On the 15th of April, it's snowing. What ever happened to that worthless groundhog?
Update, next morning. We got four inches, I just measured it. It's 20 F. I see flocks of unhappy birds looking for food, shelter, warm, anything.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Who's in charge here?
This morning the TV news announced that the IRS would be publishing new rules for non profit organizations, such as Tea Parties.
Where does a bunch of pure democratic civil servants get the right to set that kind of policy? By rights, Congress should pass a law. In real life, Congress is so split, and so partisan that it is incapable of passing anything.
Especially on something like this. First Amendment freedom of speech and press, means organizations can say and publish anything they like. IRS and FEC want to change that rule, into "You cannot say anything political, any time. This led to the famous Heller decision, the Supreme court ruled that corporations and labor unions could politick as much as they like.
Anyhow the IRS wants to make a rule, defining just about everything as political activity and therefore forbidden to nearly every organization in the country. We are talking about Tea Parties, Sierra Club, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, NRA, NMRA, Elks, Chamber of Commerce, Shriners, Republican Party, Democratic Party, Consumers Union, Campfire Girls, Masons, VFW, churches, AMA, ABA, SAE, Salvation Army, USO and on and on.
These "non governmental organizations" do immense amounts of charitable work They bring Americans together, they set up civic events, and they form the civic glue that holds the country together. And, they lobby for their political interests. Wise Congressmen listen to them, laws they support get passed, laws they oppose don't pass. Much of the work of democracy is guided by these non governmental organizations.
And now the IRS is trying to take them all over.
Where does a bunch of pure democratic civil servants get the right to set that kind of policy? By rights, Congress should pass a law. In real life, Congress is so split, and so partisan that it is incapable of passing anything.
Especially on something like this. First Amendment freedom of speech and press, means organizations can say and publish anything they like. IRS and FEC want to change that rule, into "You cannot say anything political, any time. This led to the famous Heller decision, the Supreme court ruled that corporations and labor unions could politick as much as they like.
Anyhow the IRS wants to make a rule, defining just about everything as political activity and therefore forbidden to nearly every organization in the country. We are talking about Tea Parties, Sierra Club, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, NRA, NMRA, Elks, Chamber of Commerce, Shriners, Republican Party, Democratic Party, Consumers Union, Campfire Girls, Masons, VFW, churches, AMA, ABA, SAE, Salvation Army, USO and on and on.
These "non governmental organizations" do immense amounts of charitable work They bring Americans together, they set up civic events, and they form the civic glue that holds the country together. And, they lobby for their political interests. Wise Congressmen listen to them, laws they support get passed, laws they oppose don't pass. Much of the work of democracy is guided by these non governmental organizations.
And now the IRS is trying to take them all over.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Why we cannot simplify federal income tax
What makes federal income tax such a bear to fill out? It's all the special interest benefits built in thru out the law. Mortgage interest deduction, the darling of realtors, home builders, and mortgage banksters. Special deduction for school teachers who buy their kids pencils. Capital gains to benefit stock holders. Medical expenses deductions, favorite of the ill, and the medical industry. A 12% tax break for manufacturing inside the United States. And the liberal's favorite ploy, the variable tax loophole, the wealthy have to pay more. For instance social security benefits used to be non taxable. Then some slippery democrats added stuff making them taxable to the wealthy. The incomprehensible Earned Income Tax Credit. And on and on and on.
And we are doomed. Each special interest will fight to the death to keep their special tax benefit. Us ordinary tax payers have to wade thru the special little worksheets, the gobble-de-gook instructions, and the never ending new tax forms. We never get up on our hind feet and demand "Drop all this malarkey, give me one straight percentage to pay and be done with it".
We should not have to purchase $80 software packages to do our taxes. It didn't used to be this bad. I can remember a time BC (before computers) when I did my own taxes with a ball point pen. I couldn't do that now.
Those special interests ought to to be hunted down and tarred and feathered.
And we are doomed. Each special interest will fight to the death to keep their special tax benefit. Us ordinary tax payers have to wade thru the special little worksheets, the gobble-de-gook instructions, and the never ending new tax forms. We never get up on our hind feet and demand "Drop all this malarkey, give me one straight percentage to pay and be done with it".
We should not have to purchase $80 software packages to do our taxes. It didn't used to be this bad. I can remember a time BC (before computers) when I did my own taxes with a ball point pen. I couldn't do that now.
