NHPR calls president Trump crazy.

Just this morning I heard this.  On FM radio.  To cloak their position, NHPR  said they were  quoting a Democratic Congressman from California.  "California" is a land of fruits and nuts, "Democratic" is a party of lefty greenies, neither adjective lends credence to the Congressman's words. They did mention the Congressman's name (once) but I didn't catch it. 
   Congressman didn't right out call the president crazy, instead he spoke in psycho-babble, but I have been hearing psycho-babble for years and years and know how to understand it.  He was calling president Trump crazy.
   Which is an extreme thing to say about an elected US president. 
   It's also pretty extreme for NHPR to carry the story.

NHPR quoting UNH. There is no electricity shortage in NH

Heard on my clock radio this morning.  A UNH study claims that we don't need to bring down the NH electric rate in order to grow business.  They made the further claim that NH electric rates were no worse than the national average.  And we didn't need more pipelines to bring in natural gas.
  The greenies love this kind of "stuff". 
  Pure poppycock.  My residential electric rate is 25 cents a kilowatt-hour, the nation average is 10 cents a kilowatt hour.  Lack of gas pipeline capacity causes radical prices spikes in the cost of natural gas.  Which in addition to ripping off those who heat with natural gas, causes price spikes in electric rates, because most electricity is generated by natural gas. When natural gas prices go crazy in a cold January, the electric rates do the same.
   Did UNH actually run this study?  Or did NHPR misquote them?  Who knows? Both groups have enough greenies in them, to support any amount of  greenie propaganda.  
   But that was this morning's news on FM radio.   

I taped over the camera on my laptop

I did it a year ago or more.  After seeing posts about some PA school that was spying the their students, via school supplied laptops, I put a square of masking tape on the camera lens of my laptop.  If I was really serious about it, I would find the microphone and tape that over too.

The "replace" plan is out this morning.

It's ONLY 120 pages, which makes it possible to read, unlike the thousand pages of Obamacare.  I haven't read it myself, so what I am writing here I get off the TV.  The bill keeps the ban on preexisting conditions, and kids up to 26 years old can stay on there parents insurance. 
  It offers "Tax Credits", presumably for buying insurance, possibly for paying medical bills.  If I remember my IRS form 1040, tax credits are better than deductions.  A deduction reduces your taxable income (adjusted gross income) whereas a credit reduces your tax.  For example, a $100 deduction reduces your tax bill by your tax rate times the deduction, usually amounting to $20-$30.  A $100 credit reduces your tax bill by $100.  This is a good idea.  It levels the playing field between most of us, who get our health insurance tax free thru our employers, and the self employed who get no kind of tax break at all. 
   On the other hand, half the population of the country is so low on the economic ladder that they owe no income tax at all.  Tax credits don't do you any good if you don't owe any income tax.  
   The plan fails to allow sale of health insurance across state lines, a measure that would increase competition
 and lower costs.  Everybody except the insurance companies is in favor of interstate sale.  Failing to put it in is a squishy soft cave in to the insurance companies.   Insurance companies don't vote, nobody likes them much, but they have a lot of money to buy Congressmen with.  Looks like they bought themselves a lot of Congressmen on this one.  Congressmen go for cheap this year.
   The bill also fails to require Medicare and Medicaid to bargain with big pharma over drug prices.  Again everybody (even insurance companies)  thinks this is a good idea.  Nobody likes big pharma much and they don't have the vote.  But big pharma  does have money, same general amount as the insurance companies, and they have bought themselves plenty of low priced Congressmen. 
  The bill fails to do anything to reduce the cost of health care, like clamping down on malpractice suits (lawyers like malpractice and nearly all Congressmen are lawyers). It doesn't allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, which would do a lot to lower drug prices.  It doesn't rein in the ever growing FDA requirements for more and more testing of new drugs.  It does nothing to rein in the outrageous marketing expenditures by big pharma. 

The buck stops here

So Obama is claiming that HE never authorized a tap on Trump's phone.  He failed to say that Trump's phone was never tapped, he just said he didn't do it.  Old Harry Truman would not have seen it that way.  If any government agency tapped Trump's phone, then Obambi is responsible, at least as long as he was in office.  There is a report out on TV saying that the rubber stamp FISA court DID issue a warrant to tap Trump's phone.  Nobody has denied that report, yet.  If the report is true, then Trump's charge of wiretapping is true. And Obambi is doing a weasel.    As usual. 
   TV is doing a long song and dance about the FISA court and what it can or cannot do, aimed to showing that the court won't do a wiretap on just the president's sayso.  Since the court meets in secret, the justices are secret, and the records are secret, it can do anything it wants. And probably has.  

Why the Republicans haven't announced a "replace" plan.

It's due out this morning according to the TV.  Democrats have been sniping at it, claiming that the Republicans should have a replace plan already.
   I'm pretty sure that actually the Republicans have a plan.  In fact they must have a dozen plans.  Problem is, they cannot get everyone (or even 51%) to agree on WHICH plan they are going to support.  Health care is a gravy train for patients, doctors, big pharma, insurance companies, hospitals, medical device makers, ambulance drivers, ambulance chasers, state governments.  Health care is 19% of the US GNP, that's a huge amount of money.  With that much gravy the spread around, no wonder everyone wants their fair share, and more if they can get it. 
  To pass anything at all, the Republicans need nearly every single Republican vote.  The Republican margin is thin, and in the Senate, a mere three defectors could sink anything.  I'm thinking that they won't keep their party in line, or even attract a few Democratic defectors, without president Trump getting behind ONE replace option and pushing it hard.  Which he hasn't done yet.

Who knows what a Gryf is?

Good question.  The Economist compared the EU to a triceratops, a big, extinct, dinosaur, generally believed to be a plant eater along the lines of the dinosaurian rhinoceros. Only with more horns up front.  Then they went on to call for conversion of the triceratops into a gryf. 
   So what's a gryf?  Tarzan, on one of his adventures into darkest unexplored Africa, encountered them, and they looked like triceratops (Tarzan even recognize them as such in the book) but they were ferocious man eaters instead of herbivores.  I happened to have read that very Tarzan book as a child.  My summer camp library had a copy.  The book (Tarzan the Terrible) was published back in the 1920's and I never saw it for sale anywhere. It's like really out of print.   
   Anyhow, an Economist writer read the long out of print Tarzan book, and  thought the Edgar Rice Burroughs fictional monster would make a good simile or metaphor in 2017.  Groovy.

