Pratt & Whitney to merge with Raytheon. WSJ

Front page of today's Wall St Journal.  They called it United Technologies and Raytheon to merge.  United Technologies is the holding company that holds Pratt and Whitney.  Pratt is one of the only three jet engine makers in the world.  The other two are GE and Rolls Royce.  That means they are making about a third of all the jet engines made in the whole world.  That's big. 
   Raytheon started up in the 1930's making vacuum tubes and cashed in on the invention of radar in WWII.  Raytheon had good connections with the MIT Radiation Laboratory where the American radar effort was centered.  A lot of Raytheon people were old MIT grads, they kept in touch, and when the Rad Lab needed something built, they had Raytheon do it.  By the time I went to work at Raytheon in the 1970's they were big.  They had the fantastic anti ballistic missile radar project which I got to work on.  They were doing SAM-D which became the Patriot anti aircraft and anti ballistic missile system in time for the Gulf War.  Raytheon was the go-to contractor for Navy ship borne radars and later the Aegis missile systems for Navy cruisers.
   Any how, the merger, if it goes thru, to be called Raytheon Technologies Corporation will be the second largest defense contractor, right behind Boeing, and be worth $100 billion. 
   This will reduce the number of defense contractors, reducing competition, which will raise the price of defense contracts to us taxpayers.  Was I Donald Trump (I'm not) I would have the anti trust department over at Justice object to this merger on the basis that it is anti competitive.  Anti trust hasn't done anything since they chickened out of supporting Netscape from predatory pricing by Microsoft back in the 1990s.  There has been some talk in recent days about breaking up the big tech companies, but I haven't since any real action on that front.  Fat as I can see, the DOJ antitrust people simply draw their pay and don't do anything.

Budget Day in Concord.

Senate Session, 6 June.  Budget day.  Plus 200 year anniversary of the Concord state house.  We had a small army of former Senators in the visitor’s gallery and the senate president introduced each one by name.  And a short joint session where nice things were said about New Hampshire history and the progress women have made in politics over the years.  No Fast Track calendar this week.  We ran thru the 8 bills on the regular calendar, mostly on roll calls, 14-10, all the Democrats voting for and all the Republicans voting against.  That got us up to lunch, sandwiches and cookies on the lawn outside.  After lunch we started on the budget and didn’t finish it until midnight.  The budget comes in two parts, part 1 (200 pages) and part 2 (180 pages).  Over than style changes it was/is not clear to me what the difference between them is.  Transparent they are not. Would you believe opaque?   No index or table of contents.  I never found any totals of spending or tax revenues for the whole state, or even of the various departments of state government.  I have been told that restoration of 100% stabilization grants is in there, somewhere, but I never found it.  The budget is started by the governor, who asks all his department heads how much money they need.  This list of goodies then goes to the house, which modifies it to suit them selves.  Then it comes to the senate and we make a lot of changes, or we try to. 

    We submitted 20 amendments.  The Democrats voted each one down, 14-10.  My amendments, one to fund renovation of the Hitchner building in Littleton to support White Mountain community college expansion there, and the other for expansion of the Coos County Family Health Services clinic in Berlin, both perished on party line roll call votes 14-10.  Anyhow, that makes this budget a Democrat budget.  Lots of new taxes.  Lots of expensive goodies like a 1.5% COLA for state retirees.   

   It was after 10 PM by the time our last amendment was voted down.  Then we got into a complex, and amazing bit of parliamentary quibbling than ran on till midnight.  We had originally voted to “divide” the budget into stuff we liked and stuff we didn’t like.  Senate president Donna Soucy had ruled the budget part 2 “divisible”.   In a voice vote the Democrats overruled the senate president (one of their own party!) and declared part 2 indivisible.  Very unusual to slap down your own senate president like that.   Which meant we could only vote the whole thing up or down, whereas we wanted to vote for the stuff we liked and against the stuff we didn’t like.  So we called a recess and waited for the Democrats desire to go home to override their desire to score an obscure political point.  It didn’t work, and at midnight we finally held a roll call vote to approve budget part 2.  All the Democrats voted for and all the Republicans voted against.  So the Democrat budget is off to the governor’s desk.  

Why Huawei should be no way

The US is campaigning to keep China's Huawei Technologies telecom equipment out of US and allied telephone systems.  We think Huawei is a security risk, that Huawei equipment contains secret back doors that allow Chinese intelligence services to intercept our voice and data traffic.  This risk sounds real to me. 
   One of Tom Clancy's techo thrillers has a CIA agent in Beijing securely emailing his intel reports back to Langley using a secret backdoor in US built telecom equipment installed in the Beijing phone system.  Clancy explains how the backdoor was slipped into the embedded computer code of the telecom switch by a few patriotic low level employees of AT&T and Microsoft at the request of CIA years before. Senior management knew nothing about it.  Although Clancy is writing fiction, that tale sounds completely plausible to me, an old embedded systems programmer.
   Huawei is a Chinese company and it is reasonable to believe that it is tied more closely to the Chinese government than US companies are, and that Huawei employees are as patriotic as US employees, perhaps even more so.
   We should work as hard as possible to keep suspect Huawei equipment out of our phone systems.  And out of our allies phone systems too.  

