Dunkirk 2017

It came by Netflix, and I watched it on my Sony flatscreen last night.  Lots of dramatic shots of British soldiers in deep doo-doo, bombs falling, tide going out, few to no boats in sight, struggling in the water. Many pitiful scenes of British soldiers standing in line on the sand, (queuing up the British say) waiting for a vessel to take them home. One group takes a stranded fishing trawler out into the Channel.  They spend most of their time below decks shouting at each other.  I kept wondering why they stayed below, rather than out on deck where they could see where they were going and who was coming after them.  Lots of shots of RAF fighters going out at low level.  RAF pilots looking and sounding cool as cucumbers under fire.
   Although the camera man did things right,  turning on the lights before filming, the sound man bungled badly.  He never muted the score and the sound effects when characters were speaking.  That, combined with modern actor's tendency to mumble their lines, caused a good deal of the dialog get lost.   Fortunately there wasn't much dialog.  I never caught the stage names of any of the characters, mostly because nobody ever addressed any one else by name.  And with the exception of the two teen aged boys aboard the old codger's yacht,  nobody had any connections with friends, family, sweethearts, warbuddies, any other human being.  There was no protagonist for us audience to rally behind and root for. 
    The movie never told us that we were watching a turning point in WWII.  Hitler could have won the war that day.  If der fuhrer had stayed off the telephone and let his best tank general, Heinz Guderian, commander on the scene, do what he wanted to do, the British army (every soldier Britain had) would have been surrounded and taken prisoner of war.  Instead, Hitler feared that Guderian's panzers were too far out in front, they might be counter attacked. He ordered Guderian to stop and wait for the bulk of the German infantry, marching on foot,  to catch up with him.  This delay gave the British time to evacuate.  This fact comes right out of Guderian's after-the-war memoir. 
   Britain nearly gave up the fight that summer.  They had been driven out of Norway, driven out of the Low Countries, driven out of France.  They had sacked their prime minister and installed Winston Churchill that very week.  The entire British establishment, members of parliament, the press, academia, the churches, business men, the entertainment business (we call ours Hollywood, dunno what the Brits called theirs) were against fighting the war.  Many of them had fought in the First World War, and they were not going to do that sort of thing, ever again.  And Germany had more people, more industry, more advanced science, and looked invincible. 
   Hitler was offering the Brits a deal, You Brits let me keep all of continental Europe, and I Hitler will let you keep your overseas empire and your Navy.  A lot of Brits were ready to take this deal.  Not Churchill.  Newly installed as prime minister, Churchill had to rally his country.  The British rank and file were more tough minded than their establishment.  The rank and file didn't want to kowtow to the Nazis, and were willing to fight.  They figured they had whipped the Germans twenty years ago and they could do it again. But in June of 1940 everything was in flux.  If the Germans had taken the BEF prisoners of war that would have been a tremendous downer to all of England.  As it turned out, the Brits got nearly every man, 350,000 or so, off the Dunkirk beaches and safely home.  That did a lot to steady things down and build support for Churchill.  
   If the evacuation had failed, Churchill might have been turned out of office (he had a lot of old enemies going back forty years) and Britain might have signed a deal with Hitler.  Which would have made launching the D-Day invasion from Britain impossible, and deprived USAF of bases from which to bomb Germany. 

Don't talk to cops, they are out to getcha

Advice to President Trump.  Special Council Mueller is out to get you.  He will take anything you say to him and twist it to make you look bad.  Your best bet is not to say anything to him.   I'm sure all your lawyers are telling you this already.  If Mueller wants a private interview with you, tell him to get a  subpoena from a real court.  Not that rubber stamp FISA "court".  If you have things you want to "get on the public record"  tweet them.  Tweets go right out, the way you want them to.  Anything you say to Mueller will get twisted before it becomes public.

Congressional Earmarks and Donald Trump.

Can you taste the pork yet?  Earmarks were a scheme whereby CongressCritters could order federal taxmoney spent in their district on pet projects.  Like that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.  CongressCritters loved earmarks, after getting one, they could brag about it back in their district.  We rvrn got one some years ago, Former Senator Judd Gregg managed to pull down $492,000 to renovate the Littleton Opera House, a well loved antique building, standing on a prominent site in downtown Littleton. 
   The incoming Republican congressional majority from 2012 voted to outlaw earmarks as pure pork and a total waste of taxpayers money.
   Yesterday I heard our boy, Donald Trump, praise the earmark system and suggest bringing it back because it was the one thing that could achieve bipartisan support.  "You vote for my earmark and I'll vote for your earmark".  Earmarks might have been something that drew bipartisan support, but bipartisan or not, voting for earmarks was voting to waste a lot of taxpayer money.  I'd druther spend less rather than get bipartisan support for pouring good money down the drain.  

