Things Democrats have brought us.

   

1. $5 a gallon gasoline.  It has dropped off a bit from $5 but not enough to matter.
2. Attempts to renew the “assault weapons” ban.  Since there are no real differences between “assault weapons” and deer rifles, this law will ban all rifles.
3. 9.5 % inflation.  Your dollars are worth 9.5% less in buying power than a year ago.
4. The Afghanistan debacle.  We pulled out of Afghanistan turning the country over to the Taliban and leaving billions of dollars worth of good American weapons to Islamic terrorists.  We had Afghani’s clinging to USAF transports and falling to their deaths when the plane took off.
5. Lack of baby formula in store.  For that matter a lot of empty shelves for all sorts of common products like bacon.
6. Kamala Harris for vice president.  If anything happens to Biden, impeachment, heart attack, Covid 19, falling off bicycles, falling down the boarding stairs from Air Force 1, you name it, Kamala becomes president.  By all accounts she is worse than Biden.
7. Opening up the US-Mexican border to anybody who shows up.  Resulting in  floods of fentanyl, Covid 19 cases, and illegal immigrants.
8. Turning the presidency over to Who Runs Biden’s America (WRBA).  They write the executive orders and the speeches on the teleprompter.  Biden signs what is put before him and reads out loud what ever is on the teleprompter.  We have no idea who WRBA is but who ever they are they are running America right into the ground. 
9. Biden is pushing a big spending bill thru Congress and will sign it when the Congress approves it.  It will make inflation worse. 
10. Biden is putting the Armed Forces onto a lefty greenie path, including Critical Race Theory training for the troops and mixed sex bathrooms and mixed sex locker rooms.  There was a scene of this in the movie Starship Troopers.  They are discharging 60,000 regular and National Guard troops who lack Covid 19 vaccination.  The armed services are reporting recruiting shortfalls of as much as 45%.
    

       All real Americans need to vote a straight Republican ticket in the mid term federal elections coming up this November.  Only that will save America from total ruin.

More Old Line Science Fiction authors. Poul Anderson.

He wrote a lot of stuff.  I have 17 Poul Anderson books on my bookshelf and I dare say there are more such books out there. Andersen wrote good fantasy, good historical novels and good hard science fiction. Some of my favorites are Three Hearts and Three Lions, War of the Wingmen, The Star Fox, and The High Crusade.  All Poul Anderson books, not just my favorites, are good reads.  Anderson stories have a protagonist who also serves as the view point character.  In the eyes of the protagonist, his friends are noble and good, his enemies are evil.  A very simplified world view but this is fiction, and a straight forward and not too complicated world view makes for a good story.

   Anyhow if you are looking for a good science fiction and fantasy writer you cannot go wrong with Poul Anderson.

 

Are we in a recession?

 The usual description of a recession is two quarters (half a year) of declining GNP.  We got that today.  The Biden Administration is saying “No we don’t.  We have to have something else before it is a recession.”  They never said what “something else” might be.  This story doesn’t convince many people, but it soaks up hours of TV time debating the worthless issue. While this fruitless debate goes on, the Administration doesn’t have to answer real questions, like “Will you reauthorize Keystone XL?”, or “When will you start leasing land for oil and gas exploration?” Or “When will you tell the banks and finance houses that it is OK to lend for oil and gas drilling?”,  The Wall St Journal simply mentioned that most people believe two negative quarters is a recession and then they moved on. 

 

400 Parts per Million of CO2 is nothing.

 The earth takes in a flood of solar energy on dayside.  To keep the world’s temperature fairly steady the world has to radiate as much heat from the night side as the Sun pours in on the dayside.  Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere absorb heat radiated from the sun warmed ground, rather than allowing the heat to radiate into outer space. 

  CO2 is a green house gas.  So is water vapor.  There is a lot of water vapor in the air; you can see it with the naked eye in the form of clouds.  The amount of water vapor varies with temperature but it averages around 4000 parts per million.  That is ten times the current amount of CO2 which is 400 parts per million.  The part the Greenies natter about is the rise from 300 parts per million to 400 parts per million over the time since the Industrial Revolution.  That is an increase of 100 parts per million or 2.5% of the amount of water vapor.  Real people (not Greenies) don’t believe that a 2.5% increase in greenhouse gases makes any difference to the temperature of the world. 

