California, the state that says brass castings cause cancer.

 We don't want any California fruitcakes to hold federal offices.

My sincerest sympathy

 To all who have suffered from, and are still suffering from Hurricane Ian.  The images I have seen are horrible.  May God go with you all. 

America needs to produce enough fuel to get Europe thru the coming winter.

 Europe used to get substantial amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal from Russia.  After Russia attacked Ukraine they stopped supplying any sort of fuel to Europe.  At this moment Germany and much of Europe is facing a terribly cold winter, coming up in just a couple of months. 

  We should be shipping fuel to Europe to make up for the lack of Russian fuel.  Back a couple of years ago, in Trump time, we had the necessary fuel production right here in America.  After two years of Biden making nice to the Greenies, we can no longer produce much, if any, fuel for export to our European allies. 

   We need to fix this.  Everyone should get out for the midterm elections this coming November 8 and vote a straight Republican ticket.  A Republican majority in the House and the Senate could restore the oil production that Biden and the Greenies destroyed and save our European allies from a winter without central heat. 

Save our country, vote a straight republican ticket in November

 

Next month, November, is the mid term elections.  All members of the House of Representatives, a third of all US senators, and most state governors and officials are up for election or re election.  This may be the last chance for us voters to pull our country out of its current power dive into the ground.  We don’t get another chance until 2024, and which point to may be too late to save the country. 

   The most important thing us voters can do is get rid of all the Greenies.  Greenies have strong opinions and no common sense.  Greenies want to shut down drilling for oil and gas, fracking, coal mining, and nuclear energy and cattle raising.  They feel (they don’t think but they have a lot of feelz)  that fracking, oil and gas exploration, coal mining, and nuclear power are evil and should be stopped.  None of them have gone thru a New Hampshire winter with no central heat.  Or walked to the store in a snow storm because they don’t have any gas for the car. 

    The reason for $5 a gallon gasoline is the Biden administration making nice to Greenies.  They shut down the Keystone XL pipeline their first day in office.  They stopped leasing any federal land for oil drilling, and they told the banks not to lend money to drill for oil, it was too risky.  That deliberately cut US oil and gas production by 1 million barrels a day, creating the shortage that led to $5 gasoline.  We need to get rid of these people, they will starve us all. 

   Greenies don’t have the courage to put them selves on the ballot.  Instead they attach themselves to the Democrats, who are on the ballot.  To get rid of the country wrecking Greenies, get out and vote a straight Republican ticket this November.

Don't give New York State a hand out.

“Infrastructure” actually means use federal money to maintain New York State roads.  If you don’t live in New York, vote against infrastructure bills. 

New York roads are terrible.  Potholes, missing center strip, terrible signage, frost heaves, and worse.  Driving, you immediately notice when you enter New York State, the roads are in terrible shape.  This has occurred because New York State government stopped doing routine road maintenance maybe 30 years ago. 

   All the MSM people, TV or newspaper, live and work in New York.  They know how bad New York roads are.  They think all the roads in the country are as bad as they are in New York.  They figure that calling for “infrastructure” spending they will be fixing roads all over the country.  Not true.  Reasonable states like New Hampshire, the other New England states, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Delaware have been doing routine road maintenance for years, and their roads are in decent shape.  A federal infrastructure bill will use tax money from all over the US to fix up New York roads which have been neglected by the state of New York for many many years. 

Hurrican Fiona is tearing up Atlantic Canada

Somehow Fiona manage to glide by New Hampshire without bringing us even a few clouds.  Granted Fiona was well offshore when passing New Hampshire, but usually a close by hurricane creates a day or two of bad weather. Not this time.  The TV is telling of massive power outages in Canada, and even Maine.

Platforms are back.

    Used to be, each party, and many candidates, would publish a list of things they would do, if elected.  These lists were called platforms, and they had a decent effect upon voters.  For the last couple of elections, neither party bothered to publish a platform.  Probably because politicians think that taking a stand on anything loses you votes.  What ever the issue is, there are voters who are for it and voters that are against it.  Taking a stand, on anything, loses the voters who don’t agree, and fails to gain votes of those who do agree.  Which accounts for the hours and hours of politicians speaking but saying nothing.

