Gina Haspell for CIA director

She is Mike Pompeo's choice to replace himself.  She is a new name to me.  Apparently she is an old CIA hand, been with the agency for 30 plus years.  Actually worked in the field, collecting intelligence, rather than being a paper shuffling desk weenie back at Langley.
   Democrats have been trashing her because some of the intelligence she gathered came from vigorous interrogation of,(possibly waterboarding of) Al Quada prisoners back right after 9/11.   I'm perfectly OK with this, it shows she was actually gathering intelligence rather than opining without facts.  Or leaking to the NY Times.
  If I was going to criticize Ms Haspell, I would ask her about her views on past CIA disasters, such as the failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, their prediction that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, their prediction that the Iranians had stopped  their nuclear weapons program, the Valerie Plame case, and leaking the story of Bin Laden's satellite phone to the New York Times.  Bin Laden must read the Times too, after the satellite phone story broke, Bin Laden got rid of his  phone and ran Al Quada by messengers.  This probably extended his life by five years. 

Facebook's New "feature"

In the last few days, Facebook began placing tags on news articles that they force onto your Facebook feed.  Click on the tag and you get a short writeup containing the name of the source  of the article (useful) and Facebook's opinion of that source.  For Breitbart News, their opinion went on for two lines calling Breitbart right wing extremists and screwballs.  Neutral it was not.
  Question for Facebook.  If you think Breitbart is alt right trash, why do you push Breitbart articles onto my Facebook feed?

Ford wants to drop out of the car business

Ford announced this change of course last week.  They are going to concentrate on pickup trucks, SUVs, crossovers and similar stuff.  They will keep making Mustangs and one new sedan design.  But Fiesta, Focus, Taurus, and a couple of other econoboxes will be dropped. 
   Ford didn't give reasons for their plan.  At a guess, they like the higher margin in pickups and SUVs as opposed to the close to zero margins in the little econoboxes.  At the time, I thought it was short sighted to abandon the bulk of the car market to the Japanese.  I think the big boys, Ford, GM, and Chrysler/Fiat need to compete head on for a share of the biggest part of the car market.  Driving to work, or anywhere, the bulk of the vehicles I see on the road in my part of the USA are little econoboxes.  There may be be much margin in econoboxes, but there is real volume.
   Now this week some new info comes to light.  According to the Wall St Journal, both Honda and Toyota are having trouble moving their Accords and Camrys, despite new redesigns on both models, and excellent reputations going back many years.   And on Saturday, an article speculating that the sedan as a product is going away for ever, just like the station wagon did. 
   Hmm.  Maybe Ford is onto something? 

$130K Bimbo Hush Money

Did anyone, for even a minute, think that Trump's lawyer paid off Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket?  $130K may be pocket change to billionaires like Trump, but for ordinary folk like New York lawyers, $130K is real money, far too much to just kick in out of friendship. 
   Apparently it's a big surprise to the TV newsies.  They have been talking about little else ever since Rudi Guliani said that Trump reembursed the lawyer for it yesterday.  I mean, what else did you think happened?  

Speed up your computer. Uninstall Avast

Computer had been getting sluggish and flaky.  So bad that I dared to run ComboFix, world's most aggressive anti virus.  Combo Fix didn't find much, but it did demand I shut down Avast's active virus scanner, 'cause it was interfering with ComboFix.  The only way I could find to shut down Avast was to uninstall it.  The Avast uninstaller whined a lot and took forever, but it did get Avast off the machine. 
   After killing off Avast, Trusty Desktop is perceptibly more lively.  He is an older machine, but he has a 2.19 gigahertz processor and nearly a gigabyte of RAM, not too shabby, even today.  He is still running XP, which is leaner and meaner than the later Micro$oft offerings. 
   These virus scanners hook onto the network port, and inspect every packet, in coming and out going,  which slows your internet a lot.  It was really showing up running Firefox.  Downloads were flaky, and Firefox would freeze for long enough to irritate the bejesus out of me.  Getting rid of Avast cleaned up a lot of that.

Those questions for President Trump

The ever clueful  New York Times is the source for the list.  It might have been leaked from the Mueller investigators (doubtful)  or Trump's people (somewhat more likely) or just invented out of clear blue sky by the NY Times people (highly likely).  I notice a senior Times editor just left the Times, could it be over inventing fake news?
   The questions that I saw are kinda awful.  Totally vague, which allows the prosecutors to bear down and take the interview anywhere they want.  Lots of "what did you think" questions,  which is fishing for a thought crime.  Covering vast stretches of time, which makes it hard for the target to remember everything he said or did going back 10 and 20 years.  And opens the target up for perjury charges should he misstate or misremember any picayune detail. 
   Was I Trump, I'd hold out for written questions, asked in writing and replied to in writing.  And I get some very clever lawyers to go over each answer with a fine toothed comb to weed out any booby trap answers.  

I don't believe in thought crimes

Crimes, that get you hauled into court, ought to be things you did, not thoughts you had.  To be a free country, like we claim to be, one should be free to think anything they like.  Only actions can be criminalized. 
And not too many actions either.  I believe Moses got the number just about right, and Moses lived and died thousands of years ago.  

  Take that newsie's Watergate Wail, "What did he know and when did he know it?"  That's a cry to pursue a thought crime.  "Knowing" is pure thought.  It's perfectly legal to know damn near anything.  Why do the newsies go about siccing cops and courts on people just for knowing something?  A far better question is "What did he do, and when did he do it?"  

   A lot of places have passed new laws penalizing "hate crimes".  These are things already crimes, they just added some extra jail time if the crime is motivated by prejudice against minorities.  I don't hold with that.  The law should punish actions, crimes, the same way no matter what the perp was thinking, before during, or after committing the crime.  Murder is murder, doesn't matter why the accused committed murder.