  As far as real people are concerned, the Greenie push to stop using oil and natural gas is just a political scheme to let them control a large part of the US economy and squeeze money out of that control.  The Greenies love $5 a gallon gasoline.  And at this point it looks like the Greenies are controlling Biden.

His Dark Materials

 Unsatisfying.  Audio is terrible; I could not understand most of the dialog.  Casting is mediocre, Lyra and Will Parry are too tall, and look to be 18 or 19.  They speak to each other, and I would enjoy hearing what they are saying to each other. The books, (which I have read) have both characters as 15 or 16.  Mrs. Coulter just looks plain, not romantic enough to attract Lord Asreal.  This made for TV version is nowhere near as good and the movie Golden Compass. 

TV is going crazy about a heat wave.

  I am getting old but I can remember summers going back maybe 75 years.  At home (New England) summer weather was mostly warm and pleasant.  We went swimming in Lake Cochichuate, we played with neighbor kids, and we ran around in the woods surrounding Lake Cochichuate.  Every summer we had a hot spell, a few days or even a week, of really hot weather, 90F and more.  Mother coped.  She would take us to an air conditioned movie, or out to eat somewhere, or just do a nice big steak on the outdoor fire place.  And the hot spell would be over.  And we didn’t have radio and TV commenting that this hot spell was global warming and would end the world.  It was just a hot spell. 

Really old science fiction writer. Edgar Rice Burroughs

Although Edgar ice Burroughs is best known as the creator of Tarzan, he started his writing career with “A Princess of Mars” way back before WWI.  The only reasonable science fiction author older than Burroughs is Jules Verne.  In this romance, Mars is habitable, with breathable air, little water, lots of strange animals, and multiple races.  All Martians go around armed, long sword, short sword and radium revolver. Red Martian princess Dejah Thoris meets up with Earthman John Carter.  They fall in love; they escape captivity by the Green Martians riding double on the back of a thoat. They lead the forces of Helium and Thark to the destruction of Zodanga. 

   Burroughs wrote another dozen Martian novels over his life.  The first three, Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars, and Warlord of Mars are the best reads. The later ones, not so much.  Burroughs influenced later science fiction stories.  For instance Star War’s Princess Leia owns a lot to Burrough’s Dejah Thoris. 

Men and Women

A woman is a human being who can get pregnant, bear live children and nurse them after birth.  A man is a human being who can impregnate a woman.  There are some men who wish they were women or think they are woman but I would merely call them men with delusions.   Likewise there are women who wish they were men or think they are men, but I would merely call them women with delusions.  It is beyond the capabilities of medicine to actually change a man into a woman or vice versa.  Attempts to do so can render the individual sterile or infertile, which can be a great sadness in later life.  I would call attempts to change a person’s sex by drugs or surgery to be medical malpractice, especially in the case of young persons.

   People with delusions about their sex are called “transsexuals” by some.  I will stick with calling them delusional. 

    I feel much of the talk about “transsexuals” comes from people who want another identity group to politic with.  We already have identity groups of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and LGBTQs,  Adding “transsexuals”  expands the number of identity groups to politic with or for.

How do you tell when a Biden administration spokesperson is lying?

Ans.  When they talk about “Transition”.  “Transition” is the idea that the US economy can be made to run without using oil and gas.  Like magic Wind and Solar will pick up the load.  Yeah Right.  No way does wind or solar run my car or heat my house.  If we stop using oil and gas then we are back to the Hiawatha economy, no aircraft, no motor vehicles, no railroads, no central heating, no air conditioning, no fresh fruits or vegetables in winter, living in tepees and cooking over wood fires.  I get tired of camping out, especially during a New Hampshire winter.   

   In short, “transition” is extremely uncomfortable, and only works in the Deep South where you don’t get winter.  I don’t want it and no real voters want it.  Just because Administration spokespeople talk about it doesn’t mean it is going to happen. 

