Microsoft whines about America's Talent deficit

Today on the Wall St. Journal Op-Ed we have Brad Smith, executive VP and general counsel at Microsoft wailing about 6000 Microsoft job openings that they cannot fill.  Of these, 3400 are for "engineers, software developers, and researchers".  Brad Smith then goes on to cry about the US education system.  
   Tough cookies Microsoft.  If you need software people, you can train them yourself.  Run an ad. "Learn Programming.  Good pay.  No prior experience necessary."   That will get you all the applicants anyone could ever need.  Enroll the better half of them in a Microsoft run software training program.  In three months I can teach any decent college graduate how to program anything.  And so can Microsoft. 
   It is crazy for Microsoft to expect colleges to graduate students with five years experience in Windows internals, C sharp, Visual Basic.Net and Excel Macros..  The Microsoft HR droids want to hire people off the street with years of experience in very narrow specialties.  Got news for you HR droids, the world doesn't work that way. 

So where was the air support in Benghazi?

After a month of chattering about the Libyan outrage, who knew what and when did they know it, who was responsible for lack or security men, we have NOT talked about real issues.

1. Why no air support?.  The jets can move out at 600 mph.  We could have had fighters over the besieged consulate within an hour. 
2. Why no Marine reinforcements?  The V22 Osprey VTOL transports are slower than jet fighters, only 300 mph or so.  But they could have landed a company of Marines in the consulate courtyard within two hours. 

These are more important questions than why US ambassadors were pushing the "Video drove them crazy" story on the Sunday pundit shows a week after the attack.

357 Magnum in an automatic pistol?

That's what we get from Coonan Inc according to my latest American Rifleman.  It looks like a regulation .45 automatic but it takes 357 Magnum revolver cartridges.  Interesting and all that, but why?
   357, being a revolver cartridge, has a rim on the brass to seat on the back of the cylinder.  Without the rim, the hammer strike would merely push the entire cartridge up the cylinder instead of igniting the primer.  Revolver cartridges need that rim.  There have been several attempts to make revolvers that could fire rimless .45 auto cartridges, using clever metal clips that grab the extractor groove in the rimless automatic round.  They worked, mostly, but nobody was ever very fond of them.  Convenienal wisdom is that revolvers need rimmed cartridges.
   On the other side, rimmed cartridges don't stack neatly into a magazine  the way rimless will.  The rims have a tendency to catch each other and jam the gun.  Instead of stacking up straight, they stack in a curve, calling for a curved magazine.  Straight magazines, with a spring on the bottom are more likely to feed than curvy ones.  The moment of truth for an automatic pistol is when the slide jerks open, the empty brass is tossed out, the springs ram the slide home, stripping a new round off the top of the magazine and jamming it into the chamber.  As any automatic pistol owner can tell you, there are a thousand ways this can go wrong, jamming the gun.  I certainly don't want to give Murphy's Law something extra to work with like a rimmed cartridge.  I want rimless ammunition for my automatic pistol. 
   Plus, nobody has ever complained about the regulation .45 round lacking in power or accuracy.  357 is a fine round, but it doesn't hit any harder. 
   It's a nice looking gun, but I'd druther have a regulation .45 automatic. 

Obama does better at debating

Naturally I stayed up to watch the Romney-Obama rematch.  Not bad.  Obama looked better and did better than last time.  Romney was as good as last time.  Obama made up a few "facts" on the fly. He said he had called the Lybian outrage terrorism the day after it happened.  I certainly don't remember that, and ever diligent Fox News found the tape, and although Obama had used the word terrorism, it wasn't in connection with the Lybian outrage.  He was just trashing terrorism in general.  Romney got on Obama's case about the pipeline and drilling permits and Obama didn't have much in the way of answers.
  The moderator was a tubby women with an attitude and bad hair (Candy Crowley).  She interrupted, argued, sucked up valuable time, and was totally in the tank for Obama.  I'd never heard of her before.  The audience questions were bad.  I mean does anyone care about the "assault weapons ban" any more?  That question did give Obama a chance to declare himself in favor of the right to bear arms. 
   Nothing new in the way of ideas, issues, or policies came up.  Everything that was said the two candidates have said before and said many times.  What's fun in watching it to see them going at each other face-to-face and seeing how good they are at thinking on their feet.  Both candidates managed to avoid fatal gaffes, and nobody was ever at a loss for something to say.

Nobody can vote for HIM because..

I hear this a lot.  But when I ask " What has he said or done that is so awful?"  they cannot think of anything.  But they KNOW that HE is awful and they could never vote for him, they just don't know WHY they feel that way. 
    And the MSM aggravate the situation, 'cause everybody knows they don't tell the truth.  So nobody listens to THEM. 
   Which might be why the debate was so effective, everybody got so see their guy, on national TV, all by himself. 

