Tell kids that street drug will kill them.

Street drugs, pills stamped out who knows where, have a lot of fentanyl in them.  The fentanyl is added because it is cheap and has a powerful kick.  The dealers hope that the extra kick will bring the kids back for more drugs.  In actual fact, the kick is so powerful that only the slightest error in mixing the pills creates a street pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it.

   Sampling some street drugs showed that 1 out of 6 pills purchased on the street contained a lethal dose of fentanyl.  In short, take a pill from a street dealer and you have a 1 out of 6 chance of dropping dead.  Many of the “over dose” deaths are really deliberate poisonings by the street drug dealers. 

   The MSM has not made this distressing fact clear to anyone.  It is up to parents to make sure their kids know that street drugs will kill them, if not right now, sooner or later.  Kids should stick with alcohol if they just have to get high. 

   Right now I don’t think kids get this message, at all.

Bissel Sucks good

 Years ago, maybe 15, the last of my old Hoovers, handed down from my mother, bit the dust.  I had been vacuuming down in the cellar and the old Hoover sucked up something big and hard.  There was tinkle and a clatter of all the metal impeller blades breaking off and falling on the floor.  So some time later I set off for Wally mart with youngest son.  I came home with a new all plastic Hoover that worked well for 15 years. 

   Youngest son last month decided to do something to spiff up Dad’s housekeeping.  He brought me a very fancy Bissel vacuum, lots of plastic, much of it transparent so you can see how well it works.  Bissel has an all clear plastic dirt chamber; I can see how much stuff it sucked up.  There is a lot of it, either fluff from the rugs or shed from the cat.  I wish I knew which, short of feeling the stuff (yuck) when I empty the Bissel.  This is a step backward.  Way back when all vacuums sucked into a cloth bag that had to taken out of doors to empty.  Mother always delegated that chore to me or one of my brothers.  Years later the vacuum industry went with paper dirt bags that you just threw in the trash.  The Bissel is back to the shake the dirt container out of doors like it was years ago.  I cheat a little bit, I put the plastic dirt contain inside a plastic grocery bag, shake it out, retrieve plastic container, and throw the grocery bag into the trash.

What does an EV battery cost and how long does it last?

 All I really know comes from years of experience with lead acid car batteries, the ones that crank your engine to get you started.  Those last four winters and cost $60 to replace.   The lithium batteries in EV's cost a lot more.  Maybe a quarter of the cost of the car when new?  Maybe worse, like one half the cost of the new car?  New EV's are like $60,000 so a battery replacement is a big deal.  Might be cheaper to just buy a new EV.  And that ain't cheap.  I have never seen anything on lithium battery life, might be anything, from a year or two up to 10 or 20 years.  I have no idea what the real answer might be.  It would be nice to know before you buy a battery car.   

Shelling a nuclear reactor is crazy

I keep seeing pieces about a big nuclear power plant in Ukraine getting shelled, presumably by the Russians.  This will lead to a Chernobyl style nuclear accident.  Reactors need electricity for instruments and lights and control rod positioning.  They also need cooling water and pumps that work.  One unlucky shell hit can knock any of this stuff out, or other essential stuff, and boom, radioactive reactor accident.  Last one (Chernobyl) was so bad they still cannot allow anyone within miles of the reactor site lest the radiation poison them. 

  Here in North America the prevailing winds are out of the west.  So any cloud of radioactive stuff gets blown east.  If prevailing winds work the same way in middle Europe then the cloud of radioactivity gets blown to the east, right into Russia.  Surely they don’t want that.  Even if the radiation stays in Ukraine, the Russians started the war to take over Ukraine.  Do they want to take it over after making a big patch of it radioactive?  How crazy are the Russians?

The US needs to totally revise teacher training.

Today to get teacher certification you have to have taken the Education major in college.  No other major need apply.  If you have not majored in Education you don’t know how to teach.  Thus saith the Ed majors who run the teacher certification process.

Trouble, they are wrong.  There is no magic knowledge in teaching.  Successful teaching calls for the teacher to establish a trusting relationship with the student, in fact all the students in the class, and know the subject they are teaching.  The education major does not teach this. 

 My college roommate wanted to teach school so he took the education major.  He told me it was the most useless and boring stuff he had ever suffered thru.  And my roommate was a sharp guy, if there were anything worth learning in the Education major he would have found it.  Essentially there is no real content in the education major, and they rehashed nothing, over and over again.  Junior and senior year, education courses met twice a day. 