Drain the Pentagon Procurement Swamp

Disneyland East we used to call it.  That humongous five sided office building from WWII times, filled with civilian bureaucrats, who soak up a good slice of the military budget themselves, and spend the rest of it.  With a giant 100,000 page set of "procurement regs", containing paragraphs tailored to jack up the price of everything the services buy. 
   We could save a lot of money, at least 10%, maybe 50% of the cost of military procurement, by burning ALL those procurement regulations.  And then fire all the civilian bureaucrats.  For a military budget,of some $600 billion, we are talking saving anywhere between $60 billion and $300 billion.
    Replace those 100,000 pages of cost jackup regs with just a few simple ones.
1.  Always obtain THREE bids for anything, even super high tech weapons systems.  If you cannot get three bidders, do without.
2.  Never do "cost plus" contracts.  Always push for "firm fixed fee" contracts.   Settle for "cost plus fixed fee" contracts only when the product is badly needed and you cannot get firm fixed fee contracts..
3.  Avoid gold plating the specifications.  In all possible cases, procure standard commercial items, using the commercial specifications common to industry.  Make the specifications public for review by possible bidders, bloggers, and the press.  Make the requirements testable features of the completed product, not directives to use over priced mil-spec parts in manufacture. 
 4. And on the subjective side, qualify all bidders.  For instance on an aircraft contract, clearly Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, and Grumman,  are qualified, they have track records of building aircraft going back to before WWII.  Whereas AC/DC Power Supply and Storm Door Company is not qualified, they have never built so much as a toy aircraft, and nobody has ever heard of them.  You cannot give a contract to an unqualified bidder, they will be unlikely to actually deliver the product, but they will most certainly, spend all the money.
  

You gotta call 'em something.

You gotta name the enemy before you can fight him effectively.  Obambi refused to name them and they took over Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and other places.  The Trump administration is calling them radical Islamic terrorists. 
   Democrats and even some Republicans object that the word Islamist makes Muslims worldwide feel we are persecuting them.  Which has some truth to it.  But what else to call them?  In the past, we called enemies by their ideology (Nazi, Commie, Fascist).  Far as I can see, this enemy's ideology IS Islam and so calling them Islamic is fair enough. 
  I suppose we could call them Jehadis.  Except that word doesn't carry enough  juice to be a biting epithet.  Using acronyms, ISIS, ISIL, AQAG, also doesn't seem to cut it.  Using their own names like Al Quaeda suffers when they stop using the name themselves. 
   Perhaps we could call them scumbagies? 

Jeff Sessions schmoozing with the Russians??

The New York Times, a sleezy rag that's been spreading disinformation for 70 years that I know of, quotes an unnamed Justice Dept official the the effect that Jeff Session had two contacts with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.  Sessions has denied the reports.  The TV newsies are going full bore with this story, this morning's Fox News has talked about little else today.
   I got some questions.  1.  When did these alleged contacts occur?  2.  What's wrong with a US Senator talking to anybody, including the Russians?  3.  Sessions was a US Senator until very recently.  How does a Justice Dept official know anything about what a Senator is/was doing?  4. Who is this mysterious Justice Dept official that the Times hangs the story on?  5. Are there any other sources?  Named or anonymous?  6.  Sessions has a pretty good rep for honesty, why should I not believe him over an unnamed source? 

Can we cut the State Department?

Good question.  State has 13000 employees.  It has missions in 172 countries.  That's 75 employees per country.  While 75 employees might be reasonable for a major county like Russia, it is overkill for minor countries like Luxembourg, or Bermuda. 
   In the 21st century, State has two missions that make sense to me.  First to gather intelligence.  There is a lotta useful stuff we can pick up by just reading the local newspapers.  Like who is who in their government, and in the government's opposition.  What are the important industries and businesses?  And who runs them? How does the general population feel about things? Geography, good maps are important, and they remain useful for years.  During WWII North African operations relied on maps made by the US marines fighting the Barbary pirates of old.  All this stuff is important, and gathering it and filing it, is legal. 
  Second is to give aid and succor to US citizens abroad.  Lost or stolen passports, arrest by local authorities, kidnappings,  and Lord knows what else.  As a mid to lower class American, I like to hope that if I get into trouble in a foreign land I can call on the US consul or ambassador for help. 
   And, in this day and age of air travel and world wide instantaneous communications, heavy duty international negotiations are handled out of Washington DC, not by US ambassadors abroad.  In fact president Eisenhower created the National Security Counsel to bypass a State Department that he considered inefficient, and infiltrated by communist agents like Alger Hiss.
  So, if we allowed 20 state department employees per country, that yields a headcount of 5120, a helova lot less than the 13000 bodies they have warming chairs today.  If we figure each state department bureaucrat costs $100K a year,  than laying off 7840 of 'em would save $784 million a year.  That's not quite real money in DC speak, but it's still a useful piece of change.

Game of Thrones, Season 6

I'm three DVDs into it and it loosing its cool for me.   The TV miniseries has run off the end of the George R.R. Martin books, which are decent and I have read them all.  Now that the TV is running it's own course, independent of the books, I am loosing track of what's going on.  The show's habit of never calling anyone by name makes things tougher.  An actor will appear on screen, I will say to myself "This guy was in the show a while ago, but I cannot remember his/her name or what he did."  Not knowing frustrates this viewer of the show.
   Then things don't seem to ever get anywhere.  Denarys is still leading the Dothraki toward invading Westeros.  In six whole seasons she hasn't been able to get her Dothraki to the seashore, let alone boarding ship for Westeros.  Arya is still wandering around looking for something to do.  Brendan is still a paraplegic having visions that don't lead anywhere. 
   Then they killed off so many characters over the past seasons that they have decided to bring some back to life, by witchcraft and magic.  Running out of talent I suppose.  They bring Jon Snow back to life in an early scene, but they never spoke his name.  The episode was half over before I decided it was Jon Snow and not his half brother Rob Stark.
    And the camera man is still refusing to turn on the lights.  Pure black scene follows pure black scene.  Arya has gotten her self into a strange place where another girl her size takes some pleasure in beating the stuffing out of Arya with a quarterstaff.  In the fight scenes both Arya and the other unnamed girl wear identical black ankle length dresses.  The scenes are so dark, I can't tell Arya from her opponent.  
   Continuity is weak.  The show has at least six story lines (Denarys and the Dothraki, Brenden, Sam Tarly and his wildling wife, Jaime and Cersei Lannister,  and Tommin the new teenage king)  They cut from one to story line another so fast there is no time to get anything accomplished, and we viewers get confused as to where we are.  And if the rapid story line shifts don't confuse the viewers, they do flashbacks and dream sequences.
   Anyone know if they will do a season 7?

