Mark Steyn on The Donald

Mark Steyn was on Fox this afternoon.  He said Trump's appeal comes from failure of the Republican establishment.  The grass root republicans came out in 2010 and 2014 and elected a solid Republican majority in Congress.  But the Republicans haven't done anything now that they control both houses of Congress.  They haven't gotten Keystone XL thru.  They haven't taken any scalps at the IRS.  The EPA is still killing jobs from coast to coast. They haven't slammed the door on illegal immigration.  Plus a lot of other things.  Trump sounds like he will fix some or all of these failures.  The Republican base likes that.  They have little use for the RINO establishment. 
   Steyn makes a lot of sense here.  I think he is onto something. 

Dawn over Marblehead

According to this, the IMF has decided that a third bailout for Greece would be a waste of money.   Jeez, took 'em long enough to see the light.  The noise from Europe is when the IMF backs out, so does every one else.  All the Greek  bailout will do is finance the Greeks in paying off some of their fantastic international debt.  It would be cheaper just to stop bailing Greece, let the Greeks default on their loans, and learn to run a balanced budget.  All that debt was run up by Greeks spending more than they take in with taxes.  Time to stop subsidizing them, Greece can learn to cut spending and hike taxes just like a real country.  And the banking idiots who loaned the money deserve to take a good solid loss.  Maybe that will learn 'em. 

Ant Man

It was hot last night, so I decided to beat the heat with an air conditioned movie.  It's new, it's getting good box office sales.  It's a Marvel comic book movie.  It has a handsome superhero, a slightly mad scientist (Michael Douglas), and the scientist's beautiful daughter.  It has a lot of CGI, explosions, and deeds of derring do.   The beautiful daughter spends a good deal of time attempting to straighten out her father (guess how that works out) and beat some sense into handsome hero AntMan.  This works out better for her, and by the last reel they are on the verge of proposing marriage, or maybe they do propose, I might have missed that part.  Handsome hero is a divorcee, with a little daughter who adores him, even if mom has custody and is being sticky about visitation.  It's cute.   Antman comics came out long after I stopped reading comic books, so I cannot said how well the movie tracks the books.
Good movie for kids, at least kids of 6 or 7 years or more.  Younger kids may not "get it". 
    And it is NOT three D, a blessing.

Is Trump Legit?

Even Fox News was asking if Trump should allowed to run.  All kinds of Republicans are wringing their hands and deploring The Donald.  They say he is hurting the party.
    Heh, the country is supposed to be a democracy.  Citizens can say pretty much anything they please in public.  Trump is sounding good to a lot of voters.  We ought to listen to what he is saying, partly to figure out what to say to appeal to voters, partly to catch him saying things that cost him, like trashing John McCain.
   I haven't quite figured Trump out myself.  I cannot put my finger on his appeal.  But appeal he has, look at the polls.  Part of Trump's appeal is he uses numbers and concrete examples in his speeches, unlike every one else in the presidential race who speak in vague generalities.  But the way things are going, Trump could go places.
   I am not ready to vote for Trump.  He shoots his mouth off too readily to be president.   I can see him kicking off an international trade war, like we did with the Smoot Hawley tariff in the 1930's. 

Isolationism caused WWII

The immediate cause of WWII was Adolf Hitler.  He wanted to refight WWI and win instead of losing.  Nobody else in Europe was that crazy, and nobody believed Hitler was that crazy.  Hitler started throwing Germany's weight around in the 1930s  If the two surviving great powers, Britain and France, had exerted them selves,  Hitler could have been stopped, deposed, brought before an international trial and executed in the 1930's.   They didn't, their voter's didn't want to, nobody wanted to risk getting sucked into another WWI, and Germany looked like a pretty tough nut.  If the British and the French had had solid American backing, they might have found the stones to act. 
   But the Americans were into "isolationism".  "Let Europe stew in it's own juice."  This pusillanimous attitude got started during WWI.  After the WWI, there was a great peace treaty, the treaty of Versailles. To enforce Versailles, the American president Wilson wanted to set up the League of Nations.  But when he brought the League of Nations treaty to the US senate, the isolationists opposed it and defeated it.  Later on, conspiracy theories of WWI were circulated, things like the war was instigated by arms makers ("the merchants of death") as a way to increase sales.   Needless to say, a lot of people were unsatisfied by the deals cut at Versailles.  The British and the French scarfed up a lot of loose colonial territory.  The Germans thought they had been shafted.  The British had promised Palestine to both the Jews and the Arabs. 
   Net result, America withdrew from world affairs.  When Hitler started throwing his weight around we did nothing.  The French and the British lacked the will and the strength to do anything.  We should have said "We won't stand for any backchat out of this two bit dictator.  If he steps one inch out of line, we plan to clobber him good."  But the political strength of the isolationists was so great that we did nothing, we let Hitler grow in strength until he brought the world down in flames. 
   This political season you can hear the isolationists rising up again in America.  "No boots on the ground."  The Iranian nuke deal.  "Leading from behind."   We need to oppose this, lest it touch off WWIII.

Product Differentiation

Long ago, you bought RAID, and it would kill about any kinda bug.  So I stop in at Mac's to get another can.  Their had RAID for ants, RAID for roaches, RAID for wasps and hornets, and a couple of other things I forget.  They did not have plain old RAID for flying insects, which is what I wanted.  Give a housefly a whiff of that and their wings stop moving and the bug falls to the floor.  They may twitch a little bit, but pretty soon they are dead. 
   So much for product differentiation. 

Trashing Hillary

Fox News has been on Hillary's case about emails.  They accuse her of putting classified information in her emails, and doing her email on a private server at her New York home. 
   Well, as a republican, I am always happy to see Hillary get trashed.  But let's be real about it.  Every email from the American secretary of state is of intense interest to every country in the world, friends, enemies, they all want to know what the Americans are thinking.
    And, compared to Office of Personnel Management, Hillary's private email server is probably more secure.  
    A better question:  Given the overall insecurity of email, should American officials use email at all?