   Mirabel Dictu.  The Republicans just published their platform for the coming election.  “Commitment to America” they called it.  The name sounds similar to “Contract with America” which was the name Newt Gengrich used for his platform many years ago.  Newt’s platform was fairly effective.  Let us hope this one works as well. Needless to say, the Democrats have been trashing “Commitment to America” ever since it came out on Friday.

How Bad is the illegal immigration situation?

I just received one of those “Do Not Destroy. Registered Member Documents Enclosed” envelopes in the US Mail.  It was from Judicial Watch (a reasonable political group to whom I have contributed some money in the past) and the first seven questions were about the very large costs of illegal immigration, extra school costs, extra hospital costs, and more,  from illegal immigration.  The costs quoted were high, so high that I would want to check them out before I believed the numbers.  The tone of the rest of the document was “Illegal immigrants are costing us an arm and leg and we should shut them down.” I suppose the states on the Mexican border might be getting hit this hard but I don’t think my state is, yet.

   Where I live, New Hampshire, is a border state, our border is with Canada.  Far as I can tell, Canadians are happy with things in Canada and are staying in Canada, except for shopping.  Prices are lower in the US than they are in Canada, so we see a reasonable number of Canadians down here shopping.  They spend money, which is a good thing.  The Canadians mostly drive back to Canada after a shopping trip to New Hampshire.  The Mexican border is as far away from New Hampshire is it can be for an American State so I don’t think we are getting hit as hard as this questionnaire suggests, yet.

   Personally I am perfectly OK with illegal immigrants who find a job, pay their taxes, stay out of trouble with the law, go to mass on Sunday, and send their kids to school.    I call these good citizens, and our country needs all the good citizens it can get. 

   Immigrants who are MS13 gang members, who smuggle fentanyl, extort money, and engage in crime, are terrible citizens and we should lower the boom on them, good and hard.

   Anyhow I will return the questionnaire to Judicial Watch and maybe even send them a little money.

 

Fog in the Notch

 It is so thick I can barely see the house across the street.  And it is raining.  Fall is coming, today I hear. 

Camp Lejeune water

    You must have heard the lawyers advertising for plaintiffs over the matter of Camp LeJeune’s water back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.  The lawyers are taking up as much airtime as Mike Lindell, the pillow guy.  The lawyers all call the Camp Lejeune water “toxic” and cause of a lot of bad sounding illnesses.  I have not heard just what it was/is in that water.  “Toxic” is just enough word for poisonous.  I’d like to know what they found in the water and how much.  Modern chemistry is good enough to detect small amounts of anything just about anywhere.  Before I get very excited about such detections I want to know just how much was detected and what is the safe limit for what ever it is that got detected.  I have no heard that about the Camp Lejeune situation. 

Newsies don't know Cape Cod very well.

Those 50 immigrants that Texans flew up to plush Martha's Vineyard were relocated to "a Massachusetts National Guard base on Cape Cod".  That was probably Otis Air Force Base, where I did Air Force summer camp back in the early '60s.  I heard or read somewhere lately that Otis AFB has been renamed "Joint Base something-or-other".  I am so glad that we have bureaucrats and paper pushers with nothing better to do than rename Air Force Bases.  We could even save a little taxpayer's money by tracking those bureaucrats down and laying them all off. 

Aviation Week still pushing for green airliners.

There are three ways to go to make an airliner that is better for the climate than what we have flying today.  Airliners use and burn a LOT of fuel.  Just to fuel a single seat, single engine fighter plane for a long flight (Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB Florida) took 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.  This is a full 18 wheeler semi trailer worth of fuel.  That’s just for a little fighter plane.  To fuel a four engine jet liner carrying a couple of hundred passengers across an ocean takes a lot more, probably something like 40,000 gallons, 4 full 18 wheeler semi trailers. 

  Aviation Week keeps mentioning “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF).  What ever it is, Aviation Week claims it burns without CO2 emissions, and to work fine in existing jet engines.  I have no idea what SAF is, how it is made, what it might cost.  Googling turned up one post, which I wrote myself a couple of years ago. 

