Can we Revoke Faisal Shahzad's Citizenship?

So reads the headline on a Wall St Journal OpEd piece by Peter H. Shuck, professor at Yale Law School.
To which I say, why in the name of all that's holy would we want to? He attempted to commit an atrocious crime on American soil, was apprehended by American police on American soil, and will face American justice. Since he is a US citizen, our foreign enemies cannot bad mouth us for being mean to foreigners. If convicted, the usual punishment is jail time or execution. Revocation of citizenship is surely unusual, and possibly cruel as well. There is a clause about that in the Constitution.
My other question is, what is this clueless lawyer doing teaching law at Yale?

Physician's Town Hall

We had one last night up here. It was kinda scary. The doctors, all respected local practitioners, known to and respected by the audience, tried to put a happy face on Obamacare. But as discussion went on it became clear that they see a grim future. Higher prices, less service. Rationing of care, extinction of new drug development, more and more paperwork. Mandatory electronic medical records that allow the government, the insurance companies, potential employers, and personal enemies to access your medical records. Bureaucratic OK's required before expensive treatment which are Sarah Palin's death panels under another name. The extinction of private medical practices, all doctors becoming mere employees of hospitals or health care organizations.

Follies of the Main Stream Media

So I'm getting a little breakfast in a greasy spoon on the way out of Washington DC. I skim a copy of the Washington Post that's lying on the counter. The editorial page is a classic. First article urged the administration to go postal on Egypt. Here is a friendly middle east power that has, and is still, doing good things. They called off the war with Israel 40 years ago and have kept their word. The outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood (root of Al Quada) in the 1920's, and imprisoned and executed Fawzi el Qutb (dangerous Islamic extremist) in the 1960's. Egypt has been a better friend and ally than even the Saudi's. Yet here is the Post calling for the administration to do regime change on them just cause Hosni Mubarak is a military strongman rather than a democratically elected politician. The world is not a perfect place, but but Mubarak is a better man than that nutcase with a funny name running Iran. If you want to pick on middle eastern governments why not pick on the really bad ones?
Next editorial down is praising the DC teachers union for finally coming to the contract table. Here we have the worse school system in the country, and the Post is siding with the teacher's union? As opposed to the parents and students? The DC system didn't fall to it's current nadir without a lot of help from the teachers.
No wonder the Post is loosing money, it isn't focusing on matters that readers care about.

Hat is in the ring. I'm running for office

Had to happen sometime. The Grafton County Republicans have been looking for someone, anyone, to stand for election to District 2 Grafton county, (Bethlehem and Franconia). At the last Lincoln Reagan dinner, a bunch of senior county Republicans backed me into a corner and pressed me to run. So, I said yes.
The district is two small towns way up and north of Franconia Notch. Both towns together cast 1500 votes for state rep in the last two elections. Both towns are residential and tourist places, no industry or agriculture worth mentioning. It's a single rep district.
New Hampshire has an enormous (400+) lower house from a smallish state, so reps are pretty far down the food chain, compared to state senators, executive council members, newspaper and TV reporters, to say nothing of executive and judicial branch officials.
My campaign plan is simple. Walk around and knock on doors. The district is small enough that it is possible to meet a lot of voters face to face.
I can use all the help I can get.

National Portrait Gallery

So I got to Washington DC. First time in years without young children, so instead of doing the fun childrens stuff like Air and Space, I did a grown up art museum. The portrait gallery was great. Best stuff is on the first floor, portraits of Americans that mostly I had at least heard off, and some about who I know quite a bit. Plus painters I had heard of. You can see the style changes over the years. Eighteenth century and earlier the men wear colorful three piece suits with coats down to their knees. After the revolution the bright colors go away and everyone dresses in black. Beards come back in for the civil war and last for 50 years.
All the faces show determined middle aged men, of the "don't mess with me" sort. Nearly all white, a number of Indians, and a very few blacks.
They have lots of room to expand. The upper floors are clearly waiting for some more stuff to show.

Westtown Alma Mater

Time flies. I attended my 50th high school reunion Saturday. At first I thought about maybe not going and pretending that I ain't that old. But as emails and Facebook stuff piled up, the nostalgia began to build, and I went. Driving into the school is a big change. The road I used to bike into West Chester on is all different. 50 years ago the road was all cornfields and apple orchards and wood lots. Now it is solid housing developments. Nice looking houses, but the farmers are all gone. It isn't until you get on the school grounds that things look familiar. The old treasured Main Building is still there, all red brick and a zillion chimneys. Since I graduated the school has added a theatre building, a science building, a lower school building, a middle school building, a student hangout building, an 9th grade girls dorm, and two more gyms. Our class gift will fund a new building for the maintenance people. Dunno what they will put up after that.
Our efficient class officers had name tags made up with our old 1960 year book pictures on them. Good thing, I wouldn't have recognized a lotta class mates with out them. We did lots of catching up on old times, and a fair amount of time listening to school officials make pitches for money and student referrals. That sell seemed a little harder than in past years.
All an all an enjoyable day, doing very simple things.