The news, All Trump, all the time

Fox News and the Wall St Journal cover Trump every day, all day.  Nothing else in the whole wide world gets any coverage.  And most of the Trump coverage is repetitive and negative.  I've heard every kind of anti-Trump trash talk there is.  I don't need to hear more of the same.
  I propose the newsies cut back the Trump coverage to maybe 10% and go out and cover some other stories.  For instance the Iraqi Army, backed by USAF and US special forces has taken half of Mosul and is planning to assault the other half.  All the coverage I have seen is from independents like ITV.  No American newsies are on scene, talking to the troops and the locals, and using a Mosul byline. 
   How about some coverage from the South China sea, maybe some close up video of Chinese gun and missile emplacement from a drone? 
   How about some live coverage from the Ukraine?  Or Poland where we deployed a US Army tank brigade last month? 
    I'm tired of the all Trump, all the time news coverage.  I want to see/hear what is going on in the rest of the country and the rest of the world. 

Words of the Weasel Part 48

"Substance" as in "substance abuse".  Used by snowflakes who shrink from calling them druggies or drunkards.  If you cannot name the problem, you cannot deal with it.  And a good strong dose of social disapproval helps druggies kick their habit. 

What's with all this Russia talk by TV newsies?

First they make a big deal about the Russians hacking the DNC and releasing some embarrassing emails to WikiLeaks.  Then they have a field day over the Mike Flynn affair.  Meet the Press spent a lotta time yakking about Russians this morning.   They were clearly trying to sell the idea that the Russians tipped the election to Trump AND that talking to the Russians before the inauguration is treason. 
   Does anyone in the real world believe either idea?

How long do curly bulbs last, really?

The traditional incandescent bulbs claim a 800-1000 hour life.  That's the best compromise between light per watt hour and bulb life.  They sell long life incandescent bulbs, and they do last longer, but they don't give much light.  A 60 watt conventional bulb throws as much light as a 100 watt long life bulb.  800-1000 hours for say a living room lamp that goes on at sundown and burns til bedtime, is 200-300 days, call it a year. 
  The curly bulbs claim 8000 hour life, ten times the life of an incandescent.  That ought to mean ten years service life. 
   And I suppose some curly bulbs do last that long.  A lot of 'em don't.  I have had at least four, die in place after only a year or two of service.  That's out of a total of 8 curly bulbs in my house.  Half the population of curly bulbs dies young.  Mostly the dead ones come out of the fixture with a burn mark on the base, suggesting that some electronic part inside the solid state ballast has failed, rather than the glowing curly tube.  Let's guess that the marketeers who pushed for the 8000 hour life claim  were thinking that the only part that could fail was the curly tube, analogous to the filament in an incandescent bulb.  Solid state ballast failures were ignored.
   On the other hand, as a homeowner, I don't care why the curly bulb died, I gotta replace it for $5 or live in the dark.  But I do think anyone computing lifetime costs of incandescent vs curly bulbs ought to call the curly bulb life as 4000 hours rather than the 8000 hours marked on the package. 

Clean Energy's Dirty Secret

Cover story of this week's Economist magazine.  Comes with a cute graphic cover.   The secret?  Between heavy subsidies and falling costs, a lot of solar cells and windmills have been installed.  Once installed, this equipment runs whenever the sun is up or the wind is blowing.  So on a sunny breezy day there is plenty of juice, and cheap juice at that,  and the expensive central power plants have to shut down until sundown.  The Economist is halfway wised up, they do understand that we need those central power plants to keep the lights on after sundown.  The problem as they see it is to find away to pay for the necessary central power plants when they only get to run and make money for half a day.  The "alternate energy" is supplying power for the daylight hours. 
   There are a few unmentionables with the Economist.  Not once does the phrase "nuclear power" appear in the multipage article. The Economist is virtuously anti-nuclear.   They do briefly mention batteries, suggesting that eventually they will be able to carry the load after dark.  Not likely, anytime soon.  We have been fiddling around with battery technology for better than 200 years.  Best we have now (Lithium Ion) is only maybe twice as good as Alexander Volta's first copper zinc cell of 200 years ago.  We need an improvement of ten times to get a battery good enough to carry the electric grid thru the night. 
   Another unmentionable was "fracking"  In North America, the frackers are producing so much cheap natural gas that the electric companies have given up on nuclear and coal because natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than coal. But the Economist can't breath a word about that because fracking is a dirty word in Europe.  
    The Economist wants, but doesn't quite say so, is government subsidies for central power plants to keep them on line for backup when the sun is down and the wind stops blowing.
   Simpler and cheaper would be to drop subsidies for "alternate energy" and drop "net-metering" which forces power companies to pay "alternate energy" producers for juice they don't need.   But the greenies would freak.. 
  

Combat Readiness

No military unit is ever 100% combat ready.  Troops will be taking leave, some weapons will be out of commission, there are always some shortages in compliment, authorized slots unfilled, some gear worn or obsolete.  So,  something less than 100% is as good as you can do. 
   Back when I was pounding a flight line in USAF, the standard was 71% of squadron aircraft ready to fly every day.  We had to report our percent in commission every morning at 4 AM.  That gave maintenance most of the night to fix the planes that the pilots had broke flying them the previous day.  We had 20 fighters and to make 71% operationally ready, we had to have 15 aircraft in commission, every single morning.  We usually had one aircraft in periodic inspection which took days to complete.  Or undergoing engine change, which took a day and a half.  So we could only afford to have four aircraft down for maintenance after the witching hour of 4 AM.
  Aviation Week ran an article this week about readiness rates.  Somehow USAF was still making 71%, but just barely.  Army, Marines and Navy were only doing 50%.  Back in my day, a USAF squadron commander who failed to make 71% got relieved of duty.  Dunno how the other services feel about the issue, nowadays. 
   Distorting the numbers is the huge amount of aircraft out for depot level maintenance (DLM we used to call it).  At squadron level we only had to report on squadron aircraft.  If we sent an aircraft off for DLM, it no longer counted as assigned to our squadron.  About once a year we would send a plane off to depot, and it would take depot a matter of months to get it back to us.  So something like 2.5% to 5% of the force was in DLM.  That was then
   Now, the Marines are reporting 171 F/A18 fighters assigned to squadrons and 109 F/A18 fighters in DLM.  That's 38% of the fleet out of commission for DLM.  That's bad. Really bad. 
   Aviation Week (staunch industry supporter that they are) is calling for more funding for aircraft maintenance. 
    I wonder how you rate the combat readiness of infantry or tank units. 