Libya is for Losers

The TV newsies have been talking about the Libya disaster for a couple of weeks now.  Coupla things they haven't talked about.
1.  Marines.  I watched the whole congressional hearing, where they had four State Dept guys getting grilled by 20 Congresscritters for hours.  During all that time the word "Marines" never passed anyone's lips.  The back and forth was all about additional State Dept security guys.  Now as for me, when I got Al Quada climbing over the consulate wall, I want a company of Marines.  They know how to handle this sort of thing.  Once over the wall, Al Quada is on American soil, and the Marines can shoot them all.  Nobody talked about this.
2.  Coverup story.  Just what is the White House trying to sell to the voters.  And why?  Apparently the real story is Al Quada planned to attack and burn the consulate, and they suceeded.  To which an intelligent White House would say "We are gonna track 'em down and kill 'em."  A lot of voters are OK with that.
Instead they said "We Americans are to blame for stirring up the natives with provocative Internet video".  Few voters like that story much.

Winter is coming

Mt Lafayette from the Mittersill Inn driveway.  Took this picture two days ago.  It snowed on the deck that night and it stuck up on the mountain.  Notice that leaves have not all fallen yet.

Drive away bill payments

Paying the bills on a rainy Sunday.  I open the bill from Time Warner Cable.  (cable TV & broadband). Inclosed is a nice form letter explaining that they changed my account number, for the convenience of their computer wienies. 
   And would you be so kind as to redo all the paper work for your credit card payments 'cause when the new account numbers go into effect, credit card payments to the old account number will no longer be accepted.  Likewise if you are paying by electronic funds transfer.
   Right.  I'll drop everything and go thru all that again.  Real Soon Now
   Fortunately I still pay with old fashioned paper checks so I don't have  to bother.
   I wonder how many payments Time Warner will never see because their computer wienies were too lazy to program the new bean counting system to use the old customer account numbers.

  

Scam. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT)

A legal US tax scam.  All a company has to do is convince the IRS that they are in the real estate business, at least that a lot of their business is real estate, and presto, chango, NO US CORPORATE INCOME TAX.
Nice deal if you can get it.  Right now a cellphone operator, American Tower is trying to become a tax exempt REIT on the basis that its cellphone towers are real estate.  In line behind American Tower are data center operator Equinox (they own a fair number of big buildings full of computers) and bill board company Lamar Advertising (billboard are real estate).
   This tax scam is essentially unfair.  Business is business and all businesses ought to be taxed alike.  No special deals for special business.  The REIT scam sucks money out of everything else and pours it into real estate.  Which might be why a real estate bubble caused Great Depression 2.0.  We would be better off to have investors decide where to put their money.  They will pick things that will make money (and employ workers).  The REIT scam is  picking winners and losers via the tax code.
   Romney and Ryan might be willing to repeal this ugly bit of tax favoritism.   

Ryan vs Biden last night

A slug fest.  Biden was a lot feistier than Obama and I scored the event as more even than last week's showdown.  Biden was rude, smirking, laughing and interrupting.  Color him obnoxious.  Ryan was cool, polite, knowledgeable, a nice civilized and polite man I'd happily invite  home for dinner.  Biden can go eat at McDonald's.
  The moderator asked stupid questions and interrupted too much.  Give me Jim Lehrer anytime.
  Both guys presented arguments for their sides, but they kept quoting "facts" that I had never heard of  to bolster their arguments.  Being something of a political junkie who follows this stuff, I figure any fact I never heard of before is likely made up on the spur of the moment.  Bogus.   

Four Careers are Toast

I watched the Darrel Issa hearings yesterday.  He had four State Dept people on the dock, two field guys who were on the ground in Libya and asked for re enforcements well BEFORE the legation was attacked and burned.  The other two were Washington desk wienies who had denied the requests for reinforcements.
The field guys reluctantly admitted under direct questioning that Washington had not given them anything. The desk wienies claimed that they had given the field guys "full support".
   Figure the State Dept bureaucracy will deal with these poor guys.  The two field guys will be dumped on for confessing to embarrassing facts.  The two desk wienies will be dumped on for not being more evasive under questioning.  All four of them can kiss off any thought of promotion in the next 100 years.
   The atmosphere was tense to the point of Chairman Issa offering his committee's protection to the two field guys against State Dept retaliation.   