Posting will be light to non existant next week

I'm taking a road trip to Washington DC and don't plan to be back until next Thursday. If I luck out and have time and internet access I will post. Otherwise I'll resume when I get back.

Britt Hulme gets it right

Britt was on Fox last night. Talked about the Gulf oil spill. Said the overall safety record is pretty good, tens of thousands of offshore wells drilled with just this one really bad spill. Then he mentioned that the bulk of oil spills are tanker accidents (can you say Exxon Valdez?). He pointed out that if we don't drill for it here, we bring it in by tanker. Stop drilling and we get more tanker traffic. He reckoned that we do better, spill wise, drilling for it here than we do running tankers from the mid east.

Farewell old Paint

At 125K miles, trusty Cadillac is toast. Between the NH champion potholes and road salt, the bolts that hold the rear axle on the poor car have loosened from the body and the axle is close to coming off the car. Caddy, like all cars since the 1960's, is a unibody car. No frame, the body sheet metal carries all the structural loads. This design is highly admired by the auto racing fans, who call it "monocoque". It saves weight. Drawback to the design is there are no hardpoints to bolt heavy stuff like the engine and wheels. The car winds up with the heavy stuff bolted onto plain light sheet metal.
When the sheet metal fails, there is no reasonable fix, short of replacing the entire body of the car.
Too bad. Caddy has been a wonderful car for the last 75K miles and five years. It was cheap to buy, fast, powerful, quiet, and comfortable. Thrifty too, 27 mpg highway.

Signs of Spring

Yesterday it became warm enough to brush Cat on the porch. In winter Cat wisely refuses to get anywhere near the door. Yesterday Cat stood calmly on the porch railing while I brushed her out with an ordinary people type hair brush. Huge clumps of shed cat fur drifted away on the slight breeze. It's a pleasure to do this outside. When brushed inside the huge clumps drift away to the furniture and it makes me wonder why I bother. The idea behind brushing Cat is to reduce the amount of fur shed indoors.
Second clue. I had to get the mower out and cut the grass. The last snow storm only melted out the day before and here I am with the mower. Grass grows quick up here in the mountains.

Spectacular Pictures of drill rig burning and sinking

Watt's Up With That has a great set of pictures posted here:

The existential beauty of off shore wind farms.

This morning's NH public radio had a lady advocate waxing eloquent about the beauties of the Narragansett bay wind farm. "If only BP had been putting in wind rather than drilling for oil." Now that Teddy Kennedy is gone from the scene, some federal department OK'd the Cape Wind project, which had been held up for years by a Kennedy led group objecting to the unsightliness of it all.
The advocate failed to mention to cost per kilowatt hour for wind generated electricity, and the 2.3 cent a kilowatt hour subsidy for wind plants. The Cape Wind project will be 500 kilowatts, about one half the output of a real power plant, and only when the wind is blowing hard.
Not did she discuss what happens when the wind stops blowing, which it does frequently. I have sailed Narragansett bay and can attest to weary hours spent waiting for a wind.
In actual fact, the power companies have to build a real power plant to back up every wind plant to keep the customer's lights on during a calm. That's expensive.
So expensive that us rate payers expect another rate increase when and if Cape Wind ever goes on line.

Blow out Preventers and the BP spill

There is not much published on the web about these gadgets. They were invented in the 1920's and they ended the "gusher". You must have seen a picture of black oil spurting up higher than the top of the drill rig. The movie "Giant" with Jimmy Dean as oil wildcatter Jett Rink had a great gusher scene, black goop falling like rain.
The blowout preventer is a VERY strong valve that sits on the top of the well and shuts off the oil flow. Just how they work, above ground or underwater, was not made clear. It is implied, (but not outright stated) that they work by squeezing the steel drill pipe shut. Presumably this requires a power source (hydraulic? electric? compressed air? explosives? ) to work the pipe crushing ram. Also presumably activating the blow out preventer is an emergency measure since it damages the drill pipe, requiring replacement of the section of pipe the preventer squeezed flat. Also, presumably, the blow out preventer only succeeds in shutting off the oil flow when the drill pipe remains more or less intact.
Questions for BP. How was the blow out preventer powered one mile under water? Did the power come down from the floating platform that exploded and sank? How was the signal to actuate the preventer carried down under water? Was there any redundancy in case water got into the wiring or a pipe sprang a leak? Was the actuation automatic, like a fire alarm? Or was it the duty of the watch officer to flip a switch in the control room? What sort of protections against accidental actuation of the blow out preventer were there? What was the name of the watch officer responsible? Did this individual survive the fire and explosion that sank the platform?
More questions. Can the preventer be actuated by a submarine? What equipment does the sub need to carry? If the power supply is sunk, or run down (batteries, or compressed air tanks) can the sub recharge it? Is there a backup actuater such as a big hand crank? If so, can a sub work it?
And more questions. Who sold the blow out preventer? Was it new or used? Is that model rated strong enough to handle a well that deep? Who inspected the blowout preventer before it was installed one mile under water? What are the inspection requirements? Cracks? Leaks? Fully charged batteries or air tanks? functional control circuits? Are there any inspection requirements once the blow out preventer is under water? If so, did BP carry them out?
These are all questions that educated and experienced news men would ask. Unfortunately newsies these days are neither educated nor experienced.