NH Senate activity 30 May

Senate Session 30 May.  A circus.  We voted on overriding Governor Sununu’s veto of death penalty abolition.  Vast excitement among the newsies.  In actual fact, the lawyers and the courts abolished the NH death penalty 80 years ago.  But the newsies found an appealing issue and have devoted yuge amounts of airtime and editorial words to it. The public would have been better served by air time and editorial words covering real issues like minimum wage, new taxes, transgender supremacy bills, and gun control.   Two big TV camera’s on tripods, five journals on laptops, two guys with big still cameras.  It was a roll call vote.  16-8 to override.  Just one vote over the two thirds majority needed to override.  I voted to sustain the governor’s veto and the death penalty.  There are some atrocious crimes, like school shooters who kill dozens of innocent students, or cop killers or traitors who pass secrets of the ultimate weapon to mortal enemies, who deserve death.   After the death penalty vote, the newsies all packed up and left.  We stayed in session until 7:30 PM.  I got home in the last of the daylight at 8:30 PM.  To the great joy of Stupid Beast. 

    We knocked off 21 bills with a quick voice vote on the Fast Track (Consent) calendar.  Then we bickered over 42 bills on the regular calendar for the rest of the day. 

   We kicked HB 186 the minimum wage bill into next year by re referring it back to committee.  That was a heavy duty jobs killer.   The Democrats rammed thru HB 105, which would allow people with out of state plates and/or out of state driver’s licenses to vote in New Hampshire.   Roll call vote 14-10, all Democrats for, all Republicans against.   Then they rammed thru HB 611 to allow everyone to get an absentee ballot, no questions asked.  And HB 651 that would allow campaign funds to be spent on child care.  Real politicians don’t put the kids in child care, they take them to their campaign events.  That’s what my mother did when she ran for the Massachusetts house many years ago.  We kids would have rather stayed home and watched TV, but Mother knew that voters love children and so she brought hers with her to all her events.  HB 481, the pot legalization bill got re referred to committee, which puts it off until next year.  And finally HB 608, a bill on Transexual rights was roll called thru 16-8.  This bill would allow boys to use the girl’s rooms, boys to compete on girls sports teams.

Black Panther 2018

   I missed seeing this in the theater last year.  After reading much hype I net flixed it and watched it.  Meh.   Opening credits scene showed a cool metal armored riding rhinoceros.  Never did see it in action in the movie but it looked cool in the credits.   The hidden black African kingdom of Wakanda needs a new king.  Wakanda possesses lots of high technology, anti gravity stretchers, Millennium Falcon style aircraft, futuristic cities and more.  The plot is obscure.  Many of the characters speak an African language which I don’t understand.  I never did catch the stage names for any character.  If the hero had a love interest it was never clear which chick it was. 

   The hero must win the kingship thru single combat with someone else.  This happens out doors in a small river leading to a mighty waterfall.  Of course, I expected the loser to get thrown down the waterfall.  Well that didn’t happen, this time.  Hero gets the crown, rules for a while, then suffers a rematch at the waterfall some time later.  This time he gets thrown over the falls.  He survives, and makes a comeback in the last reel. Not clear how. 

   The cast is all black, Wakanda is black, and Marvel ran Black Panther comic books for years.  That was after I had given up comic books so I missed out on much of the background of the movie.  Needless to say black fans just loved this movie. 

   Me, not so much.  They had Darkman working the camera giving us a lot of pure black scenes with only mumbled dialogue to clue us in.   Since the cast was all black, nothing showed up in the dark scenes. No even an eyeball.  At least in Game of Thrones you could see a white face or two barely visible in the black. 

NH arsenic limit in drinking water.

And I forgot to write about HB 261 concerning arsenic limits in drinking water.  It would establish a limit of 5 micrograms per liter for arsenic.  That’s really low.  I asked the advocates for this bill (Sen Feltes and Sen Sherman) where this limit came from.  Who or which organization recommended this VERY low limit. Neither of them knew where this VERY low limit came from. We are talking 5 parts per TRILLION here.  Back when I took chemistry in college it was felt than anything less than 1 part per MILLION (1000 parts per TRILLION) wasn’t going to hurt anybody.  Anyhow this cute little bill was adopted on a voice vote (all ayes, no nays).  Dunno how much it will increase everyone’s costs, first to make a measurement that delicate and second to reduce the arsenic content that much. 

NH needs to require public speaking senior year of high school

Down in Concord VERY few people can speak properly.  They mumble, they don't speak loud enough to be heard even from the front row of seats.  They slur their words, they talk too fast.  I sat thru a capital budget hearing.  I took a front row seat.  Of all the witnesses testifying, I could not tell what project they were advocating, where it was to be, how big it was gonna be.  All the witnesses were such poor public speakers that I missed most of their words.
   My high school required public speaking, a once a week course, of all seniors.  It was taught by the headmaster, old Daniel D. Test.   Held in the school theater, we spoke from the stage, Dan Test would sit in the last row.  And call out "I can't hear you" if you were not speaking loudly enough.  That course has stuck with me, and done me good over the years.  We ought to require it of all New Hampshire high schools.