What to Cut? Item 5 BATFE

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,Firearms and Explosives.  These are the guys that brought us Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Fast and Furious.  They are federal police, with arrest powers, badges, and guns and little discretion.  When they cause a major mess (Ruby Ridge and Waco) they have to call in the FBI to bail them out.  They have a history of harassing  and entrapment of firearms dealers, gun show customers, and ordinary gun owners. 
   We would be better off without these feeders at the public trough.  State and local police make the great majority of all criminal arrests.  We don't need armed federal policemen to collect liquor and tobacco taxes from legitimate manufacturers.  Smuggling and bootlegging untaxed cigarettes or liquor is a violation of state law and evasion of state taxes which state police forces are well motivated to pursue. 
  BATFE has a budget of $1.12 billion a year.  Small compared to farm bills and transportation bills.  But you know what they say, "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money."
   More competent and better balanced agencies like the FBI and the IRS could handle the few legitimate duties now handled by BATFE. 

What to cut? Item 4. CIA

The trouble with CIA is that it is all too often wrong. They told Eisenhower that Fidel Castro was an agrarian reformer. They failed to predict the breakup of the Soviet Union, even after the fall of the wall.  They told George Bush and Colin Powell that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were a slam-dunk.  In actual fact, Saddam didn't have a nuclear program, which we found out AFTER invading the country.  They didn't  have even a single agent on the ground inside Saddam's Iraq.  CIA attempted to destabilize the Bush Administration by creating the Valerie Plame affair.  CIA agents still work out of embassies, which is like hanging a "kick me" sign on the back of your trench coat.  CIA announced  the Iranians did NOT have a nuclear program, just in time to scuttle some proposed sanctions.  CIA leaked the story about NSA listening into Osama bin Laden's satellite phone to the New York Times.  It took CIA ten years to finger Osama bin Laden. 
   With a track record like this, who in their right mind would believe anything CIA reported?
   Besides, America's best intelligence comes from NSA (who intercepts enemy communications) and the Air Force (who flies recon satellites). 
   CIA's budget is famously secret.  CIA appropriations are disguised somewhere deep inside the federal budget, so we don't know just how much money they spend each year.  But what ever they spend, it really ain't worth it, 'cause what ever CIA produces is suspect, 'cause it comes from an outfit with a long and well documented history of brain death.

What to cut? Item 3. Ground the FBI's Air Force

This came to light in a Wall St Journal piece last month complaining about Dept of Justice officials taking joy rides in FBI aircraft.  Apparently the FBI operates a fleet of executive jets for unspecified purposes. 
   Far as I am concerned, FBI agents ought to fly commercial, just like the rest of us.  And put up with taking off their shoes, nudity scanners, and groping by TSA agents.  If we citizens have to put up with this crap, so should they.   After all, they work for us.  
   You can fly anywhere in the country for a few hundred bucks.  Whereas a 10 seat executive jet costs $25 million to buy, and hundreds of dollars an hour to operate.  We could fly the agents first class for less than that. 
   This is small change compared with farm bills and tranportation bills.  I don't have real numbers, but if the FBI had a fleet of 10 aircraft, and flew each one 40 hours a week, at $200 an hour, we have $4.16 million a year for operating costs.  Small change, but every little bit hurts. 

What to cut. Item 2 Federal Transportation Bill

Used to be, streets and roads were built and maintained by cities and states.  They did alright.  They built the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Merritt Parkway, the New York Thruway, the Connecticut Turnpike, and the Mass Pike, to name a few that I drive frequently.
  Then back in Eisenhower's time we got the Interstate Highway Program.  The Federal government put up 90% of the money, picked the routes and set the standards.  That was a half century ago.  And we got a magnificent highway system.  Best highways on the planet.  If you don't believe me, take a drive in Canada. 
   Anyhow, after 50 years of building, the Interstate system is complete.  We have superb roads going everywhere in the country.  Even way up here in the wilderness of northern NH, I have an interstate exit within walking distance of my front door. But, we keep spending federal highway money, whether we need it or not. 
  Back in June, Congress managed to pass a $227 billion-over-two-years highway bill.  That's $100 plus billion a year, about as pricey as the farm bill they haven't passed yet.  Put the saving from killing the transportation bill together with the savings from killing the farm bill, and we have better than $200 billion in savings to put against a $1 trillion federal deficit.  Not too shabby, and we haven't touched Social Security or Medicare.
    And this is politically do able.  Granted all the contractor's in the country are in favor of federal highway spending (the Feds will spend on anything, the staties are thriftier).  But there are more voters than contractors, and those voters ought to be worried about federal money printing turning their college savings, their retirement savings, and the value of their houses in to waste paper. 

