New Republican presidential candidate, Tim Scott

I saw Tim Scott on TV today, doing his acceptance speech. He is officially in the presidential race now.  I was impressed.  This guy gives a good speech, had his audience cheering on the applause lines.  I have not gotten a hold of a printed copy of his speech to check where his political stuff is coming from, but it all sounded good.  I might vote for him.  To win, he has to give that speech to a lot more Republican audiences.

The federal debt limit.

We have one.  It says that the US cannot borrow money above the debt limit.  US Treasury is saying that they will need to borrow more to pay the government’s bills starting in June. Speaker McCarthy has written and passed a bill to raise the debt limit and do some noticeable cutting of federal spending. No spending cuts, not debt limit increase.  Needless to say the Party of More Free Stuff (democrats) does not want to go along with any kind of spending cuts.

   It should be possible to dicker and come up with a compromise that has enough spending cuts to satisfy Republicans and spends enough for feed democrats.  Right now Biden and WRBA are not negotigiating; they are junketing way out in the Far East.  They won’t be home til Monday.   With out Biden and his heavy duty advisors at the table, face to face, nothing can get done. 

   Default is not the problem, despite what the TV keeps saying.  Default is the failure of the US to pay its obligations, namely federal bonds and treasury bills when they come due.  Federal tax revenue is about 60% of the needed money to run the government and pay the obligations.  Obligations are like 10% of the tax revenue.  Do a little trimming, pay some suppliers late, and we have plenty of money to pay down on bonds and T-bills.

   I expect when Biden and WRBA get home they will be able to cut a deal with the Republican and McCarthy and get on with things.  

Biden wants to put our lights out.

Slow Joe Biden wants to put our lights out.  He wants his Environmental Pollution Agency to require that fuel burning electric power plants reduce their emission by 95%.  Wow. That is like ordering all our power plants to shut down.  It cannot be done.

Consider a coal plant.  Let’s burn a ton of coal to make steam to turn the electric generators.  Coal is pretty much pure carbon.  The ton of coal burns by combining with two oxygen atoms to each carbon atom.  This gives 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide up the stack for every ton of coal burned.  There is nothing you can do to improve this.

Gas fired plants are a little bit different, but the end result is about the same.  

 

In New Hampshire we ought to have a New Hampshire bureau that sets reasonable performance standards for electric plants and inspects New Hampshire plants for compliance with New Hampshire standards.  Out of state trouble makers who cause trouble for our electric generators are sabotaging our electric supply and should be thrown in jail.     

Reparations in California

California ought to become amusing.  They have promised “reparations” of $1.2 million (per individual? per family? Per extended family?)_to not well defined groups.  California is $8 million in debt.  It will take many many times $8 billion ($200, $400, $800 billion?) to pay the proposed reparations to every one eligible for them.  The TV has not been clear about who might be eligible.  Good luck California.  I will bring popcorn.

Keep on Trucking. Anywhere but California.

 California is going to ban the sale of diesel trucks as of 2036.  Was I a trucking company or a mere owner-operator, I would start thinking about relocating out of California.  Reregister all my vehicles some state outside of California.  They did not say if they would permit out of state trucks with good paperwork to drive into California.  If they go that far, I would look of out-of-California customers to serve. 

  I am glad I bought a new Chevy this year.  I am beginning to hear talk about banning the sale of real cars (internal combustion engines) and forcing us all to buy battery cars.

Did the Army helicopter accident in Alaska happen in daylight or after dark?

 Three people were killed and a fourth injured.  They haven’t said when the accident occurred.  If it occurred after dark, did the helicopters have their running lights burning? They should be.  Only reason for flying without lights might be a training mission for flying formation in the dark.  Which is very dangerous. 

You can bring your kids reading up to par.

You can bring your children’s reading, arithmetic, science and other subject’s grades up to par. Start out by getting your kids teacher to give you the kid’s test scores.  This will give you something to compare progress against.  If the teacher won’t show you your kid’s test scores go the next school board meeting and complain. 

   To learn reading, the kid has to read.  Which means you have to have some appropriate books in the house.  For real young kids Dr Seuss is great.  Likewise Shel Silverstein.  Take the kid[s] book shopping with you.  Comic books (graphic novels) can be good.  Check to see of the kid likes it, and check to see if you like it.  You can refuse to buy any graphic novels that you disapprove of. 

  For older kids Tolkien is great.  Likewise an Oz book, Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, Fletcher Pratt stories, especially “Battles that Changed History” is fantastic.  Science fiction, Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, Andre Norton,  Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, E. E. Smith, L Sprague DeCamp, Larry Niven, and many others. 

   Then you have to encourage the kid to read.  Sit down with your kid and a good book.  Read a paragraph to the kid.  Ask the kid to read a paragraph to you,  When the kid strikes a word that he doesn’t know, let him work on it for a bit and then tell him how it is pronounced and what it means. 