So who is gonna run for President??

 There are two answers, one for democrats one for Republicans. 

For the democrats anything goes.  Biden is saying he will run again but I think that is just talk to prevent him from becoming a lame duck early on.  As soon as Biden says he is not running in 2024 he becomes a lame duck, right then and there.  So far the only democrat who has expressed interest (he didn’t say he would run, he just sounded interested) is that Gary Somebody or Other from California.  Saints preserve us from a California democrat.  If the democrats have anyone else I have not heard.

 

The Republican have Donald Trump.  He is strong, a lot of people voted for him last time.  After a year and a half of Biden, Trump is looking pretty good.  One the other hand there are a lot of Never-Trumpers out there who won’t help.  And then we have Ron Desantis, Florida governor.  I know little about Desantis other than he got into a squabble with Disney a little while ago about that bill for parental rights, forbidding teaching about sex in grades three and below.  Actually had it been up to me, I would have made it grade 6 and below.  I am not sure just where parents stand on that bill. 

 

So, 2024 is up in the air as far as I can see right now. 

Biden says he would use US force to prevent Iran from getting nukes.

    Does anyone believe Biden?  I have my doubts that in the clutch Biden would order a couple of US armored divisions into Iran to do regime change.  I fear he would chicken out and back off.  What do you think the Iranians, the Russians, the Iraqis, the Saudis, the Israelis, and who ever else might care, think?  Would Biden have the stones to go thru with it?

Old Time Science Fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein.

   Heinlein has been dead for nearly 35 years now.  I remember seeing his obituary on the front page of the Boston Globe back in 1988.  The only other writer to ever get a front page obit in the Globe was Tolkien back in the 1970s.  To get a front page obit you have to be very widely read and your writing must be considered important.  In a long active career Heinlein wrote a lot of stuff, all of it good reading.  Some of his best were Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Red Planet, and The Star Beast.  And a lot of others, all well worth reading.  Controversial is his novel Stranger in a Strange Land.  This book drops out of the hard science fiction mold into something else that is hard to describe.  It works best for older readers, into (or graduated from) high school.  I would discourage children from, reading it while they are still in grade school. 

Out of 30-30 ammunition.

 Have some friends coming up for the weekend who said they would like to go shooting.  So I drove over to the Alderbrook range just to make sure my fancy radio card still worked.  It did.  So I dropped by the Sports Shop in Littleton to buy a little ammunition.  They had .22 and 9 mm.  They did not have any 30-30 which amazed me, 30-30 is extremely popular, all the lever action rifles use it.  The only round that might compete in popularity is .223, the round used by AR15s.

Street Drugs kill. We need to tell our kids.

 Street drugs are given names of opioids and sold to people looking for the high they get from good strong opioids. At this time, the street drug makers and sellers are liberally spiking all their wares with fentanyl.  It’s cheap, it gives a rocket ship high, and it is extremely powerful, so powerful that the slightest error in manufacture adds a lethal dose of fentanyl to the pill.  They did some checking and they found that one in five pills bought off the street contained enough fentanyl to kill, right upon swallowing the pill.

 We need to tell the kids that street drugs kill.  Stick with weed or beer.

Addams family 2.

 I Netflixed it.  It is a cartoon, no live action.  Gomez comes out looking like a football wearing a striped suit.  Chester looks like a blimp.  Mortica looks like a string bean dressed in black.  Wednesday spends her time having Pugsley beaten into a pulp or thinking about changing families.  No good lines for anyone.  Best part of the flick is the Addams family RV, a rolling antique that puffs purple smoke while underway. I lost interest before the end and started doing housework. 

I cannot recommend it on account of terminal boredom.

Christian Nationalists.

 I never heard of them before yesterday when NPR ran a long 45 minute piece on my car radio trashing them.  NPR repeated the piece this morning. NPR clearly disagrees with Christian Nationalism.  I don’t know what to think.  NPR did not tell us what Christian Nationalists believe or what their ideology might be.  NR never mentioned any Christian National leaders, let along give any names.  No mention of a Christian Nationalism headquarters, or a party newspaper, web site, radio station, or just a party email list.  No mention of Christian Nationalists working in the Biden administration or the previous Trump administration

What is the tariff deal between Britain and the EU after Brexit?