What to Cut? Item 1. Farm Subsidies

This election features Democrats calling for tax hikes and Republicans calling for spending cuts.  Neither side has been specific about how bad the tax hike might be, or what might be cut.  Both sides fear that specific proposals will just mobilize opposition, so they stick to vague generalities that mean nothing.  So lets take a look at what we could cut. 
   Easy target Number 1 is farm subsidies.   There is a $1 trillion over 10 years farm bill wandering around capitol hill right now. It hasn't passed yet but they are trying hard.  Only farmers (less than 5% of the population) benefit. Most of us get taxed just to pass money to farmers.  Most of whom are corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, not family farmers.  Farming is just another business, like manufacturing or mining or trucking, or fast food.  Why should farmers get a $100 billion a year government subsidy that no other industry gets?
  We are talking about a lot of money here.  The yearly US deficit is $1 trillion, so the farm bill is 10% of the entire deficit.  Kill the farm bill and we have made a serious step toward balancing the US budget.  While we are at it, we could close down the Agriculture Department and save even more. 

7.8% unemployment, Hurrah

The Democrats and the newsies are talking this up like happy days are here again.  Right.  Does anyone really feel that Great Depression 2.0 is over?  I don't think a few tenths of a percent change in "unemployment" makes much difference to the voters.  Voters know that times are bad and jobs are hard to come by.  Talk it up as much as you like, it doesn't really mean all that much.

The Peak of Peak Leaf Season.

The leaves are working hard on coloring up.  Sun came out today after days of rain so I got the camera out.
This is about as good as they are gonna look, they are already beginning to fall.

This is my front lawn. That;s a poplar tree.  The big maple behind the house has already turned and shed so no picture of him this year.

 Standing in front of the Mittersill Inn, looking up the access road.  That's Mt. Lafayette in the background. 

A maple tree on Ridge Cut road.  He ain't gonna get much redder than this. This is Columbus Day weekend, so the tourists will get a fine show of up country color.  .

Thin Red Line, Dreadful WWII movie

It was made fairly recently.  It's allegedly about Guadalcanal.  A green Army (Army not Marine) unit is landed on Guadalcanal.  They move up to the line, get ordered to assault an enemy held hill, and most of 'em get killed.  All the officers come across as nut cases.  We have conversations between one star generals and bird colonels, bird colonels and captains that would provoke court martials for all hands in the real world.  Nobody wears insignia of rank, making it hard for us viewers to figure out who is giving orders and who is taking orders.  The hill is covered with fantastic shoulder high grass, thicker than any grass I ever saw in Viet Nam.  It's so thick and lush that they could have taken the enemy position by belly crawling thru the grass.  They would have been totally invisible.  Instead they all stand up, start running forward into enemy fire, and all get shot for their pains.  
   Another down check, we never learn the names of any of the characters.  They probably give names once or twice, but not often enough or clear enough for this couch potato to catch 'em.  The movie shows Guadalcanal as a tropical South Pacific paradise with brown skinned native girls, colorful parrots, dugout canoes and grass huts.  No one who fought on Guadalcanal had anything good to say for the place.  All the letters home and memoirs talk about is heat, mud, bugs, enemies, snakes, booby traps, and artillery barrages, a genuine hell hole, not Bali Hai from the musical South Pacific.
The purpose of a war movie is to show a protagonist thrown into a dreadful situation, have him master the situation somehow, and learn from it and grow a bit.  Nothing like that happens.  We don't even have the satisfaction of seeing the more obnoxious characters take a bullet.
Bad flick.  We turned it off three quarters of the way thru to watch the Great Debate. 

So I stayed up for the Great Debate

Well, it went off.  Nobody imploded on stage.  Romney looked and sounded good.  Jim Lehrer moderated and just asked the questions and then let the candidates speak to them, which is good.  No new ideas were presented.  But they did speak to the issue, the economy, and kept the discussion on an adult level, and didn't wander off into trivialities. 
Good show.
We will see if it influences the polls.

Air Strikes won't work says Aviation Week

Long illustrated article discusses the Iranian situation in depth.  The writers conclude that the Iranian nuclear facilities are too deeply buried to be damaged by bombing.  Even by USAF, let alone the Israeli Air Force. Unless nukes were used.  USAF won't use nukes and we are pretty sure the Israelis won't either.  The article did say that the Stuxnet computer virus slowed the Iranians down by five years, but that won't work again the article says.  The Iranians are constructing a secure network and taking their computers off the public Internet. 
  Of course, Stuxnet wasn't spread via the Internet.  Stuxnet was put on flash drives, and they scattered a few infected flash drives around the parking lots outside Iranian nuclear facilities.  Sharp eyed workers would spot the flashdrives lying on the asphalt, pick them up and take them in to their cubicles.  When they plugged them into their computers, Stuxnet would load itself into RAM and go to work.  No Internet access required for infection.

