New England Town Meeting

Ayup, we still hold 'em.  Beloved of de Tocqueville, older than the Constitution.   Franconia Town Meeting started at 7PM.  Turnout was light, maybe a hundred out of a town of a thousand.  But the old Franconia people, Peabody, Foss, Lovett, Dinsmore, Walker, me, and others were there.  The town warrent (agenda) was mostly about money, the operating budget, the library budget, new snow plows and police cruisers, the dump funding, routine stuff of no ideological importance.
  Surprise, a floor motion to reduce the $1.6 million town operating budget by $54,000 passed.  That's a new one for Franconia, a well to do small town, full of democrats, and with a stiff tax rate.  Normally everyone grumbles about spending, but then they vote it thru.  This time, they actually cut the selectman's budget and it stuck.  Took a voice vote, two shows of hands, and a paper balloting, and it only passed by one vote, a lotta spendies voted against it, but it passed.  More of a symbolic gesture than real tax relief, but better than nothing.   
   It was 10 PM before the last town vehicle purchase was approved and meeting adjourned. 

Heat Wave.

It made up above 40F, first time this year.  Perhaps there is a spring hiding out there under all the snow?

Islamic ideology or Teen Age Angst ?

TV news has been upset over stories of young westeners, both boys and girls, going off the join ISIS.  The TV newsies take the position that the ISIS ideology must be so attractive as to pull young people into it, even just thru internet contact. 
  Perhaps.  but could it be these young people are fleeing terrible home situations?  Unloving parents, unsympathetic and boring schools, no jobs, no friends.  Could the idea of carrying an AK on the front lines, or finding a tall dark and handsome sheik with Rudolf Valentino looks to marry beat out being  on the bottom of a high school pecking order? 

Congress cuts the feet from under Iran deal

Dunno what counts for conventional wisdom in Iran, but in the rest of the world, a letter from the national legislature dissing a nuclear deal would kill that deal.  I mean why give them anything at the bargaining table when they have announced they won't keep the deal even if you get them to sign it. 
  Off hand, I'd say that Obama's relations with Congress are about as bad as they can get.  I wonder how that happened :-)
  I don't think anything like this has happened since the War of 1812.  And that was a long time ago. 

Words of the Weasel Part 39

"Unusual Dreams"  quoted as a side effect to some TV advertised pill.  That may be what the pill maker calls them, but ordinary people call them "nightmares". 

Why cut a deal when you don't trust 'em?

Dunno.  We don't trust the Iranians.  We know they want the bomb, badly.  They have spent a lot of money and time getting as far as they have.  The bomb would make the Iranian regime safe against regime change.  Even the boldest American future leadership would shrink from invading Iran if the Iranians threatened to nuke Jerusalem.  Real people (the kind with brains) have to figure that the Iranians will keep driving for a bomb no matter what kind of deal they sign with Obama.
   So why is Obama so set on a deal?  Especially a bad deal.  Even if the deal holds together for the next two years, it will ruin Obama's historical reputation for ever, if the Iranians produce a nuke right after Obama leaves the presidency.  Obama ought to know this, although sometimes you have to wonder about him. 
   The only way to keep the Iranians from the bomb is to remove all those centrifuges, along with all the uranium in the country.  Anything less is foolishness.  We ought to keep the sanctions on, ratchet them up tighter, until the Iranians turn over the centrifuges.  And we ought to destabilize their regime thru propaganda, aiding internal dissidents, assassination, and other dirty tricks. 

Beware the malware spreading flashdrive

Flashdrives, very convenient, very big, and deadly.  It was flashdrives that spread the Stuxnet virus into Iranian secure nuclear enrichment network.  Flashdrives with the virus were scattered in the parking lot.  Sharp eyed employees spotted them, picked them up, and took them into work.   Once the flashdrive was inserted into a computer, Stuxnet was sucked off the drive and started up. 
   Why does this work?  Blame Micro$oft.  Way back, about Win 95 time, the microsofties put "Autorun" into Windows.  It's still there.  Back in Win 95 days, before flashdrives, Autorun would scan every CD inserted in the CD drive and attempt to run program disks (say a new copy of Office) or to play music disks.  Automatically, hands off.  It was possible to turn off Autorun, but the turn off wasn't reliable, Autorun would come back to life at unexpected times. 
   Now that we have flashdrives, Autorun attempts to run any program it finds on the flash drive.  For that matter it still tries to run CD's, and floppy disks. 
   So, inserting a flashdrive in your computer can open it up to hackers, to use in bot nets, to launch Distributed Denial of Service attacks, to read all your email and suck up all your passwords.  And post any embarrassing photos they may find on your hard drive.  If I was running a secure network, I would use a pair of diagonal cutters to snip off all the USB ports on all the secured machines.