Words of the Weasel Part 41

"Progressive".  That's what liberals now call themselves since liberal has become a bad word.

The Mystique of America vs that of ISIS

ISIS has a strong mystique, strong enough to get young people from Europe and even America to travel to Syria and take up arms with them.  Strong enough to get a couple of fanatics in San Bernardino to shoot down 14 of their co workers in cold blood and then die in a gun battle with police. 
   Well, America has a strong mystique too. America where the streets are paved with gold. America from where hot pop music comes from. America land of the Hollywood movie and the Wild West. America the land of fine big powerful cars and flawless thruways.  America where obstacles are over come with miraculous new technology.  America that flies to the Moon. America where all men are created equal. America where any man can become rich.  America which has millions of people yearning to get in.  America which has taken in millions of immigrants over the last century and turned them into hardworking loyal citizens.
   I'll bet that we can take in 10,000  or even more Syrian refugees, settle them, employ them, and turn them into hardworking loyal citizens just like we have done with millions of immigrants in the past.  Even if a few ISIS crazies slip in with them, the bulk of them will buy into America, and tip the cops off to any terrorists hiding in their midst. 
   It's worked before, and I bet it will work again. 
  

Strategy, as opposed to tactics.

Strategy is the highest level of planning and directing a war.  Tactics is concerned with how to win an engagement with the enemy.  For instance, at the Casablanca conference in WWII, President Roosevelt announced that the allied war aim was "Unconditional Surrender".  That was strategic.  It surprised our allies the British, and it shocked the German enemy.  But it told the American voters, whose unflinching support for the war was essential, that the administration was not fooling around, and that we would not settle for the sort of half measures that followed WWI.  Other strategic decisions of WWII were the decision to do Germany first, and the decision to invade North Africa. 
    Tactical decisions, are of a lower level.  For instance, George Washington when he crossed the Delaware, fearing that his colonial militiamen might not be able to stand up to Hessian regulars, brought eighteen guns across the river with his infantry.  When battle was joined  American artillery superiority quickly decided things.  That is an example of a tactical decision. 
   By my way of thinking, current day discussions about boots on the ground, is a tactical discussion, it is not strategic.  The strategic discussion, which we have not had,  is what should we do about ISIS and middle east insurgency under any name they select.  We could ignore them and hope they go away or die out. We could embargo them, cut off their oil sales, access to the banking system, commercial air transport, and all imports.  We could bomb them, either lightly, or back to stone age.  We could infiltrate political operatives, or a modern day Lawrence of Arabia, and attempt to raise a revolution against ISIS.  We could invade and occupy the ISIS lands.  Or some other option that has not occured to me.  These are strategic issues. 
   Whether to deploy American troops is a tactical decision.  I only see American troops necessary if we decide to invade and occupy the ISIS lands.  The lesser strategic options could be done without US troops.
   Our country would be better off by first deciding upon a strategy, rounding up the political support for the  strategy, and executing it.  So far, nobody, Obama, the media, the Congress, the pundits, not even Rush Limbaugh, has said a word about strategy. We don't have one.   

Adventures in Oven Cleaning

I put the evil day off as long as possible.  But with all the children coming home for Christmas I wanted to show the kids that the old man was capable of keeping a decent house and enjoying his retirement.  So I started at 11 AM.  Didn't finish till 4 PM.  Arrgh.
   Cleaning this oven is not for the faint hearted.  It needs spintites, pliers, a trouble light, in addition to Easy Off, Brillo, lots of old newpapers to mop up the sludge, a sacrificial sponge. This oven has a heating element floating on spacers an inch above the oven floor.  I's gotta come out if you want to get the bottom of the oven clean.  Takes spintites to get it loose.  This time there was a scary zorch as I pulled the heating element out.  That didn't happen last time.  So I tripped gaily down to the cellar and pulled the two forty amp stove breakers.
    Lotta Easy Off.  Give it an hour to bite into the crud.   Mop up with old newspapers, then give it a shot of FantasTic and wipe down with a sponge that you will never use again. Uggh.  Easy Off the broiler, the burner pans, the oven grilles.
   It's done.  I pushed the oven breakers in.  Haven't had the guts to turn the stove on yet.
Arrrgh.
   Post script.  Stove works, but there is a POWERFUL odor of Easy Off when the oven heats up.  Hopefully that will fade away with time. 