Those special interests ought to to be hunted down and tarred and feathered.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Inventions of the Dark Age
History books, at least those that cover the period, shed lots of tears about the fall of Rome, and call the next 1000 years the Dark Ages. Starting with Gibbon (Decline and Fall) most historians treat the medieval period as a huge setback to civilization with no redeeming features. Perhaps.
Dark they might have been, but the medievals were inventive. In the thousand years we call medieval, they invented a lotta good stuff. What they didn't invent they imported from elsewhere and placed it into service.
1. Trebuchet. Weight driven catapult, powerful enough to break a masonry wall, something which the spring driven catapults of the Greeks and Romans could not do.
2. Wooden barrels. Shipping container that completely replaced the heavy and fragile pottery amphora used in antiquity. Stronger and lighter than pottery
3. Magnetic Compass. The odds of your ship returning safely are much better if she carries a compass.
4. Stern rudder. Much stronger and less likely to break in heavy weather than the steering oar. Moderns who have sailed replica vessels of antiquity (Thor Heyerdahl and Hodding Carter) always write about their steering oar breaking at sea.
5. Spectacles (eye glasses)
6. Stirrups. Without stirrups, it's like riding bareback. You can do it, but you have to pay all your attention to staying on the horse. With stirrups the horseman's seat is firm enough to fight effectively. With stirrups the mounted knight, who dominated European warfare, becomes possible.
7. Heavy plow. A big strong plow, often wheeled, with an eight ox team, which could turn the heavy bottomland soil, which the lighter "ard" used in antiquity could not.
8. Three field rotation. Let only one third of the land lie fallow, as opposed to the two field rotation practiced in antiquity. Increases cropland by one sixth (17%)
9. Water mills. Although a Roman invention, the Romans never built very many of them. Whereas the Domesday book records 5 to 6 thousand water mills in England by 1087
10. Blast furnace. Water wheel powered bellows made a fire hot enough to actually melt iron, so that it could be poured and cast in molds.
11. Printing. Gutenburg and all that.
12. Gunpowder. and firearms.
13. The University.
14. Crossbow. Although known to the Romans (there is an engraving of one on a Roman tomb) it wasn't used much. Major advantage of the crossbow; it is as simple to shoot as a modern rifle. Any recruit could be trained to shoot well enough to be useful in a few weeks. The long bow took a lifetime of practice to make an archer.
15. Spinning Wheel
16. Mechanical clock.
17. Gothic cathedral
18. Horse collar. Before the horse collar, law limited the load horses could pull to 500 pounds. With horse collars medieval wagoneers could move 2500 pound loads of building stone.
19. Windmill
20. Arabic numerals
21. Double entry book keeping.
22. Scientific method (Roger Bacon)
23. Wheel barrow. Simple, but highly useful.
Dark they might have been, but the medievals were inventive. In the thousand years we call medieval, they invented a lotta good stuff. What they didn't invent they imported from elsewhere and placed it into service.
1. Trebuchet. Weight driven catapult, powerful enough to break a masonry wall, something which the spring driven catapults of the Greeks and Romans could not do.
2. Wooden barrels. Shipping container that completely replaced the heavy and fragile pottery amphora used in antiquity. Stronger and lighter than pottery
3. Magnetic Compass. The odds of your ship returning safely are much better if she carries a compass.
4. Stern rudder. Much stronger and less likely to break in heavy weather than the steering oar. Moderns who have sailed replica vessels of antiquity (Thor Heyerdahl and Hodding Carter) always write about their steering oar breaking at sea.
5. Spectacles (eye glasses)
6. Stirrups. Without stirrups, it's like riding bareback. You can do it, but you have to pay all your attention to staying on the horse. With stirrups the horseman's seat is firm enough to fight effectively. With stirrups the mounted knight, who dominated European warfare, becomes possible.
7. Heavy plow. A big strong plow, often wheeled, with an eight ox team, which could turn the heavy bottomland soil, which the lighter "ard" used in antiquity could not.
8. Three field rotation. Let only one third of the land lie fallow, as opposed to the two field rotation practiced in antiquity. Increases cropland by one sixth (17%)
9. Water mills. Although a Roman invention, the Romans never built very many of them. Whereas the Domesday book records 5 to 6 thousand water mills in England by 1087
10. Blast furnace. Water wheel powered bellows made a fire hot enough to actually melt iron, so that it could be poured and cast in molds.