Harbor Freight comes to town

They took up half the space in a small deserted strip mall, giving them a big store, about the size of a Staples.  They remodeled, and opened for business the other day.  I stopped in to browse this morning.  They have a lot of stuff in there, hand tools, power tools, ladders, jackstands, welding rigs, a neat little metal working lathe ($569) just about anything you might want. 
  I hope they prosper.  They have to overcome a terrible reputation for quality, actually lack of quality.  I looked hard at the stuff on display trying to judge the quality.  The stuff looks OK, the socket wrenches are nicely polished and bright chrome.  With sockets the only way to tell quality is put the socket on a two foot breaker bar and give it the old heave ho on a stuck nut.  Low quality sockets will break under this stress test, good ones will survive.  Their prices are right, rock bottom low, and for Harry Homeowner who doesn't use his tools nearly as hard as the professionals do,  Harbor Freight can be a deal. 
  I did like that little metal working lathe for $569.  Didn't buy it though. 

Mosul, Iraq

The TV has been talking up the battle of Mosul.  They claim to have taken the half of the city on the west bank of the Tigris river, and are now talking about taking the half the city on the other bank of the river. 
   The TV does not say if allied/Iraqi forces have surrounded Mosul and cut it off from food and supplies.  Since the TV doesn't talk about it, I guess that the surviving ISIS half of Mosul is still in contact with the rest of the ISIS lands.  Which is not encouraging.
   Thruout all history, the way to conquer a city has been to surround it and starve it out.  It's been true since the Greeks besieged Troy.  The Germans tried to take Stalingrad by frontal assault rather than surrounding it.  Did not work out for them.  Cities are man made defensive works.  Fighting from house to house with grenades and assault rifles is the toughest kind of fighting anywhere.  If you have the combat power to push into a defended city, you have plenty of combat power to surround it and then just wait for the defender to get hungry. 
   So what are we doing in Mosul anyhow?  Do we have any US newsies with our forces at the front?

Whither the retail business

I went shopping with youngest son on Saturday.  We went to the North Shore Mall on Rte 128.  I worked on the north shore for ten years, back before I retired.  Used to stop into the North Shore Mall  regularly.  This was the first time back there in ten years.  It was a nice Saturday, no snow, temperature in the 50's, sunny, a nice day.
   And the place, a truly big mall, was far from crowded.  There were some shoppers, but not all that many, compared to what they used to have.  And the shops were women's clothing, cosmetics, GMC herbs, new age crystals.  Nothing much to attract a guy. No Radio Shack, no men's wear, no hardware. The North Slope didn't have ski gear or snowshoes, or ice fishing stuff, or winter camping gear.  They only had two colors of parkas, black and International Orange. I don't like either color.   We did find a Lego store, and a Brookstone, but that was about it as far as stores selling guy stuff. 
   Any how, I'm glad I don't have to make a living in retail.   Let's guess, Amazon and Walmart and Target, and Home Despot have taken the North Shore Mall customers. 

How to tell fake news from real news

Graph department that is.  The Internet is awash in graphs claiming to show the growth, or shrinkage of all sorts of things.  Net Worth, employment, GNP growth, income inequality, and on and on.  The graphs typically show a bunch of colored lines, rising dramatically, and implying that something is getting bigger, or better, or worse, or something.
   Lies, damn lies, and statistics.  How can you tell a real and true graph from fake data trying to convince you of something that isn't true?
   These tricks may not work all the time, but they will weed out a lot of fake data graphs.
1.  Are both axes labeled?  With what they represent and what the units are (gallons, pounds, feet, furlongs per fortnight, dollars, whatever).
2.  Are the scale divisions of the axes uniform?  A graph with scale divisions every 10% except for a few on the end scaled out to 2%,1%, and 0.1% is attempting to bend the plotted curve somewhere.  Any graph with non-uniform scale divisions is trying to lie to you.
3.   Does the vertical axis go all the way down to zero?  I can take a straight line and turn it into a jagged mountain range if I expand the vertical scale enough.  If the vertical scale doesn't go down to zero, the graph is trying to make bumpiness bigger than it really is.
4.  If its a graph of something versus time, does the time axis go back before 2007?   Great Depression 2.0 started in 2007 and just about everything went down the drain that year.  A graph that starts in 2009 will show a steady increase as we pulled out of Great Depression 2.0  Same graph restarted in 1997 will likely show a great dropoff in 2007 and may show that things have not recovered to where they were in 2006.  Two different messages.  
5. Do the numbers at the extremes of t he graph make sense?   For instance I saw a graph claiming that of the top 0.1% income individuals in the country, 40% of them had not completed college and were out of work.  Somehow I just don't believe that. When I find one unbelievable data point, then I figure there are more that I don't find.  Put that graph into the damn lies category.

    I'm picky.  If a graph fails any one of these tests, I put in into the "damn lies" category.

Got a call from my old Alma Mater

It was a young female student, a senior, getting in some work for the alumni office, calling to thank me for a contribution I made a few weeks ago.  We got to chatting, about majors and the job market and how things were back when I graduated better than 40 years ago.  She thought things must have been better back then, especially after I mentioned that I had a job offer before I graduated.  I asked here what shw was majoring in.  "International relations" she said.  I refrained from saying anything while I thought to myself, "A real dead end major unless you want to join the State Dept or the CIA."  So I asked her if she had taken a course in computer programming.  "No, but I wish I had" was the reply. 
   After the phone call was over, I thought to myself, "There goes a nice young woman who is graduating with a major that won't help her get a job.  Let's hope she can marry the right guy."
   Lesson: if you are a student, or a parent of a student, you need to do some serious thinking about your college major.   The right major will get you a job upon graduation.  The wrong major and you are out of luck.  Decide now what you want to do for a living when you graduate.  Pick your major to make you employable in your chosen field.   Engineering (real engineering, chemical, electrical, mechanical, or civil) worked for me,  is fun to do, plenty of jobs, and decent pay.  The sciences, computer programming, business administration, and mathematics are also good bets.   
   Avoid the talky-talk "sciences" (sociology, anthropology, psychology, ecology) and anything with "studies" in its name (ethic studies, gender studies and so on). 
   If you just cannot stomach a STEM major, learn to write.  There is a tremendous demand for good English writing in business, industry, and government.  An English major or a history major will teach you how to write. 

Words of the Weasel Part 46

"What did he know and when did he know it".  The old Watergate cry.  Congressional Democrats are in full cry on TV this morning.  This is an accusation of thought crime.  And I don't believe in thought crime.  Liberty means the right to think anything you please.  Crime has to be action of some sort. 
  The proper questions  are "What did he do?  When did he do it?  Where did he do it? And what evidence do you have? "  To be a crime it has to be an action.  Thought (or knowledge) is never a crime.

