American Flag flies in Hong Kong

Wall St Journal had a photo of Hong Kongers waving American flags above a piece on "unrest" in Hong Kong.  I was touched that a people on the far side of the world, under attack by their communist government, would find inspiration in the American flag.  I guess what America stands for still has meaning around the world. 

Words of the Weasel Part 53

Accountable.  As in " hold him accountable".   In real life accountable means to express mild disapproval in cases that call for indictment, trial, and 20 years in slam. 

The great Ukrainian telephone call kerfuffle

The TV news has been talking about nothing else for several days now.  The Democrats are calling impeachment.  The Republicans are not saying much.  I have not seen a good believable write up of what really happened. I have seen a lot of highly partisan write ups, from both sides, and I have trouble believing any of them.   Impeachment is going to make it impossible for Congress to do anything else for months, maybe years.  Impeachment talk won't go away until November 2020.   I tend to think this is a tempest in a teapot, a revival of the Mueller report, but going for impeachment makes it more serious.  It ought to do Biden some harm, the stories of Hunter Biden taking a $50,000 A MONTH salary from a Ukrainian firm are disgraceful.   Far as I can tell public opinion is still out on this great telephone kerfuffle.  I have no idea where it will eventually settle. 

Another great business name, Night Line Legal

Night Line Legal, they are getting air play, for some lawyers advertising for plaintiffs.  Sounds as reputable as Midnight Auto. 

Congress finds a new out

They are going to impeach Trump, or at least talk about it even if they lack the stones to actually do it.  This will tie Congress up for the rest of this year, and maybe a good slice of next year.  They won't deal with any of the things they ought to be dealing with.  Immigration, copyright and patent reform,  passing spending bills before the end of this fiscal year, dropping the magical 50 mpg CAFE standard, allowing import of medicines, eliminating boutique gasoline blends that make it illegal to ship gasoline from one state to another,  allowing sale of health insurance in all 50 states, shutting down the highway trust fund now that the interstate highway system is finished, and rolling back political correctness on campus.  And probably more stuff that escapes my memory right now.
   Not that Congress was doing any of these things, they have more fun trashing Trump.  And, now they have the impeachment thing to occupy all their time and energy.  The excuse this time is a telephone call between Trump and the newly elected president of Ukraine.  Apparently Trump mentioned young Hunter Biden drawing $50K salary PER MONTH, in Ukraine and maybe it should be looked into.  Congress has been running an investigation on TV all day talking about procedural issues, like which computer system the transcript was saved on.  Apparently there is not much in the way of actual wrongdoing or unethical conduct, so they talk about procedure. 

Global Warming according to the Economist

Got my new Economist in this morning's mail.  Cover is a clever climate graph, so clever that I had to read the article to understand the graph.  Anyhow the Economist graph shows global warming only starting in the 1990s and getting really hot in the 2010's.  .  Everything is cool  from the beginning of time (of graph) (1850) until the 1990's.   Trouble is, that is wrong.  NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has temperature records going back to the invention of the thermometer ( late 1600's).  I downloaded the records some years ago and graphed them out with Excel.  Global warming flattened out in the 1990s and has remainded flat to this day.  Dunno where the Economist got their data, but there is a publicly available database from a reasonably reliable institution that does not support the Economist's colorful cover graph. 

Things Detroit ought to do

   They ought to put an outside thermometer in every car.  They are not expensive, the sensor can be had for a couple of bucks.  And some software to read the sensor, scale the answer into degrees F, and display it on the digital dashboard.  Software is free. 
   They ought to give us back a dimmer knob for the dash lights.  My current car, a Buick, has a daylight sensor that looks for sunlight and when it fails to find any it figures it is nighttime and dims all the dash lights.  It gets things wrong, a lot.  Just pulling into a parking garage is enough to make it think its nighttime, and then it makes everything on the dash, the clock, the radio, all the instruments, too dim to read.  A good old fashioned knob that you turn by hand to set the brightness of the dash would be a blessing.
   They ought to make the digital dash readable.  Mine shows everything in a single tiny display which hides behind one of the spokes of the steering wheel.  It has 5 push buttons to select which is displayed, oil pressure, battery voltage, coolant temperature, mileage, fuel economy, etc, etc.  The display is so small I cannot read it wearing my driving glasses.  Better would be good old analog gauges, the kind with a needle in them, all on the dash all the time.  And mark the dials with green for normal operation and red for trouble.
   Then it would be nice if they made a sporty car that can be driven in snow.  The current sporty cars, Camaro, Mustang, Challenger, are so bad in snow that people laugh if you turn up with one at a ski resort.  Or for that matter just in Littleton NH, the locals figure anyone driving a sporty car is a flatlander.