Bad month for the energy industry

Between the coal mine explosion in West VA and the oil rig fire and explosion in the Gulf, the TV newsies had had non stop disaster coverage. Unfortunately the press coverage has skipped over the little matter of what went wrong, and pressed on to the usual "isn't this terrible" voice over on video of the disaster scenes.
So far the newsies have not discovered any real evidence of wrong doing at the coal mine. No public disclosure of failure to make required inspections, install the required safety gear, or ignoring alarms. Not that any of this might not have happened, it just that the TV news hasn't reported it.
The oil rig disaster happened under charter to BP, an accident prone operation. BP is so Beyond Petroleum that they let the Alaska pipeline rust out and spring a leak, allowed a major explosion and fire at a Texas refinery, and now it looks like they bear some responsibility for a blowout as bad as Santa Barbara. Santa Barabara happened back in the 1960's and was so bad that California has banned off shore drilling ever since.
For those that remember Santa Barbara, may remember a lot of talk about "blowout preventers", and lack of same on the Santa Barbara well. According to TV news, the gulf well has a 450 ton blowout preventer installed on the sea floor. It isn't working, the oil is pouring out of the damaged well. There has been no coverage of why, of how blowout preventers work, of the possibility of shutting off the oil flow by remote control from the surface or by submarine. This reflects the basic ignorance of newsies. They don't know nothing.

So what did Arizona pass?

Some TV people claim the new Arizona law allows the cops to question anyone about their citizen ship. Other TV people claim the law only allows the cops to ask about citizen ship AFTER they make an arrest for other reasons. They can't both be right, some of them are are misleading the public. I wonder which one it is.

Confused Vegetation

Right after Leaf Day, we get a winter storm warning this morning. Snow started in earnest a couple of hours ago. We have two inches down and it's still coming down heavily. Dunno what the trees think of this.
Follow up. We have thirteen inches down as of 7:15 this morning and it's still snowing. This is as heavy a snowfall as we have had all winter. Winter storm warning is in effect until 4 PM

Big Pharma Roast

CSpan had some government bureaucrats patting them selves on the back for fining drug maker Astro-Zenica billions of dollars. Astro-Zenica's crime? Marketing drugs for "off label" uses. Terrible crime that. Normally I'm as ready as the next guy to roast a drug company. They charge ridiculous prices, waste enormous sums on marketing, and haven't developed much in the way of new pills lately.
But marketing drugs "off label" is pretty harmless. A new drug (call it Wondermycin) is taken to the FDA and after much time, mountains of paperwork, and probably some under the table payoffs, the drug is approved for sale. The approval reads something like this. "Drug Wondermycin is approved for treatment of this, that and the other disease". Those are the "on-label" uses.
Later on it is discovered that Wondermycin is also good against a couple of other diseases. (Off-label uses) Word gets out to the medical community and doctors begin the prescribe Wondermycin for those other diseases. "Word gets out" means the Wondermycin salesmen tell the doctors about the "off label" uses.
This infuriates the FDA. FDA feels that the drug makers should submit more mountains of paperwork, run more expensive clinical trials, and grovel before the desks of FDA bureaucrats in order to obtain a new approval listing the additional uses. Naturally, the drug companies, after the terrible beating they took getting Wondermycin approved in the first place, are unenthusiastic about going back to get beaten up a second time.
In actual fact, off label uses are carefully controlled. The doctors, for ever looking over their shoulders for a malpractice lawyer hiding in the hallway trash can, are not about to write a prescription for off label use unless said off label use is super safe. No doctor with two brain cells firing is going to risk a malpractice suit by causing harm to a patient. The doctors all know that should a patient suffer so much as a hangnail after taking a drug for an off label use, they will get sued down to their socks.
So, FDA and the bureaucrats are fining Astro-Zenica for promoting off label use, even though off label use isn't going to hurt anyone. This is bending the cost curve UP, and doing it just to make the FDA bureaucrats feel all warm and fuzzy.

Republicans oppose $50 billion bailout fund

The financial reform bill has a provision for a $50 billion fund to "clean up" failed banks. Republicans are opposing this and the democrats are in favor? Far as I am concerned, it's a $50 billion bailout fund. It means that deals with failed banks are covered, at least the first $50 billion. That's bad. Wheelers and dealers should have to worry that they won't get paid if they deal with banks that go bankrupt. They might not do quite so many risky deals if the risks were higher.
This bill also might limit credit default swaps and require banks to "spin off" their credit default swap units. That's a good idea. Credit default swaps are high stakes gambling that put Lehman, AIG, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and some other fools out of business in 2008. FDIC insured banks shouldn't be gambling in this casino with taxpayer insured money.
If the democrats could give up their bailout fund, Republicans might vote for the bill. Why do the democrats want to bail out Wall St again?