   Then the kid will need to know phonics so he can sound out new words.  When the kid is just starting to read, he will hit a lot of words he doesn’t know.  With phonics the kid can sound the word out and get it.  For phonics the kid need to know the sounds of all 26 letters of the alphabet.  The Alphabet song is good for this. The he needs to know the five vowels, and the long and short sounds of each of the five vowels, and some of the rules that make vowels long or short.  For instance if the word ends in E the vowel is long.

   And, very important, read a bedtime story to the kid[s] every night.  This shows the kid[s] that reading can be fun after they learn how to do it.

   You are probably better at choosing books for your kids than any teacher.  My youngest had nothing but age inappropriate, or boring, or nasty dystrophies worse than 1984,  or heart breaking stories like the one about a young girl Afghan who had her favorite pet camel seized by the Taliban and used to fed the troops.

   After a year of this kind of practice that kid will be reading better, maybe reading at grade level.

Lincoln 2023

    The movie starts out with Lincoln in an army camp, talking to enlisted soldiers, both black and white.  All the soldiers finish up talking by reciting passages from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.  Touching, at least to this movie watcher.

   The movie then cuts back to Washington where Lincoln is pushing his secretary of state Seward to support passing the 13^th amendment to the constitution, the one that will outlaw slavery for good.  Lincoln argues that it is needed because the Emancipation Proclamation  is only effective during the Civil War and will loose its force when peace finally happens.  Seward argues that freeing all the slaves will only make the Confederacy fight longer and harder. 

   Lots of scenes with lots of characters follow.  Some of the characters might be famous enough to have made the history books.  But nobody ever names anyone, so you never know.  The only name that comes thru is that of Thaddeus Stevens, a hard core Republican in Congress.  No scene involving General Grant and Lincoln happens, nor do we have a scene of Lincoln reprimanding the troublesome General Henry Halleck.

    A meh movie, despite having Stephan Spielberg directing.   None of the actor’s names were familiar to me.      

Good Work Space X

 Congratulations, Space X, The main stage got the whole thing off the launch pad and 18 miles up into the air. Something went wrong with the main stage separation, we could see the whole rocket swinging around off course on TV. I have not heard if the main stage managed a soft landing. But it's a good first try. I am sure SpaceX will be back at it and fix whet every if was that went wrong. Good work Elon Musk.

Thoughts on going to college.

It is frightfully expensive.  A four year degree can cost you $100,000, new house money.   Is it worth it?

If you flunk out and don’t graduate, you get nothing for your money.  There is no refund.  You want to ask your self if you have the stick-to-it-tiveness to make it to graduation.  How did you do in high school?  College is not much harder than high school.  If you aced high school, you can make it thru college, no sweat.  If you just scraped by in high school you will be hurting in college.  Do you like academic work?  Does writing a term paper sound interesting, or a fearfully difficult challenge?  Is reading in a decent text book interesting or boring?   This is a matter you have to answer for yourself, nobody else knows you well enough to do you any good.  If you think you can cut it in college good.  If you have doubts, think things over carefully.  If you flunk out sophomore year you will be out a lot of money and have nothing to show for it.

   If you are not sure about college, try something else when you graduate from high school.  Enlist in the armed forces, it will teach you a lot of stuff that is good to know and they will help you pay for college if you decide to go after serving your hitch.   Hike the Appalachian trial, sail around the world, join the forest service, ride a motor cycle across the United States, take a job as sailor on a merchant ship, become a ski bum for a winter. Anything for a change of pace.

  Do you have any idea what you want to do to make a living after graduation?  Aside from a very few lucky independently wealthy individuals, you will have to make a living for most of your life after graduation.  Your life will be happier if you make you living doing something you like and that interests you. 

   At this point in your life you may not have a clue about what you want to do after graduation.  You need to ask around, start with your parents.  What does your father do?  Or your mother?  Does what either does sound interesting? Talk to aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends of the family, teachers, ministers, police officers, and firemen, anyone who you figure know what they are doing.  Read a few biographies of people you admire. 

   College gives you a credential (a degree) that can get you a white collar paper pushing job.  Or a job in sales.   Have you considered a blue collar job that gets you out of doors and gets your hands dirty?  Truck driver, lumberjack, plumber, electrician, electronic tech, heavy equipment operator, soldier, carpenter, fish and game warder, lineman, cop, and fireman, many others?   These jobs pay as well or better than white collar paper pushing jobs and are fun if that sort of life appeals to you.

   If you decide to go the college route, pick a major that makes you employable.  The STEM (Science Technology Engineering, Mathematics) majors are always employable.  Engineering, if you can hack it, is fun, pays well, and you are always employable.  I became an electrical engineer and it worked well for me over a 40 years career.   Avoid the “talky-talk” sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science) and any major with “studies” in the name (black studies, women’s studies, any old thing studies).  These are fun to take, but they won’t get you a job anywhere. 