$3000 health insurance vs $12000 health insurance

Used to be, before Obamacare, you could purchase health insurance for your and your family for about $3000 a year.  It was "hospitalization only" insurance, it only paid if you got really sick and got put into the hospital.  Routine stuff, yearly physicals, taking the kids to the doctor for earaches and such, you paid for out of pocket.   The savings, $9000 a year, paid for a lot of trips to the doctor and a lot of yearly physicals.  If you had some money in your checking account to handle the routine stuff, hospitalization only made a lot of sense.  You were protected against catastrophe, at a price you could afford.
   The medical community detested hospitalization only.  It led to patients asking how much that recommended CAT scan might cost, and checking prices on pills and getting prescriptions changed over to cheaper drugs. 
   When they slipped Obamacare over on us, they remembered  how opposition from the medical community had killed Hillarycare.  They remembered those Harry and Louise radio commercials, and decided to get the medical community on board by giving them everything they ever wanted in Obamacare.
  And so, Obamacare outlawed hospitalization only insurance.  No more would medical providers have to explain how much treatments would cost to patients.  Since every thing was all paid for, patients didn't care what stuff cost.  While they were at it, Obamacare made all kinds of weird and wonderful medical scams mandatory and all paid for, like osteopathy.  The practitioners love it.   

In like Flynn

Some things I don't understand.   It's perfectly reasonable for Trump's national security advisor to talk to some Russians.  Flynn is an old intelligence guy, knows some Russians, and contacting our biggest international problem is a good idea.  Let 'em know that we won't nuke 'em, that we could make a deal, pass on a bit of sweetness and light, is always a good idea.  We aren't at war with the Russians, reaching out and schmoozing them is a good thing.  Far better than calling them names. 
   How did Flynn manage to get himself cross threaded with Mike Pence?  Just what was it that he failed to say, or "misspoke" ?  And why would a senior retired Army general officer not live up to the code of the services and tell the truth? 
   And, who in the intelligence world leaked the phone taps on Flynn?  And leaked them to the press, not just Congressional Democrats?  You tap a senior guy's phone and that's serious business.  When the senior guy finds out, he will retaliate.  Clearly Trump has a heavy duty leaker on the loose.  He needs to call a plumber ASAP.  
  

Words of the Weasel Part 45

"Border Tax".  A euphemism for tariff.  I listened to some talking head on Fox News spend five minutes explaining why Trump's proposed "border tax" was not a tariff.  Tariffs have been a hot subject thru out American history.  And the history books all use the word tariff.  We are doing our children a disservice to introduce a new  buzz phrase for an old old concept.
   Could it be that a century of free trade agitation has made people think that tariff's are bad for them?
   In real life, tariffs are good for domestic makers of stuff, for obvious reasons.  Tariffs are bad for everyone else because they have to pay more for stuff.  Everyone else is more people than the makers (both labor and company) of any one kind of stuff.  Since this is a democracy, it is reasonable to support free trade since more people benefit from a free trade regime. 

Father of Dodge Viper says it died because it ran out of reasons to live

Bob Lutz, product champion of the Viper, back some years ago, said the idea of the Viper was to have more power and go faster than anything else.  When Chevy put out some Corvettes that were even faster than Viper the car lost its reason for being.
   Piffle I say.  When the competition comes out with a product hotter than yours, it's time to soup up your product.  Chrysler just didn't want to spend the money. Or didn't have the money.
   If some car maker was looking for a new product, how about a sporty car that can handle driving in snow? I've driven Camaros and Mustangs, a lotta fun on a dry road but totally worthless after the first flake hits the road.  Up here in NH, people laugh at you if they see you driving a sporty car in winter.  Which cuts into the market for sporty cars.
  What someone ought to make is a sporty car that works in winter.  Fifty fifty front rear weight distribution is a good starting place.  Then it needs four wheel drive, with limit slip differentials fore and aft.  Maybe a built in ski rack that doesn't whistle at 65 mph.  Decent tires with rubber that sticks in snow.  They make 'em.  Plenty of defroster heat.  Good strong windshield washer to cope with the salt spray.  Bleed some engine heat to the washer bottle to keep it from freezing.  Outside thermometer so you can tell if that glittery black stuff up ahead is ice or just wet asphalt.   Give it some decent styling and I'd buy one. 

Ivanka Trump and her clothing line.

All I know about Ivanka Trump is what I see on TV.  She sure looks like a nice, good looking, pleasant, mother of three.  The sort of young woman any father would be proud to call his daughter.  And so, when Nordstroms and some other retailers drop her clothing line,  her doting father says a few words.  What does anyone expect him to say?  And Kellyanne Conway says a few more words, good for her. 
   The newsies are making a federal case out of this.  Which is one reason why polls show president Trump has more credibility than the newsies do. 

Can I trust US courts anymore?

Good question.  Seattle district court judge James Robart certainly doesn't believe in following the written law.  The 1952 law says the president has total authority to ban any immigrant or class of immigrants from entry to the United States.  Judge Robart ignored this and forbade the president from barring immigration from seven Middle East countries.  In short, the judge ruled in accordance with his personal political ideology and not in accordance with the law on the books.  Plus the two plaintiff states clearly lacked standing to sue the federal government. 
  What's worse, the 9th Circuit court of appeals backed him up.  So, we have the federal courts in the western part of the country making judgements based on personal prejudice rather than written law.  I wonder what they were teaching in law school back when these so called judges were doing law school.  Scary.
   So much for the procedural argument.  The substance of the issue is of only medium importance.  We don't get all that many immigrants from the seven middle east countries in Trump's executive order.  On the other hand, these seven countries are so screwed up from civil war or just plain collapse into failed states, that we cannot believe anything they tell us.  We ought to be vetting immigrants to weed out criminals and select for people who will become loyal and productive members of American society.  Vetting means contacting the authorities in the immigrant's home country to verify his name and home address, see how much schooling he has, see his police record, and so forth.  This only works if the home country has authorities in charge.  The seven countries on Trump's executive order are all  so war torn that we cannot find the authorities, and even if we find someone who claims to be an authority in an enemy country like Iran or Syria, we suspect that they would lie to us.  Surely an Iranian mullah who wanted to infiltrate an agent into the US would have no problem telling US authorities that "Yes Omar is a good boy, never been in trouble, good marks in school. Yada-Yada." 
   So, it's a twofer, the so called judges are wrong on the issues as well as procedures.  Very scary.

How much should that wall cost?