Feudalism and the Stirrup thesis

This is a thesis in medieval history.  The stirrup, invented somewhere out east, India perhaps, the steppes perhaps, came to Western Europe in the 700's.  We have contemporary painting, carvings and such, some show riders without stirrups, some show riders with stirrups.  Which makes us think the stirrup came into wide spread use after 700AD and before 800AD. 
   In case you have never ridden a horse, I can tell you that stirrups on your saddle make all the difference in the world.  With stirrups your seat is firm, firm enough to rope cows and drag them to a halt, firm enough to wield a sword, and especially firm enough to couch a lance, and stay on your horse after you hit the other guy.  Without stirrups you are riding bareback, and all the rider's attention is devoted to staying on the horse.  Wielding edged weapons or even shooting arrows bareback is just not practical. 
   Which is why cavalry was a minor force, used mostly for scouting up until the time of Charlemagne.  Charlemagne's cavalry were the first equipped with stirrups, and they conquered all of Western Europe.  Armored cavalry dominated European warfare up until the infantry were issued muskets sometime in the 1500's.  Frankish knights on the First Crusade easily swept Muslim opponents from the field.  When the Franks lowered their lances and spurred their horses into a charge, look out, nothing could stop them.
   Armored cavalry are far more expensive to equip than infantry.  The horse is costly, so is the armor, and other gear. So expensive that  the land of Western Europe was divided into fiefs, each big enough to support a cavalry man, who was planted  on the land as a nobleman.  Which lead to the nobility of Europe, who called the shots and ran things up until the French revolution, and in some countries far later.  This was called the feudal system.
   The feudal system was standard thinking among medieval historians, until the  1970's.  They were teaching it to my daughter at John's Hopkins only a few years ago. 
   Now the bulk of medievalists no longer believe in the feudal explanation of European history.  They have a new thesis, which I do not understand, but they are all very set on it.
   And so, on a medieval history mailing list, we have the following topic getting discussed, "Can educators really affect willful ignorance?"  The gist of this thread is plenty of students come into the class believing in feudalism as a thesis, and still believe in it at the end of the class.  Teaching of the alternate thesis doesn't take.  And this is just dreadful.  I'd be more sympathetic if I even knew the name of the alternate thesis, even more if I had read a good explanation of it, in a hard back book.  I'm a history buff, and had such a book come to my attention I would have read it.  

I hate push buttons. Let me have controls I can feel in the dark

New car can be annoying that way.  The radio, black push buttons on a black panel is a prime example.  The markings on the push buttons are faint, don't glow bright enough in the dark,  and many of 'em lead to menus going a couple of levels deep.  Which are unreadable in the dark.  Working the radio is so difficult that Buick installed a complete second set of radio controls on the steering wheel.  The steering wheel buttons have larger legends than the on ones on the radio.
   In real cars, headlamps were controled by a real knob on the dash, a knob you could feel for in the dark.  Pull it full out and headlamps came on.  Push it halfway in and parking lamps come one.  Twist it to adjust the brightness of the dash board indicators. 
   In this car, they give you two small buttons next to each other.  No legends, just some obscure icons, a gear wheel is headlamps, a wispy looking P with branches growing out of it is parking lamps.  You can't feel for them, you have to take your eyes off the road and look at the dash should you want to turn headlamps on.  Dash board brightness is a slider, next to another slider, which looks just the same as the first slider.  Quick, is it the left hand or the right hand slider that dims the dash?
   This car has four real gauges that are perfectly readable.  Tach (you really need a tach on a slush box car) speedo, gas, and temperature.  Everything else, oil pressure, battery voltage, regular odometer, two trip odometers, gas mileage, oil life, tire pressure, all comes up on ONE dim LED display.  You get a set of four push buttons to select which parameter gets shown on the single hard to read digital display. 