Leaf Day comes to Franconia Notch

It's here. I have green leaf buds showing on all the trees. About time too.

Arguments we don't need to have

Cover story on Commentary "What kind of socialist is Barack Obama". I don't know, and the answer really depends upon what your definition of socialist is. Change your definition of socialism and you change the answer to the question. I don't care if you call Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist, a rightist Burkharin deviationist, a pure Marxist, or a democratic socialist. They are just labels.
Let's talk substantive issues, such as Can the US economy survive the costs of Obamacare, or Did the Porkulus do anything good for the economy, or Should the Obama Administration allow Iran to build nukes and if not what should be done about it. But arguing over the label to apply to Obama's policies is a waste of time in my humble opinion (IMHO).

Used cars cost more after Cash for Clunkers

I'm so glad to contribute my tax dollars to the destruction of perfectly good used cars. Prices for used cars have skyrocketed. I'm in the market for another car, trusty Caddy has the rear axle just about rusted off. Combination of New Hampshire potholes and road salt has eaten up the sheet metal of the unibody where the rear axles attached. Does not look repairable.
So, much cruising of internet car sites. We have acres of boring econoboxes. Slathers of pickup trucks and SUV's which I don't need. There are a few full sized sedans left, Ford Crown Vic, (and Mercury and Lincoln which are the same car with different grills) and Cadillac. And Buick. Nothing else. For used, pricing on Caddy is about the same as Ford and Buick, and Caddy has a better engine.
Drove down to Manchester to look at a 99 Caddy with only 38K miles on it. It was good looking, but the 38K miles was suspicious. For a one owner 11 year old car, that means the previous owner only put 3500 miles a year on it. That's low. Or someone has figured out how to roll back the electronic odometer. Wear on brake pedal and plastic headlight lenses was heavier than my current 125K mile Caddy.
So, I will keep looking for new wheels.

Supression of religion, Judge made law style

The first amendment reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion o prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
Modern judges interpret this as preventing bible reading in school, prayer at school assemblies, creches on town property, ten commandment monuments in courthouses and other rulings that have given offense to many good citizens.
In actual fact, the establishment clause says no such thing. Establishment of religion means the sort of deal King Henry VIII gave the English church, namely, you churchmen all work for me, the king, and you no longer work for the pope. After a controversial attempt to return England to Catholicism, it was required that all English kings and high officials be members of the Church of England. Catholics, Quakers, Puritans and Presbyterians need not apply. The Church of England was "established", the dissenters were out in the cold. In fact, belonging to these unestablished dissenting churches was a reputation destroyer, as bad as belonging to the communist party in current day America.
Dissenters set up colonies in North America, Puritans in Massachusetts, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland. Lots of Presbyterians came over too but didn't set up a special colony for themselves.
Naturally when the Constitution was written, each American church feared that one of their competitors might become "established" with all the benefits and perks that the Church of England enjoyed back in England. And so, a compromise was placed into the Constitution, namely that no church could be established.
This compromise worked very well up until the 1960's when judges highly trained in nit picking and ignorant of American history decided that "establishment of religion" meant any religious expression.
Today the TV is alive with stories of a federal judge ruling that a national day of prayer (how harmless can that be?) is unconstitutional.
The country would be better off if law school required two credits of American history for graduation. Morison and Commager would be a good text.

Financial regulation, need therefore Part III

Tim Geithner was on Meet the Press this morning talking up the financial reform bill. Geither kept talking and talking about regulation, without ever saying what the regulations might be. Presumably guv'mint bureaucrats will be given authority to give orders to the banks. That's a lot of power for a bureaucrat.
Geithner did say he favored an exchange for "derivatives" by which he meant credit default swaps.
I suppose an exchange would keep records, from which regulators could figure out how much money the banks had wagered on the swaps. Me, I think financial regulations should outlaw swaps completely. Credit default swaps don't grow the economy, instead they divert money from useful investments into high stakes gambling. Credit default swaps killed AIG , Lehman, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns. These are clearly dangerous gambling games with the power to crush mighty brokerages with a single email.
Geithner stressed that "his" regulations would protect taxpayers from future Wall St bailouts. He didn't say how. The bill has a $50 billion bailout fund built into it, but that's chicken feed. TARP was $750 billion, 15 times as much, and it wasn't enough.
We need to put the fear into Wall St. Every trader making risky bets should fear losing his job, loosing his house, loosing his life savings, loosing his reputation, and going to jail if the bet doesn't pay off.

Is the Tea Party full of wierdoes?