I'm not a great wall fan myself.  New Hampshire is about as far away from the Mexican border as you can get.  But ABC was just claiming that the border wall would cost $25 billion.  Which is rediculous.
The US Mexican border is 2000 miles long.  At 5280 feet to the mile, that comes out to 10 million feet in round numbers.  Chain link fence material, the chain link, fence posts, ties, and everything is about $5 a foot.  I looked it up on the internet. Let's assume installation is about the same as the cost of materials, so make it  $10 a foot, or $100 million to do the whole border.  That's a far cry from ABC's $25 billion.
    Actually, there is a bit more to doing it right.  To prevent people from digging under it,  we ought to put a solid concrete footing under the fence, all the way across.  That might cost another $100 million.  Then we need an access road on our side of the fence to allow the border patrol to get men to the site of an illegal crossing in a hurry.  It can be a dirt road, just good enough for a jeep.  And we ought to fly air patrols in Cessnas (not $1 millon UAVs) daily.  The real purpose of the fence is to stop vehicles from crossing, or at least to leave an unmistakable hole where someone crashes thru.   You need air patrols to spot the big  holes in time to get the border patrol in pursuit of the fence crasher before he gets away.
   Even with all this stuff  I'm thinking we could do the wall for less than $1 billion.
  

Adventures in Router Land

The virii and trojans and  ransomware are getting aggressive this year.  I decided to upgrade the firmware in my router.  Router is a $40 plastic box that plugs into the cable modem and offers WIFI and four internet connectors.  The router faces the raw internet, and needs to reject incoming messages that would take over the router and do evil.  The router acts as a firewall, and if it should be penetrated, the hacker has direct access to the Windows machines plugged into the router.  And Windows is like Swiss cheese, fully of holes.  If the tougher software in the router is compromised, the Windows machines are toast. 
   My router is a NetGear N300 purchased a couple of years ago.  I Googled the router maker name, model number and "firmware".  This gave me an offer to download new firmware.  On this particular router you can talk to it using your web browser.  You put in a special URL and the router picks up and displays a groovy little user interface.  From this I learned that my current firmware was v18 while the new downloaded firmware was v42.  Hmm, been a lot of patching of router code over the last couple of years.   The router offered an "upload firmware" function, which was sorta flaky.  I had to run it two or three times before the upload "took". 
   So, me router firmware is all up to date, which is the best I can do against the swarm of malware running around the internet.  Upgrading the firmware did not mess up any of my computer connections to the router.

Wall St Journal Pushes a Carbon Tax???

Yesterday's Journal Op-Ed had a piece authored by James Baker and George Schultz.  Both of these guys have been Secretary of the Treasury AND Secretary of State.  So they have some experience.  They may not have any common sense, but they have lots of experience.  They claim that a $40 a ton carbon tax will clear our air and improve the economy.  They propose the revenues from the carbon tax be paid out to all citizens rather than going to reduce the deficit and pay the government's bills.  They think this payout will avoid the downturn that just socking everyone with a hefty tax hike will.   They make it sound kinda sweet, mentioning a $2000 a year refund to the average family. 
   What they don't mention, is that everyone will have to hike their prices to pay their carbon tax.  To put it in perspective, each time I fill my 275 gallon furnace oil tank, I'd get hit for $40 in carbon tax.  Call it $200 a winter.  
    And surely, avoiding a $40 a ton carbon tax would be a strong incentive for business to expand overseas, or anywhere outside the US just to avoid the tax.  That carbon tax will undo all the good work of frackers in getting the price of oil down. 
   And, they want to impose all this pain to reduce global warming.  We haven't had any global warming that you could measure with a thermometer for the last 19 years, and they want to sock it to me for global warming?  As I write this it is 14F outside with snow swirling in front of my windows. 

That $500 billion foreign trade deficit

According to today's Wall St Journal  that's how deep in the hole we are.  Our imports were $500 billion more than our exports.  In short, the rest of the world shipped $500 billion worth of goods into America and America shipped them zilch.  Since people don't like to ship goods and not get paid, presumably we sent $500 billion in cash to pay for this stuff. 
   $500 billion is a lot, even for a US GNP of $17 trillion.  And we have been doing this for at least 20 years, maybe more.  How does it work? 
   Do we merely print an extra $500 billion dollars?  The US greenback is desired all over the world, and we can probably get away with printing a whole lot of 'em before foreigners wise up and stop accepting them.
   Do we have some invisible export that earns us $500 billion a year?  Does tuition paid by foreign students to US colleges count as exports?  What about royalties for Hollywood movies, video games, pop music, Superman comic books, and other stuff? Does all that count as exports?   Do foreign stock purchases on the NYSE or NASDAQ count?
    Something else?
    The point is, we have been running humongous trade deficits for many many years and it keeps on running.  Somehow the international books get balanced and we don't run out of money.  It would be nice to know how this really works 

Jungle Book, Disney 2016

I missed this when it was in the theater in town some months ago.  So I Netflixed it this week.  It's a live action kinda remake of the old Disney animated one.  Neel Sethi plays Mowgli and does it well.  He is young,  cute, he delivers his lines well, he looks good.  He is about the only real live action actor,  the rest of the cast are CGI animals, all well done, nice fur, good voices, very huggable.  It is an enjoyable flick.  They manage to do a couple of scary scenes that I found scary even at my age.  They borrowed some songs from the earlier animated version.  Baloo and Baghera and Kaa are nicely done.  I liked it.  Any child over the age of six ought to love it. 

Shed another tear for poor old Sears Roebuck

Sears troubles are so bad that banks are leery of lending to Sears.  According to the Wall St Journal Sears investors had to pay $4.62 million in bond insurance (a credit default swap) to insure a Sears $10 million for five years bond.  That' $924,000 a year, or 9.24% a year.  That's pure usury.  Or, the investors view Sears as so likely to default that they don't want to risk their money. 

Trump Adminstration leaks

The TV is talking about them.  They believe the number of leaks from the new born Trump administration is excessive.  The imply (they don't have the stones to come out and say it) that the leaks are coming from Trump appointees jostling for position inside the new administrative. 
  I wonder about that.  The vast US civil service are Democrats to a man (or a woman)  They are fire proof.  We could not fire low level civil servants even after we caught them stealing stuff out the base warehouse.  I'll bet you cannot fire them for leaking, even if you could catch them at it.  Not when they can put gigabytes of data onto a single easily concealable thumb drive.  And they all have broadband internet at home.
   Judging from the hysterical response of Democrats to Trump, being shown on TV hour after hour, I bet a lot of those Democratic civil servants are just as rabidly anti-Trump.  And they plan on leaking to damage the Trump administration.  
   Dunno what Trump can do about that.  Civil servants are everywhere in the US government.  They are the typists, the IT guys, the administrators, the janitorial staff, the receptionists, and every sort of paper pusher.  And  they can see everything, especially if someone has it typed up.
   We may be in for the most transparent administration in history, where everything gets leaked, to the media, to the Congress, to the homeless in the streets.
   Transparency may be OK, but American allies are already reluctant to share intelligence with the Americans for fear it will turn up on the front page and the New York Times,  burning agents and undoing years of careful intel work.
   