Free Speech. It's Wonderful

So I'm driving home from DC, passing thru NYC.  Signal seek on the car radio gets me a nice strong NYC FM station, which is running a "Vaccines cause Autism" talk.  The speaker is smooth,  cites examples and studies, and if you hadn't heard a lot of respectable websites and newspapers saying the opposite, you might be taken in.  Or if you are a committed anti-vaxer this stuff is music to your ears. 
   So I punch signal seek again.  The next station is doing a long talk about how Hollywood is being mean to Muslims by not giving them heroic parts in the movies.  Where as just the day before I had been thinking to myself that we need a few good comedy movies making fun of ISIS. 
  This is not some benighted backwater in the rural South, this is New York City, supposedly the capital of right think in the United States. 

Feeling the Bern

NHPR gave Bernie Sanders a good long interview on the radio this morning.  Let's see here.  Bernie said he had two litmus tests for any Supreme Court nomination.  The nominee must be against the Heller decision (campaign finance) and for Row vs Wade (abortion).  And the nominee must believe in the Constitution as a "living document", which is a code word for bending the law to support your politics.  Bernie than ranted on about rich people buying elections via campaign contributions.  He didn't mention that George Soros puts five times as much money behind Democrats as the Koch brothers put behind Republicans. 
   Bernie came out four square for a $15 minimum wage.  And free health care for all.  He didn't mention that a $15 minimum wage locks teenagers out of the labor market.  Unions like that.  I don't.  Then he went on about income inequality, a terrible thing Bernie opined.  He never did mention that  people on unemployment widen income inequality.  He never did say anything about getting the US economy growing again, which would do good things for income inequality.  Bernie doesn't seem to understand that private enterprise creates all the wealth in the country, wealth to feed, house, clothe, employ, doctor, defend, and educate our citizens.  One of government's jobs is to encourage private enterprise so it will spread its benefits over the land.  Our population grows every year.  If our economy doesn't grow to match it, everyone gets poorer.
   Bernie didn't say anything coherent about ISIS.  He was real firm about no US boots on the ground, but other than that, he had no plan to destroy ISIS. 
   I'm voting in the Republican primary.

You can't keep 'em out, ya gotta catch 'em

The United States has a 3000 mile long northern land border.  A great deal of it runs thru primeval forest, un roaded, un settled, un patrolled.  Anyone can hike across the border for little more than a decent pair of boots.  We have two long coasts, 2000-3000 miles each.  Each coast is covered with harbors, ports, boat launch ramps, marinas, gas docks, shore restaurants, you name it.  Come in from the sea in a small craft and you are just another fisherman or sailor, or boater coming in at end of day.  No papers needed.  It doesn't take much cash to rent a slip at a marina to leave the boat.  Light aircraft can fly across the border and land at any of thousands of tiny town airports, the kind that doesn't even man the tower, let alone a customs and immigration post.  So, the terrorists who want in, can get in, even if they don't have the paperwork to fly in by commercial airline.  And, we cannot subject every tourist to the sort of background investigation that we use on personnel cleared to handle nuclear weapons.  It just costs too much. 
   So anyone from a reasonable country, a place like France or Germany or Britain, who has a passport, can just fly over here.  And people from crazy places like Syria, there is little a US passport agent can do other than interview the traveler and take a hard look at his/her passport, make sure the picture matches the face in front of him, look for signs of forgery.   Sometimes that works and some times it doesn't.
    We have to catch them here.  That takes tips to the cops, wiretaps (or the internet equivalent thereof), and checks for papers (aka stop and frisk) as often as legally permissible.  The cops would get more tips if they were more careful about gunning down innocent citizens.  And us loyal citizens ought to make it a point to always have some ID on us.  

We need more concealed carry, not more gun control

Had anyone been carrying at San Bernardino they could have shot both terrorists long before they killed 14 people and wounded 21.  Far as I am concerned one answer to terrorist shooters (and any other kind of shooter) is to have a gun on you, and return fire.   The other answer is to have enough intelligence to detect and arrest them before they strike.
   Speaking of which, the TV news this morning claims the San Bernardino shooter was in contact with "a known ISIS recruiter" located in Minnesota.  My question is, why is a "known ISIS recruiter" running around loose?  He ought to be in jail, ASAP.  Why wasn't he? 