Something like 1/3^rd of British exports used to go to the EU tariff free.  Boris Johnson promised to do Brexit AND keep British goods tariff free.  I never did hear how that worked out.  A quick Google didn’t tell me anything.  You would think paying tariff on 1/3^rd of your exports would hurt and we would be reading screams and cries from the wounded.  I haven’t seen any, yet.

A Ten Year old girl is pregnant.

 

 

And they won’t give her an abortion.  I fear going thru pregnancy and child birth is very dangerous at 10 years old.  I never heard of a pregnancy in a girl so young, but some helpful person posted that it happens very occasionally.  I think a girl/young woman ought to be at least 18, mostly full grown, before getting into childbirth.  I don’t know if the 10 year old story is real, but, I think any state writing an abortion law ought to have a clause authorizing abortion for the very young, no questions asked.  Young, girls can make mistakes, and I believe we ought to permit the girls to correct such mistakes.  Was I writing the law I would allow abortion for any girl younger than 19. 

Biden does not like the Supremes about repeal of Roe vs. Wade

Biden was on TV, in his new replica Oval Office, objecting to Row vs. Wade just now.  Most of the time he was just calling the justices names, he was not making any point of constitutional law, common law, or common sense, he was just calling them names.  That does not help him, or the country.  The Supreme Court has been an important part of American government since Marbury vs. Madison, which was a long time ago. 

We citizens see the court as fair and principled.  To hear our elected president tearing the court down does not go over well.  Criticism or suggesting a better way we understand and like.  We don’t like personal attacks on justices.  You would think an old head (very old head) like Biden would know this. This might be from WRBA who provide Biden's speeches and TV clips and probably don’t know this. 

Who is Running Biden's America? (WRBA for short)

 I am pretty sure that Biden is just signing what is put before him and reading what ever is on the teleprompter.  I have  seen little to nothing suggesting who the people writing the executive orders and putting speeches on the teleprompter are.  Weekend Pundit once suggested it was Biden's wife.  I don't remember anyone else saying anything at all.  

It would be nice to know who is driving America over the cliff. 

Not sold in stores

 The TV runs ads for all sorts of pills and plasters.  They will make you sleep, cure bags under your eyes, fill you up with good freeze dried fruits and veggies, cure all sorts of things that I never heard of before.  If you believe the TV ads they can cure anything.   A lot of ads don’t bother to tell us just what the advertised drug is supposed to cure.

   None of these miracle products are sold in stores.  They are all mail order.  That makes me wonder if they really work.  You would think that if they worked they would be on the shelves of drug stores along with the aspirin and Tylenol and nose drops and what ever.   

How long does a recession last?

Depends who you ask.  Ask an economist and he will say the recession is over when GNP and/or the stock market stops going down.  This usually happens 18 months after the recession kicked off. 

   Ask a real person, and they will say the recession does not end until wages, prices, and jobs have recovered to where they were when the recession stuck.

   For instance the last recession, Great Depression 2.0, kicked off in the winter of 2008-2009 after a bunch of really stupid loansby big banks went bad.  Economists said it was over by 2010.   In many ways it is still with us, 13 years later.  Lesson: don’t trust what economists say, they lie a lot.

   It is business men that end recessions.  They work hard and do nearly anything to get their sales back up to where with used to be/ ought to be,

USS Constitution Gets a nice piece on Fox News.

   Fourth of July is when they do the “turn around” cruise.  Constitution gets towed out into Boston harbor and turned around so that the sun gets to dry out the other side of the ship.  This spreads the weathering by sunlight more evenly and presumably helps the ship to last longer.  Fox said some nice things about enemy cannon balls bouncing off her live oak sides, and her 35-0 record in single ship duels over her career. 

   Constitution was bigger, faster, and more heavily armed than Royal Navy frigates.  In those days the biggest warships, line of battle ships, or just “battle ships” had two gun decks and carried a lot of guns.  Nelson’s Victory had 100 guns.  Run of the mill line of battleships carried 74 guns. 

