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.