"bloody nose" versus "regime change" strike on NORKs

We are hearing talk today, in the Wall St Journal, and PBS, and the other TV newsies about taking the military option with the NORKs.  A "bloody nose" strike, which would do some damage, perhaps take out a missile site, or shoot down a missile after launch, or something,  but the NORKs would recognize that it was just a  minor slap in the face rather than the opening moves in a total war to wipe them out.    Dicey.  Lets think about Little Rocket Man, in his secret headquarters, watching on radar the warplanes crossing his borders, violating his airspace, headed for important installations.  What's Rocket Man gonna think?  If he thinks the Yankees are coming to hang his ass, he will probably order an all out strike on the South right then and there. 
   Let's think about something else in the military line.  How about a regime change strike?   We just put a smart bomb thru Little Rocket Man's bedroom window.  Boom. Instant regime change.   Do it right, a single stealth aircraft, after dark, flying low, and the NORKs won't know what we are doing to them until it's too late.  For good measure we could hit secret police headquarters and army headquarters at the same time.
With Little Rocket Man turned into dog food, it will take 'em a few days to settle things out and give orders to attack the south.  And the new regime might be ready to listen to reason and negotiate rather than start up the Korean war again.      

Head Shrinkers and the Goldwater rule

The Goldwater rule, goes back to 1964 when Goldwater ran for president against LBJ.  A bunch of shrinks opined in the public press that Goldwater was mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency.  In short the shrinks called Goldwater crazy.  Goldwater sued them for libel. 
   The American Psychiatric Association, after the election was over and the smoke had cleared, issued a rule that shrinks must not opine about the mental conditions of people they had not met and examined in person.  Which makes sense.  If you haven't examined the person yourself, what do you really know?
     And, in the few cases where you have examined the person, that makes you the doctor and the person your patient.  For a doctor to talk/write about a patient's mental or emotional state is a clear violation of ethics, common courtesy, and ordinary politeness.  Should my doctor  discuss my health, physical or mental, with anyone, I would be deeply offended, offended enough to find a more honest doctor ASAP.

Are burglars tele casing my place?

I get a lot of strange phone calls.  When I answer, all I get is silence.  So I hang up.  Are they calling to see if anyone is home?  So they can burglarize the place in safety?  Even though I have little in the place of worth to a burglar or a fence.  About the only worthwhile items are a seven year old Sony flat screen TV and a HP laptop. 

How can two ships collide 200 miles offshore?

Surely all ocean going steamers have radar in these days?  The Ramore Head, upon which I sailed to Europe in 1956 had a very good radar on her bridge.  Southwester, a 42 foot wooden sailing yacht, had a decent radar that could pick up ordinary buoys at a couple of miles when I sailed on her twenty years ago.
   Now we have video of a supertanker, engulfed in flames, 2-3 hundred miles off of Shanghai China. The newsies say she collided with a freighter carrying grain.  Were the bridge crews sound asleep?  Surely the radar on both bridges showed the other vessel approaching?   Chapman (Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling) has an entire chapter on right of way and rules of the road.  The Officer of the Deck is required to know all the rules by heart and follow them.  Both ships were far out to sea, free to maneuver in any direction without fear of running aground.
  So what really happened?
  For that matter we have never heard what really happened aboard those two Navy destroyers that collided with merchies last year.  

Wolff, Bannon, Fire and Fury

That's all the TV newsies are talking about.  I'm sure the book has lots of dirt on the Trump administration.  At this point nobody knows how much is real and true, and how much is made up.  All the newsies want to spread the dirt around to stick it to Trump.   Trump and his people say it's all fake news.  I don't see how we voters will ever know what's what.  And this voter doesn't care anymore. 
   I rate the Trump administration on things like GNP growth, unemployment decline, cutting my taxes, cutting regulations, getting Keystone XL going to lower my furnace oil cost.  Things that count in the real world.  It would be nice if the newsies spent more time telling us what's going on in the world rather than spreading rumors designed to hurt the Trump administration.