Strange things about San Bernadino massacre

The shooters don't appear to be nutcases, they seemed to have a rational plan to do a lot of killing.  Unlike the school shooters who appear to be taking out their personal mental hangups on innocent bystanders. 
     They say the man, Farook, was an employee of the department doing the Christmas party, that he attended the party and left early.  So he drove back to his house, changed into tactical garb, picked up his wife, picked up rifles and pistols, drove back to the party and started shooting.  How far away from the party site was the shooter's house?  How long to drive to and fro?  Seems odd.
    The shooters had a plan to hit the party, but their get away plan didn't work so well.  Seems like they left the shooting site and went home, and were still at home when the cops turned up a few hours later to check things out.  Why did they not immediately put that SUV on the road heading out of state at 65 mph? 
    Why such a low profile target?  They could have hit a church congregation, a sporting event, a mall, a government facility,  an airport, lots of high profile stuff. 
    From what I see on TV, it looks like the wife might be the real terrorist who radicalized her fairly new husband.  They had a child, so there must have been some feeling between them.  Did they really meet on line? Or was the marriage arranged by the families?  Just where do those families stand on the matter of ISIS?
   The cops haven't been telling the newsies much, probably 'cause the cops don't trust newsies.  Don't blame them, we learned not to trust US newsies way back in Viet Nam.  The word was, don't talk to the press, no matter what you say, they will twist it to make you look bad, make your unit look bad, and make your branch of service look bad.  

Windows 8 forgot the ABC's

Back on the last decent Windows to come out of Redmond, you could right click on your desktop, click on "sort by name" and all your desktop icons would be arranged in alphabetical order.  Convenient.  On this year's Windows 8.Flake  the right click on the desktop is still there, and the "sort by name" is still there, and the icons get moved around when you click on it but they don't get moved into alphabetical order.  In fact the order seems purely random, although repeatable, you get the same strange order each time. 
   Micro$oft managed to spend untold amounts of programming time but all they get is a fatter slower product with broken features.  Stuff that used to work, doesn't anymore.

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

I have four inches of fresh new snow on my deck.  From my deck it is an easy walk to the Peabody slopes chairlifts.  It started snowing sometime before sunrise and is just tapering off now, a little before three in the afternoon.  It's just above freezing, so the snow is heavy and wet, with a bit of cold it will freeze hard making an excellent base.  The wind isn't blowing so the snow fell on the trails and stayed there. 

San Bernadino

The shootings at San Bernadino yesterday were horrible.  My deepest sympathies to the victims and their families. 

Academic Deathwish

Some college student demonstrators are calling for more "ethnic (black) studies" programs.  Talk about self destructive impulses.  Although a black studies course may make blacks feel better about being black, they won't do a bit of good when it comes to finding a job. 

Congress can't just pass a bill anymore

They gotta stick onto a "must pass" bill.  This morning Fox was talking about a bill to offer medical benefits and other stuff to the 9/11 first responders who are said to be having silicosis of the lungs from working in the cloud of cement dust raised up when the Twin Towers fell.   Sounds like a worthy bill.  They ought to just vote it thru.  But, the Fox newsies were taking the Congressional leadership to task because they did not "attach" this bill to the highway bill, and how bills that are not attached to "must pass" legislation don't stand a chance.
   This ain't right.  If the bill is good, Congress ought to pass it.  They shouldn't be playing "You don't get your bill unless I get my bill." games.  That's childish. 

Driving down to Washington

Decided to spend Thanksgiving with daughter and her fairly new husband down in DC.  I drove just to avoid giving TSA a chance to hassle me at the airport.  Had a fine holiday, fine turkey dinner, good time. 
   Daughter owns a house in Washington NE, not far from H St.  The H St trolley project is still sucking taxpayer money after five years.  They have the track laid, the over head wire strung, and the trolley cars running, empty.  After five profitable years for the contractors, they still won't carry passengers, they just run empty trolleys up and down H St.
   The neighbor hood is mostly black.  I was impressed with how nice the neighbors were, friendly, cheerful, helpful, really nice.  Perhaps DC is far enough south that the southern charm is still alive.  
   The car, new to me, even if it is a 2003 Buick, ran like a top all the way down and back.  Burned maybe a half a qt of oil, got 26-27 mpg.  Lot of trucks hauling lots of product over the road.  Even if some of 'em are empties, they wouldn't be on the road unless they were headed somewhere to pick up a load.  So even with Great Depression 2.0 still on, a lotta product is being made, then shipped, and paid for.  The truckers and the bus drivers are still polite and professional.  They stay in lane, they signal, they drive straight, good safe drivers.  I took the scenic route on the way down, crossed the Hudson on the Newburg bridge (60 miles north of Manhattan)  then took old US 202 at Flemington NJ for West Chester PA.   Avoided a pile of tolls.  It's scenic and maybe a couple of hours longer.  On the way back I took the toll route, I95, Delaware Mem. Bridge, I290, Jersey Pike, GW Bridge.  Managed to get off the GW Bridge onto the Henry Hudson Parkway up the west side of Manhattan, nice views of the Hudson.  Picked up the Cross County Parkway to the Hutchinson River Parkway to the  Merritt Parkway, to the Wilbur Cross Parkway, all the way to I91.  made the whole trip, including a quick stop at Mac's Market in Franconia in 9 1/2 hours. 
   