Frank and Robot, Depressing movie

Youngest son dragged me over to the Colonial to see this flick last night.  Frank, retired old codger, has grown children who worry about his health.  Frank has been letting things go, like the dishes, hair cuts, picking up, housework in general.  It's unattractive. 
  So the children buy Frank a household robot.  It cleans and cooks and sweeps and urges Frank to eat healthy and go on low sodium diets and yadda yadda.  Somehow Frank, wily old codger who used to be a cat burglar, talks the gullible robot into becoming his assistant on a few burglary jobs around the town.  "Just to keep his hand in". 
  It's cute, and there are some good lines, but speaking as a guy approaching old codgerhood, I found it depressing.  Frank is at end of life, alone, with nothing to do.  His children are unattractive, deeply into trendy unproductivenesses, and no grandchildren.  It's so bad that Frank develops a father-son relationship with the robot. 
   Depressing movie. 

What is it with Democrats and Tax Hikes?

Democrats want tax hikes.  It's their holy grail.  Obama keeps talking about the need for more taxes.  ("a balanced approach") So do Anne Kuster, Maggie Hassan, NHPR, and Carol Shea Porter.  David Gregory offered a 10 for one deal, "For each dollar of tax hike you Republicans give us, we will give you 9 dollars of spending cuts."  Real bipartisan that is.
   As far as Democrats are concerned, original sin is refusal to hike taxes.  They beat on Republicans about this all the time.
   And the electorate must have some kinda death wish, they keep on electing democrats. 

Refrigerator patents

According to the Wall St Journal, Whirlpool and LG settled their patent suits over household refrigerators yesterday.  Wow.  The household refrigerator was invented a hundred years ago.  You would think the patents had expired by now.  Ingenious lawyers, aided and abetted by the ever helpful US Patent Office, have managed to bill yet more hours over trivia. 
  The last go round was over "the concept of a refrigerator dispenser with an extendable tray and water spigot".  And that idea really really deserved a patent because it was not obvious to any housewife, let alone someone "skilled in the art".
   We could get the economy moving again except every time someone puts a product on the market they get sued by patent trolls.  There is nothing new about refrigerators.

Leaf Season

Leaves beginning to turn in Crawford Notch (just north of North Conway).  Took this pix on Thursday. 

Overtaxed by Polls

Just finished watching Meet the Press, with David Gregory.  He and his guests talked about little else than polls.  Polls that say Obama is winning.  Depressing stuff, except that the good polls, Rasmussen and Gallup, say it's a tie. 
   Thing about polls, is that you gotta weight them.  If you do telephone polling (and all of 'em do) you quickly find out that people who answer their home phones in daytime are mostly retired elderly.  Every one else is at work.  And everyone knows that the retired elderly are conservative and vote Republican.  So they weight the results by what they think the population truly is.  If the pollster thinks the population is 41% Democratic to 34% Republican, he throws out  excess Republican polls until he gets  down to 41% Democrat and 34% Republican.  And so on for what ever other categories ( age, income, whatever) that the pollster wants to correct for. 
   The better pollsters, the ones with a reputation for accuracy that they want to protect,  are pretty good at weighting.  Rasmussen brags that his polls came out within 1% of the actual election results in 2010.  On the other hand, plenty of polls commissioned by politicians and newspapers come out the way the politician or newspaper wants them to.  Pollsters who merely want to get paid, will produce the results their customer wants.  The customer is always right.
    When I see a headline "Some and so is ahead in the polls by 1%" I know the newsie is flimflamming me.  The polls ain't that good.  When it's within 1%, it's a dead heat, no matter what David Gregory calls it.  It's gotta be more like 5 %, and it's gotta stay there for more than a day before I'm gonna believe it's in the bag for anyone.    
  So I look at the Rasmussen and Gallup websites from time to time, and ignore the newsie's poll chatter.
  
  

Peak Leaf Season

It's coming.  Drove over Crawford Notch the other day and a lot of trees have turned.  I still have some green left around the house, and I am pretty high up, so my trees turn a bit earlier than most.  It's pretty colorful already.  I figure by next weekend it will be slightly past peak.

Who makes the most airliners?

Answer, the US and Europe.  The Russians are just about out of the business.  Aeroflot buys western aircraft now.  From Aviation Week we have a few projections of production thru 2021.

Boeing 787     1300 units
Boeing 737     4799 units
Boeing 777     917 units

Airbus 320      5346  units
Airbus 350      817  units

Antonov An148   143 units
Ilyushin  IL-96      12 units
Irkut  MS-21       123 units

Boeing and Airbus plan to crank out thousands of aircraft, where as the Russians are looking at a few hundred aircraft, barely enough to keep their companies alive.

Official Microsoft Antivirus

Microsoft Security Essentials it calls itself.  Came free via Microsoft update.  So I ran it in "full scan mode" overnight.  It reported that it checked 1.8 million things on my hard drive and found seven "threats", all with the name of Java something-or-other.  Upon command it zapped all seven "threats".  It didn't call out tracking cookies as hostile which is nice and keeps blood pressure low among us users.
   My PC survived the experience, so here we have a nice free antivirus scanner.