The Bering Land Bridge

A lot of talk about it.  The Bering Straits are shallow, and not all that wide, and it is thought that in long past times the seas went down and/or the land went up, and people and animals could cross from Siberia to Alaska dry footed.  A lot of speculation about how and when the Indians came to North America centers on when the land bridge might be open.
    What the land bridge enthusiasts forget, or perhaps never knew, is that man can cross the Bering straits by boat, given decent weather.  Say summer weather. The Eskimos used to cross regularly, up until the Soviets tightened up their customs enforcement after WWII and  started hassling any American Eskimos they caught on their side of the straits. 
     The Eskimos used skin boats, umiaks, to make the crossing.  Granted a skin boat sounds kinda flimsy, except the skins were walrus hides, a quarter of an inch thick and tough as fiberglass.  A umiak could carry a dozen people, and were strong enough to take the thrust of a forty horsepower outboard motor. 
    If today's Eskimos could make the passage, I dare say the ancestors of the Indians could make the same passage, about anytime they felt like it.  No land bridge required. 
    The recent publications about DNA analysis of an 11,500 year old Indian child from an Alaskan site all talked about crossing on the land bridge.  I maintain they could have come by boat, any summer. 

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

I have 9 inches of nice light powder on the railing of my deck.  And my deck is within walking distance of Peabody Slopes chairlifts.  It snowed all day Thursday.  No wind (despite weatherpeople predicting hurricane force winds) . So the nice new powder snow is still on the trails rather than blown off into the woods where it doesn't help the skiing at all.   Conditions are as good as it gets at Cannon.  Forecast is for cold over the weekend, so bring an extra sweater, a scarf, maybe even a face mask. 

Floating Fortress to bolster US Naval Power

Headline of a Wall St Journal op-ed on Saturday.  The writer, William Lloyd Stearman, long time National Security Council staffer,  laments the fact the the US has not done an amphibious assault since Inchon, way back in the Korean War.  He blames this on the existence of anti ship missiles that make it too dangerous to bring warships closer than 100 miles to land. 
   His solution a humongous 1000 foot long ship, displacing 125,000 tons, loaded with anti aircraft missiles and artillery, more artillery for shore bombardment, helicopter and VTOL fighter pads, and carrying Marines would be able to close up on the enemy coast, land the marines, and give them fire support.  "This ship could be designed to make it virtually unsinkable."  Yeah right.  This concept has been kicking around in various issues of Naval Institute Proceedings for years under the name of "arsenal ship".
  Sounds cool, but Mr Stearman seems to have forgotten WWII experience showing that if you put enough bombs and torpedoes  into the biggest ships, they sink.  Witness Bismark, Yamato, Roma, Prince of Wales, Lexington, Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Zuikaku, and many more famous capital ships.  
   To do an amphibious assault, first you need air superiority, air craft carriers and their air wings.  Once you have air superiority, you don't need an arsenal ship.  The aircraft take out the anti ship missile sites.  Then ships of ordinary size will do just fine. 
  I'm surprised that this guy was a National Security Council staffer for more than 15 years and has no better grasp of naval warfare than this op-ed shows.  

Lying to the FBI,

Should not be a crime at all, let alone a felony.  All the FBI has to do is interview/interrogate the victim long enough and they can catch him/her in a contradiction. Who can remember all the things they said during a long interrogation?  Just keep the interrogation up until the victim makes a mistake, and bang, you got him.  Lying to the FBI, a felony.  You can take the victim to court on that, even if you don't have any evidence of a real crime. 
   Far as I am concerned, we oughta get rid of lying to the FBI (or anyone else) as a crime.  Unless the victim is under oath, in which case false statements are perjury, the cops should be required to discover real evidence of real crimes (not thought crimes) in order to prosecute citizens.

Strange things in the modern Navy

According to Instapundit, the Navy ran a "climate assessment" survey aboard the two destroyers that collided with merchant vessels.  The surveys asked crew men about how short of sleep they were, how they felt about the ship, the mission, and the Navy.  And how they felt about their officers.  Basically the men reported being tired, overworked, and not too sure their officers knew what they were doing.
Wow.
I was an Air Force officer for six years back during the Viet Nam war.  USAF did not run surveys of any kind back in that day.  How the troops, both NCO's and enlisted men felt about me, my leadership, the Air Force mission, and fixing aircraft right was important to me.  I put in a lot of hours in my shops looking around and talking to the troops, likewise out on the flight line. I joined a stock car racing club the troops had organized.  I said nothing when the troops posted Lt. Fuzz cartoons on the shop bulletin boards.  I would not have benefited from or believed in a USAF survey.  I had seen how my troops had massaged the maintenance date reporting system to indicate that they were all working hard, and doing things right.  I would have figured the troops would respond to a survey with answers that they figured would do them good. 
  Gotta wonder about that Navy.  Competent officers keep in touch with their men and have a pretty good idea of what they are thinking.  They don't need "climate assessment" surveys. 
   The Navy has never given clear answers about how those two destroyers managed to collide with merchies.  Could it be that the entire bridge crew just fell asleep, letting the ship plow straight on under autopilot control?

