Coffee, making thereof

Your coffee is good when you can enjoy it black.  If you have to do the cream and sugar thing, it means your coffee is coming out bitter.
Step 1 in making good coffee is a clean coffee maker.  Brewing coffee releases all sorts of oils and fragrances which stick the the coffee maker innards.  After time ( a few hours) the oils turn rancid and make the next pot taste bitter.   You need a coffee maker that is easy to clean, inside and out.  The French press is good,  it comes completely apart and you can get inside it with a wash rag or a sponge.  The Silex vacuum coffee makers are good, all glass,  easily cleaned.  Percolators are bad, the inside of that perk tube  is just plain uncleanable. 
Step 2 is good coffee.  Shop around,  try a can of the expensive stuff.  Try some cans of the supermarket brand cheap stuff.  Keep some notes so you can remember what you like.  Up here, Surefine 100% Columbian $4.50 a can makes very good coffee, as good or better than some $10 a can coffee from Dunkin, Green Mountain and others .
   I don't do the grind it from beans thing.  I buy ground coffee and keep it in the fridge after opening it.  Works for me.
   Put in one heaping tablespoon of coffee for each cup of water.  Give the coffee at least four minutes to brew.  Try a little salt with the coffee.  Sometimes salt improves the coffee, the US Navy swears by it,  sometimes not so much. 

Who will buy Greek bonds?

Nobody in their right mind.  The Greeks have racked up debts equivalent to several years of Greek GNP.  They are still spending more than they take in with taxes.  No way are they going to be able to pay off what they owe right now, let along pay off any future borrowings.  All sensible people know that lending more money to Greece is like pouring the money down a drain.  The Greeks just don't have, and never will have, the ability to pay it back. 
   For some reason, unclear to me, the EU (Germany mostly) has been giving the Greeks bailout money to keep them from outright default on their debts.  Why the EU feels this generous is a mystery, but they do.  And, for some years, the EU has run a Greek supervision operation that tries to tell the Greek government what to do to balance their budget.  The Greeks hate this.  They have been rioting in the streets of Athens to show their displeasure.  But the EU has been saying, "Do it our way, or no more bailout money." 
   And just last week, the EU began talking about getting out of the Greek supervision business in August and letting the Greeks do their own thing.  Not discussed was whether the bailout money would continue after August. 
   Greeks don't have their own currency, they are on the Euro.  Greeks cannot print their own Euros like they used to do when they were using their own drachmas years ago.  Now the Greek government has to borrow money when expenses exceed tax revenue, which they do, every year.  And what sensible person would loan the Greek government a dime?  Fortunately for the Greeks there are plenty of sucker banks who will buy anything, no matter that the borrower will never be able to repay. 
   It will be a good sideshow to see what happens to the Greeks after August.  Bring popcorn. 

Looks like the Congresscritters blew it.

They  were unable to pass a budget or a continuing resolution to fund the Federal government.  Republicans and Democrats are on the tube, blaming each other for the shutdown.  Neither side is explaining what great issue is being served by this impasse.  They probably don't know themselves.  After all they are Congresscritters, none too bright.  The MSM is busy blaming the Republicans, as usual.  We shall see if any voters believe the MSM any more. 
   I suppose the shutdown will continue until the pain becomes too acute and Congresscritters agree to fund the government again.  The pain is largely felt by servicemen who won't get paid.  And snivel servants declared "non-essential" who don't get paid either.  I feel for the servicemen, they don't get paid much and just paying the bills each month is tough.  I don't care that much for the snivel servants, they can go out and find honest jobs in the private sector.
   As far as I am concerned, the Post Office will continue to deliver my mail and my Wall St Journal, and my Social Security electronic funds transfer (checks are obsolete) will continue to happen.  At least that's what they are saying on TV.  I am not entitled to an income tax refund, so the IRS can stay laid off forever far as I am concerned. 
   I hear that the Congresscritters will continue to get paid, which is a scandal, they ought to be the first to have their pay stopped. 