Top Gun, Maverick 2023

Meh.  Not as good as the old Top Gun.  Very long.  A lot of chit chat between unnamed and unknown characters standing around the bar.  Little of interest was said.  Navy brass was bearing down on Maverick, trying to get him out of the Navy.  In the Air Force we made much of our aces like Robin Olds.  Why a couple of snooty admirals want to dump their hottest ace is unfathomable.  The flying scenes don’t really start until half way thru the movie.  The target is a uranium enrichment plant way behind enemy lines.  The plan is to fly up a deep and twisty riverbed, staying too low for the SAMs to get them, and bomb the deeply buried enrichment plant out of existence.  Maverick gets a dozen young hotshot pilots to train, plus he must select only half of them to fly the mission.    After none of his hotshots succeed in training, Maverick flies the training course himself and aces it, naturally.

   I wondered about some of the flying scenes.  The fighters seemed to climb and turn better than I expected.  I was left wondering if I was watching CGI or real aircraft.  At one point someone refers to “front landing gear”.  I never heard anyone say that in the Air Force, it was always “nose gear”. 

 

Biden inflation.

 

Biden inflation. Irving just filled my furnace oil tank. 172 gallons. $4.49 a gallon. $767.77 over all. Ouch. Biden deliberately caused this rip off when he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, stopped oil drilling on all federal land, and told banks and finance companies not to finance oil drilling. He did this the very day he was inaugurated. Greenie payoff.

Need-to-Know

                                  

How? Why?  Does an Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard get access to so many Top Secret documents?  Was his security clearance in order?  Did he have a need to know this stuff?  Which superior officer[s] made all this stuff available?  In addition to prosecuting the leaker, let’s find and prosecute those who made the stuff available. 

I also heard that we have nearly three million people with security clearances.  That’s entirely too many.  The more people have clearances the greater the chance that one of them will leak classified. 

 

Security, Rules for.

 The massive leak of classified documents to an internet gamer’s site has convinced all America’s friends to never share anything with the Americans because it will be leaked all over the world.

Years ago the US Congress passed a law that declares the US has only three classifications for anything, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.  This was done because the intelligence services and the armed services had dreamed up all sorts of different classifications of stuff, and when Congressmen asked to see the stuff, they were told that they didn’t have to proper clearance to see it.  So Congress installed the “Only-Three-Levels” system we still have in order from them to see anything they wanted to see if they possessed a Top Secret clearance.

Another security principle is “need to know”.  Unless you have a need to know the information, you don’t get to see the information unless it relates to your mission.  For instance an Army general planning a campaign has a need to know about the enemy.  The same Army general does not have a need to know intelligence on navies.  There was one notorious case where an Army private had access to State Department classified and passed to the Russians.  Need to know was violated in that case.

Back when I was on active duty with USAF the FBI had to do a background check on me to get a mere Secret clearance.  They even visited my old high school and interviewed Fred Swan, my physics teacher and swim team coach.  That was a long time ago.  I don’t know how things work now.  How was this “OG” character that WaPo said did the entire recent massive leak given a security clearance?  What was his need to know all those documents?

Classified is safest on paper and locked in a safe.  Putting the stuff onto Windows computers is asking to have it stolen.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, full of holes. High school kids can break into Windows.  I wonder where the stuff in this week's leak was stored. 

Hardcopy

I am dong my income tax, using TurboTax.  I get to end, TurboTax tells me I have not made any mistakes, and my chance of getting audited is low.  So I print out my tax return.  I don’t efile, that makes it too easy for IRS weenies to feed my tax return into their computers.  I mail ‘em hard copy.  My printer hummed and clattered but the ink ran out after a few pages.  Ink cartridge went empty.  So I drove into the Littleton Staples to get a fresh ink cartridge.  Arrgh, Staples does not carry #74 black ink cartridges any more, they are obsolete now.

   Since my old HP printer was at least 15 years old, I decided to buy a new one.  Only $99 for a genuine HP.  I get it home, get it unpacked, and plug it in to the computer.  I down load the HP driver for the printer.  Arghh, 133 Megabytes.  For just a driver.  Will software fatness never end?  The new driver announces that it can tell genuine HP ink cartridges from competitors ink cartridges and will refuse to print with non-HP ink.  Arghh. 

Banning TikTok

I don’t use, or even have TikTok, so all I know is what I see on the web.  I see a lot of bad stuff about TikTok and little to no good stuff.  So I am fine with banning it. 

   This might be a little hard to do.  TikTok is a website.  If we pass a law outlawing the website, TikTok could merely change the name of their website and carry on as before.  We could speak to the Face books and Twitters of the world and tell them if we see any TikTok material on your sites we will use the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up your company into at least 5 pieces, maybe more.  We would have to get all the websites, not just to biggies, but it could be done. 

   I hear that 100-150 million people have the TikTok down load on their smart phones and computers.  If we shut down all the TikTok websites then I assume the TikTok down loads won’t be able to do anything.  Unless China opens up a TikTok website to feed all those hungry down loads. 

   Or, we could talk very firmly to Micro$oft.  Their Window Update program can remove any kind of app from a Windows hard drive.  We could insist that Micro$oft use Update to clear those 100-150 million TikTok down loads off every hard drive in the land.  Micro$oft won’t want to do that, and I have no idea what sort of pressure could be brought to bear on the Micro$ofties to get on with it.

