More Tests, more Covid cases.

 The more Covid tests they have the more cases of Covid they discover.  As I have previously mentioned, there is a strong group of organizations that want to keep the Covid pandemic going.  They are making money and gaining power from Covid.  Right now even the Who Runs the Biden Administration (WRBA) are Covid pandemic boosters.  

    Reporters are right now grilling Psaki at the afternoon press conference about why not more Covid tests available.

 As a side issue, Mayor Lightweight in Chicago is unhappy with the Chicago teachers union that has refused to teach.  An off-the-record strike.  If Mayor Lightweight was serious about getting Chicago schools open, she would tell the teachers “If you don’t teach, you won’t get paid”.  I haven’t heard her say that, or anything close to that.  Until she does, she isn’t serious. 

Horrible NYC fire.

My sincere condolences to the 19 dead, and their families, in that horrible apartment building fire in New York City today. 

   How ever there are a few questions that come to mind.  How do tenants on the top floor (19^th floor) leave the building?  Elevator[s]?  Was there more than one elevator in the place?  Did the elevator[s] keep working thru out the fire?  What happens when the down button on all 19 floors is pressed at once?  I assume there were stairs.  Were the stairs open or were they blocked by fire?  Did the building have sprinklers?  If not why not?  Can you install outdoor fire escapes on a 19 story building?

New York City is in for some amusing times.  They elected a new mayor, Eric Adams who sounds a lot better than the outgoing De Blasio.  Adams was a member of NYPD for a good long time, worked his way up to serious rank in the department.  Adams has promised to crack down on crime and clean things up.  Sounds good to me, although living way up in New Hampshire, I may not be fully in touch with New York City doings. 

   Same time New York is getting a new District Attorney, a certain Alvin Bragg.  Alvin is a soft on crime guy and on his first day in office released a long list of crimes that his office would no longer prosecute.  Criminals accused of these no longer prosecuted crimes would be turned loose.  This ought to handicap Eric Adams efforts to crack down on crime.  Back in the day, Rudi Guiliano introduced “broken windows policing” namely arresting and charging for minor offenses like jumping subway turnstiles on the theory that you often caught wanted criminals and it put out the word to the underworld that the cops were serious.  Alvin clearly doesn’t believe in “broken windows”. 

   I don’t know how Alvin came into office.  If he was elected, then the good citizens of New York who elected him are going to have to suffer.  If he was appointed somehow, New Yorkers ought to be looking for the scalp of who ever appointed him. 

9-Lives vs Friskies

 I fed cat on Kibble for years.  She used to eat it.  Couple of years ago, something happened and cat stopped eating Kibble.  She is a nice cat, been with me for 14 years, so I bought her some canned catfood.  That comes in two styles, Shreds and Glop, and Pate. I like Pate, it is less messy.  Cat likes shreds and glop.  When I fed cat with pate she would nibble around the edges and leave a good deal of it in her bowl. I like cat, so I weakened and bought her shreds and glop, Friskies by name.  So now we are dealing with a cat food shortage.  I cannot buy 40 can cartons of Friskies at Walmart any more.  Best I could score just before Christmas was a 24 can carton of 9-Lives shreds and glop.  Not good.  9-Lines doesn't put enough glop in with the shreds so the stuff won't shake out of the can into cat's bowl.  I have to use and dirty a spoon to get 9-Lines out of the can into the cat bowl.  And then wash the spoon.  PITA.   

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

 It snowed all day today (Friday). It was snowing by 6:30 this morning and just let up a few minutes ago (4:30 PM)  We got 3 inches on my deck, which is within walking distance of Peabody slopes.  It's nice fluffy powder, skiing ought to really good tomorrow (Saturday). No wind.  Temp about 28F up here, 24F down in the valley. 

Whither Corona virus?

 The Biden administration is finding that public opinion is firming up about their handling of the omicron variant of the Corona virus.  The public is beginning to think that Biden isn’t handling it well.  The folks that are benefiting from Corona virus, big pharma, most governors, the president, Tony Fauci, the MSM, and probably more, have seized upon the emergence of omicron as an excuse to keep the pandemic going.  So they talk it up as the second coming of the Black Death. 

   There are stories going around, that while omicron is very infectious, it isn’t really a very serious disease.  It hasn’t killed more than a handful of people so far.  The symptoms are so mild that a lot of people don’t notice that they have anything.  Only when someone runs a lab test on them, and gets the test to give a positive result do they chalk up another Covid case. 