Conquer the World with Soft Power

We  used to be good at that.  American soft power crumbled the fearsome Soviet Union.  We never had to use our substantial hard power against the Soviets,  in general a good thing.  Instead Hollywood movies, blue jeans, hot rods and drag racing, rock and roll, major league baseball, a booming economy where the streets were paved with gold, Voice of America and the BBC, and democracy, convinced the average Russian-in-the-street that America was way cooler than Russia.   This finally lead to the overthrow of the Soviet government in the late 1980's.  The Russian people, who had stood shoulder to shoulder against the Nazis under Stalin, just lost faith in Communism and wanted a government and economy like the Americans enjoyed. 
  Now we have Islamic terrorism to confront.  If soft power worked against the Soviets, a very tough opponent, it ought to work against the Islamics.  Some of the soft power that stood us in such good stead in the 50's and 60's is looking dated now.  Hollywood has almost forgotten how to make a good flick.  Detroit is bankrupt and the Detroit auto industry is building boring little econoboxes rather than 409 Impalas and GTO's. Pop music lacks any one of the stature of Elvis or the Beatles, short wave radio is mostly gone, replaced by the Internet. 
   We do have some soft power stuff going for us.  Apple and Iphones, Facebook and Google.  The world still sees our streets as paved with gold, that's why so many of them want to move to the US.  But the Islamic terrorists put up a show so strong as to recruit lone wolf terrorists with just Internet contact.  We need to do something about that.  Some movies making fun of them, or some horror flicks starring Islamic crazies in place of the usual monsters.  We could get pop music back on track by returning control of the industry to real music people, like it was in the 1950's, rather the the current crop of clueless suits who persist in featuring wimpy boy bands.   To replace VOA and BBC we could build up a respected international web site centered on real news (if there is  a journalist left alive who could run such a site).  Jim Lehrer hasn't been on air for quite a few years. 

DACA, Lotta talk, few specifics.

   I have a lot of sympathy for people brought into America as children and who have grown up in America.  Far as  I am concerned, we ought to treat them as if they were born in the US.  Make 'em citizens.
   For all the talk from the newsies about DACA, we have few details.   Such as cutoff age for membership.   Clearly children brought into the country at age 6 and under ought to count.  Maybe age 12 and under.  Age 21 and over, clearly should not count, we reckon 21 to be the age of majority.  What about teenagers between 12 and 21?   For all the newsie babbling on the tube, you would think someone would have mentioned an age limit by now.
   Detail.  Is anything else required to gain the privileges of DACA status?  Graduation from an American high school?  Graduation from college?  Good behavior, such as a clean criminal record?  Or perhaps just no felony convictions?   Reasonable English language skills?  Holding a real job in the private sector?  Marriage?  children? 
  Detail.  Just what benefits come from DACA status?  Immediate US citizenship?  a green card?  some kind of path to citizenship?  Eligible to vote?  US driver's licenses?  Permission to stay in the US for say five years?  Or ten years? Or for life?  I have not heard a word about this detail from the  newsies either.
   Detail.  Do we offer DACA status to children arriving in the future? 
   I think we citizens deserve these details.  Clearly the newsies and the Democrats don't think so.
   Bottom line, our country needs more good decent citizens.    We ought to work to keep the DACA cases of good decent people as citizens and throw the book at gang members, drug runners, bus hijackers,  San Francisco shooters, and Islamist terrorists. 

Windows 10 explorer

Window Explorer, not to be confused with Internet Exploder,  used to offer us users a view of the files we had on the hard drive, actually on all the drives, hard, floppy, CD, or thumb.  Now that we are upgraded to Windows 10, we find that Explorer doesn't work right.  The Win 10 version of Explorer shows four copies of all my files.  I keep my files in "My Documents" the traditional Windows location.  Only in Win 10,  Explorer show four versions of "My Documents" one of which just gives error messages when clicked on.  Which one is the real one? Why display the same thing four different times?   Is this to add confusion to us users? 
   And, Windows Explorer has forgotten alphabetical ordering.  Click on your desktop and ask it to sort your icons into alphabetical order.   The icons swirl around, but they do not wind up in alphabetical order. 
   Micro$oft strikes again. 

