Can I trust US courts anymore?

Good question.  Seattle district court judge James Robart certainly doesn't believe in following the written law.  The 1952 law says the president has total authority to ban any immigrant or class of immigrants from entry to the United States.  Judge Robart ignored this and forbade the president from barring immigration from seven Middle East countries.  In short, the judge ruled in accordance with his personal political ideology and not in accordance with the law on the books.  Plus the two plaintiff states clearly lacked standing to sue the federal government. 
  What's worse, the 9th Circuit court of appeals backed him up.  So, we have the federal courts in the western part of the country making judgements based on personal prejudice rather than written law.  I wonder what they were teaching in law school back when these so called judges were doing law school.  Scary.
   So much for the procedural argument.  The substance of the issue is of only medium importance.  We don't get all that many immigrants from the seven middle east countries in Trump's executive order.  On the other hand, these seven countries are so screwed up from civil war or just plain collapse into failed states, that we cannot believe anything they tell us.  We ought to be vetting immigrants to weed out criminals and select for people who will become loyal and productive members of American society.  Vetting means contacting the authorities in the immigrant's home country to verify his name and home address, see how much schooling he has, see his police record, and so forth.  This only works if the home country has authorities in charge.  The seven countries on Trump's executive order are all  so war torn that we cannot find the authorities, and even if we find someone who claims to be an authority in an enemy country like Iran or Syria, we suspect that they would lie to us.  Surely an Iranian mullah who wanted to infiltrate an agent into the US would have no problem telling US authorities that "Yes Omar is a good boy, never been in trouble, good marks in school. Yada-Yada." 
   So, it's a twofer, the so called judges are wrong on the issues as well as procedures.  Very scary.

How much should that wall cost?

I'm not a great wall fan myself.  New Hampshire is about as far away from the Mexican border as you can get.  But ABC was just claiming that the border wall would cost $25 billion.  Which is rediculous.
The US Mexican border is 2000 miles long.  At 5280 feet to the mile, that comes out to 10 million feet in round numbers.  Chain link fence material, the chain link, fence posts, ties, and everything is about $5 a foot.  I looked it up on the internet. Let's assume installation is about the same as the cost of materials, so make it  $10 a foot, or $100 million to do the whole border.  That's a far cry from ABC's $25 billion.
    Actually, there is a bit more to doing it right.  To prevent people from digging under it,  we ought to put a solid concrete footing under the fence, all the way across.  That might cost another $100 million.  Then we need an access road on our side of the fence to allow the border patrol to get men to the site of an illegal crossing in a hurry.  It can be a dirt road, just good enough for a jeep.  And we ought to fly air patrols in Cessnas (not $1 millon UAVs) daily.  The real purpose of the fence is to stop vehicles from crossing, or at least to leave an unmistakable hole where someone crashes thru.   You need air patrols to spot the big  holes in time to get the border patrol in pursuit of the fence crasher before he gets away.
   Even with all this stuff  I'm thinking we could do the wall for less than $1 billion.
  

Adventures in Router Land

The virii and trojans and  ransomware are getting aggressive this year.  I decided to upgrade the firmware in my router.  Router is a $40 plastic box that plugs into the cable modem and offers WIFI and four internet connectors.  The router faces the raw internet, and needs to reject incoming messages that would take over the router and do evil.  The router acts as a firewall, and if it should be penetrated, the hacker has direct access to the Windows machines plugged into the router.  And Windows is like Swiss cheese, fully of holes.  If the tougher software in the router is compromised, the Windows machines are toast. 
   My router is a NetGear N300 purchased a couple of years ago.  I Googled the router maker name, model number and "firmware".  This gave me an offer to download new firmware.  On this particular router you can talk to it using your web browser.  You put in a special URL and the router picks up and displays a groovy little user interface.  From this I learned that my current firmware was v18 while the new downloaded firmware was v42.  Hmm, been a lot of patching of router code over the last couple of years.   The router offered an "upload firmware" function, which was sorta flaky.  I had to run it two or three times before the upload "took". 
   So, me router firmware is all up to date, which is the best I can do against the swarm of malware running around the internet.  Upgrading the firmware did not mess up any of my computer connections to the router.

Wall St Journal Pushes a Carbon Tax???

Yesterday's Journal Op-Ed had a piece authored by James Baker and George Schultz.  Both of these guys have been Secretary of the Treasury AND Secretary of State.  So they have some experience.  They may not have any common sense, but they have lots of experience.  They claim that a $40 a ton carbon tax will clear our air and improve the economy.  They propose the revenues from the carbon tax be paid out to all citizens rather than going to reduce the deficit and pay the government's bills.  They think this payout will avoid the downturn that just socking everyone with a hefty tax hike will.   They make it sound kinda sweet, mentioning a $2000 a year refund to the average family. 
   What they don't mention, is that everyone will have to hike their prices to pay their carbon tax.  To put it in perspective, each time I fill my 275 gallon furnace oil tank, I'd get hit for $40 in carbon tax.  Call it $200 a winter.  
    And surely, avoiding a $40 a ton carbon tax would be a strong incentive for business to expand overseas, or anywhere outside the US just to avoid the tax.  That carbon tax will undo all the good work of frackers in getting the price of oil down. 
   And, they want to impose all this pain to reduce global warming.  We haven't had any global warming that you could measure with a thermometer for the last 19 years, and they want to sock it to me for global warming?  As I write this it is 14F outside with snow swirling in front of my windows. 

That $500 billion foreign trade deficit

According to today's Wall St Journal  that's how deep in the hole we are.  Our imports were $500 billion more than our exports.  In short, the rest of the world shipped $500 billion worth of goods into America and America shipped them zilch.  Since people don't like to ship goods and not get paid, presumably we sent $500 billion in cash to pay for this stuff. 
   $500 billion is a lot, even for a US GNP of $17 trillion.  And we have been doing this for at least 20 years, maybe more.  How does it work? 
   Do we merely print an extra $500 billion dollars?  The US greenback is desired all over the world, and we can probably get away with printing a whole lot of 'em before foreigners wise up and stop accepting them.
   Do we have some invisible export that earns us $500 billion a year?  Does tuition paid by foreign students to US colleges count as exports?  What about royalties for Hollywood movies, video games, pop music, Superman comic books, and other stuff? Does all that count as exports?   Do foreign stock purchases on the NYSE or NASDAQ count?
    Something else?
    The point is, we have been running humongous trade deficits for many many years and it keeps on running.  Somehow the international books get balanced and we don't run out of money.  It would be nice to know how this really works 

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.