A TV newsie reported that 58% of tea party members have guns in their homes and that 60+% of them watch Fox News. Obviously a sign of dangerous radicals.
Most Americans do have firearms somewhere, and most of them do watch Fox News. That makes the Tea Party people main stream Americans.

John Yoo on Justice Stevens

Interesting op ed piece in the Wall St Journal today. John Yoo, the author, is the Justice department lawyer from the Bush administration who dared to give written guidance to CIA about the difference between legitimate interrogation and torture. Yoo provided useful and clear cut guide lines as to what was legal and what was not. For this service Yoo has been vilified by democrats and his guide lines denounced as torture memos.
Yoo tells the story of way back during WWII, John Paul Stevens was a Navy intelligence officer who was in on the Yamamoto operation. American code breakers intercepted and decyphered Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's travel schedule. A squadron of P-38 fighters was dispatched to intercept Yamamoto's plane. The mission was successful, the Betty bomber carrying Yamamoto was shot down into the jungle. Yamamoto was killed in action by P-38 machine gun fire.
Sixty years later, the now Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens opined that "The targeting of a particular individual with the intent to kill him was a lot different than killing a soldier in battle and dealing with a statistic".
Wow. Stevens believes knowing the enemy's name makes some kind of difference in the morality of killing him. There is some difference between the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers killed by Marines who didn't know their names, and a high ranking navy officer killed by Air Force pilots who did know who they were gunning for?
Far as I am concerned, killing uniformed enemy in war time, although distasteful, is necessary, legal, and moral. Certainly more moral than nuking enemy cities. That a US Supreme Court justice fails to understand this is appalling.
Could Obama nominate a replacement with better sense?

Tea Party Manchester NH April 15 2010

I went. Large enthusiastic crowd. We filled up Victory Square in downtown Manchester.


That's a whole city block covered with people. Everybody was polite, the crowd listened to the speakers and applauded the applause lines. There were no hecklers. Lots of speakers, Congressmen, former Congressmen, and New Hampshire activists. A common thread among speakers, the country is going down the tubes and the only chance of salvation is get to the polls in November and vote the rascals OUT.
All the Republican candidates were there, I saw Kelly Ayotte, Karen Testerman, and Bill Binder.



I'm told Bill Binnie and Jennifer Horne were present. The place was wall to wall campaign yard signs. No Democrats attended. The organizers mentioned they had invited democrats but none accepted.

Some more pictures are here



Skip Murphy of GraniteGrok, a leading NH blog, set up a "Meet New Hampshire Bloggers thing" with tables, chairs, WiFi, and electric power. Some 5 or 6 of us brought laptops and live blogged the affair. Aside from difficulty reading LCD screens in daylight, and typing fingers stiffened by the cold, it worked out well. Thanks Skip for doing that. We bloggers are covering the event. I didn't see anyone from TV stations or newspapers. So this, and other humble blogs, may be the only public record of the event.

Keep this up and we can have a Republican landslide in November.

--
David J. Starr

Obama blames Big Branch Mine Disaster on Management

Obama just got off national TV. He is blaming management for the accident. He gave no facts, just his conclusion "Management did it". Union people are always happy to hear that.
The real cause of the explosion was methane gas, which escapes from the coal. There are published standards for this, how much methane is allowable, periodic tests that must be run, and a requirement for ventilation. Obama did not discuss these issues at all. He did not show that mine management allowed methane to exceed published limits, failed to run required tests, or failed to ventilate the mine.
Management is strongly motivated to prevent their multi billion dollar mine from blowing itself to kingdom come. There is no return on investment after the investment blows itself away. If management was venal or incompetent Obama gave no evidence to support that view.
Citing a number of safety writeups from government inspectors is unconvincing. I used to be in that business. When I was inspecting, I could always find things to write up. Longer I looked, the more I could find. Unless it can be shown that methane was allowed to accumulate before the accident, it ain't management's fault.

Z1485 Point&Shoot as a video camera

I'm going to a tea party tomorrow. The net is warning us all to bring video cameras to record any SIEU thuggery or liberal attempts to discredit the tea party. So I got out my trusty Kodak Z1485 point-n-shoot. This little wonder has a video mode. To give the camera some breathing room, I transferred all my still photos to computers and zapped the camera memory card clean.
Taking videos is simplicity squared. Just turn the knob to video (icon of a movie camera) and press the button. It even records sound. It consumes about 2 megabytes of memory per second. With the smallest 2 Gigabyte memory card it will record 1000 seconds (15 minutes) of very decent looking video.
Playback on the camera is done the same way you review still photos. You can move the video off the camera and onto your computer with nothing more than Windows Explorer. Just plug in the camera's USB cable, and Explorer will "see" the camera as if it were a CD or floppy disc. The video is stored in files named xxxxxx.mov where xxxxxx is a arbitrary number. Just drag the .mov file onto hard drive. From hard drive it will play back with QuickTime or my son's media play program "VLC".
Should I capture anything worthy tomorrow I will figure out how to upload it to U-Tube. Presumably that isn't too hard since zillions of people are doing it.