   The MSM is not carrying this story yet, it is against the narrative, but they have not denied it either.  If true and I have no way of checking out the story, then we could call the Corona virus pandemic over and get the country going again.  I think the public is beginning the think this way, and it makes them think the Biden administrative doesn’t know what it is doing.  If the omicron strain is reasonably mild, the Administrative could declare victory over Corona virus and claim credit for the victory.  Who Runs the Biden Administration (WRBA) may catch on shortly.  Or they may not, or omicron is not as mild as some stories say.  

  Time will tell.  The mid term elections are coming.  

Looking back on last year's Capitol riot.

 The Democrats are celebrating 6 January, the day of the Capitol riot last year.  They love it.  It is a chance to trash Donald Trump, can’t miss out on that. 

   Couple of things I remember from this time last year.  Two Capitol security chiefs resigned the next day.  Obviously they, or their bosses, didn’t think they had done a good job securing the Capitol building. TV doesn’t talk much about that any more.  And then there is that video showing Capitol police holding a door open and waving the demonstrators inside.  The TV hasn’t shown that video for a long time, but they aired it a couple of times last year. 

It ought to take a solid majority to pass a law.

 A law that does not command a majority of the country, and the Congress, is probably a bad law and we should not pass it.  The Senate requirement for a 60 vote majority to pass most laws is a good idea.  It will prevent a lot of bad laws from getting passed. 

   For instance, most voters in all states like the idea of voter ID, with a picture ID.  Voter ID laws make it harder for out of state shills bussed in just for the election to effect the out come.  The Democrats are trying to override state laws requiring a picture ID with a federal law outlawing voter ID and they want to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate to allow them to pass this controversial and bad law with just 50 senators and the vice president’s vote.  Bad idea in my book. 

Remember the blizzard of '78

The TV is showing a spot of trouble down in Virginia today.  Snowed on I95 and traffic got stuck.  One trucker was saying he was stuck for 5 hours, someone else claimed to be stuck for 14 hours.  But, eventually traffic started to move, and the cars and their passengers made it out.

   The newsies don’t seem to remember the blizzard of ’78 up here in Boston.  It started to snow, and kept on snowing for three days.  Rte 128 has a few modest grades, and they got too slippery for the trucks to get up.  Traffic stopped moving and the snow kept falling.  It got so bad that everybody abandoned their cars on 128 and walked out in the snow storm.  That left 10 miles of 128, solid with abandoned cars with snow up to the roofs.  Only the radio antennas showed.  Best the public works people could do was start at both ends with tow trucks, and tow the cars out, one by one.  It took ‘em a week to get 128 back to being a road. 

We need a better battery.

   Title of a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal Friday.  People have been saying this ever since Alexander Volta demonstrated the first battery back in 1799 (Ben Franklin’s time) Volta’s battery had electrodes of copper and zinc and used salt water as the electrolyte.  It wasn’t very powerful and I don’t remember ever reading about things being powered by Volta’s battery.  It was a piece of laboratory apparatus used to demonstrate “current electricity” as opposed to static electricity which involved rubbing dry things together, creating hundreds of volts and virtually no current flow.  Volta’s battery would make a frog’s leg twitch, but I never heard of it doing any else. 

   Since Volta’s time, invertors have created the lead acid battery (used to start cars), the carbon zinc dry cell (used in flashlights) the alkaline battery (a better flashlight battery), the nickel cadmium battery, the silver zinc battery (only ever used in the F106 fighter plane due to outrageous cost) and finally today’s lithium batteries used in battery cars.  And there was an Edison battery whose chemistry escapes me now.  The letter’s author, an MIT professor who ought to know better, called for yet better batteries. 

   We have been hearing this complaint about batteries for better than 200 years.  

Advanced Technology at work

 It has been snowing lightly all day.  Put down about an inch, enough to make driving tricky.  Clever little weather routine down on my task bar of my Windows 10 machine says  "Cloudy". Well it is cloudy, but the snow is of greater interest to drivers and skiers. Didn't say squat about the snow.

Afghanistan

We have been in Afghanistan, in strength, since 9-11.  That’s 20 years ago.  In that time we should have reformed the madrassahs into schools teaching the three R’s, rather than Jihad.  We should have done land reform, so that the peasants, who worked the land, owned the land.  This would have required dispossessing a lot of land lords, who would have bitched to high heaven, but so what?  We should have insisted on fair elections in each district of Afghanistan to select representatives to an Afghan central government.  We should have insisted that as a first act, the new central government approve a national constitution that we wrote with a lot of help from serious Afghans. 