   Any large warship with just a single gun deck was called a frigate.  Constitution fit this definition; anyone could see thru a telescope that she only had one gun deck.  But Constitution carried 44 guns and they were big 24 pounders, battle ship guns.  The usual frigate was smaller and only carried 28 or 32 guns and the guns were 12 or 18 pounders.  In short Constitution had a lot more firepower, and was faster to boot, she could catch anything afloat and out run anything stronger than she was. 

  However Royal Navy captains felt honor bound to engage any American frigate even one much stronger than they were.  The Royal Navy had been very successful in single ship duels for years and years and her skippers in the war of 1812 figured that Royal Navy discipline and seamanship could beat anything.  Well not so much in the case of Constitution.  Her heavier gun battery blew down British masts and slaughtered British crews.  The American crew was all good men with a grudge against the British, usually connected to impressment. They fought with enthusiasm.

   Anyhow, after Constitution’s many victories; the British government was forced to issue orders to their frigate captains to avoid getting into fights with Constitution, or her sister ships, unless they outnumbered the American by three to one. 

  The Brits have a long memory.  In the 1930s the Germans launched Graf Spee, a very large ship armed with 11 inch guns.  By the standards of the day Graf Spee was a cruiser, heavy cruiser to be sure, but a cruiser.  But, the British called Graf Spee a “pocket battleship”, so that British cruiser captains did not feel honor bound to engage.  And this worked.  In 1939 Graf Spee was out in the oceans commerce raiding.  A squadron of three British cruisers, two 6 inch and one 8 inch, located her and engaged.  In the furious gun battle that ensued Graf Spee took enough damage that she took refuge in Montevideo harbor in Ecuador.  Ecuador was a neutral country, and the laws of war limited a hostile warship’s stay in a neutral harbor to a day or so.  So Graf Spee steamed out to meet the British cruisers again; only the German skipper scuttled rather than fighting.  He committed suicide after getting back to shore.  To the British, sinking the Graf Spee counted as sinking a battleship, and they made a big deal out of it.  Only for the memory of the damage “frigate” Constitution had done all those years ago did the Brits succeed in promoting Graf Spee from heavy cruiser to battleship.

Cadillac Lyriq. The new battery powered caddy.

   The reviewer is shown stroking the nicer trim bits in the cockpit, opening the rear hatch and the floor under the hatchback.  I could not see a spare tire down their and the reviewer didn’t mention anything about a spare, like did the car come with one?  It does come with a big black grille.  Not sure why a battery car needs a grille to let fresh air in to cool the radiator.  I don’t think battery cars have radiators.  This review failed to say what kind of range the car would get on a full charge.  Nor did it mention how long it might take to recharge a flat battery on the road.   This reviewer nattered on and on about lovely cockpit trim without ever mentioning how well the car drove, acceleration, braking, cornering, noise at speed, ride, carrying capacity, you know car stuff that us drivers are interested in.  No mention about how many people it had seats for, and whether you could squeeze 4 by 8 sheets of plywood or sheetrock into the car.  It had cute looking flush door handles on the outside.  No way to get your gloved hand into those handles to tug open a frozen door.

   Could be a nice car, but you couldn’t prove it by me from this light weight review.

Airline Flight Cancellations??

How does this happen.  The airlines know how many flyable aircraft they have.  They know how many crews they have.  And lesser things like airport gates.   It should be simple to compute how many flights they can fly before running out of something, aircraft, crews, gates, what ever.  Only schedule the flights you have resources to fly.  Don’t put/leave flights on the timetable if you don’t have the resources to support them. 

  Should be simple to figure and get it right.  I wonder why the airlines don’t bother; they just run out of something, probably aircrews, and cancel flights, hanging the passengers out to dry.

  We need a passenger support agency that lets us know how bad each airline is so we can make reservations on the carriers more likely to fly.

  Delays are another matter.  There is always bad weather or air traffic control to blame the delay on.  But cancellations are pure contempt for passengers.