  I have had a lot of teachers over the years.  Mostly good, many very good, a couple of dud’s (Miss Coyne and Mrs. Waters) but in general a pretty good bunch.  The absolute best teachers I ever had were in the US Air Force.  These guys were just enlisted men, pulled right off the flight line and set to teaching in the Field Training Detachment.  They were extremely good; they knew their subject matter backward and forward.  They maintained order in class rooms full if 18 and 19 year olds, the prime age for making trouble.   None of them had gone to college, let alone taken the education major.  My takeaway from this experience is successful teachers know their stuff and develop rapport with their students. 

  For US education I would first abolish certification of teachers.  Let the principal and the faculty at the school look at resumes and interview candidates and hire the ones that seem good.  Allow them to lay off new teachers that are not working out without doing a bunch of paperwork.   Look for college majors in subjects that they will be teaching, English, mathematics, US history, French, Spanish, physics, chemistry, and not wasting time on the Education major that has nothing to teach anyone.  

 

 

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Trump’s lawyers are talking lawsuit against DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid.  I think they have a case.  No one is secure if DOJ can send 30 FBI agents to paw thru everything in the house.  I hear that the language used to describe things to be seized was so broad as to cover everything in the house, the garage, the pool, and the women’s bedrooms.

Alec Baldwin and shooting his camera woman.

 I assume it was an accident.  I don’t know any of the principles personally but I don’t think they are the kind of people who would commit murder. 

The TV news has talked and talked about the shooting that resulted in the death of the camera woman.  What really happened is Alec didn’t know, or didn’t bother with, the first and simplest rule of firearms safety.  Namely ALWAYS check that the gun is NOT loaded when you pick it up.  Open the action, remove the magazine and look in the chamber to make sure no live round is lurking therein.  The gun in question I believe was an 1873 Colt .45 single action Army revolver, the kind that loads the cylinder one round at a time thru a loading gate.  This means when Alec picked up this gun, he had to check all six positions of the cylinder, one by one for being empty.  A little tedious.  In this case, the check was not made either because Alec was ignorant of gun safety rules, or he found the check too tedious to bother with.

   This makes the shooting of his camera woman an accident, but it is Alec Baldwin’s accident.  

How to Teach Children to read.

 The Phonics method works.  We teach the children the sounds of each letter.  This is not hard after the children learn to sing the Alphabet Song in kindergarten.  And learn the rules about long and short vowels.  And learn the more common digraphs like “th”.  Teach them that long words can be broken down into syllables. Each syllable starts with a consonant, has a vowel in the middle and a consonant on the end.  Sound out the syllables, one by one, and then say them in order and you have the word.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, that and the other stuff is probably less than 50 things the child has to learn by heart.  And with them, the child is equipped to handle new words, something that happens a lot when the child is just learning to read.

 

The Whole Word method is popular with Ed majors, but it does not work.  It cannot be taught.  The child is taught to look at the whole word.  If he/she is lucky, the mind will recognize the word and the child will know how to pronounce the word, what it means, connotations and denotations.  If the mind fails to recognize the whole word, the child is out of luck, the word is meaningless.  Whole word requires the child to learn by heart a lot more than just 26 letters and some other stuff.  The King James Bible is noted for restricting itself to a vocabulary of only 850 words.  Whole word requires memorizing at least 850 words and probably a lot more.  That is a lot harder for a child to do than Phonics. 

 

   Whole Word is what skilled readers do.  I picked it up by fourth grade.  It just came to me after doing some reading.  Some people, like my best friend, don’t have it by high school.  Best friend was plenty smart, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and went to work computing the intensity of the sound fields around the Saturn V engines.  NASA wanted to know if the sound from 27 rocket engines, all firing at once, would be enough to crack the concrete on the launching site.  Senior year in high school, best friend went out for tutoring in reading, and came back able to read Whole Word method.  He was lucky, and bright, and supported by loving parents, and attending a top notch private high school with me. 

The big Tent Sale, Littleton NH.

Word got around.  The tent was supposed to open at 9 AM this Saturday.  I got there a few minutes after nine.  The place was already packed with people who got there before nine.  The stuff was mostly house wares, rugs, books, sports equipment like ice skates and golf clubs.  I didn’t see any tools.   There was a nice brass set of fireplace tools.  I have a fireplace.  I though long and hard about buying them.  On the down side, my hearth is small and mostly full of firewood.  The nice brass tools would probably get knocked off the hearth, onto the living room rug.  On the other hand they would look cool.  I sat in a chair to rest my feet and contemplate the fire tools.  After some agonizing I decided not to buy them.  I did get away with a Donald Hamilton paperback,  a Wallace and Grommit VHS tape, a couple of whisky drinking glasses, and two nice woven scrap baskets that will replace my existing ones which are 60 years old and falling to pieces.  Much nicer than the extruded plastic scrap baskets down at Wally Mart.  After an hour the crowd thinned out.  Word to the wise, if you want to get anything nice as a yard sale, best to get there early.