Superbowl LI

First TV in months that wasn't all about Trump and the election.  Refreshing I call it.  Cliff hanger ending.  Go Pats. 

Are cats trainable?

Perhaps, and with great difficulty.  I have a closet, full of exciting smells from leather boots and shoes, small and dark.  Stupid Beast loves that closet.  Last week she nipped inside when I wasn't looking.  I closed the closet door on her.  I didn't miss her for half a day.  When I did notice a lack-a-cat I checked her favorite nap places and then opened the closet just to check.  Out she popped.  Clearly happy to escape the closet.
   This morning, I open same magic closet to get out a pair of pants.  Stupid Beast slipped right in when I wasn't looking, and so I closed the closet door.  But, I opened it again to get something else a few minutes later.  And Stupid Beast popped right out.  I believe she had learned that spending half a day in the closet was hungry and thirsty work. 
  

 

Are the Senate rules democratic?

We have been hearing a lot of talk lately about Senate rules.  One that I never heard of before surfaced last week.  In attempting  to block "advise and consent" of president Trump's cabinet, the Democrats walked out of the committee meeting and claimed that the committee could not vote on the cabinet appointee unless there were some Democrats present.  That's a new one on me.  The next day the Republicans dredged up some rule that said they could too vote.  And so a couple of cabinet appointees made it thru the committee votes to stand before the entire Senate, sometime now.
   Then there is an older Senate practice, which allows any single senator to "place a hold"  (a veto) on any judicial appointment.  Somehow, letting a single senator veto any judge strikes me a profoundly undemocratic.
   Then we have the filibuster.  This practice was started in the 1950's by Democrats.  It came from a Senate rule that allowed unlimited debate.  Once a senator has the floor he can keep on talking as long as he can draw breath.  Democrats would filibuster to block civil rights legislation in the bad old days.  For the really big cases they used to bring in cots to give exhausted senators a bit of rest. Filibusters became so notorious that sometime in the early 1960's the Senate created the "cloture rule".  Under cloture rule, a supermajority (60 votes) sufficed to take the floor away from a windbag filibusterer and move on with Senate business.  As time went on, to avoid the tedium of waiting for Senator Windbag to become obnoxious, they dispensed with th need for Senator Windbag to actually take the floor and keep on babbling.  Now any senator can merely declare he wants to filibuster something, and that something is blocked unless and until they dredge up 60 votes to impose "cloture".  The effect is to require a supermajority to pass anything of substance thru the Senate.
   And then the Senate gives the majority leader the right to personally veto anything.  The majority leader sets the Senate agenda.  Any bill he dislikes, just never appears on the agenda.  Poof and it's gonzo.
    I'm thinking it's time for a housecleaning on Senate rules.  

$130 million a year to UC Berkeley? A third of Berkeley's budget?

I heard these numbers on TV yesterday.  US taxpayers give UC Berkeley $130 million a year.  This is one third of Berkeley's yearly budget.
If true, this is appalling.   It makes UC into a US government college, run by the Feds, indoctrinating the students with whatever party line the Feds want.
   Someone will say that the $130 million is support for research.   When they do, I would ask to see the results of all this research.  What new products are on the market incorporating UC Berkeley research results?  What textbooks have UC Berkeley research results printed in them?  In short, what has all that research money produced?  Other than salaries for tenured professors?
   I doubt that Berkeley can match the results of the old Bell Labs, who invented the transistor, discovered the cosmic background radiation, performed the Davidson Germer experiment showing that electrons had a wavelength like photons.  These are just the few things I remember from a long ago physics course.  There are doubtless more successes to Bell Labs credit.  Too bad the anti-trust people killed off Bell Labs in the 1970's.  

Update:   This morning's Wall St Journal says Berkeley receives a lot more money, like $400 million in research grants and $200 million in student loans.  

The UC Berkeley riots.

Some good TV video of "protesters" dressed in black and wearing masks, smashing plate glass shop windows.  This has got to be off-campus, no college campus I know of has shops with plate glass windows. The cops report NO arrests were made.  Translation: The cops were egging them on. 
   Maybe 'cause the cops are afraid of getting in trouble if a "protester" resists arrest? 
   Maybe 'cause the cops are as anti Trump as the students?  Does anyone believe that?? 
   Maybe 'cause their superiors told the cops to cool it?  And who might those superiors be?? 
   Maybe the cops feared the "protesters" would kick the s**t out of them if they interfered?? 
   Maybe something else? 
   Who knows?

President Trump picks a new Supreme

Honestly, I had never heard of this guy Gorsuch before.  All I know about Judge Gorsuch comes from president Trump's fulsome introduction last night on TV and some kind words from Bill O'Reilly and Charles Krauthammer later in the evening. 
   Let's hope Judge Gorsuch sticks to his word, given on TV last night, to judge according to the written law, as understood by those who wrote it at the time they wrote it.  The liberal notion of a "living constitution" is just propaganda advocating the courts to make up new law from the bench.  It's a totally undemocratic notion.  In a democracy, new law comes from the elected legislature, not appointed judges.  Over the years, liberals have used the courts to pass laws that never would have passed a legislature.  Some of them were disasters or disgraces.  Dred Scott started the Civil War.  Plessy vs Ferguson was a disgrace for a half century.  Roe vs Wade touched off a culture war that lasts until this very day.  
   Getting Judge Gorsuch approved by the Senate looks to be real circus.  I'm gonna get me some popcorn and watch the clowns.  

Wow! Trump immigration policy makes big waves

As I get the story, Trump announced the ban on immigrants/visitors from seven African and Middle East countries Friday night.  By Saturday, someone[s] had organized sizable demos at the big airports, LAX in particular.  That's quick work.  How did they do that? and who is they?  Did "they" put the word out on social media?  If so, what media?   I'd join up with that media just to keep in touch with what's going on.  Did "they" use a telephone tree to call all "their" members?  Did "they" take out ads in the newspapers?  Is it possible to get a newpaper ad out that quickly? 
   Or did "they" have foreknowledge, from a leak somewhere in the Trump administration, so they could have more time to get the demo's rolling?
    And, are all those demonstrators going out with their signs just because they still hate Trump? Does anyone actually favor immigrants from pest holes like Somalia?
    The noble MSM are missing a lot of angles to this story. 

$2107 each for a handgun?

Seems very pricey.  But that is the price the government is willing to pay for the new Sig Saur handgun that will replace the current unloved M9 Beretta.  The Sig will be made in New Hampshire, a good thing as far as this NH resident is concerned.  It will be chambered for 9mm Luger which is standard world wide, despite a lot of shooters feeling that anything less than .45 ain't enough for serious work. 