What's in a name?

In Libya a US consulate was attacked, burned and looted.  The US ambassador and three other Americans were slain. In the real world, this is called an outrage.
   The Obama world has tried to call it a "protest" and "a bump in the road".   Recently they have called it "terrorism".   The TV news is now filled with talking heads discussing "terrorism".   It seems that the exact nomenclature used is full of deep inner meaning offering a clue as to the administration's true thoughts.
  Yeah, right.

Debi Warner for NH State Senate District 1

District 1,  my district is the north country.  All of Coos county right up to the Canadian border, and most of Grafton county.  The senate seat is open, John Gallus, the incumbent, is retiring this year.  Debi Warner of Littleton is running for the seat.  Debi is a personal friend of mine.  She is a fine person, caring, intelligent, and with a superior ability to listen to people.  She is very effective, and has already lobbied a bill thru the state legislature to make your medical records private, and prevent the Attorney General's office from requisitioning them when ever they felt like it.
   We should elect Debi.  She would be a most effective voice for us in the North Country.  To accomplish anything we have to get a majority in the Senate to vote in favor of it.  Debi is a wonderful advocate, able to bring others around to her point of view without baring teeth.  When we need something from Concord, Debi is the best person to get it for us. 

Food fights

First I hear about an epidemic of obesity  among children.  That has been hot for some time.  Then over the weekend  I hear that school children don't like the new healthy school lunches.  Well, no kid has ever had a good thing to say about school food.  Then  we have been hearing about humungous numbers of people going on food stamps.
  Now, this morning, Vermont Public Radio is bewailing the onset of wide spread hunger in Vermont.  A Green Mountain Famine as it were.
Can all this be true at the same time?
 

Home invasion. Chipmunks

It was a fine warm sunny day.  Working on the bathroom, going in and out, we left the door open for a while.  Thinking that Stupid Beast, pictured here, would be on guard.
Not a chance.  Turned around and there was a chipmunk, in the kitchen, checking out the cat's dish.  I guess chipmunks are OK with catfood.
Stupid Beast just sat there, chipmunk in plain sight, and did nothing. 
Unworthy of the name of cat.

Tax Hikes

I'm watching Meet the Press, my usual Sunday morning fair.  They get to the talking head part of the show and I hear the democratic mayor of Atlanta, GA say "We cannot have a budget deal without a revenue increase."
In other words, I want a tax hike no matter what.  And I don't want to cut anything.  Just jack up the taxes to meet the bills.

The bathroom tile project moves forward.

In the top photo we have the rotted studs and window sill removed and replaced with fresh new 2 by 4s. 

Next we have installed insulation. Extruded foam board, a two inch piece and a one inch piece to completely fill the space between the 2 by 4 studs.  The foam board is held in lace with just friction, no glue.  This bit of exterior wall is now the best insulated wall in the house.

 And here we have the concrete board (Hardiebacker) up. The fit is pretty good if I do say so my self. 

And finally, the tile goes up.  Had to buy a carbide hole saw to cut the holes for the pipes.  Rented a tile saw to cut the fractional tile pieces. 

Still to do.  Grout the tile and make a new window casing.  We started this job on Monday and got the tile up on Friday. 

Actually, they hate our guts.

The Obama administration has been attempting to blame that anti- Islam movie for the violence against US embassies and the slaying of a US ambassador.  Why?
  Could the real reason be, that they just plain hate our guts? And the movie has nothing to do with it?  Which is an uncomfortable thought for any American, be they leftists or rightists. 
   To avoid such uncomfortable thoughts, the administration is peddling the idea that it's all the fault of some nasty hate thought thinking California movie makers.  Just suppress all such thought crimes and the world will be a better place.  And Republicans will stop asking inconvenient questions about US foreign policy.

Things you learn tiling bathrooms

Putting up the backer board for the new tile.  In the old days they used plain old drywall, but, when a leak in the tile lets water thru the tile and into the drywall, it becomes wetwall and just dissolves.   This job is being done with state-of-the-art  Hardiebacker pure concrete board.  It's so waterproof you can immerse it in water for 20 years without trouble. 
  Being pure concrete, how do you cut it?  Two ways.  Score it with a box cutter knife and snap it.  Or cut it with a diamond blade in a skilsaw.  Score and snap is the way to go for most cuts.  For real thin cuts, you gotta use the saw.  Seven inch diamond blade was cheaper than you might think, only $13 at the local Big Box.  Use the skilsaw out of doors, it makes a dense cloud of cement saw dust that is nasty stuff to clean up.  Bad for the lungs too.    Holes for pipes get cut with an ordinary hole saw in an electric drill. 