  Then there is hydrogen.  Burns good and clean, no CO2, just H2O (water).  Has to be cooled way way down so it liquefies, before you can get enough of it into an airliner to do any good.   The airliner needs special hydrogen tanks, fitted in somewhere.  The usual plan for fuel storage, filling up the wings with kerosene, probably won’t work for hydrogen.  The hydrogen keeps boiling off, requiring a cylindrical fuel tank that can take some pressure.  The wings cannot take any sort of pressure. 

  And finally there are batteries.  I am surprised that even theoretically possible batteries have enough power to lift themselves (let along an airliner) off the ground.  I am aware a one experimental battery powered aircraft project.  The aircraft is the size of a Cessna.  They got a lot of development work to grow that up to airliner size.

Butterflies.

 

Monarch butterfly gets caught in abandoned spider web.  I have a couple of very sizable webs hung off my eaves.  After a couple of days of steady rain the spiders, big ones, abandoned the webs, I have not seen the spiders in several days.  But the webs are still up and this big Monarch butterfly got caught in one.  He fluttered and flittered and yanked himself around for a long time.  He must have been successful, I just looked for him and he was gone.  Good luck butterfly.  You are gonna need it this time of year.

Feathers in their bonnets

 The British are doing a great procession bringing Queen Elizabeth's body to Edinburgh Cathedral.  The Scottish honor guard is  wearing feathers in their bonnets.  First time I have ever seen what the old cliche looks like in real life.

Spider Webbery.

A spider spinning a web needs something to anchor the web to.  In nature a tree branch with a fork in it, that yields two branches maybe a foot apart works well.  A lot of other spiders have to make do with less.  I see them jumping off my eaves, trailing a thread of silk.  The lucky ones land on my deck railing, the unlucky ones just get blown away. Even the lucky ones are not that lucky.  It is a good ten feet from my eaves to the deck railing.  I never see the spiders climbing back up to spin a second thread. They need two anchor threads to keep the web spread out.  I don’t think spiders can see from my eaves to my deck railing.  I think they are just casting themselves to the winds, hoping for the best.   

9-11 21 years later.

 I was at work, at Analog Devices, that morning.  Someone came running thru the lab, crying out that New York had been bombed.  So I took the lab TV set; we had one because we were doing video compression work and we needed the TV to se if video looked good after being compressed and then decompressed.  I set the TV up out in the hall, on rabbit ears and it pulled in the major networks who were covering nothing besides 9-11.  Everybody on our floor of Analog Devices gathered around the TV, no one spoke.  We saw the World Trade center get hit and later collapse.  New York’s first responders ran into the stricken building to save people.  Many of them died when the building fell.

   Over the next couple of days everyone put an American flag, on a flag pole, on their cars or pickup trucks.  

Political TV ads get rough.

 The New Hampshire primary is Tuesday (the 13^th) only three days away.  Anyone who has a TV ad is running it now, before the primary.  Ads after the primary are wasted.  I had WMUR on this morning.  It was wall to wall political ads.  Some of them were attack ads, aimed at candidates some one did not like.  Accusations of corruption, ballot box tampering, pay offs, fingers in the till were right out there, front and center.  Tuesday’s results will be interesting. 

I am voting for Chuck Morse for Senate, Chris Sununu for governor, and I don’t know who for US rep.

Condolences on Queen Elizabeth's Death

 Condolences to the royal family, condolences to all the subjects of the queen, condolences to all who loved and admired her world wide.  I am old enough to remember when she ascended to the throne, and the impressive parade the British threw to commemorate the event.  I am extremely sorry to hear of her death. 

Sean Bean’s best role. Sharpe’s Rifles

The year is something like 1813, the place is Spain.  Sir Arthur Wellesley (later to become the Duke of Wellington) is leading a British army into Spain to drive out Napoleon’s army, and younger brother who has usurped the Spanish crown. Wellesley sets out for his morning exercise, a horse ride, with his dog coming along.  Suddenly troop of French cavalry appear and take after Wellesley.  At the last minute Sergeant Richard Sharpe appears on the scene, rifle in hand.  His first shot takes out the leading French rider, some quick hand-to-hand work rifle to sword takes care of the second, and a very quick reload takes out the last.  For saving his life, Wellesley promotes Sharpe to lieutenant on the spot.   

