First Blog

Former FBI Director James Comey recently referred to the investigation of Hillary Clinton as a “matter.”  Now  suppose, some future Attorney General or FBI director drops an investigation of somebody.  Shall we call this an “anti-matter.”  Responses might be called “matter --- anti-matter” reactions. Would nuclear physicists be totally offended?  Would Sci-Fi fans be confused?  What would Mr. Spock do? Naturally, congressional leaders and news organizations would need a fresh page of talking points. So lost they would be. ---------------- Have you noticed how many of the big name stocks, such as Boeing, Amazon, Apple, and Google plus many more are selling at really high prices per share.  .  Can you afford to buy a 100 shares, the normal minimum, of any stock selling at $1000/share?  This implies these companies are simply uninterested in the small investor.  This implies only institutional and rich investors are sought.  This means they are courting only a very select

Many of you read that the FBI had an edge up on decrypting messages from the San Bernardino shooters.  It was reported that certain graphics could be decrypted.  Well and good.  See, http://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2016/03/messages-from-san-bernardino-shooters.html We were skeptical.  Now we see that the FBI did crack the Apple phone encryption without the help of Apple. Whew! An independent firm helped the FBI, we are told.  This is ridiculous.  Why?  Because if such decryption were possible within just a couple of months, it would have been done many more months sooner.  One could guess that Apple leaked information to Party A who in turn notified Party B, who then helped the FBI.  Apple's reputation is preserved.  Whew! What's next?  We may see is an announcement from Apple is that they have beefed up their iPhone security - maybe in the next upgrade.  They need to do this!  If Apple was using anything close to, say RSA security, the encryption would be impossible to dec

I'm not defending the FBI for their conduct of the Boston Marathon bombing.  But, you must admit they did a marvelous job of tracking, identifying and harnessing the Boston Marathon bombers.  This is wonderful.   But the pundits are hard at work - what else are they to do?  They want to blame somebody.  For every tragedy there must be blame assigned.  It does not matter that the bombers were rapidly identified ; it does not matter they were caught in a matter of days ; it does not matter they (the FBI) minimized the subsequent lost of life.  We are at the stage of the classic "blame game" The FBI is now blamed for everything .   Why was there not a follow-up on the Tamerlan Tsarnaev visit to Russia, including the alert offered by Russia?  Why were we not alerted to this single cell plotting their nefarious deeds? Why was he not watched continuously?  N aturally , this case could have been overlooked or discounted by a ineffectual investigator.  That is an internal matt