Trump is indicted

New York DA Alvin Bragg finally got around to doing it, after threatening to do it for weeks.  I hear some TV newsies decrying it for charging a president with a crime. I hear other TV newsies claiming that the backlash will assure Trump gets elected.  I have no idea which, if either, of these two ideas will work out. The charges Bragg has leaked are Mickey Mouse to the extreme.  Paying off a bimbo to keep her mouth shut is not a crime, never has been a crime.

Does it matter if the Nashville massacre is called a hate crime?

The shooter is clearly guilty of first degree murder.  That used to deserve the death penalty years ago, but Democrats and lawyers have almost eliminated the death penalty in America.  Why confuse things by calling it a hate crime instead of murder?

   And since the shooter was shot dead by the Nashville police, it doesn’t really matter.  We aren’t going to try the killer since she is already dead. 

   TV news spent a lot of time discussing this issue today. 

   I hear the shooter was undergoing some sort of “medical” procedure on account of her psychological problems.  I would love to learn the name of the doctor whose treatment was so tragically ineffective.  

It isn’t the guns, it’s the homicidal maniacs.

    The Nashville school shooting was horrible.  Three nine year olds are dead, shot by the shooter.  That is too terrible for words.  Three adult school staff members are dead, also shot by the shooter.  

   Biden is using this horrible case to call for more gun control, this time he wants to outlaw and confiscate all semi automatic rifles and pistols.  Most guns out there are semi automatic, so Biden is calling for confiscating everyone’s guns.

   Guns are not the problem and not the cause of the Nashville massacre.  The true cause is the large number of homicidal maniacs that we allow to run around loose.  We should have mental hospitals and homicidal maniacs should be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital until they are cured of their homicidal mania. 

   We used to do this back in the old days.  Unfortunately the 1960’s reformers declared that involuntary commitment was like putting people in jail without a proper trial.  The inmates were released to become homeless street people and the mental hospitals were closed.

   Until we round up the homicidal maniacs running around loose we will continue to have horrible shooting cases like Nashville.

 

 

 

Is Stanford a real law school?

Does it train its students to become real practicing lawyers out in the real world?  In the real world everyone, especially the lawyers, treat the judge with courtesy and respect.  A lawyer that interrupts the judge the way the Stanford students did would be declared in contempt of court.  The judge would have the court officers remove the offender from the court. Or the judge can sentence the offender to a prison term, right then and there.  In my estimation the Stanford students who shouted down the judge ought to be expelled from Stanford on the grounds that they will never become a real lawyer. 

Marketing Medicine

I see TV ads many times a day.  The medicine[s] always have a strange name, a made up word.  The TV doesn’t say what the magic medicine might cure.  They are not sold in stores, you have to order from the medicine’s website or telephone them.  If these magic medicines really worked I would think you could buy them in drug stores.  Since stores don’t carry them I have doubts that they actually do any good. 

“The Batman” movie 2022

Meh.  Two simple old fashioned techniques fail in The Batman.  The scenes are not lighted.  They are so dark the only character I could recognize was Batman himself, when he was wearing his costume. Other actors came and went, but I could not see them well enough to tell one from another.  All they had to do was turn on the lights.  Surely a movie budget can afford a little electricity. 

   And the curse of the soundman hits this movie hard.  The actors speak in stage whispers, or just too softly.  I failed to understand much of the spoken dialog.  Which makes it hard to follow what little plot the movie might have had.

   Things got so bad I stopped watching The Batman before it was halfway thru.    

 $32 million for a drone???

The TV says the USAF drone lost over the black sea cost $32 million.  You can buy a low end Russian jet fighter for that.  Gold plate much?? 

Silicon Valley Bank.

This bank had $200 billion plus in deposits, mostly from companies.  It had companies that deposited $20 billion apiece.  Sooner of later any half way competent company can find far more profitable uses for $20 billion, more profitable than leaving it in the bank.  When such a company withdraws $20 billion to do something it’s gonna shake the financial stability of the bank, even if it does have another $180 billion in the til. 

   I believe the thinking in bankers’ minds assumes that the depositors’ money is very small compared to the banks total assets.  And that they have a lot of depositors but they don’t all withdraw their deposits at the same time. 

  I’m thinking that Silicon Valley ignored all this and did not worry when big depositors made big withdrawals.

Biden promised to make all the depositors whole without laying the burden on taxpayers.  He is gonna have FDIC pay off everybody.  Of course FDIC gets its money from taxpayers, and $20 billion depositors take a lot of paying off.

 

The Federal Debt limit.

 We are approaching it.  It should hit sometime in September.  Last time, maybe ten years ago, the newsies cried and wailed that the US was going to default on its debts.  Not true. Never happened.  The Federal government collects enough taxes to pay about 65% of its debts.  The other 35% is paid be selling treasury bills (soundest investment on the planet). Last time my mail got delivered (the post office is nearly independent these days.  They don’t do checks for Social Security any more, the computers do electronic funds transfer right into my checking account.   I wasn’t due an income tax refund, so shutting down the IRS didn’t bother me.