Microsoft Update stopped working

Microsoft Update had been working happily on my aging XP desktop for some years.  I have trusty desktop set to notify me of updates rather than just zap them in automatically.  Now and then I run Microsoft update by hand from Internet Exploder.  Today Microsoft Updates started and then choked up with an error message about how it could not access the internet.  Hmm.  And it popped up a network diagnostic button which I pushed figuring it wouldn't do any harm.  Network Diags trundled for a while and then reported that my firewall was blocking ports 80 (http) 443 (https) and 21 (FTP).
  So, hit "Settings" and then Microsoft Firewall.  And punch a button marked port.  And type in the three port numbers (80, 443, and 21).  Firewall complained about port 80 claiming it was already present.  But it accepted the other two ports.  And then Microsoft update started to work. 
  For all this hacking, Microsoft update did not find any serious updates for me.  I browsed the non serious updates and decided than none of them would do my any good. 
   Still wondering what happened.  Did Microsoft tighten up Update so that it needed the HTTPS port? Did some passing virus turn the ports off by way of defending itself?  Should I get a better firewall? 

New Hampshire GOP holds its annual meeting

I'm a delegate so I went.  Had to get up at 5:45 to get down to Derry by 8 AM.  It was snowing lightly in the Notch.  I managed to get up my driveway and out on the road just before the town plow plowed me in.  I93 was a tad slippery up in the Notch but dried out nicely by the time I got to N. Woodstock. 
   It being the annual meeting, many of us, yours truly included, wore coat and tie.  It being New Hampshire, a lot of people showed up in blue jeans and hunting shirts.  Meeting was called to order at 9.  The only real business to address was election of the State Chairman.  Somehow this took all day, we didn't get adjourned until 2:30.  Lot of people got tired and left early. 
   There was the usual opening exercises, Governor Sununu gave a short speech, all the reports (treasurer, bylaw committee, etc) were read.  This lasted til 10, and then trouble decended.  Somebody got 9 or 10 changes to the party bylaws onto the agenda.  The changes were poorly written, few of us delegates could understand what the bylaw changes meant and they started out with a confusing voting system were a yes vote was actually a no vote.  They gave up on that after first amendment sucked up a half an hour before getting voted down.  Another couple of hours was consumed voting down the rest of 'em, all except one, which authorized paying a salary to the state chairman.  That passed cause most of the delegates could see that state chairman is a full time job, and few people can do a full time job without a salary.  Real people have bills to pay. 
   Then we got to voting in new officers, treasurer, asst treasurer, secretary, asst secretary, vice chair, area chairs, and finally, we voted in Jeane Forester as state party chairman.  That got us up to a little after 2PM and then we called it a day and adjourned.  I got back home just around 5PM.  Stupid Beast was glad to see me. 

The Legend of Tarzan 2016

This flick hit the theaters back in July 2016.  Publicity work must have been pretty bad, I never heard of it until I did a search for "Tarzan" on Netflix.  I'm an old Tarzan fan, got started reading my father's collection of Tarzan novels in grade school.  I have seen most, perhaps all, of the Tarzan movies and TV shows going all the way back to the Johnny Weissmuller movies.  This was a medium speed Tarzan movie, not great, but watchable. 
   The cast were names I had never heard of, but they did a reasonable job working against a faint to flaky plot and really terrible continuity situation.  The movie starts up with a very British lord John Clayton in London, does flashbacks to a boy Tarzan being raised by Kala the she-ape deep in the jungle, pops back to the present (1890) flashes back to a young Tarzan whipping Kerchak hand to paw, pops forward to the same young Tarzan meeting Jane, and so it goes.  The flashback scenes are cute and all, but the constant flashing back and forth is confusing, and when laid on top of a weak plot yields a confusing movie. 
   The soundman was only fair to poor, a lot of Jane's lines were unintelligible to me.  The cameraman is still  turning the lights off, yielding a pure black scene with just a hint of  someone's white face floating around in the blackness.  They have a lot of pretty nicely done CGI animals, lions, great apes, wild buffalo, elephants and suchlike.  They have a stern wheel river steamer that looks pretty good although it is almost certainly CGI.
   Tarzan is properly ripped, has a good six pack abs. He looks a little too skinny for the part, I expect Tarzan to be built like Schwarzenegger.  This Tarzan doesn't really look strong enough to rassle with great apes and live to tell about it.  We don't see Tarzan without his shirt until halfway thru the movie, and he never does get down to the traditional loincloth,  he is wearing pants right up the the end of the flick. 
   Jane is nicely played, young, beautiful and tough.  She spits in the bad guy's face, and later escapes from the bad guy's river steamer by diving over the side into crocodile infested waters, while still wearing the ankle length white dress she was wearing when captured.  We never learn just how she avoided or dealt with the crocs.  We see her climbing out of the  muddy river with the white dress now stained river-mud-color.  A few scenes later the dress goes back to being white, and still later back to river-mud-color.
   Overall, not too bad, at least for us dyed in the wool Tarzan fans.  

Waterboard 'em enough and they will say anything you want

Interrogating prisoners is something of an art.  Coercion, whether the 3rd degree methods of modern police to real old fashioned medieval torture,  is a deal between the interrogators and the subject.  Talk and it will stop hurting.  Most subjects understand this.  And, most subjects want it to stop hurting, and so they talk.  They will lie their heads off and say anything the interrogators want them to say.
   For criminal police work, where all they have to do is make the subject say " I confess" this probably works.  For military intelligence work where we want the location of enemy troops, supplies, other assets, or operational plans,  or names of leaders and agents, targets for airstrikes, success of past attacks, or size of military units, it's not so effective.  The subject, under duress, will invent answers to the questions.  This defeats the purpose of interrogation, by filling the intelligence files with nonsense.  
    So I am not in sympathy with president Trump's call to waterboard more subjects.  I don't think you get useful intelligence this way.  CIA used to have some pretty good interrogators.  They got Khalid Sheik Mohammad to sing like a canary.  Then came the great CIA shakeup over black sites, waterboarding, VHS tapes of interrogation. I wonder if CIA has anyone left who can interrogate effectively.  Or would dare to do so from fear of prosecution.
   What we ought to do is take more prisoners.  Obama liked killing 'em rather than taking 'em alive, probably to try to empty out Gitmo.  Seal Team Six had Bin Laden at their mercy, they had plenty of airlift, they should have cuffed him and flown him out.  Rather than calling in an airstrike, send troops in by helicopter to capture alive as many as possible.  Take the prisoners to Gitmo and grill 'em medium rare.  Do fancy televised trials for the higher ups like Bin Laden.

God Speed Mary Tyler Moore

The TV is carrying news of her death at age 80.  She put on a lot of really good TV in her day.  I watched a lot of it.  There isn't anything nearly as good on TV these days.  God Speed.