Battle Cry, Movie based upon Leon Uris Novel

It's in Technicolor, it's made in 1955.  I rented it largely to see how things came out.  I started reading the novel way back when (grade school) and the folks objected and made the paperback disappear.  They figured I might learn bad language or something.  Anyhow I thought the flick would be a quick answer to "how-it-comes-out" for a book I never finished in childhood.
  It's the standard WWII movie, we follow the men leaving home, doing boot camp, and into combat.  Trouble is, the flick is just one long, long soap opera centering upon the love lives of our heroes.  They fall in love, some of 'em get married, others get Dear Johnned.  The romantic entanglements are right out of "Days of our Lives" or any other TV soap.  We the audience can guess how it's going to turn out long before anything happens on screen.
   They do get into combat.  We see they marching in formation down the dock to board ship.  And after a very brief and bloodless fight, they are back on board ship heading back to New Zealand to pick up the romances where they left off. 

Bathroom Tile Project

 The bathroom.  The tile around the shower had been getting soft for years.  Two or three go rounds with silicone bathtub caulk hadn't done much.  Crud and water was dripping downstairs.  Time to do some thing about it.
  Step A is getting the old tile out.  This is youngest son, Jonathan, going at it
This is the original tile that came with the house in 1962.  The insulation batts are fiberglass and original too.  They are in fair shape considering their age and the water that has leaked onto them over the years.
 

 Water leaking behind the tile has done a number on the studs.  We flushed out a big carpenter ant's nest when we pulled out the last piece of soggy dry wall.  Concrete board or blue board hadn't been inventing in 1962, the tile was laid on plain old paper covered drywall. 
  When the ant's were discovered, I handed Jon a can of bug bomb.  "But this says for flying insects" he objected.   "Give it to 'em anyhow."
And the ants curled up and died in a very satisfactory fashion.

Whacking old tile. 

Hummingbird Feeder

Hummingbird Feeder. End of Season 

This plant was hung up to dry in June. It gets a quart of water every day (except rainy days) and that's all. It brings in hummingbirds every day. The season, for both plants and hummingbirds, is just about over now. But Plant has been fun to have.  I'll probably get another one for next summer.

Sunday Pundits

Good old David Gregory on Meet the Press.  He is interviewing Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel.  Gregory asks Netanyahu "Aren't you trying to interfere in US elections when you advocate establishing "red lines" for Iran?" 
   Netanyahu politely changes the subject.
Gregory then asks "Don't you think Mitt Romney would make a better president than Obama?"
   Netanyahu politely changes the subject.
Gregory then asks  "Didn't Obama throw Israel under the bus?"
   Netanyahu politely changes the subject.
Far as I am concerned, Gregory was baiting the Israeli Prime Minister, hoping he would say something damaging to Israel on American TV.  Netanyahu is old enough and wise enough to avoid sticking his foot in his mouth, but it was not a friendly interview.  And Gregory is not a trustworthy newsman.  He is partisan, out grinding his axes.  Apparently Gregory is on an anti Semitic kick this Sunday.

Making Trouble

According to the Wall St Journal:
"In Eqypt, some journalists translated some of the footage into Arabic and broadcast it on national television. Several popular preachers in conservative Islamic channels urged people to turn out Tuesday at the US Embassy in Cairo, protestors there said."

   In other words, some Egyptians decided to stir up trouble by dredging an inflammatory bit of film off the Internet and playing it on Egyptian TV.  They got themselves a fine peck of trouble.  For cheap. 

Retaliation

I'd like some.  Burning American consulates and killing American ambassadors just frosts me.
Trouble is, I don't see anyone worth retaliating against.
We have fifty to a hundred thugs who did the actual assault.  We have maybe the same number of Arab mayors, police chiefs, and infantry officers who failed to disperse the mobs, either thru malice or incompetence.  We have the entire population of the country who didn't participate, but who like the idea of kicking Americans.  We have brand new national governments who probably didn't know this was going down and would have stopped it if they had known it was coming.
   Somehow it doesn't feel right to go to war against a third world country over the vicious acts of a very few mutants.  

Dead Cat Bounce, Rasmussen

That terrible bounce in Obama's poll standing, the one that had the Internet wailing and gnashing its teeth?  Well, it's gone.  Looking at the Rasmussen presidential tracking poll we see the bounce is flat.  Obama popped up a few percent, and then dropped right back down.  It's 46-45 Obama's favor this morning.  Which is dead even, a tie, in the real world.  The Rasmussen poll has a good track record. 