There's one born every minute

Verizon has found another one. They are trying to sell phone lines in 14 states to Frontier Communications. Frontier is OK with paying $8.6 billion for 4.6 million land lines ($1797 per line). It would take 10 years for my phone bill to pay off $1797. According to the Wall St Journal, the deal is opposed only by the Communications Workers of America and only in the state of West Virginia.
Frontier ought to know that if these land lines were worth anything, Verizon wouldn't be selling them.
Verizon's telephone line spin off in Hawaii caused the Hawaiian buyer to go bankrupt in 2008. Verizon's sell off of rural New England telephone lines to Fairpoint Communications caused Fairpoint to go bankrupt in 2009. Verizon spun off Yellow Pages and they went bankrupt too.
Verizon sees it's future in cell phones and internet. It's dumping the rural phone business. The suckers who buy rural phone lines are doomed. Verizon wasn't making money on rural phone service with all the poles and wires paid for, long ago. The suckers think they can make money on the same business when saddled with a heavy debt they used to buy the business from Verizon. Ain't gonna happen.
In the Fairpoint catastrophe, the stockholders and banks got wiped out, the workers are facing layoffs, and service has deteriorated so badly that everyone is switching to a cell phone.
Wanna bet the same thing happens to Frontier? Dunno why the Frontier suits are falling for this scam, but they are. And the Public Utility Commissions in 14 states are not saying "boo".

Ron Hunt died last Sunday

Ron Hunt was a long time Franconia resident. Cancer finally got him last weekend. Ron was a member of the Franconia Fire Dept, a selectman, ran the auto salvage yard, and just about everyone in town knew him or knew who he was. He got a decent sendoff, 300 people attended services, held out of doors in the center of town. This in a town of only 900 registered voters. Fireman in full dress uniform, the Franconia antique engine, Ron's pulling tractor, and a great big tent. A dozen of Ron's friends and relatives spoke movingly.
A pillar of the community and we will miss him.

What happened to Protestants on the Supreme Court?

News reports tell me that retiring Supreme Court justice Stevens is the last Protestant on the high court. Everyone left is Catholic or Jewish. This ought to say something about the miserable state of the Protestant church in America. Jews and Catholics have a solid tradition of absolute right and wrong that goes back to the time of Jesus and before. Modern Protestants have bought into a relative morality that can permit a lot of dreadful things. Seems like when selecting honorable men to serve on the high court the body politic looks for men who believe in absolute right and wrong, rather than a slippery relative right and wrong.

Who wants a nuclear free world?

Not me. Nuclear weapons have kept the peace since 1945. There has been some bloodletting but never World War III. Even the Soviets were unwilling to come close to using nukes. Witness the Cuban missile crisis where the Soviets backed down rather than risk pushing the United States too hard. What's not to like?
Obama is talking up a nuclear free world. Dunno why, unless he really fails to understand world history since 1945. This deal he is pushing with the Soviets has some positive angles, both sides can reduce their arsenals and still retain enough power to turn the world into a parking lot. But promising not to use nukes defeats the primary reason for having them.
We have nukes for deterrence, in simple words to scare the bejesus out of our enemies. Promising not to use them, or not to build new models reduces the scare. Why do that? Better to have our enemies fear us than to have them love us.

The Curse of Home ownership

Good old NHPR was on this morning, like every morning. The terrible burden of home ownership was the topic. The new roof required shortly after the closing, the hot water heater that failed, Dad coming home and picking up his tool box to work on the house instead of playing with the children.
Man, I don't know how I survived 40 years of home ownership. I did a roof, all it takes is a little money. I changed out four hot water heaters over the years. Got so good I could get to Sears, get the heater home on top of the car, installed, water back on, and still get to work by 11 AM. Done my share of home remodeling projects, two kitchens, two bathrooms, wall paper, book cases, porch railings, dishwasher replacements, disposal replacements and paint. The children loved every one of these and begged to stay up late and help Dad. Home projects were always cooler than yard work.
Could I be listening to "can't change a lightbulb" journalists whining on the air?

UNH joins the global warming bandwagon

NHPR did a global warming piece this morning. They interviewed a young associate professor from UNH. During a lengthy talk this professor managed to completely avoid the use of numbers. Things are bad and getting badder he said but never a number to say how bad. Then he proclamed that this winter's DC snowstorms were actually caused by global warming. Global warming puts more moisture in the air so we get more precip.
He's wrong on that, the DC snowstorms were perfectly ordinary snowstorms that happened to track a little bit more southerly than usual. Had they gone thru New York state and New England they would have been un remarkable. The distance from the usual storm track and DC is only about 100 miles.
UNH will probably give this guy tenure next week...