   They did furlough a lot of federal bureaucrats.  Tough on them but my sympathy for bureaucrats is limited.   Plus as I remember they all got their jobs back with back pay. 

   So the newsies, even the Fox newsies, are wailing on the air that we are going to default on our debts.  Did not happen last time.  The Party of More Free Stuff (Democrats) has proposed trillions of dollars of new pork spending.  If the Republicans have the stones they should tell the Democrats, we won’t raise the debt ceiling just to pay for their pork.

Let’s make the rails safer.

Norfolk Southern has done two massive train wrecks inside of a week.  There is the East Palestine wreck and now a second wreck not far away from the East Palestine wreck.  Most of the time derailments leading to train wrecks are caused be faulty track.  Around here main line track at White River Junction is so old that I can pick spikes out of the ties with my fingers.  They run AMTRAK passenger trains over that bit of totally worn out track.  I’ll give the railroad this; they limit the speed of the passenger train to 30 mph over this bit of dead track.

   What we need is a public written document describing what properly maintained track is and how to inspect it.  Best issued by a private railroad association, not a government bureau.

   After a train wreck the railroad’s insurance company should inspect the track.  If the track fails to meet documented quality, the insurance company should refuse to pay off to the railroad.  For backup, if trackside land owners, local governments or businesses feel the railroad is running unsafely they can inspect the track themselves and sue the railroad if they find it running on dangerous track.

    The East Palestine train wreck is hard to explain.  The hotbox caused the truck to burst into flames 6 to 8 feet high.  There is a bit of video tape that shows this.  Why the train crew failed to stop the train after seeing the flames is strange, and no newsie has been intelligent enough to ask Norfolk Southern about it.  Hotboxes have been a hazard to railroading since its beginning two hundred years ago.   With 200 years of experience to guide them train crews ought to know to stop the train and cut the hotbox car out onto a siding and leave it there.

China is out to replace the United States as most important world power

I do not approve.  Here of some things that we should do to slow China down.

We ought to pass a tariff of 10% or maybe more on all Chinese goods.  That will cost the Chinese some business. The president can do this.  US tariffs are set by executive order of the president.

We should forbid US banks and other financial companies from loaning money to Chinese companies.  If a Chinese company needs to borrow money, it should borrow from places in China.  I believe this will require legislation in Congress.

 We ought to make a list of strategic items that US companies may not sell to China.  Semiconductors, small arms, ammunition, crude oil and refined fuels such as gasoline and diesel.  Coal, heavy weapons and their ammunition.  Aircraft.  A commission could come up with a more comprehensive list.  This ought to require legislation in Congress, but similar things have been done throughout the cold war on authority that I don’t understand.

US college education falls into two classes.  Four years of American college education is a hoot.  All of us who did college look back fondly on our college years.  Chinese students who graduate from an American college take back good memories of their time in America and will make it easier for us to get alone with China in the future.  Chinese students who are just out of high school (18 years old), unmarried, paying full list price, we ought to welcome.  Older students, who might be applying to US colleges to learn up-to-date US technology or snoop classified research, ought to be subject to more stringent checks.

Marking your product “Made in America” increases the sale of the product.  We ought to have an organization the keeps track of the “Made in America” mark and require that only 10 or 15 % of the product come from China, the bulk of the product should be from the US or friendly countries.  This might also require legislation from Congress to achieve. 

We ought to ban Tik-Tok and the like.

 

 

Chevy Trax

I bought one. It is Chevy’s smallest SUV.  There is a bigger one with an instantly forgettable name, and then the big iron, Suburban.  I am single, children are grown and the Trax is big enough for me.  It comes with a four cylinder turbo charged engine with plenty of power for an SUV.  It is not a sports car, and I didn’t buy it as such.  I was more interested in the all wheel drive that gets it into (and out of) my brother’s unplowed driveway. 

    Good features.  The door handles are big enough to get my fingers wearing gloves all around them to tug open a slightly frozen door.  Windshield is good and big.  It comes with a radio dongle instead of a key.  If you have the dongle in your pocket the car will start and run. No dongle, no go.  The rear seats fold down giving more cargo space to the rear luggage compartment.

   Bed features.  Every thing is so complicated I cannot make the car do anything without holding the ¾ inch thick user manual in my hand.  I had to use the manual just to put gas into it. I haven’t found the trip odometer, or the water temperature gage.   The manual says the car lacks an oil pressure gage.  The rear window is not big enough and rear vision is limited on the sides.  The stylists were from the “black” school.  The instrument panel is black, the buttons on the panel are matching black, the floor mats and the whole interior are black.  The dome light fails to come on when I open a door.

You should buy a radial arm saw.

Reason?  They are very cheap and plentiful on eBay. 

In the old days, when I was a kid, most fathers had a shop, somewhere, the basement, the garage, and other places.  In those days, before chop saws, the shops had either a table saw or a radial arm saw (RAS).  The benefit of the RAS was it could be pushed up against a wall of the shop and work just fine.  Table saws, if they were to cut long stock, needed to be in the middle of the shop with clearance all around.  Both RAS and table saw cut with a disc shaped blade with teeth on the edge turned by a motor bolted to the blade center.  