Fantasy that the MSM keeps repeating

Fantasy #1.  Trump should/will fire special prosecutor Mueller.  Not likely.  Last guy to fire a special prosecutor was Nixon.  See where that got him.  Trump is smart enough to understand that. 
Fantasy #2   Impeach Trump.  The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress and simply won't allow impeachment to go forward.
The MSM would do the country more good if they stopped pushing fantasies.

We oughta do something to help the Iranian protesters

The Iranian mullah government is hostile to us, supports terrorism world wide, and thanks to Obama, will have nuclear weapons shortly.  Anything we can do to make life hard for them we ought to do.  They are having some anto regime demonstrations.  We ought to assist the demonstrators
Favorable publicity on the net, the MSM, radio and TV is good.  We need to make contact with Iranian dissidents inside Iran.  That could be difficult since I don't believe we have diplomatic relations with Iran.  We need to tell CIA to get some agents inside Iran, even without embassy cover and diplomatic immunity. 
   Political dissidents can use money, weapons, internet access, passports and visas, airline tickets, satellite antennas, cell phones, xerox machines, lots of stuff, that we have and aren't all that expensive, compared to say a single new F35. 
  

How much infrastructure do we need??

New Hampshire has kept it's roads and bridges in pretty good shape over the years.  Much better shape than New York.  Right around my place in Franconia, which is pretty rural, the state has replaced two smallish highway bridges on secondary roads for being really old.  Aside from the stalled widening project on southern I93, the rest of the state is in quite passable shape.  We haven't fallen into the railroad track black hole yet, despite the best efforts of some commuter rail enthusiasts.
  And we have enriched a lot of road contractors over the years.  I have been driving I93 from Boston to NH ski country since the road first got started.  The first asphalt was put down in the 1950's, and they had it finished all the way to Cannon Mt by the late 1960's.  It was built to the Interstate highway standards of the 50's and 60's, four lane divided highway, good for 70-80 mph.  I drove up and down it for skiing for decades. 
   Then sometime in the 90's Interstate standards were tightened up.  More clearance and longer sight distances required.  And so, a lot of contractors got nice jobs blasting back all the rock cuts from the Mass border to Franconia notch, making the cuts wider.  Did not make the road wider, just the rock cuts. And there are a LOT of rock cuts going thru the White Mountains  The same rock cuts I had been driving thru, with no problems, for 30 years, were now wider, and a lot of contractors got richer, but it didn't make I93 any better for drivers.  It did soak up quite a bit of infrastructure money.
   And then the infrastructure spending folks decided that we needed huge electric signs, to show helpful messages like "Drive Safely", and "Snowfall expected, Plan ahead".   Really essential those messages are.  The signs probably cost $100,000 apiece and they put in half a dozen of 'em. 
   And then more infrastructure signage.  We now have big, cute mileposts, every 0.2 miles.  I drove I93 for 40 years without cute mile posts so close together that you can see one from where ever you are.  I figure each sign cost a couple a hundred dollars, installed.  I93 is about 100 miles long, that's 500 mileposts, and $100,000 for the lot.  Really essential infrastructure that was.
   I think we ought to dump federal infrastructure spending, the Highway Trust Fund.  And drop the federal gasoline tax that finances it. Let the states decide what infrastucture is worth paying for, and let them raise the money for it.  They can hike the state gas tax to raise the necessary money.
  Anyhow Trump is talking up an infrastructure spending bill. All the road contractors and the state highway departments love the idea.  Trump is thinking there is a chance that he can get the Democrats to vote for it.  Faint that chance is.  But "bipartisanship" is a many splendored thing. 
   Far as this taxpayer is concerned, we have plenty of infrastructure.  All it needs is routine maintenance, plowing, mowing, culvert cleaning, and the like, and the states can handle that.
  

I wonder why they turned back in mid flight?

United Airlines I believe it was.  They got off the ground and four hours into a flight from California to Japan.  Someone discovered that one of the passengers on board, was supposed to be on another flight.  Apparently some screwup at the airport, the guy showed a valid boarding pass at the gate. Only it was a boarding pass for another flight.  So the air crew decided to turn back to California.
   I wonder why.  Doing that created a full plane load of angry passengers, angry because they had been stuck on the airplane for better than eight hours (four hours out, four hours back) and hadn't gotten any closer to their destination.   They could have continued on to Japan and had Japanese air port security deal with the problem after they landed.  They could have duct taped the guy if they had thought he was about to detonate a bomb in his underwear.  What ever they feared he might do, he had four hours in the air back to California to do it.  Pressing on to Japan would have taken about 8 hours, but if you can handle the guy for four hours back to California I don't see why they could not have handled him for eight hours on to Japan.
   So much for passenger relations.