 

Wall St Journal reports Chinese students in US colleges down 50%

 This is too bad.  American college is fun to do, girls, parties, sports, dorm bull sessions, and more.  Any Chinese exchange student will leave for home with a nice warm feeling about America after doing four years of college here.  And, it is a good bet that any Chinese who can swing an American college deal will in later life become an important official in China.  Which has gotta be a good thing for us.  Plus the Chinese students bring money; say $100,000 for a four year college. 

I will pay a bit more for a product marked "Made in USA"

 Used to be, nearly every thing in stores was marked "Made in USA".  Not any more.  Take a walk thru Walmart and everything is marked "Made in China" or unmarked which I figure means the same thing. Japan and Korea are selling as many cars as Detroit.  Me, I still drive a Made in USA Buick and would buy Made in USA product even if it cost a bit more.

Either I'm getting faster or the flies are getting slower

 I managed to hand swat about a dozen of 'em today.  You know the drill, you move your hand very slowly towards the fly and when within maybe 1-2 inches, you swat.  That close and the fly isn't fast enough to avoid your hand.  I usually don't do that well, but today was good for me, bad for flies.

Books I read as a child.

The Battle of Britain.  By Quentin Reynolds.  Copyright 1953.   I encountered a good looking copy in the giant book box down at the town dump.  A freebie.  I recognized it and grabbed it.  It still reads well.  The author was an American war correspondent in Britain in 1940, the year of the battle of Britain.  In 1953 he writes of his meeting with British sailors, and the captain, of a smallest steamer in a coastal convey going up the English Channel.  Fending off German attacks by aircraft and E-boats and shelling from Pas de Calais livens things up.  In later chapters he writes about RAF fighter pilots, air raid wardens, RAF bomber crews, ordinary British civilian who have to sleep on subway platforms because of the bombing, firemen, and more.  Since he was there at the time, Quentin qualifies as a primary source and writing while the memories ought to be still fresh. You finish the book with a strong feeling the British were imperturbable, kept a stiff upper lip, and were ready to fight to the death.   Just the right sort of stuff to make any American want to support Britain.   

They raid a former president’s home, they can raid my home.

   Raiding someone’s home is extremely rude.  It can also be very dangerous.  To pull this on a well liked former president means they can try it on me, or anybody.  Especially if one of those 87,000 new tax collectors decides that my federal income tax has a problem.  I do my federal tax with Turbo Tax, which is pretty effective.  If Turbo Tax likes my 1040, I print it out sign it and mail it. If the new tax collectors get the FBI to bust down my door at 0’dark thirty, to confiscate anything, I will shoot them.  30-30 will go thru body armor.  I will keep shooting until they stop moving.  Then I will reload and make sure they are all dead.  Anybody busting into my house at night is a dangerous killer.

   That ought to make the papers.

FBI raids Donald Trump’s home at Mar-el-Largo.

 This is the FBI tilting the election to the democrats, something totally illegal.  The FBI is acting like the Gestapo or the KGB, not the law enforcement agency of a democracy.  We should disband the FBI, lay off all their personnel, sell their property (cars, aircraft, furniture, computers, what ever) burn their files, and sell their buildings.  State and local law enforcement can keep order in the streets. 

Littleton Wal-Mart Remodels

They have been at it for a month.  They put down a nice stone floor, dark gray, nicely polished. They are upgrading their shelving.  Dunkin Donuts seems to be gone.  No donuts on their shelves, no one behind the counter, no coffee.  Tables replaced by shelving full of kid’s toys.  Too bad I liked Dunkins honey dipped donuts and used to buy a few for breakfast when I was in the store.  They removed the seating at the pharmacy so you have to stand while waiting your place in line.  The book shelf seems to be gone.  Small loss, they have not stocked a book I cared to buy for a year or more.

How to read the MSM.

The main stream media have a lot of fake news, and a lot of news slanted so heavily as to reverse the true meaning of the story.  So how does one find out what is really going on in the world?  Maybe George Soros can hire a small crew to sort thru the news and give him a short summary of what is really going on, but few of us have George Soros’ money.

