  They are fire proof.  We could not fire low level civil servants even after we caught them stealing stuff out the base warehouse.  I'll bet you cannot fire them for leaking, even if you could catch them at it.  Not when they can put gigabytes of data onto a single easily concealable thumb drive.  And they all have broadband internet at home.
   Judging from the hysterical response of Democrats to Trump, being shown on TV hour after hour, I bet a lot of those Democratic civil servants are just as rabidly anti-Trump.  And they plan on leaking to damage the Trump administration.  
   Dunno what Trump can do about that.  Civil servants are everywhere in the US government.  They are the typists, the IT guys, the administrators, the janitorial staff, the receptionists, and every sort of paper pusher.  And  they can see everything, especially if someone has it typed up.
   We may be in for the most transparent administration in history, where everything gets leaked, to the media, to the Congress, to the homeless in the streets.
   Transparency may be OK, but American allies are already reluctant to share intelligence with the Americans for fear it will turn up on the front page and the New York Times,  burning agents and undoing years of careful intel work.
   

Superbowl LI

First TV in months that wasn't all about Trump and the election.  Refreshing I call it.  Cliff hanger ending.  Go Pats. 

Are cats trainable?

Perhaps, and with great difficulty.  I have a closet, full of exciting smells from leather boots and shoes, small and dark.  Stupid Beast loves that closet.  Last week she nipped inside when I wasn't looking.  I closed the closet door on her.  I didn't miss her for half a day.  When I did notice a lack-a-cat I checked her favorite nap places and then opened the closet just to check.  Out she popped.  Clearly happy to escape the closet.
   This morning, I open same magic closet to get out a pair of pants.  Stupid Beast slipped right in when I wasn't looking, and so I closed the closet door.  But, I opened it again to get something else a few minutes later.  And Stupid Beast popped right out.  I believe she had learned that spending half a day in the closet was hungry and thirsty work. 
  

 

Are the Senate rules democratic?

We have been hearing a lot of talk lately about Senate rules.  One that I never heard of before surfaced last week.  In attempting  to block "advise and consent" of president Trump's cabinet, the Democrats walked out of the committee meeting and claimed that the committee could not vote on the cabinet appointee unless there were some Democrats present.  That's a new one on me.  The next day the Republicans dredged up some rule that said they could too vote.  And so a couple of cabinet appointees made it thru the committee votes to stand before the entire Senate, sometime now.
   Then there is an older Senate practice, which allows any single senator to "place a hold"  (a veto) on any judicial appointment.  Somehow, letting a single senator veto any judge strikes me a profoundly undemocratic.
   Then we have the filibuster.  This practice was started in the 1950's by Democrats.  It came from a Senate rule that allowed unlimited debate.  Once a senator has the floor he can keep on talking as long as he can draw breath.  Democrats would filibuster to block civil rights legislation in the bad old days.  For the really big cases they used to bring in cots to give exhausted senators a bit of rest. Filibusters became so notorious that sometime in the early 1960's the Senate created the "cloture rule".  Under cloture rule, a supermajority (60 votes) sufficed to take the floor away from a windbag filibusterer and move on with Senate business.  As time went on, to avoid the tedium of waiting for Senator Windbag to become obnoxious, they dispensed with th need for Senator Windbag to actually take the floor and keep on babbling.  Now any senator can merely declare he wants to filibuster something, and that something is blocked unless and until they dredge up 60 votes to impose "cloture".  The effect is to require a supermajority to pass anything of substance thru the Senate.
   And then the Senate gives the majority leader the right to personally veto anything.  The majority leader sets the Senate agenda.  Any bill he dislikes, just never appears on the agenda.  Poof and it's gonzo.
    I'm thinking it's time for a housecleaning on Senate rules.  

$130 million a year to UC Berkeley? A third of Berkeley's budget?

I heard these numbers on TV yesterday.  US taxpayers give UC Berkeley $130 million a year.  This is one third of Berkeley's yearly budget.
If true, this is appalling.   It makes UC into a US government college, run by the Feds, indoctrinating the students with whatever party line the Feds want.
   Someone will say that the $130 million is support for research.   When they do, I would ask to see the results of all this research.  What new products are on the market incorporating UC Berkeley research results?  What textbooks have UC Berkeley research results printed in them?  In short, what has all that research money produced?  Other than salaries for tenured professors?
   I doubt that Berkeley can match the results of the old Bell Labs, who invented the transistor, discovered the cosmic background radiation, performed the Davidson Germer experiment showing that electrons had a wavelength like photons.  These are just the few things I remember from a long ago physics course.  There are doubtless more successes to Bell Labs credit.  Too bad the anti-trust people killed off Bell Labs in the 1970's.  

Update:   This morning's Wall St Journal says Berkeley receives a lot more money, like $400 million in research grants and $200 million in student loans.