   I am not sure just what we actually did in the last 20 years in Afghanistan.  Our noble MSM didn’t tell us much.  Apparently we left a lot of Taliban sympathizers alive and in business.  Enough Talibansters to lead to the shameful bugout from Afghanistan back in August. 

 

Recovering from the US Civil War.

 There was plenty of bad feeling to go around in 1865.  Sherman had inflicted lots of pain in Georgia.  John Wilkes Booth had assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  Plenty of white southerners who had enjoyed being superior at law to black slaves were disappointed.  The subdued southern states were occupied by the US Army. The massive casualties of the war, 600,000 men, inflicted great pain on many many American families. 

   But, the Civil War had abolished slavery.  The southern states attempt to pull out of the Union and set up their own country was defeated.  These things stuck. 

   The part that is not told by the history books I have read, and I have read quite a few, is how all the bad feelings were, if not defeated, at least reduced a lot.  By World War I times, say fifty years after the end of the Civil War,  the old south had been converted into as loyal and patriotic part of the United States as any other part, and in fact more loyal and patriotic than many other parts. 

   It is difficult to imagine the course of world history if the Confederacy had survived or reappeared and made good its departure from the Union.  Certainly all the bad feelings from 1865 would have contributed mightily to such an outcome.  The Cold War with the Soviets would be all sorts of difficult for Washington DC had it been required to deal with a not very friendly Confederacy whose territory started at the city limits of DC. 

Stalingrad WWII 1943

The decisive battle between Germany and Russia.  The Russians took horrendous losses but won the battle.  And went on to win all the future battles with the Germans.  Turning point in WWII.  Stalingrad was a medium duty Russia city on the Volga River.  Not the size or importance of Moscow or Leningrad, but a serious city with some serious industry.  Paulus, the German commander completely blew it.  To take a city or a castle you have to encircle it, cut it off from supplies and reinforcements and starve it out.  Paulus didn’t bother, he didn’t cross the Volga river to get on the far side of Stalingrad and surround it.  He called on the Luftwaffe and artillery to blow the place up and ordered his infantry to assault it.  The Russians dug in and shot down the attacking Germans in droves.   
   Georgy Zukov, Stalin’s top general, the man who had clobbered the Japanese in 1939, talked Stalin into fixing the Germans at Stalingrad.  The local commander was told to hang on, help was coming.  Two huge Russian armies of 250,000 men each were launched against the German supply lines and cut them.  Suddenly Paulus found himself cut off in Stalingrad with no rations or ammunition.  The German’s “fireman” Walter Model organized a rescue mission.  Paulus should have ordered all his troops to pull out of Stalingrad and head for a roundez vous with Model.  Paulus failed to do so, partly because Hitler was against the idea, and partly thru who knows what personal failings.   
    The Russians captured or killed all of Paulus’s 250,000 men.  The German army never recovered from this terrible loss.  

Who should a political representative answer to??

 There are two legitimate choices and a bunch of illegitimate choices, with the illegitimate choices shading over into crime.  The first legitimate choice is his/her district, the voters who elected him/her.  (Note: I need some unisex pronouns for use in cases where I don’t know the sex of the person I am writing about) The second legitimate choice is the political party, democrat or republican in the American case.  After the representative gets to Congress he/she will feel great pressure from the other representatives to vote to support the party every time.   Senator Joe Manchin (R West Virginia) was subject to this strain last week.  The party wanted him to vote for Biden’s “Build Back Badder” bill, a $2 to $4 trillion collection of freebies and  pork.  Senator Manchin’s district did not want “Build Back Badder” they felt (correctly) that it would increase inflation and raise their cost of living.  Senator Manchin, to his credit, voted for his district, and has been heavily dumped on by the democrat party for not supporting them.   

How to pronounce omicron (latest corona virus strain)??

 I pronounce it like it is spelled, starting off with "O".  I hear people on TV and radio pronounce it like it was spelled Armicron, starting off with "A".  Dunno how that happens.  I don't do radio or TV. 

So who will the Democrats run in 2024?

 They could run Biden again.  I think any Republican could beat Biden in 2024.  Biden's health might fail in the next three years and he will say he won't run again.  Or the democrats decide that running Biden is just handing the presidency to the Republicans, and decide to pick a more electable candidate.  Trouble is, just this year, I cannot think of any democrat that would make much of a president.  Scratch Kamala Harris.  Scratch Elizabeth (Fauxahontis) Warren.  Scratch AOC.  The Bern?? Who else do they have?  Must be somebody but I cannot think of a name.