Financial regulation, need therefore Part II

The usual suspects, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, are talking up financial reform, now that Obamacare has been rammed thru.
Not that we don't need something to prevent Wall St from driving the economy over a cliff again.
Too bad the Dodd and Frank bill is welfare for Wall St. The bill contains an elaborate and expensive plan for taxpayers to bail out Wall St the next time they wreck the economy. And as a sweetener for taxpayers, there will be a new "consumer protection agency" to limit some of the customer fleecing going on. With lots of well paying jobs for bureaucrats.
We really need rules to prevent the gambling and speculation that put us into Great Depression 2.0. The purpose of Wall St is to finance economic growth, new factories, new products, construction, inventory, and sales. It is not doing credit default swaps, reselling mortgages, or executing stock trades in milliseconds. We need regulations to crack down on the gambling and speculation that crashed the economy, not plans to bail out the gamblers.

Hurrah for Dollar Stores

They may not have everything, but what they do have for $1 costs about $3 at the local food store (Mac's Market). They have crackers, cookies, condiments, shampoo, chocolate bars, dishwash, salami, frozen foods, disposable paint brushes, and tie wraps.

Buzz. Free Media for Ipad

Fox and Friends this morning is so charmed by the new Ipad. The had one on the show, raved about it, showed good video of the screen, showed the thing responding to finger touches. Ran for minutes.
Gotta hand it to Apple. A product so cool that a leading cable news channel gives them a free commercial. Not just a passing mention, but a close up and detailed look at the thing.
Steve Jobs is doing his best to get us out of Great Depression 2.0. The country needs more guys like Jobs.

Is nuclear power affordable?

Maybe. The plants are expensive, the last round of proposals and bids centered around $6 billion dollars to construct a nuclear plant. That's a lot of money. Such a plant would produce 1000 Megawatts of electricity.
If the plant was financed with 20 year bonds, bearing 6% interest, the yearly bond payment would be $480 million dollars. That's the payment to the bank every year to pay off the bonds. That's also a lot of money. Will the plant sell enough electricity to pay its mortgage?
Assume the plant runs at full load 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Assume they get 8 cents a kilowatt hour for their juice. Then the plant makes $700 million and some change a year from sale of electricity. Subtract the $480 million mortgage payment and the owners have a yearly cash flow of $220 million to pay the workers, purchase fuel, keep the plant up, pay their taxes, pay off the lawsuits, and provide some profit.
If any of the assumptions (interest rate, electric rate, demand for all the plant's output all day long) change for the worse, the plant may start losing money. I hear in the Journal that banks are unenthusiastic about lending for nuclear plants for fear they may default on the loans. There has been demand for federal loan guarantees for nuclear construction.
One thing that would help is reducing the cost of the plant. A lot of that $6 billion goes for permits and review of the design and getting Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval of the plant design. And fighting the greenie lawsuits. These costs could be reduced by coming up with a standard design to eliminate the NRC review costs. Plus legislation to reduce the grounds for greenie lawsuits.
Bottom line. Nuclear power ought to pay for itself, but the margin of profit could be wider than it is.

Wall St attempts to re open the Mortgaged Backed Security Casino

From the Wall St Journal, print version, Tuesday March 30, Page B1. "Securities Debate is All About Trust". Mortgage backed securities are paper IOU's issued by banks. The banks claim the IOU's are "backed" by home mortgages, implying that the buyer of the IOU is buying something as sound as a home mortgage. In 2007 the marks discovered that the mortgages "backing" their IOU's were in default. They wised up and few to no mortgaged backed securities have been sold since.
The banks obtained the mortgages used for "backing" by purchasing them from the likes of Country Wide (home of Angelo) and other mortgage dealers. The mortgage dealers started to give mortgages to anyone who walked (or was dragged) in the door. "Ninja, No Income,No Job or Assets" mortgages became common. The dealer's sold these fraudulent mortgages to the banks for real cash. The banks "backed" their IOU's and sold them to "investors" or in ordinary language, suckers. The vast number of Ninja mortgages caused the crash in housing prices that triggered off Great Depression II.
Currently, the Administration and Congress want to require banks playing the IOU game, tohold onto 5% of the IOU's created, skin in the game, to give a small incentive for the banks to deal honestly. The banks are whining that 5% is too much and will ruin the market.
What ought to be done is to prevent the sale and trading of mortgages at any level. Banks issuing mortgages retain 100% of the mortgage on their books. None of this wimpy 5% stuff. This way the loan officer granting the mortgage, the only individual who actually understands the risks, who has interviewed the borrowers, checked with their employer[s], and inspected the property, has some incentive to do it right. If the bank owns the mortgage for it's full life, then it will be diligent and grant mortgages only to those who will pay them back.
Decent home mortgages are very sound investments. The homeowners are strongly motivated to keep up on their payments. Assuming a proper evaluation of the property, the mortgage is secured by valuable real estate. "Safe as houses" is the old cliche. Ninja mortgages are a scam.
The mortgaged backed security business caused Great Depression II and we need regulations to prevent it from happening again. Nearly two years have gone by and nothing has been done, AND the things proposed to be done are too wimpy to do any good.