11. Printing. Gutenburg and all that.
12. Gunpowder. and firearms.
13. The University.
14. Crossbow. Although known to the Romans (there is an engraving of one on a Roman tomb) it wasn't used much. Major advantage of the crossbow; it is as simple to shoot as a modern rifle. Any recruit could be trained to shoot well enough to be useful in a few weeks. The long bow took a lifetime of practice to make an archer.
15. Spinning Wheel
16. Mechanical clock.
17. Gothic cathedral
18. Horse collar. Before the horse collar, law limited the load horses could pull to 500 pounds. With horse collars medieval wagoneers could move 2500 pound loads of building stone.
19. Windmill
20. Arabic numerals
21. Double entry book keeping.
22. Scientific method (Roger Bacon)
23. Wheel barrow. Simple, but highly useful.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Washing Windows, Taking out the Trash
Doing a little housecleaning on Antique Laptop the other day. Ran WinDirStat, a cute program that shows you where all your hard disk space has gone. Lists all the directories in order of size and draws a neat little map of the disk, with each directory in a different color. WinDirStat is on the web, Google can find it.
Anyhow, WinDirStat showed this big plump directory Windows/SoftwareDistribution. It was plump, nearly 500 Mb. Question, can I zap it and have my XP system survive the event? Google drew a lot of hits on this one, ranging from don't touch it, your system will melt, to blow it away, it's worthless. Sorting thru the answers it turns out that Windows Update is busily finding and downloading patches behind your back. The patches come over the net in a compressed form. Windows update decompresses the patch, applies it, and leaves the compressed version and some stuff needed if you ever want to back the patch out, in Software Distribution. Lets be real here, nobody ever backs out a patch, unless it is killing their system. Assuming your system is working well, you don't need the stuff in SoftwareDistribution.
So how do you get rid of it? It's a little more complicated than just deleting it from Explorer. Windows Update is a "service" a privileged piece of code that is always in RAM, and gets control of your machine when ever it likes, for as long as it likes. Windows Update puts some kind of unbreakable protection on SoftwareDistribution so you cannot zap it in the ordinary way. How to cope?
Open a DOS window. You do this from the start menu, hit the run box and type in "cmd". For those of you who never had the pleasure of running DOS, it can be a little awkward. The mouse doesn't work in DOS. Your first job is to navigate to the c:/windows directory using the CHDIR (CD for short) command.
Do CD .. until you reach the c: root directory.
Do CD windows and you should be there.
Do NET STOP wuauserv to turn off windows update and unprotect the SoftwareDistribution directory.
Do RENAME (Ren for short) softwaredistribution anynameyoulike (I used softtrash) .
Do NET START wuauserv to turn windows update back on.
Exit DOS and check your system to make sure it still works. Run a program or two. Visit a website. Then reboot to be sure that still works. When you are satisfied, go back and zap the old softwaredistribution and recover quite a chuck of disk. You will notice that Windows Update has created a new, and smaller SoftwareDistribution all by itself. The RENAME trick is a way to let you back out. If something should go wrong, you can put things pack the way they were.
Not only does this trick recover a lotta disk, it speeds things up. Antique Laptop boots faster, fast enogh to notice. I think Windows Update had been wasting time riffling thru 500 Mb of patches going back to the year 2000.
I did this trick on XP, but a lot of the net rumor I read tells me Vista, 7, and 8 has the same problem only worse. There is a tool, DISM, in the newer Windows to deal with the ever growing Windows trash directories. I'm still on XP so I cannot tell you much about that.
Anyhow, WinDirStat showed this big plump directory Windows/SoftwareDistribution. It was plump, nearly 500 Mb. Question, can I zap it and have my XP system survive the event? Google drew a lot of hits on this one, ranging from don't touch it, your system will melt, to blow it away, it's worthless. Sorting thru the answers it turns out that Windows Update is busily finding and downloading patches behind your back. The patches come over the net in a compressed form. Windows update decompresses the patch, applies it, and leaves the compressed version and some stuff needed if you ever want to back the patch out, in Software Distribution. Lets be real here, nobody ever backs out a patch, unless it is killing their system. Assuming your system is working well, you don't need the stuff in SoftwareDistribution.
So how do you get rid of it? It's a little more complicated than just deleting it from Explorer. Windows Update is a "service" a privileged piece of code that is always in RAM, and gets control of your machine when ever it likes, for as long as it likes. Windows Update puts some kind of unbreakable protection on SoftwareDistribution so you cannot zap it in the ordinary way. How to cope?