To trim a 9 foot 2by4 stud to length on a table saw you have to brace the long stud to the miter gage which is only 6 inches long.  It’s very easy to let the long stud slip a tiny bit, and the trim cut is now longer a good square cut, it becomes a little bit off, and the whole project does not fit together a well as you would like. 

   With a RAS, I locate a work bench, the same height as the RAS table right next to the RAS table.  I lay the long stud on the workbench and push it up against the 4 foot RAS fence. With four feet of fence to guide it, the cut will comes out square in both directions.

   Some time in the 1980’s the safety gurus looked at the RAS and declared it too dangerous to use.  The blade could be in many different places, which made it easier to loose track of it and cut yourself.  Half the diameter of the blade was exposed and could do a very nasty cut if the used did not pay attention closely.  The safely gurus were so effective (destructive) that homeowners just stopped buying RASs.  By now I don’t know of any company that still makes them and sells them.

    But there are a lot of used RASs, in good shape, on Craigs list and other places for pennies.  I have seen RASs go for as little as $50.  Table saws will cost you more like $400.  They come in various sizes, from a big 16 inch blade down to a tiny 9 inch blade.  The big 16 inch blades are quite expensive, and unless you are doing timber framing, I would go for a smaller one.  I have a 10 inch RAS which is big enough for everything I do in my shop.  And 10 inch blades are widely available.

   Looking at a used RAS, trying to decide if it is good enough for your shop.  Plug it in, see if the motor runs and the blade turns.  Look for an iron casting for the arm.  The lightweight stamped sheet metal and plastic arms bend out of place during use yielding a cut that does not go where it ought to.  You want a round column with plenty of beef to it supported by a large and beefy bracket holding the column upright from the RAS frame.  The frame should be steel “C section” beams.  Check that the power head rolls smoothly all the way to both ends of the arm.  Check that the auto stops at 90 and 45 degrees are working.  Swing the arm back and forth and make sure the autostop clicks in and locks the arm in position.

    So far so good.  You want to check out the seller’s place.  You want the RAS manual, the blade guard and the anti kickback fingers.  If the seller cannot find, or does not have these items, no sweat there are other places.  Other things you might be able to obtain from the seller is a dado set, extra blades, or a chuck for router bits or twist drills.

   When you get your used RAS home to your shop you want to give it some tender loving care.  Wipe it down with a rag moistened in paint thinner or charcoal light to get the dirt and saw dust off it.  Rub down the guide grooves in the arm in which the power head rolls.  Sawdust gets in there and then gets flattened by the rollers into a bump.

   If the RAS needs one, you want a nice new sharp carbide blade.  I use an ordinary blade with 20 degrees of hook, the normal amount.  The safety gurus claim the RAS wants a blade with zero hook.  I don’t believe the gurus, the ordinary 20 degree blade works just fine in my shop.  You can clean the black stickum off old blades by soaking them in a solution of laundry borax in water.

   Quite likely you want to make a new table and a new fence, since the old one will have all sorts of saw cuts in it.  Make the new table 4 feet long.  Make the width match the old table.  Particle board ¾ inch thick makes a good flat smooth table.  Counter sink all bolts down til the blade won’t hit them

   After installing the new table, you need to align your RAS.  If the have the manual, read up on alignment.  First thing is to make the new table flat to the blade.  With power off, lower the blade until it just scraps the new table.  Swing the arm as far as it will go in either direction.  If it swings and just scrapes you are good, if the blade digs into the new table somewhere and sticks, you have a problem.  The RAS manual ought to give guidance for this predicament. Then you need to check that the arm at right angles cuts square, and the blade is at right angles to your new table/ 

    Now to use the RAS safely.  Keep fingers (and hands and everything) at LEAST 3 inches away from the blade.  If the work is too small to hold and keep 3 inches back, throw that piece in your scrap box and find an bigger piece.  Make sure to maintain 3 inch clearance when you move the blade from behind the fence out to the end of the arm.

   That’s for cross cutting.  For ripping there is a bit more.  The teeth of the blade are moving towards the feed side.  If they grab and stick, the blade will hurl the work back at you at a scary speed.  Never stand behind the blade when ripping, stand to one side, so if it does kick back and throw the work it will just hit the shop wall, and not you. To begin a rip, tilt the blade guard down so that it only admits the work to the blade and blocks any fingers that might be riding on top of the work.  After the blade guard is set, then set the anti kickback fingers to stop the blade from throwing the work.  I use a push stick to push the last part of the work into the blade, rather than my fingers.      

    Good luck with your new RAS purchase. 

Cannon Mountain ski weather. 23-Feb-23

I got six inches of nice new snow on my deck.  My deck is easy walking distance to Peabody slopes over at Cannon. So if I got six inches, Peabody slopes got six inches. Cannon summit might have gotten a bit more.  Skiing ought to be really good this weekend.

You can teach your child to read.

The Internet is full of stories of public school were NONE of the children could read at grade level.  This is astounding and discouraging.  I went to public school many years ago, and things were not that bad, then.