Judge reforms patent law

Story here. A New York federal judge has ruled that patents on genes are invalid. Up until now, discoverers of genes could patent the gene and deny other scientists or companies the right to use it. The genes in the suit are natually occurring human genes, not artificial ones. The judge ruled that naturally occuring genes are not patentable, because they are not invented or created, they are merely discovered.

Hallelujah. This might be the beginning of the end of ridiculous patents. This will be appealed of course, but there is a chance the Supremes will see the light when this gets up to them.

National vehicle of the People's Republic of Cambridge

The Volvo. The height of Cambridge coolness, a muddy 240 Volvo wagon, with about ten Cambridge parking permits in the rear window. In 1999 Ford bought Volvo for $6.4 billion. Today Ford announced the sale of Volvo to the Chinese for $1.8 billion.
Credit Ford's new CEO, Mulally, for having the smarts to recognize a loser and dump it. Taking a $4.6 billion dollar loss, was better than taking the day-to-day losses of operating Volvo.
And boos to previous Ford management for wasting so much money on a doomed acquisition. Volvo was loosing money when Ford bought them. They didn't have enough volume to get the cost of production down far enough to make money. The only way to lower Volvo's production cost is/was to use a lot of high volume Ford parts or, simply put the Volvo badge on a Ford.
Doing this kills the sales. Volvo buyers buy the car 'cause it isn't Detroit iron. They want to own something different. Once they find the Volvo is just a Ford with a new grill and a Volvo badge, they leave the showroom, in droves. Volvo was asking BMW money. Nobody is going pay BMW money for a gussied up Ford, they will buy a real BMW instead. This was obvious to everybody in the car business in 1999, but the old Ford management went right ahead and wasted $6.4 billion buying Volvo.
They had company. GM bought up a number of European loser mobiles and they still haven't sold any of them.

Electronic Medical Records follow up

Cato institute has concerns about the security of electronic medical records too.
Come to think of it, Uncle Sam can check your electronic medical record in disputed cases of disability.

Corporate America, Profiles in Courage

After Obamacare is signed into law, we have Caterpillar, AT&T, and some other corporations complaining about the amount of money it's gonna cost them.
Where were all these corporations BEFORE Obamacare was passed? Could it be that they feared Obama administration retaliation if they spoke out against Obamacare?
Where were Harry and Loise when we needed them?

Electronic Medical Records

I'm listening to a long discussion on TV about the downsides to electronic medical records. Only at the very end of the discussion do the debaters touch on the real problem. Hackers.
Seems like every week I hear another case of credit card records getting hacked and card holders getting ripped off with phony charges. The credit card people are mostly banks with a good tradition of data security, and yet they get hacked on a regular basis. Don't expect hospitals to be any better.
Once your medical records are on a computer, they might as well be posted on a bulletin board in the center of town. They will become public, especially for a snooper willing to spend a little money.
Imagine a hiring manager who, after the job interview, downloads the candidate's medical history to see if he will burden the company medical plan. Or, how would you like your spouse or potential spouse checking up on your health? And God help people with mental health problems or drug and alcohol treatment on their records.
This didn't happen in "1984"

Let's hear a real threat

The democrats are complaining of "threats" conveyed by phone, mail, and email. How real is this? There is a difference between chewing out a congressman and threatening one. The only "threat" that has made it to the media was ambiguous. "There are lots of people who wish you harm".

Do any of these bold congressman have anything worse than this? Or is this just a smear the tea party tactic?

Words of the Weasel Part XV

"Closing tax loopholes" is liberal speak for "raising taxes". NH Public Radio was calling for closing loopholes just this morning.

Things are not all bad when....

When there are more milk bottles than whiskey bottles in the recycling?

Two inches of fresh global warming on the porch

And it's still falling, lightly. On the 24th of March. Brr.

Dark Ages were not so dark

The middle ages, often called the dark ages, started with the fall of Rome and ended with the voyages of Columbus. During this time great technological progress was made. Important inventions include the magnetic compass, stirrups, gunpowder and the firearms to use it, horse collars, the stern rudder, printing, the wheelbarrow, the trebuchet (a weight powered war machine), the art of distilling and hard liquor, three field crop rotation, mechanical clocks, eyeglasses, a whole new architectural style (gothic cathedrals), water mills, wind mills, crossbows and the making of cast iron. Plus others that escape my memory.
The last notable invention of the preceding classic era was the discovery of iron working by the Hittites, around 1500 BC. For the next 2000 years, no improvement in the arts and sciences came forth. The last Roman emperor (478 AD) used the same weapons, ships, agriculture, metallurgy, chemistry, and building techniques as were available to the Hittites two thousand years before.
Any general theory of history needs to explain the technical stasis of the classical era and the great progress made in the "dark ages".

What can I say?

The punch line from "The Gang that couldn't Shoot Straight". Obamacare passed the house late last night. Everything that can be said has been said.
November is coming.