Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans?

It's hard to tell by listening to the politicians.  They mostly bland down their words until they really don't mean anything.  They have learned that speaking out on one side of any substantive issue just looses them votes.  The voters that don't like what they hear will remember and make a point to vote against them, where as the voters that like what they hear don't care enough to get to the polls on election day.  So the professional politicians practice saying as little as possible while sounding good.  Hence all the happy talk about motherhood and apple pie.  Donald Trump is an exception to this rule and it hasn't killed him, yet.
  But there are real differences between the parties.  Consider the matter of helping the poor.  Republicans believe the real solution to poverty is plenty of decent jobs. Which means they favor things that help business because business creates those decent jobs. Democrats believe the real solution to poverty is government handouts, welfare, food stamps, single payer health care and such.  Paid for by confiscating (taxing) wealth from the wealthy and giving it to the poor.  With some nice fat skimming off  the top for deserving friends of the party.
   Modern Republicans believe that America, as the largest and strongest country in the world, needs to take action to oppose foreign tyranny, obnoxious ideologies, nuclear proliferation, and out right banditry.  Modern Democrats are isolationists and peaceniks.  They don't believe that anything outside our borders deserves our attention.  This is a reversal of the party positions from the early years of the 20th century. 
   Republicans are respectful of Christianity and organized religion.  Democrats favor removing religious symbols (creches) from just about everywhere, and punishing anyone who offers prayer in public.
  

Is Fiction Really Dead?

Every Saturday the Wall Street Journal publishes a best seller list.  They break it down into hardcover fiction, ebook fiction, hardcover non ficition, ebook nonfiction and business titles.  Often as not, best sellers in hardcover fiction will be Dr. Suess, or Shel Silverstein.  Both of these are classic children's books, every child has, or ought to have, a copy.  Parents, grandparents and grown up friends and relatives buy these classics for birthdays and Christmas presents.  There is a steady market, proportional the the number of small children in the country.  When one of these steady sellers makes it to the top of the best seller list, it really means that no other author has been able to sell all that many copies of their work.  The last real best seller fiction were the Harry Potter stories, that J.K. Rowling fed into the market every other year or so.  I can remember riding the Boston subway to and from work where a quarter of the riders in the subway car would be reading the latest hardback Harry Potter yarn.  That's a best seller.  We don't seem to have any best sellers of that magnitude any more.
   Partly the dropoff in best seller fiction is the fault of the big publishers.  They won't look at any new fiction unless the author has acquired an agent.  There aren't all that many agents in the world and the ones that are out there, are swamped with clients.  They won't take on a new author.  They are too busy.
   Even best selling author Tom Clancy had to go all around Robin Hood's barn to get into print back in the 1980's.  His best seller, Hunt for Red October , was finally published by the Naval Institute Press,  a specialty house for technical works for Navy officers.  After  the smash hit success of his first book, Tom had no trouble getting his second best seller, Red Storm Rising, published by GP Putnam.
   What this means, is as the established authors die off,  (for example Clancy died quite recently) there is nobody in the pipeline to replace them. 

Slow News Day

Friday's Wall St Journal.  Front page color photo.  Heartwarming shot of  Senator Tammy Duckworth bringing her new born baby into the Senate chamber for a vote on something.  All the adults in the photo have fond smiles, everyone likes small children. 
   It's cute and all that, but is this the most important thing happening the world on this Friday?

Probably a bad idea.

Florida Republican Rep Ron DeSantis, and ten colleagues sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff  Sessions asking for criminal investigation of Obama people Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and Andrew McCabe. 
   Much as all these low lives deserve some criminal investigation, trial and jail time, doing so is a bad idea for the country.  We don't want to criminalize loosing an election.  If politicians understand that loosing the election will put them in jail, they will fight all the harder, and use even dirtier tricks to stay in office.  Even the Russians let Krushchev retire to a dasha on the Black Sea and write his memoirs, rather than executing him they way they did Beria, Trotsky, and perhaps Stalin. 
   American politics is so difficult, demanding and dangerous that few first rate people go in for it.  First rate people go into business, high tech, the military, doctoring, Hollywood, lawyering, and professional sports, rather than politics.  If we make politics even less attractive by adding the risk of going to jail when you loose the election, even fewer decent people will go out for it. 
   It's best for the country in the long run to let those who are defeated in the election go on about their lives in peace. 

Civilization[s]

New PBS TV show.  Kind of a remake of the Kenneth Clark show of a similar name from back in the late 1960's.  This one goes way further back in time, this first episode starts off with cave paintings.  They showed some cave art that was new to me, and a lovely ivory figurine that I had never seen before.  The voiceover commentary was less than satisfactory.  They didn't show where these and other like works where from.  They did opine about the age of the pieces, but did not mention the type of dating used, the uncertainty of the method, or recent  revisions of carbon 14 datings of great age. 
   Then they went globe trotting, to some ancient recently discovered bronzes in China, to the Mayans, couple  of other places.
   Not as good as the original Kenneth Clark show, but watchable. 

Junk Science

Headline of op ed in Tuesday's Wall St Journal, "How bad is the Government's Science?"  It speaks to the reproducibility crisis in science, where a large number of published scientific papers simply cannot be reproduced by other workers.  Which says that the published paper was just plain wrong.  A 2015 study estimated that $28 billion a year was spent on wrong science.  Which is a terrible waste of both money and the time of scarce and hard to train scientists. 
   I ran into the reproducibility problem myself back when I was developing a portable heart monitor.  I needed a way to compress the sampled EKG so that the device could store more EKG data in its limited memory.  I researched the literature, and bingo, I found a paper discussing compression of EKG and offering a method that claimed much higher performance than the standard technique.  I read the article thru, and then programmed the new algorithm into our prototype monitor.  It worked, it did compress the data, and the decompressed EKG was of good quality, but, I could only obtain one half the amount of compression that the author claimed.  I troubleshot and debugged and finally telephoned the author to ask for help.  The author rather sheepishly, admitted that he had left out a key factor in his paper, and that yes, the compression obtained would be only half of what he had claimed.  I managed not to express my dismay over the waste of two weeks of the project's time. 
   One thing legislators could do about this.  Require that all government financed researchers publish all their raw data.  Right now, a lot of researchers keep their data private, hoping to either use it for another publication, or to prevent skeptics from going over it looking for faults.  Far as I am concerned, if the taxpayers are paying the freight,  the taxpayers own the results.  This policy would go far to squelch the likes of leftie greenie "climate scientist" Michael Moore, inventor of the global warming hockey stick. 
  Another thing, someone ought to keep score.  Any scientist who publishes unreproducible results should be barred from future government research grant money.  That will make them a bit more careful. 

Friction? Would you believe real hostility?

Front page of Monday's Wall St Journal.  "Friction between the president and Comey resurfaced after details from the former FBI director's new book reopened the debate over his firing. "
  If that's "friction" I'd hate to see real hostility.