I wonder how that happens? The midnight pageview spike.

I get a few statistics from Blogger every day.  One them is "page views"  In fact I get a line graph of page views over time.  The funny part is the timing.  Every day, around midnight, I get a burst of 100 page views all packed into a very short time, like less than an hour.  Makes the graph look like a sea of low level grass with a whacking big spike of 100 page views sticking up once a day at midnight.  Why are they all packed in at midnight?  Surely normal people are in bed by midnight?  Is it robo webcrawlers all doing their crawling when the web isn't so busy?  Is it a bug in the Blogger software?  Something else?
   Inquiring minds want to know. 
   Also, how come I get so many page views from Italy?  Like more pageviews from Italy than from the entire US of A.  I don't post in Italian. 

Duck and Cover !!!

Damn.  That false alarm must have scared Hawaiians out of their socks.  As well it should.  If they sprang that up here in NH, I dunno what I would do.  I suppose just get down in my basement, which is masonry (cinder block not poured concrete which is far stronger)  If I survived the initial blast, I have no idea what I would do for food or fuel or electricity after the bomb.  
   And, we need to get serious about Little Rocket Man and his ICBMs.

Dunkirk 2017

It came by Netflix, and I watched it on my Sony flatscreen last night.  Lots of dramatic shots of British soldiers in deep doo-doo, bombs falling, tide going out, few to no boats in sight, struggling in the water. Many pitiful scenes of British soldiers standing in line on the sand, (queuing up the British say) waiting for a vessel to take them home. One group takes a stranded fishing trawler out into the Channel.  They spend most of their time below decks shouting at each other.  I kept wondering why they stayed below, rather than out on deck where they could see where they were going and who was coming after them.  Lots of shots of RAF fighters going out at low level.  RAF pilots looking and sounding cool as cucumbers under fire.
   Although the camera man did things right,  turning on the lights before filming, the sound man bungled badly.  He never muted the score and the sound effects when characters were speaking.  That, combined with modern actor's tendency to mumble their lines, caused a good deal of the dialog get lost.   Fortunately there wasn't much dialog.  I never caught the stage names of any of the characters, mostly because nobody ever addressed any one else by name.  And with the exception of the two teen aged boys aboard the old codger's yacht,  nobody had any connections with friends, family, sweethearts, warbuddies, any other human being.  There was no protagonist for us audience to rally behind and root for. 
    The movie never told us that we were watching a turning point in WWII.  Hitler could have won the war that day.  If der fuhrer had stayed off the telephone and let his best tank general, Heinz Guderian, commander on the scene, do what he wanted to do, the British army (every soldier Britain had) would have been surrounded and taken prisoner of war.  Instead, Hitler feared that Guderian's panzers were too far out in front, they might be counter attacked. He ordered Guderian to stop and wait for the bulk of the German infantry, marching on foot,  to catch up with him.  This delay gave the British time to evacuate.  This fact comes right out of Guderian's after-the-war memoir. 
   Britain nearly gave up the fight that summer.  They had been driven out of Norway, driven out of the Low Countries, driven out of France.  They had sacked their prime minister and installed Winston Churchill that very week.  The entire British establishment, members of parliament, the press, academia, the churches, business men, the entertainment business (we call ours Hollywood, dunno what the Brits called theirs) were against fighting the war.  Many of them had fought in the First World War, and they were not going to do that sort of thing, ever again.  And Germany had more people, more industry, more advanced science, and looked invincible. 
   Hitler was offering the Brits a deal, You Brits let me keep all of continental Europe, and I Hitler will let you keep your overseas empire and your Navy.  A lot of Brits were ready to take this deal.  Not Churchill.  Newly installed as prime minister, Churchill had to rally his country.  The British rank and file were more tough minded than their establishment.  The rank and file didn't want to kowtow to the Nazis, and were willing to fight.  They figured they had whipped the Germans twenty years ago and they could do it again. But in June of 1940 everything was in flux.  If the Germans had taken the BEF prisoners of war that would have been a tremendous downer to all of England.  As it turned out, the Brits got nearly every man, 350,000 or so, off the Dunkirk beaches and safely home.  That did a lot to steady things down and build support for Churchill.  
   If the evacuation had failed, Churchill might have been turned out of office (he had a lot of old enemies going back forty years) and Britain might have signed a deal with Hitler.  Which would have made launching the D-Day invasion from Britain impossible, and deprived USAF of bases from which to bomb Germany. 