Tis the Season To be Jolly

Yeah, BUT NOT BEFORE THANKSGIVING.
This is the Grinch posting here.  Christmas season, and decorations, and music on the radio should NOT start until AFTER Thanksgiving.
   I know the retailers want to get a jump start on the Christmas selling, but there is a limit.  If you stretch Christmas shopping season all the way back to March, you don't actually sell more stuff, you just spend more time doing the selling. 

Mouse and Mouse pad beats Win8 touchscreen

Taking Flat Beast (my laptop) on the road for the first time.  Some things work good, like Flat Beast detected and logged onto daughter's WIFI router automatically.  Email comes thru and everything.  What with lack of deskspace and such I am working the laptop from the lap.  And I miss the real mouse, which don't work so good on a overstuffed couch.  The built in touch pad is flakey and jumpy, and it lacks left and right buttons to click.  And the whole touchy feelie screen is ineffectual.  The slider thumbnails don't slide under a finger touch, the icons are too small for my full sized fingers, and the whole screen is more touchy flaky than touchy feelie. 
   Tomorrow I drive home, and day after that I can get back to web surfing from a real desk with a real mouse. 

War on Coal presses forward

The US Senate just passed two "resolutions" one disapproving EPA regulation about to be applied to working coal fired power plants, and a second one disappoving EPA regulations of new and modified coal fired power plants. 
   Our noble NH Senators, Shaheen and Ayotte, vote against both resolutions.  Thanks guys.  I'm paying 25 cents a kilowatt hour and you voted to increase the price of my electricity.
   And "resolutions" are pretty weak tea.  You want to get EPA's attention? You cut off their taxpayer funding, all of it.  A "resolution" of disapproval doesn't mean anything. 

Why are drug prices so damn high?

Answer: Because the drug companies spend to damn much on marketing.    The biggies all have armies of salesmen, with sample kits, company cars, and expense accounts.  The salesmen visit every doctor in the land at least once a month.  They take the doctor out to lunch, and they buy pizza for his staff.   At lunch they push their company's line of pills. 
   This is the most expensive way to market a product imaginable.  It works, and if everyone in the industry does it, everyone has to keep up.   Paying all those salesmen takes a big pot of money, and the drug company has to get the money from somewhere.  Guess where it comes from?
   Economical marketing is to merely offer the product on the Web and get some articles placed in the medical trade journals.  A step up from that is to open brick and mortar stores.  The special sales call is as expense as it gets. 
   Not sure what we can do about it, other than taxing it.  Right now, sales expenses are a legitimate business expense and can be deducted from income.   Not sure if I like the idea of the IRS telling companies how much they can spend on various business activities.  Maybe some public interest group could lookup and publicize how much the drug companies spend pushing drugs to doctors.

Lion's Gate disappointed in box office for Hunger Games Part II

Wall St Journal had this.  The opening weekend box office was $101 million, the lowest of any of the Hunger Games movies.  The was in the Business & Tech section which just writes about money matters. 
   Funny, they didn't say a word about the quality of  Hunger Games Part 1.  It was nothing like as good as the first one back in 2012. And I'm pretty sure every fan who went to Part I was disappointed as well, especially as the first one was one of the best movies Hollywood released that year.   So naturally the box office is down.  Make a poor movie and you don't make as much money.