Words of the Weasel Part 30

Protest.  A mob in Benghasi burns the US consulate and kills four Americans including the US ambassador.  NHPR called this outrage a PROTEST. 
We used to call this sort of thing  an act of war.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Spaghetti Western Supreme. With Parmesan cheese.  It came out after Clint Eastwood's "Fistful of Dollars" and clearly borrowed from that flick.  It has some top flight actors, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robards.  It has pretty much every cliche there ever was.  It moves incredibly slowly.  In the final showdown gunfight between Fonda and Bronson, it takes a good five minutes of flashbacks and closeups before they draw the six guns.  It takes Fonda another five minutes of writhing to die after Bronson plugs him. Plot is confusing.  New bad guys keep turning up, dressed just like the bad guys that just got gunned down, are they returned from the dead or what? We keep encountering scenes of massive violence AFTER it has been done and no clue as to who did it. 
   Claudia Cardinale is knock out cute, even fully dressed is high Victorian style.  The guys are all super scruffy and unshaven, it's hard to visualize any chick wanting to come within fifty feet of any of them. 
   This flick has it's fans on the 'Net who call it the best Western ever made.  I don't agree.  High Noon it ain't.

Primary Day, Poll Standing

It's primary day in New Hampshire.  This is the real state primary where we pick candidates for every office except the presidency.  Polls open at 8 in Franconia.  The alarm clock sounded at 7.  I had time to make a thermos of coffee, put the sign poles in the car, put on Smart wool socks and a sweater, and drive to the polls.  Fall is coming, it got down close to freezing last night.  It was still well below 60 at 8 AM and the warm clothing felt good.
   At 8 AM we had me, the Cumbee's and one lone democrat who I don't know, standing outside town hall.  We had a decent flow of voters in the morning.  Not bad for a primary, even in a presidential year.  I took a mid day break and plan to go back and cover the evening rush.
   In actual fact, we ought to hold the primary earlier.  Primary winners have too little time to campaign and mend fences with the losers before the election hits. 

Get the Economy growing again

A short list of things that could be done immediately.
1.  Start building the Keystone XL pipeline.  Running pipe from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico is a big project that will employ a lot of people, use a lot supplies, and keep a lot of heavy machinery gainfully employed.  Once operational, it will lower fuel prices, and attract new industry.  And it's all privately funded.
2.  Repeal Obamacare.  Employers have no idea how expensive new employees health care will be, so they don't hire.
3.  Abolish the SEC.  It was created after Great Depression 1.0 to prevent a recurrence of same.  It has obviously failed, we have Great Depression 2.0, so what ever the SEC has been doing all these years didn't work.  But they do make it harder to do business.  So get rid of 'em.
4.  Approve drilling permits, in the Gulf, in ANWR, off the Atlantic coast, off the Pacific coast, everywhere.
5.  Abolish CAFE.  There is plenty of market pressure on Detroit to raise fuel economy.  We don't need laws. Plus the latest 55 mpg requirements are fantasy,  no car can do that well. Either the Feds will give selected (UAW and democrat) companies a waiver, or everyone will drive used cars, like in Cuba.
6. Pass a tax law that runs for at least five years.  Taxes are a major cost of businesses.  Unless business knows what the tax rate is going to be into the future, they don't know if the business will make money.  If they don't know that it will make money, they don't start that business.  

Romney might do some of these things.  Obama won't.

The Feds have to approve State Voter ID laws

Dunno how this happened.  Running elections used to be a State concern.  But the Feds OK'd the New Hampshire voter ID law and rejected Pennsylvania's.   We New Hampsters must have some in with the Feds that PA lacks. 

Bad ideas never die, Parti Quebecois rises again

Founded in 1968, Parti Quebecois (PQ) has stood for Quebec's secession from Canada and setting itself up as an independent country. They held a referendum in 1980, which failed, and they tried a second time in 1995 which nearly won.  Parti Quebecois garnered 49.6% of the vote.  Just another fraction of a percent and they would have won, and the separation process would have been launched.
   After the 1995 referendum all outside observers (Americans) figured Canada was toast. They expected the PQ to go back, do some more organizing, hold another referendum, and win it.  Somehow, that never happened.  The third referendum was never held, and the PQ simmered down to being the provincial government of Quebec.  Probably the election of Pierre Trudeau to the premiership of Canada had something to do with it.  Quebecois figured a premier with a French name couldn't be all bad.  Anyhow the Quebec separation issue died down and little has been heard of it since the '90s.
  It's back.  Quebec held elections and PQ won.  Not quite enough to form a pure PQ provincial government, they will have to cut a deal the either the Liberal party or the Coalition Avenir Quebec to form a coalition government.  But, it's a big step up for PQ  from the last election.
  Just to start things off with a bang, a gunman showed up at the PQ victory party and shot two people, one fatally, and set fire to the building. We can expect more fireworks in the future.
   Speaking as an American, whose lights are lit by Quebec Hydro, and whose family came from Montreal, I'm not in favor of Quebec separatism.