Don't talk to cops, they are out to getcha

Advice to President Trump.  Special Council Mueller is out to get you.  He will take anything you say to him and twist it to make you look bad.  Your best bet is not to say anything to him.   I'm sure all your lawyers are telling you this already.  If Mueller wants a private interview with you, tell him to get a  subpoena from a real court.  Not that rubber stamp FISA "court".  If you have things you want to "get on the public record"  tweet them.  Tweets go right out, the way you want them to.  Anything you say to Mueller will get twisted before it becomes public.

Congressional Earmarks and Donald Trump.

Can you taste the pork yet?  Earmarks were a scheme whereby CongressCritters could order federal taxmoney spent in their district on pet projects.  Like that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.  CongressCritters loved earmarks, after getting one, they could brag about it back in their district.  We rvrn got one some years ago, Former Senator Judd Gregg managed to pull down $492,000 to renovate the Littleton Opera House, a well loved antique building, standing on a prominent site in downtown Littleton. 
   The incoming Republican congressional majority from 2012 voted to outlaw earmarks as pure pork and a total waste of taxpayers money.
   Yesterday I heard our boy, Donald Trump, praise the earmark system and suggest bringing it back because it was the one thing that could achieve bipartisan support.  "You vote for my earmark and I'll vote for your earmark".  Earmarks might have been something that drew bipartisan support, but bipartisan or not, voting for earmarks was voting to waste a lot of taxpayer money.  I'd druther spend less rather than get bipartisan support for pouring good money down the drain.  

"bloody nose" versus "regime change" strike on NORKs

We are hearing talk today, in the Wall St Journal, and PBS, and the other TV newsies about taking the military option with the NORKs.  A "bloody nose" strike, which would do some damage, perhaps take out a missile site, or shoot down a missile after launch, or something,  but the NORKs would recognize that it was just a  minor slap in the face rather than the opening moves in a total war to wipe them out.    Dicey.  Lets think about Little Rocket Man, in his secret headquarters, watching on radar the warplanes crossing his borders, violating his airspace, headed for important installations.  What's Rocket Man gonna think?  If he thinks the Yankees are coming to hang his ass, he will probably order an all out strike on the South right then and there. 
   Let's think about something else in the military line.  How about a regime change strike?   We just put a smart bomb thru Little Rocket Man's bedroom window.  Boom. Instant regime change.   Do it right, a single stealth aircraft, after dark, flying low, and the NORKs won't know what we are doing to them until it's too late.  For good measure we could hit secret police headquarters and army headquarters at the same time.
With Little Rocket Man turned into dog food, it will take 'em a few days to settle things out and give orders to attack the south.  And the new regime might be ready to listen to reason and negotiate rather than start up the Korean war again.      

Head Shrinkers and the Goldwater rule

The Goldwater rule, goes back to 1964 when Goldwater ran for president against LBJ.  A bunch of shrinks opined in the public press that Goldwater was mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency.  In short the shrinks called Goldwater crazy.  Goldwater sued them for libel. 
   The American Psychiatric Association, after the election was over and the smoke had cleared, issued a rule that shrinks must not opine about the mental conditions of people they had not met and examined in person.  Which makes sense.  If you haven't examined the person yourself, what do you really know?
     And, in the few cases where you have examined the person, that makes you the doctor and the person your patient.  For a doctor to talk/write about a patient's mental or emotional state is a clear violation of ethics, common courtesy, and ordinary politeness.  Should my doctor  discuss my health, physical or mental, with anyone, I would be deeply offended, offended enough to find a more honest doctor ASAP.

