Robo Disk Jockey is broken

The Notch, FM 106.something is a strange FM station.  It plays decent pop music with very few commercials or station breaks They don't do news, best we get is an occasional weather report.  I don't know what their business plan is, they don't run nearly enough ads to pay their electric bill.  To cut costs they don't have a disk jockey, they have some kind of robo player that keeps the music coming.
 Only, robo player broke down yesterday.  The music is shutting off at random, in the middle of a tune.  After some minutes of dead air, the next tune begins to play.  They apparently don't have maintenance people.  I'm wondering how long they will last.  Is someone trying to fix it, or have they gone out of business except someone forgot to turn off their transmitter? 

Polarization, (political type)

Been reading " The Second  Civil War, How Extreme Partisanship has paralysed Washington and Polarized American"  by Ronald Brownstein  The title pretty much sums up the book.  It was published in 2007, just before Great Depression 2.0   It treats the situation as a Washington DC problem, a problem caused by Congressmen who are no longer interested in forging legislation acceptable to both sides and passing it.  Brownstein complains that modern Congressmen are more interested in sticking it to the other side than forming a concensus.  All of this is interesting, but Brownstein misses the point.
   Congressmen vote their districts.  When the district has the bit in its teeth and is running in one direction, the Congressman must vote that way, if he wants to remain a Congressman.  Congressmen are only free to cut deals on issues that their district doesn't care about.
   The reason Congress is more polarized is that the voters are more polarized.  The country is evenly split between liberals and conservatives (alternate names for Democrats and Republicans)  Neither side has enough votes to push their legislation thru, so nothing gets done.  Brownstein's book would have been more interesting if he had investigated the causes of this vast split in American voters.  Why are the voters more partisan than they used to be?  The last election was a close one.  The Democrats didn't win enough House seats to give the sort of control that FDR enjoyed.  Until there is a sea change voter's attitudes about  taxes, spending, abortion, and immigration, which elects a solid majority in favor of one course of action,  little will get done.
   These things take time.  If you believe the polls, we are  seeing such a change in attitudes about gay marriage right now.  I don't really expect that kind of movement across the board.  So we will have to bumble along with Washington deadlocked for quite a few more years.  This ain't all bad,  a lot of destructive legislation won't get passed. 

$4 gasoline, its coming soon

Governor Maggie the Hassan wants another 12 cents a gallon for the state.  She and the democrats claim it is needed for "infrastructure maintenance".   Actually they want to use it to finish widening I93 south of Manchester.  Then Obama's EPA announces new rules reducing the amount of sulfur in gasoline.  The bureaucrats claim it will only cost an additional penny per gallon.  The oil industry says it will cost more like 9 cents a gallon.  I know which numbers I trust more. 
   So between Maggie and Barry, 12 cents plus 9 cents is 21 cents a gallon price hike.  When the price of crude goes up again it will be even worse.

The Economist admits Global Warming Ends

Breakthough.  The Economist has been strong for Global Warming for years.  They like cap and trade, carbon taxes, alternate energy, CAFE and all that politically correct stuff.  In this week's issue they finally admit that global temperatures have been flat since 1998.  Seas ain't gonna rise, we will have snow for skiing and enough cold weather to make the sap rise so we can make maple syrup.  They show some graphs of world temperatures with a flat top for the last 15 years. 
   They have no idea why this is happening.  All the computer models predict warming.  Measured atmospheric CO2 is up, reflective aerosols are down.  But the decline cannot be hidden any longer.
   The global warming skeptics have been soap boxing about the lack of warming for some time now.  To have a pro warmist magazine like the Economist pick up on it means the data is fairly convincing.
  However, we must not let our guard down says the Economist.  That nasty warming might come back.  We need to keep inflicting economic pain upon ourselves just is case. 
  

How secure is secure?

The TV is full of talk about "securing the border" before doing an immigration bill.  Sounds good, but what do we mean by "secure".  No matter what we do, the occasional lucky alien will get across now and then.  And, those that do, won't tell anyone that they made it.  So there is no way to actually measure the security of the border, in terms of how many aliens got thru or didn't get thru.
   More reasonable is to talk about a level of effort.  How much effort should be expended on border security?  For me, I'd settle for a good chain link fence running all the way from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, paralleled with a road to permit jeep borne patrols all along the border.  And enough Border Patrolmen to run a patrol about once an hour.  Do this much, and I'd call the border secure even if a few illegal aliens did slip across from time to time. 
   Others might call for more or less security.
   If  "a secure border" is necessary to more forward on an immigration bill, then we need to agree on just how secure is secure enough.  That is, if we honestly want to negotiate an immigration bill.
   We have plenty of dishonest politicians who talk the talk but actually won't walk the walk. 

We don't oppose it 'cause it's malarkey

Instead we oppose it 'cause it is vaguely associated with religion.  An Arizona high school was teaching from materials supplied by United Scholastic.  United Scholastic is associated in some way with the Church of Scientology.  They didn't say just what the association was (ownership? historical? shared board of directors?).  And they went on at length complaining that using United Scholastics stuff was a violation of the first amendment (establishment of religion)
  They didn't say anything about whether the United Scholastics material was any good or not.  That apparently doesn't matter.
  L Ron Hubbard started writing science fiction back in the 1950's.  He was only middling good as a writer but he did get some stories published in Astounding Science Fiction (Later Analog Science Fiction) the premier SF mag.  His paperbacks stayed in print into the 1980's.  In the later 1950's he invented the "science" of Dianetics.  From there he went on to found the Church of Scientology, a cult which has been in and out of trouble with the law, here and overseas, for many many years.
   With that background, I would be intensely suspicious of anything associated with the Church of Scientology.  Because everything else L Ron Hubbard had a hand in was pure malarkey. 
   However our crusaders from NPR cannot be troubled with evaluating the worth of the United Scholastic material.  It's far more important to trash it for being "religion". 

Background check or blacklist?

The gun control folks are calling for yet more background checks.  Like background checks for sales between family members, friends, and private individuals.  So someone picks up the phone, calls a magic phone number and asks if it is OK to sell a gun to so and so.  At the far end of the phone, some bureaucrat checks the name against a list.  If the name isn't on the list he says "OK sell it to him". 
  In short we have the government running a blacklist.  Once your name goes on the list, you cannot purchase firearms.  Since this list is so damaging, ethical doctors are reluctant to mess up their patient's lives by calling the government and saying " I was just treating so an so and I think he is a danger to society and you ought to put him on the gun blacklist." 
   If the government is going to run a gun blacklist, there ought to be clear rules about how much evidence is needed to blacklist a citizen, rules for getting off the black list, and strict rules keeping the black list secret.  Amid all the happy talk about more background checks I haven't heard any talk about fair and just procedures for operating the black list.