The first thing to do is identify the really untrustworthy sources and just don’t bother the read them.  For instance, I don’t believe anything coming from the New York Times.  They have been passing out falsehoods since the 1930s when they sent Walther Duranty to Soviet Russia.  The Russians were just getting things organized and were making wondrous claims about the goodness of Communism.  Duranty took in the Russian propaganda, including all the good things the Russians were saying about Joseph Stalin.  Duranty wrote up stories in English and sent them back to New York, where the Times printed them all just as Duranty wrote them.  The Russians got a lot of good publicity out of the Times.  Years later the Times fell in love with Fidel Castro when Fidel was trying to overthrow Batista and take over Cuba.  Castro got a whole bunch of American help just because the Times made him seem like a romantic reformer.  Then later in 1967 or 1968 the Times sent a top editor, Harrison Salisbury, to North Viet Nam.   Harrison got together with some North Viet Namese village chief who told heart breaking stories about Yankee air pirates who had bombed his village repeatedly and killed four civilians thru wanton bombing of a purely civilian target.

   I just happened to be in the Air Force and assigned to the 366 Tactical Fighter Wing based in Thailand that year.  I did a little checking.  Yes indeed we had bombed that village repeatedly.  It had the biggest railroad yard you ever did see, running right thru the middle of it.  I figured if we had only killed four civilians for all those bombing missions we had been very careful. 

   Anyhow I stopped reading the Times and have not looked at it for 50 years.  For that matter I don’t read the Washington Post for the same kind of reasons.  I don’t bother to watch CNN, CBS, MSNBC, or ABC.  I do watch Fox News and have found it fairly reliable.  The Wall St Journal is still good.  Anyhow the point is you ought to have a list of sources you don’t bother to read because they are passing out BS.

   When reading or watching the MSM look to see if the article has any numbers in it.  In the real world numbers tell us how many things they are talking about, the length or width or height of something, how old something is, lots of things.  Most newsies are innumerate, they cannot under stand numbers and they cannot write them out properly.  I usually dismiss stories that lack numbers as the product of poorly educated and not very smart newsies.

   Much of the verbiage coming out of the MSM is  pure opinion, and lacks any facts to support the opinion.  Some times I agree with the opinion and sometimes I disagree.  In either case there ought to be some facts in the story. 

  

20,000 Ton ship full of Ukrainian corn bound for Lebanon.

 Ship has cleared inspection in Istanbul.  It's off for Lebanon.  Front page color picture in the Wall St Journal this morning.  It's really happening. 

Thank you Nancy Pelosi

For going to Taiwan.  You showed the Chinese that we will support Taiwan if they try to invade it. We showed our friends in Asia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, even India, that we still oppose Chinese Communist takeovers of anywhere.  A good point to make. 

   Nancy’s trip is the best thing that any democrat has done in years.  Thank you Nancy.

First Shipment of Ukrainian corn leaves for Tripoli in Lebanon.

It is a back page story in the Wall St Journal.  20,000 tons of corn.  That ought to fill up a big ship, and when made into Corn Flakes is will take up a lot more space.  Ukraine has a lot more grain it can ship, a million tons or more from last year and as much again or more from this year’s harvest which ought to be starting soon.  The Ukrainians say it will take a month or more to ship that much grain.  They worry about running out of room to store the new harvest if they cannot more last year’s harvest. 

   Unsaid in the Journal story is how much Ukraine gets paid for that first shipload, and follow on ship loads.  And in what currency, US dollars, Ukrainian currency, Russian rubles, Lebanese currency, IOUs, time payments, or who knows.  Surely Ukraine needs all the money it can get to keep fighting the Russians.  

Apparently a deal was struck between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the UN to  allow cargo ships thru the war torn Black Sea.  Gotta wonder why Russia signed on, you would think they would be happy to strangle Ukraine  by blockading their Black Sea ports. 

 

SOS. Save our Sink.

The kitchen sink faucet has been leaking, a steady drip drip drip, for some time now.  It got to the point where I could hear the drip drip all over the house.  I would go to bed and hear the drip drip until I fell asleep.

  So yesterday I decided to do something about it.  I shut off the water and took the faucet apart.  I took the old seals and the strange metal ball that made a single lever work both hot and cold along with me.  Went to Lowes in Littleton.  Pleasant surprise, Lowes had replacement washers and replacement for the metal ball.  That faucet was installed way back in 1962, so I had worried about finding parts for it.  But Lowes had them.  Groovy.

   I got home, put the liquor away, and started in to put the faucet back together.  Arrgh.  I just could NOT get the damn thing to go back together.  I even made a second run to Lowes to buy a third little set of spare parts, thinking maybe I needed it.  No luck. 

   So I called up my brother John, who has been a contractor up here for 40 years or so, thinking he might have an idea.  Well he could not think of anything to try over the phone, but he said he could drop by and take a look.  Son of a Gun, John got the faucet to go back together.  It doesn’t leak, the hot and the cold work.  Fantastic.  Without Brother John, I would have next tried to replace the entire faucet assembly, probably $90 from Lowes. 

  So the water runs, I can wash dishes, life is good.  Thank you John.