    Sean Bean is slender (something he lost by Game of Thrones years) in a snappy black rifleman’s uniform, a crack shot, a deadly fist fighter, an irrestible ladies man, just the right touch of a British accent.  It’s a series, 14 separate episodes, each episode an hour long.  Well filmed, excellent sound, all the dialog is understandable.  It’s been out for a while; I got it from the Melrose public library maybe 15 years ago. 

Peace and quiet in Fanconia Notch

 The rural quiet up here is broken by the roar of ride on mowers, gasoline powered leaf blowers, weed wackers, and for good measure, the roar of jet engines from low flying aircraft.  It gets really loud, especially when the land scape people are trying to catch up after two days of rain. 

Raking up old atrocities

 Beat the Press just spent their whole Sunday morning hour discussing some very very unfortunate cases from four years ago.  In both cases young black men were mistreated by white cops, in one case mistreatment so bad that the black victim died in police custody.  Horrible cases both.  I would be happy to let these cases die and move on to something a little more up to date.  Bringing these two cases up on TV just incites the defund the police people, and creates more hard feelings on the subject of race.  The past is past, talking about it on TV today won't change what happened.  And we have so many horrible cases, newer and better known, we don't need any more.  

Avengers Infinity War 2018

It came in from Netflix.  I put the DVD into my player and played it.  Sound track is terrible; I could not understand half the dialog.  Dialog from female characters was harder to understand than dialog from male characters, which is unusual.  Usually the higher pitched female voice is easier to understand.  The flick starts out with an (unnamed) ugly giant beating the stuffing out of Loki and then Thor.  Thor is so beat up I didn’t recognize him until the movie had been running for 10-15 minutes.  In an attempt to deal with the ugly giant they sic the Hulk on him.  The giant is tougher than the Hulk, and knocks the Hulk out, flat on the floor. The movie has Dr Strange, Ironman, an apprentice Spiderman, Bruce Banner, and the Guardians of the Galaxy crew, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and the green girlfriend and a couple of guys whose names I don't remember.  There was no discernible plot, nothing that the good guys were supposed to accomplish.  I finally turned it off after an hour and watched Fox News.   

5000 years of horse breeding and inventing.

I was watching TV where they were showing clips from a racetrack, before the race.  I don’t remember, or perhaps I never did catch the name of the track or the race.  The shots of the horses were impressive.  Big, beautifully groomed, tight barrels, muscular haunches, I could tell these were a lot of good fast race horses. 

   Thinking about it, I realized that I was looking at the end results of at least 5000 years of horse breeding and inventions of tack.  The oldest horse pictures we have come from ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, where the artist shows us a two wheel chariot, a great noble (perhaps even Pharaoh) riding in the chariot, and a two horse team.  At this early date, horses had been domesticated, but they were small animals, too small to bear the weight of a grown man.  Hence the chariot. 

   It won’t be until around 1000 BC that the Medes will breed up a line of horses big enough for riding.  This should have made cavalry cheaper to field.  Surely the riding tack for a single man, and just a single horse was cheaper than a whole chariot, harnesses, two horses, and other stuff needed for chariots. 

   The next improvement was the invention of the stirrup some time in the 700-800 AD time frame.  The stirrup was invented somewhere out East, India perhaps, somewhere out on the steppes perhaps.  Stirrups got the France sometime in the 700s.  By the late 700’s all of Charlemagne’s cavalry was riding with stirrups. We know this from period illustrations. 

   Stirrups improved the effectiveness of cavalry a lot, so much so that the military history of Europe is dominated by cavalry (armored knights) from Charlemagne’s time (800 AD) down to the introduction of muskets for the infantry (1450-1500 AD).  Special large and strong breeds of horses to carry the knight, the armor, and a small armory of edged weapons were developed.  Today we use those breeds of horses to pull the Budweiser beer wagon.  The race horses are all breed from horses the Arabs had.  I don’t know the story of just how or when the Arabs came by the best horses, but they did somehow.  For a long time the Arabs refused to sell their good horses to the Western infidels.  There is a story behind getting Arab horses back the Europe and America, but I don’t know it.