Are burglars tele casing my place?

I get a lot of strange phone calls.  When I answer, all I get is silence.  So I hang up.  Are they calling to see if anyone is home?  So they can burglarize the place in safety?  Even though I have little in the place of worth to a burglar or a fence.  About the only worthwhile items are a seven year old Sony flat screen TV and a HP laptop. 

How can two ships collide 200 miles offshore?

Surely all ocean going steamers have radar in these days?  The Ramore Head, upon which I sailed to Europe in 1956 had a very good radar on her bridge.  Southwester, a 42 foot wooden sailing yacht, had a decent radar that could pick up ordinary buoys at a couple of miles when I sailed on her twenty years ago.
   Now we have video of a supertanker, engulfed in flames, 2-3 hundred miles off of Shanghai China. The newsies say she collided with a freighter carrying grain.  Were the bridge crews sound asleep?  Surely the radar on both bridges showed the other vessel approaching?   Chapman (Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling) has an entire chapter on right of way and rules of the road.  The Officer of the Deck is required to know all the rules by heart and follow them.  Both ships were far out to sea, free to maneuver in any direction without fear of running aground.
  So what really happened?
  For that matter we have never heard what really happened aboard those two Navy destroyers that collided with merchies last year.  

Wolff, Bannon, Fire and Fury

That's all the TV newsies are talking about.  I'm sure the book has lots of dirt on the Trump administration.  At this point nobody knows how much is real and true, and how much is made up.  All the newsies want to spread the dirt around to stick it to Trump.   Trump and his people say it's all fake news.  I don't see how we voters will ever know what's what.  And this voter doesn't care anymore. 
   I rate the Trump administration on things like GNP growth, unemployment decline, cutting my taxes, cutting regulations, getting Keystone XL going to lower my furnace oil cost.  Things that count in the real world.  It would be nice if the newsies spent more time telling us what's going on in the world rather than spreading rumors designed to hurt the Trump administration.

The Bering Land Bridge

A lot of talk about it.  The Bering Straits are shallow, and not all that wide, and it is thought that in long past times the seas went down and/or the land went up, and people and animals could cross from Siberia to Alaska dry footed.  A lot of speculation about how and when the Indians came to North America centers on when the land bridge might be open.
    What the land bridge enthusiasts forget, or perhaps never knew, is that man can cross the Bering straits by boat, given decent weather.  Say summer weather. The Eskimos used to cross regularly, up until the Soviets tightened up their customs enforcement after WWII and  started hassling any American Eskimos they caught on their side of the straits. 
     The Eskimos used skin boats, umiaks, to make the crossing.  Granted a skin boat sounds kinda flimsy, except the skins were walrus hides, a quarter of an inch thick and tough as fiberglass.  A umiak could carry a dozen people, and were strong enough to take the thrust of a forty horsepower outboard motor. 
    If today's Eskimos could make the passage, I dare say the ancestors of the Indians could make the same passage, about anytime they felt like it.  No land bridge required. 
    The recent publications about DNA analysis of an 11,500 year old Indian child from an Alaskan site all talked about crossing on the land bridge.  I maintain they could have come by boat, any summer. 

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

I have 9 inches of nice light powder on the railing of my deck.  And my deck is within walking distance of Peabody Slopes chairlifts.  It snowed all day Thursday.  No wind (despite weatherpeople predicting hurricane force winds) . So the nice new powder snow is still on the trails rather than blown off into the woods where it doesn't help the skiing at all.   Conditions are as good as it gets at Cannon.  Forecast is for cold over the weekend, so bring an extra sweater, a scarf, maybe even a face mask. 