Open a DOS window. You do this from the start menu, hit the run box and type in "cmd". For those of you who never had the pleasure of running DOS, it can be a little awkward. The mouse doesn't work in DOS. Your first job is to navigate to the c:/windows directory using the CHDIR (CD for short) command.
Do CD .. until you reach the c: root directory.
Do CD windows and you should be there.
Do NET STOP wuauserv to turn off windows update and unprotect the SoftwareDistribution directory.
Do RENAME (Ren for short) softwaredistribution anynameyoulike (I used softtrash) .
Do NET START wuauserv to turn windows update back on.
Exit DOS and check your system to make sure it still works. Run a program or two. Visit a website. Then reboot to be sure that still works. When you are satisfied, go back and zap the old softwaredistribution and recover quite a chuck of disk. You will notice that Windows Update has created a new, and smaller SoftwareDistribution all by itself. The RENAME trick is a way to let you back out. If something should go wrong, you can put things pack the way they were.
Not only does this trick recover a lotta disk, it speeds things up. Antique Laptop boots faster, fast enogh to notice. I think Windows Update had been wasting time riffling thru 500 Mb of patches going back to the year 2000.
I did this trick on XP, but a lot of the net rumor I read tells me Vista, 7, and 8 has the same problem only worse. There is a tool, DISM, in the newer Windows to deal with the ever growing Windows trash directories. I'm still on XP so I cannot tell you much about that.
Friday, April 11, 2014
SEC bigwig blasts the agency at his retirement party
This was on NHPR this morning, although a quickly Google did not confirm it. I missed the guy's name (NHPR is bad on names, they only use them once and go with pronouns for the rest of the piece).
Anyhow they had him in the studio and he used some fairly tough language to condemn the SEC for not prosecuting the biggies on Wall Street, and going after the small fry. Which is true enough. Nobody of consequence has been prosecuted over the 2007 crash that kicked off Great Depression 2.0.
This guy totally didn't understand what te SEC is supposed to be doing. He thinks the agency's mission is to prosecute Wall Streeters. Not so. The SEC was created after the 1929 crash with a mission to prevent another crash. The 1929 crash caused 10 years of misery (the Great Depression) and was a major factor in kicking off WWII. The Great Depression traveled to Germany and had a lot to do with bringing Hitler to power in 1933. The 2007 crash was as bad as the 1929 one. The SEC failed to prevent it. That's total mission failure. We ought to disband the SEC, fire all the employees, burn all their files. And start up something new.
Prevention, means regulations forbidding risky practices such as mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, derivatives, high speed trading, excessive leverage, and banks playing the stock market with FDIC insured money. Wall Street is supposed to be a place where companies go to raise money for expansion. It is not supposed to be a casino.
Any how, all this retiring SEC big wig can find to complain about is a lack of high profile scalps. This is a man who doesn't understand his job.
Anyhow they had him in the studio and he used some fairly tough language to condemn the SEC for not prosecuting the biggies on Wall Street, and going after the small fry. Which is true enough. Nobody of consequence has been prosecuted over the 2007 crash that kicked off Great Depression 2.0.
This guy totally didn't understand what te SEC is supposed to be doing. He thinks the agency's mission is to prosecute Wall Streeters. Not so. The SEC was created after the 1929 crash with a mission to prevent another crash. The 1929 crash caused 10 years of misery (the Great Depression) and was a major factor in kicking off WWII. The Great Depression traveled to Germany and had a lot to do with bringing Hitler to power in 1933. The 2007 crash was as bad as the 1929 one. The SEC failed to prevent it. That's total mission failure. We ought to disband the SEC, fire all the employees, burn all their files. And start up something new.
Prevention, means regulations forbidding risky practices such as mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, derivatives, high speed trading, excessive leverage, and banks playing the stock market with FDIC insured money. Wall Street is supposed to be a place where companies go to raise money for expansion. It is not supposed to be a casino.
Any how, all this retiring SEC big wig can find to complain about is a lack of high profile scalps. This is a man who doesn't understand his job.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Obama says nice things about LBJ
He is on Fox News, making a speech about how great the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was. And how great LBJ was for pushing it thru the Congress, over the dead bodies of the Southern Democrats. And I agree, it was a good thing.
On the other hand I remember LBJ was the man who took the country to war and worse, to defeat, in Viet Nam. That was a bad thing.
On the other hand I remember LBJ was the man who took the country to war and worse, to defeat, in Viet Nam. That was a bad thing.
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