First thing you can try is to get your kid out of the failing school and into a better one.  The Catholic Church runs many parochial schools, from kindergarten up thru 12^th grade that do an excellent job.  My three children attended parochial school even though we are not Catholic.  Best move we ever made.

Or you can teach the child yourself.  If you graduated high school you are better prepared for teaching than any education major out of college.  Motivation is a key step.  You need to read aloud to the child.  When he/she sees that Dad or Mom reads, they want to do it to. You need some good books, written for kids your kid’s age.  Weed out any books that go off into politics, or critical race theory or sex, they merely bore young children.  Dr Seuss is very good.

There are two ways to teach reading to children, phonics and the “whole word method”.  Stick with teaching phonics, whole word is unteachable and does not work in many cases.

For phonics the child needs to know the names of each letter of the alphabet and the sound each letter represents.  The Alphabet Song from preschool works well for this.  And the child needs to recognize upper and lower case letters and understand that the pronunciation does not change because of case. 

Now we can start phonics.  Start with simple short words like dog or cat.  Have the child say the letters of the word.  With some repetition the child will hear the letters and the word they form.  After some phonics work give the child a reward by reading something out aloud.

   After a while the child will be able to just look at the word and know its meaning, pronunciation, and some connotations and denotations that go with it.  This is the beginning of “whole word” method.  Keep up the phonics.  New readers encounter a lot of words they have never seen before, but they can sound them out and get them with practice.

 

Hot Box.

    Old railroading term for an axle running hot in its journal box.  Trains have a lot of axles, four per car.  In the old days, before 1955 or so, the axle bearings were friction bearings.  The end of the steel axle rotated inside a solid brass bearing inside the journal box (square box with a tip up lid on each axle).  The journal box was filled with cotton waste soaked in oil to keep the bearing cool.  Trainmen used to walk up and down the train carrying huge oil cans and giving a good squirt of oil into every journal box that needed same. 

Freight trains had cabooses, in which a couple of trainmen rode to keep an eye out for hot boxes. The cupola on top of the caboose was used to eyeball the train looking for hot boxes that might be starting to smoke. 

  When a hot box was spotted the train was slowed, taken to a siding, and the hot box oiled to make it happy.  Trains did not proceed with smoking hot boxes for fear that the hear might melt the end of the axle, dropping the wheel assembly crosswise onto the track, and causing a serious accident.

Roller bearings came into service in the 1960’s, and are universal today.  They are much less prone to hotboxes than the traditional friction bearings.

There is video from that train wreck in Ohio showing one of the car trucks not just hot, it was engulfed in flames.  The train crew should have seen it.  They failed to do so, and ran the train until the axle did fail and wreck the entire train.

The TV newsies haven’t asked why the train crew failed to pull off onto a siding.

Shooting down “objects”

Of the four “object” shoot downs, two went into the water and two went down above the Arctic Circle.  The Navy is still trying to salvage the big one shot down off South Carolina in only 47 feet of water.  I doubt they will ever salvage the one shot down into Lake Huron.   The winter weather around the two Arctic Circle shoot downs is so bad we may never find the wrecks.

Translation:  If we want to know more about these “objects” we gotta shoot them down over land, places with reasonable weather.  So far from four shoot downs we know zip.

A piece on the Internet claims the Sidewinder missile that missed one shot cost $439,000, nearly half a million, for an air-to-air missile.  Gold plate much? The first sidewinders came into service during the Korean War and only cost $10,000 apiece.     

Gold plating everything runs up the cost of defense.

 Gold plating is the tendency of our military services to require expensive and unneeded fancy equipment added to nearly everything they buy.  For example, the WWII Jeep did the job.  After the war we civilians could buy new Jeeps from the Jeep dealer for something like $3000.  First thing they tried was the “airborne Jeep”, made as light as possible to make it easier to parachute it from cargo places.  And it had the same swing rear axle from the GM Corvair that Ralph Nader condemned.  The troops rolled a lot of airborne jeeps over, often killing them selves.  And parachuting the “airborne jeep” would smash it up making it look like a beer can someone had stamped on.   I remember walking by the Aerial Port where there was a long line of beat up jeeps.  They had been used to practice parachuting them.  The old WWII jeeps looked dirty and battered but they looked like they could be made to run again.  The “airborne jeeps” were so bent out of shape that I don’t think they were good for parts, let alone getting them to run again.

   And after the “airborne jeep” faded out of memory, the services decided they needed something a little bigger.  They bought HumVees.  A new HumVee cost $60,000.  So expensive that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford one.  A far cry from the $3000 for a WWII Jeep (Jeep CJ). 

 

  Then we come to USAF.  I was maintenance officer in a squadron of F106 fighters.  Basically a good fighter.  Designed to shoot down Russian nuclear bombers coming at us over the North Pole.  It was fast, Mach 2, so it could catch anything, good range, it could fly from Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB at the southern most tip of Florida without air-to-air refueling, or making a fuel stop.  It carried a big battery of missiles.  The ones in my squadron were built in the late 1950s and kept flying into the 1980s.  

