Friday, November 9, 2018

It's snowing up in Franconia Notch

It's full dark so I cannot see much, but I have a lotta snow in the deck light.

Why I think the Mueller investigation is a crock

Mueller is trying to prove that the Russians tried to get Trump to win in 2016 by doing something, nobody knows what, to help Trump and hinder Hillary. 
   This is a crock because the Russians wanted Hillary as the new US president.  Benghazi showed that Hillary had no stomach for retaliation for destruction of a consulate and killing four of her people.  She isn't very brave, she isn't very smart, and she would not give Putin any trouble as he invaded various small countries around the Russian borders.   Trump on the other hand was an unknown quantity,  who might be belligerent, who would oppose Russian takeovers along their border, and might do almost anything. 
   Putin is an old KGB hand, he has good intel, and I am sure he understood the differences between Hillary and Trump back in 2016.  He probably expected Hillary to win in 2016 because the entire US mainstream media thought that Hillary would win. 
   I think the whole "collusion" (what ever that means) and Russian interference in the US election is a Democrat idea to give Trump some flak and conceal Democrat corruption of US intelligence agencies, especially the FBI.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

New Hampshire, a red wave? or a red ripple?

Despite a good economy, low unemployment, rising wages, all the things a good economy brings, New Hampshire voters went Democrat.  They elected enough legislators to give the Democrats control of both houses and the executive council.  Democrats claimed both US representative seats.  Chris Sununu, the Republican governor survived with about a 5% margin over Democrat Molly Kelly.  Kelly is mostly known for her desire to raise taxes, all kinds of taxes.   I won the District 1 seat in the NH Senate, with no support from radio, TV, or print press.  This happened partly due to placing yard signs all over the district, and partly due to my Democrat opponent's indictment on charges of domestic violence back in August. 
   Why did all the voters go Democrat despite excellent economy and a balanced state budget?  All I can think of is a LOT of voters have been turned off by President Trump.  Despite excellent numbers on the economy (GNP growth is up, unemployment is down, stock market is up, taxes are down) Trump's personal style is offensive to many. 

Monday, November 5, 2018

TV newsies say the election is close, everywhere.

So, tomorrow I vote, I poll stand, and then I go home and watch the results on TV.  From what the newsies are saying, anything could happen. 

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Everybody ought to go out and vote on Tuesday

It is the duty of all citizens of a democracy to vote.  Voting sets the course the country will follow. We need all our rational citizens to vote to keep our country on a rational course of action.  Even  if you don't like either candidate, one candidate will be better than the other.  Your duty as a citizen  is to vote for the lesser of two evils.   And your vote counts. 
   I remember dragging youngest son to a school board meeting at which the vote was to pass a serious (big bucks) bond issue to construct a new building for the school youngest son had just graduated from.  That bond issue passed by ONE vote.  On the way home I told youngest son that I never wanted to hear him bitch that his vote would not count.  It was his vote that got us a new school building.  

Micro$oft breaks Win 10, Again

Back in Windows XP, you were protected against accidentally copying a old version of a file over the latest version of the file.  Wind 10 no longer protects against this.  There I am backing up Trusty Desktop onto Flatbeast my laptop.  On Trusty Desktop I copy my recent files, such as my checkbook, my list of books, my medications, a bunch of photos, and other stuff onto a flash drive.  I carry the flash drive over to Flatbeast  and start copying the latest versions of the files off the flash drive onto Flatbeast's hard drive.  Of course,  I have done this in the past, and Flatbeast's hard drive already contains old versions of these files.
  Back in the good old days of Win XP, you would get a message box saking "Do you  REALLY want to overwrite file such-and-such date such and such with  same file name, date somthingelse?"   And you would look at the file dates, and most often you would say "Go for it" if you were overwriting an older file with a newer one.
   Now we are stuck with Win 10 and we get a similar message box, EXCEPT,   one of the file dates comes up as "Unknown".  So the question now reads "Do you REALLY want of overwrite file such-and-such date such-and-such with same file name, file date UNKNOWN?  
   Of course you don't want to do that.  Do you?  So maybe you don't back up your files, maybe you say "Press on regardless", maybe you do some double checking.  But on Win 10 you have a lotta ways of messing up in file back up which good old Win XP handled correctly.
   Looks like the  Micro$sofies have been spending programming effort in breaking things that used to work.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Birth right Citizenship

Amendment 14.  Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the Stte wherein they reside."    I am not a lawyer, my degrees are in history and electrical engineering.  Lawyers have odd ways of reading and writing.  "Subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in ordinary English means citizen, legal alien, green card holder, and at a stretch, tourist visa holder.
  So to an ordinary reading of the 14th Amendment, there is no requirement to grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.  Newsies who claim that a constitutional amendment is needed are just plain wrong.
   Trump could stop Birth Right Citizenship by executive order.  Politically it would be better to get an act of Congress on the matter.  Any such change will be opposed in court, and the courts give a lot more deference to acts of Congress than they do to executive orders.
   In all the talk about process and legality and constitutional change, we haven't heard much about the real issue here, namely does our current policy of birthright citizenship cause real harm to us.  And what might that harm be?  As it is, travel agencies in China make arrangements for Chinese mothers to fly to the US to give birth here so that their children will have US citizenship.   Which is kinda flattering to us that people would spend all that money, and be away from friends and family for the birth of a child.  They really care about having US citizenship.  And the Chinese are already citizens of China, an important country, which speaks their language and embodies Chinese culture.  We Americans have created a good thing here if so many people want to come here.