Floating Fortress to bolster US Naval Power

Headline of a Wall St Journal op-ed on Saturday.  The writer, William Lloyd Stearman, long time National Security Council staffer,  laments the fact the the US has not done an amphibious assault since Inchon, way back in the Korean War.  He blames this on the existence of anti ship missiles that make it too dangerous to bring warships closer than 100 miles to land. 
   His solution a humongous 1000 foot long ship, displacing 125,000 tons, loaded with anti aircraft missiles and artillery, more artillery for shore bombardment, helicopter and VTOL fighter pads, and carrying Marines would be able to close up on the enemy coast, land the marines, and give them fire support.  "This ship could be designed to make it virtually unsinkable."  Yeah right.  This concept has been kicking around in various issues of Naval Institute Proceedings for years under the name of "arsenal ship".
  Sounds cool, but Mr Stearman seems to have forgotten WWII experience showing that if you put enough bombs and torpedoes  into the biggest ships, they sink.  Witness Bismark, Yamato, Roma, Prince of Wales, Lexington, Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Zuikaku, and many more famous capital ships.  
   To do an amphibious assault, first you need air superiority, air craft carriers and their air wings.  Once you have air superiority, you don't need an arsenal ship.  The aircraft take out the anti ship missile sites.  Then ships of ordinary size will do just fine. 
  I'm surprised that this guy was a National Security Council staffer for more than 15 years and has no better grasp of naval warfare than this op-ed shows.  

Lying to the FBI,

Should not be a crime at all, let alone a felony.  All the FBI has to do is interview/interrogate the victim long enough and they can catch him/her in a contradiction. Who can remember all the things they said during a long interrogation?  Just keep the interrogation up until the victim makes a mistake, and bang, you got him.  Lying to the FBI, a felony.  You can take the victim to court on that, even if you don't have any evidence of a real crime. 
   Far as I am concerned, we oughta get rid of lying to the FBI (or anyone else) as a crime.  Unless the victim is under oath, in which case false statements are perjury, the cops should be required to discover real evidence of real crimes (not thought crimes) in order to prosecute citizens.

Strange things in the modern Navy

According to Instapundit, the Navy ran a "climate assessment" survey aboard the two destroyers that collided with merchant vessels.  The surveys asked crew men about how short of sleep they were, how they felt about the ship, the mission, and the Navy.  And how they felt about their officers.  Basically the men reported being tired, overworked, and not too sure their officers knew what they were doing.
Wow.
I was an Air Force officer for six years back during the Viet Nam war.  USAF did not run surveys of any kind back in that day.  How the troops, both NCO's and enlisted men felt about me, my leadership, the Air Force mission, and fixing aircraft right was important to me.  I put in a lot of hours in my shops looking around and talking to the troops, likewise out on the flight line. I joined a stock car racing club the troops had organized.  I said nothing when the troops posted Lt. Fuzz cartoons on the shop bulletin boards.  I would not have benefited from or believed in a USAF survey.  I had seen how my troops had massaged the maintenance date reporting system to indicate that they were all working hard, and doing things right.  I would have figured the troops would respond to a survey with answers that they figured would do them good. 
  Gotta wonder about that Navy.  Competent officers keep in touch with their men and have a pretty good idea of what they are thinking.  They don't need "climate assessment" surveys. 
   The Navy has never given clear answers about how those two destroyers managed to collide with merchies.  Could it be that the entire bridge crew just fell asleep, letting the ship plow straight on under autopilot control?

Fantasy that the MSM keeps repeating

Fantasy #1.  Trump should/will fire special prosecutor Mueller.  Not likely.  Last guy to fire a special prosecutor was Nixon.  See where that got him.  Trump is smart enough to understand that. 
Fantasy #2   Impeach Trump.  The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress and simply won't allow impeachment to go forward.
The MSM would do the country more good if they stopped pushing fantasies.