  One big piece of gold plate on the F106, the Tactical Situation Display (TSD).  This was a 9-10 inch screen that was supposed to display your position, and the target’s position, like that groovy display in the Bond movie Gold Finger, the little display in the glove compartment that showed Bond’s car and Oddjob’s car at once.  Trouble with the TSD was it was totally unreliable.  Just the engine vibration from flying the F106 would break it.  We couldn’t get replacement TSD’s, we couldn’t get parts to fix the broken TSD’s, and by the time I joined the squadron the boys had given up on the TSD.  When it broke they just left it in the aircraft.  What’s worse, the TSD didn’t do anything that needed doing.  The F106 had very powerful radar in its nose that would show targets out to 200 miles.  It had voice radio to the ground controllers who were more than happy to tell the pilot about the target’s position, course, speed, and altitude.  Who needs a TSD with that kind of support?

 

Some things we could do.  All these gold plate boondoggles are made in Pentagon meetings.  Mostly procurement paper pushers attend them.  We ought to require that specifications for weapons systems be reviewed and if necessary vetoed by operators, pilots, aircraft maintenance mechanics, submariners, navy officers, and others who actually know something.

 

W should insist that the armed forces buy stuff off the civilian market and not require (and get soaked for) a custom military only design.

The US Army is planning on a new rifle cartridge. And new rifles to shoot the new cartridge.

 The modern rifle appeared after the US Civil War, say 1870 or so.  These were Winchester and Marlin lever actions, early bolt actions, and other competitors.  They were mostly chambered for a .30 caliber center fire cartridge with enough power to take American game, such as elk, deer, buffalo, bear, and wild hog.  This rifle cartridge served well from the Spanish American war up thru WWII. Korea and Viet Nam. 

   During WWII the troops fell in love with full automatic weapons, the Thompson submachine gun and the M3 “grease gun”.  From the soldier’s point of view, the ability to point the weapon and hose down an entire enemy unit with one quick “BRAP” could be life, should they encounter a strong enemy unit in combat.  The American WWII sub machine guns fired pistol ammunition, the .45 caliber round used in the Army .45 automatic pistol.  The pistol run lacked the power of rifle rounds, but the recoil was light enough to permit full automatic fire from a 7-9 pound shoulder weapon.  The regular rifle rounds kicked so hard that they just drove the rifle up until it pointed at the sky. 

   After WWII the Army adopted the full automatic M16 rifle.  To get the recoil down enough to make the gun usable in automatic fire, the power of the M16 round (5.56 mm) was reduced quite a bit.  The real riflemen in the army still liked the WWII 30 caliber round, it reached out further, it could penetrate more body armor and it made a sniper more effective than the 5.56mm round from the M16.

   So after decades of grousing about the lack of power in the standard 5.56 mm round, the Army has announced it wants a 6.8 mm round (.270 a civilian gun shop would call it) The army claims that the small increase in bullet diameter will give a round with ballistics nearly as good as the antique .30 caliber rounds and light enough recoil to allow fully automatic fire from a 7-9 pound rifle.  

   Needless to say, adoption of the new recoil will require the army to replace all the M16 rifles with whatever will fire the 6.8mm round. And all the machine guns too.  This could become very expensive.    

What parents need to do about fentanyl. Before it kills their children.

 Six out of ten sample pills bought from street drug dealers contain enough fentanyl to kill.  Your children need to know this.  The MSM doesn’t talk about it, so unless you, the parent, pass the word to your children, they won’t know. Taking just one pill bought from a street drug dealer has a 60% chance to killing the child, right then and there. 

   The few times the MSM mention this tragedy they call it “a drug overdose”, implying that the victim took too much of the drug.  Better is to call it deliberate poisoning, because the drug dealer sold the child a pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it and when the child swallowed that one pill, it killed him. 

    If the children just have to get high, they should stick to alcohol or weed.  Neither of them is good for the kids, but they won’t kill them as quickly as fentanyl laced pills from the street will.  And, if the children just have to get high, they ought to do it in their rooms (dorm rooms) and not be out driving.  Just one can of beer can discombobulate a beginning driver and cause a fatal car accident. 

Biden’s State of the Union fails to impress.

 I stayed up and watched it to the end.  Biden ran on for an hour and twenty.  Biden failed to explain what he would do in a second term to pull the country out of it’s tailspin into the ground.  Biden did make a lot of claims that sounded false to me.  And he complained about stuff well within his powers to fix, without saying he would bother to fix them.  He complained about corporations who make serious money but paid no federal income tax.  That’s caused by a tax code loaded with loopholes, and an IRS that doesn’t audit the big boy’s tax returns.  Biden could fix both of these problems with executive orders or acts of Congress.  Biden said nothing about keeping Chinese recon balloons out of US airspace, or having a US Navy strong enough to keep the Chinese communists out of Taiwan. Biden apparently plans to continue current lefty greenie policies that give us $5 a gallon gasoline, $10 a dozen eggs and $10 a pound bacon.