The Last Jedi 2017

Went to see it at the Jax Jr in Littleton.  Good crowd, it's been playing at the Jax for a week or more, but there were a lot of people who either had not seen it, or were seeing it a second time.  It was reasonably OK, better that the prequels in the '90's, not really as good as the original three.  I have been seeing Star Wars movies for a long time.  I saw the first one, the night it opened in Boston back in the '70's, so I'm gonna see this one.
   It had a LOT of light sabering, spaceship to spaceship duels, strange CGI creatures, explosions, pretty much constant action.  If the movie had a plot, I never understood it.  Maybe that is how they cover up the plot holes.
  They had Carrie Fisher, who looked older than the hills, and Mark Hamill, who didn't look much younger.  Daisy Ridley was back as Rey.  She did good, she looked slim, and tough.  She had a glare that could stop a clock at fifty meters.  Her costume included clam digger pants that did nothing for her looks.  The fixed that in the last reel.  She didn't get any memorable lines, but she done good.  They had three First Order bad guys, a really evil looking emperor, a nasty general, and Kylo Ren, a Darth Vader wannabee, who has a thing for Rey and kept turning up when Rey wasn't expecting him.  These guys all dressed in black and did a lot of evil.
   The Rebel Alliance has lost a lot of strength in this one.  There was a time when the Alliance could muster a fleet of a hundred or more ships for a mission against the Death Star.  In this flick the Alliance has been reduced to a single star cruiser, completely surrounded by dozens of  First Order star destroyers.  
   Rey has found Luke Skywalker, who is all sorts of old, and snarly too.  At first Luke refuses to help at all.  Then somehow, I never did understand just how, Rey converts him to the Alliance cause.  Luke gives Rey lessons in the Force which make her scary powerful.  In the last reel we see Rey doing stuff even more amazing than the time Yoda hoisted Luke's X-wing fighter out of the swamp purely with the Force.
   They introduced some new stuff, including scenes from a hoity toity Las Vegas type casino.  They had a lot of fun inventing costumes, makeup and hairstyles for the casino patrons.  A much higher class place than that dive on Tatinooe  that won't serve their kind in here.
   The movie had three story lines running side by side,  Rey and Luke Skywalker, Rose (a new character)  and Finn, Leia and Poe Dameron (another new character).  The movie jumped back and forth between the story lines with abandon, which is maybe why I never understood that plot.  They had another one of those camera men who turns the lights out on the set and films in the dark.  PITA.  And it is LONG, better than 2 1/2 hours.
   For dyed in the wool Star Wars fans, like me, it's a must see,  For ordinary people, not so much.

Do we need a US Space Corps?

We have an op-ed in the Wall St Journal pushing for one.  Me, an old USAF veteran, I'd think my old service would be over joyed, highly motivated, and more than capable to take on any space defense or offense programs.  I doubt that we need a another government organization to preform the mission, whatever that mission might turn out to be.
   Right now we have a flock of recon satellites, the GPS nav satellites, weather satellites, and a bunch of comm satellites up there.  If an enemy shot them down we would miss them, a lot.  And shooting down a satellite than travels in a highly predictable orbit, in plain sight of ground radar, is fairly easy,  compared to shooting down an ICBM, which we claim we can do now. 
   Trouble is,  there isn't much a satellite can do to defend itself.  And there isn't much that a "anti-anti-satellite" weapon could do either.  Best I can think of is to use ICBM's to vaporize the launching sites of enemy anti-satellite missiles, which is really really an act of war.  Some kind of hi tech shoot out above the atmosphere might get passed off as a trivial border incident, but nuclear weapons detonating on your soil cannot be. 
    So despite the need for defending our satellite fleet, I don't see what anyone, a hypothetical Space Corps, or the good old USAF can do about it, given today's, or even tomorrow's, technology. 
  

The US must be doing something right

Chinese "birth tourists" are going to Saipan to give birth on US soil to give their children US citizen ship.  Saipan is popular because we allow visa free entry for Chinese and Russian citizens, since 2009. This can cost a Chinese family as much as $50,000 for hospital and doctors fees, air fare, and bribes. 
   I'm impressed that Chinese families value US citizenship for their children that much.  We must be doing something right here in the USA. 

Merry Christmas to all

It's gonna be a white Christmas up here.  We have snow on the ground, just got 8 more inches yesterday, and another 8 inches is forecast for Christmas day.

Bitcoin bubble bursting

According to Business Insider, bitcoin has dropped to $11,000 today, down from $19,000 a few days ago.  This ought to be fun to watch.