  For that matter, I wonder what the Republicans are going to do for 2024.  There is The Donald.  Formidable candidate, who brings a lot (37 million?) of voters with him.  He also brings a horde of bitter enemies.  Ted Cruz?   Marco Rubio?  someone else? who knows?  A lot can happen in the next three years.

Don't infect friends and family.

 Why the lines to get tested for Corona virus?  Even if you test negative today, you can catch it before you get to Grandmothers.  If you are serious about it, get vaccinated, that works and it lasts.  This testing business seems like a waste of time to me.

55 MPG CAFÉ is greenies idea to push sale of battery powered cars.

 There is no way Detroit can make even the smallest cars do 55 mpg.  Heck, a 250 CC motorcycle won’t do 55 mpg.  They will have to resort to cheating, like the flex fuel rule that lets automakers collect a serious CAFÉ credit for each flex fuel (runs on alcohol or gasoline) car they make.  Or miss the 55 mpg target and pay Uncle some extra money to sell the non performing cars, (and raise their price). 

  This all comes from the greenies idea that they can prevent climate change (global warming we used to call it) by reducing the use of oil and gas.  This is why Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office.  This is why Biden has canceled all oil and gas leases on federal land.  Doing both of these things hiked the price of gasoline from $2.20 last year to $3.40 this year.  The greenies believe that they can save the earth by killing off real cars and converting us all to battery cars.

   Couples of things the greenies don’t know or ignore.  Mining and refining the substantial amounts of lithium to make a battery car’s battery produces as much green house gas as a gasoline car will over its life time.  The electricity to charge a battery car comes from power plants burning coal, natural gas, or oil.    Thermodynamics says that only 30-40 % of the heat energy in the fuel comes out as electricity, the rest goes into the plant’s cooling system.  The greenies are dead set against nuclear power and over the years have pushed thru safety regulations so bad as to make nuclear prohibitively expensive. 

Bake a mince pie.

  Buy a 27 ounce jar of Non Such mince meat.  Find a 9 inch pie pan.  If the pan looks old and dry, grease it lightly with veggie oil or butter, or what ever. Make enough pie crust for a bottom AND top crust.  2 ½ cups flour, ½ Tsp backing soda, 1/2 Tsp salt, ½ to 1/3 pound of fat.  I use butter. In the old days we used Crisco. Sift the dry ingredients together.  Add the butter.  Use a pair of table knives to cut the butter down into pieces the size of a navy bean.  Add ¼ cup good cold water.  Knead the pie crust until it is uniform and medium sticky.  Add a small bit of cold water if the pie crust needs it.  Divide the pie crust in half. Put the top half into the freezer.  On a floured board press the bottom half of the crust as flat as you can, then roll it out good and flat.  Check the size of your rolled out crust against the 9 inch pie pan, roll some more.   Slide the rolled out crust off the board and onto the pie pan.  Fill the pie fan with the Non Such Mince Meat.  Roll out the top crust and put it on the pie pan.  Trim the crust around the pie edges and use a fork, tines out, to crimp the top and bottom crusts together.  Bake for 30-35 minutes at 400-425 F.  Back the heat off to 300 F and give it another 10 minutes.  Remove from oven and let cool enough to eat. 

  If you want to bake ten inch mince pies, buy two jars of Non Such mince meat.  Roll the crusts out extra thin and things will work.  

 

 Merry Christmas everyone!

National Inventiveness.

 Been a lot of talk on the internet about the Chinese are getting ahead of us at inventing new products and new weapons.  We here in the United States were the world’s champions of inventiveness for many years.  Even so, there are a few things we could do to improve the situation.

First of all we could clamp down on patent trolls.  Anyone who introduces something new will be sued for patent infringement just as soon as something new looks like it will make money.  The trolls, pretty much all lawyers, hold vaguely written patents with claims as broad as all outdoors, pop up out of the woodwork and demand money.

   We need to reform the patent office.  No patent should be granted unless it describes a device in enough detail as to permit someone to make said device, and that the device works after it is built.  This means the patent application shall contain a drawing with dimensions, a test procedure so you can see if it is working, a parts list, an electrical schematic, and a parts list.  Patents of devices containing computers or micro processors shall contain a listing of the computer program. Patents that lack this detail will not be granted. 

   All patent applications shall be publicized so that interested parties, often competitors, have time to review the patent application and if it conflicts with patents they already hold, or is ordinary prior art well known in the trade, they can make objections.  The patent office shall hold a meeting on each patent application where interested parties can voice their objections to granting the patent. 

    Interested parties may sue the patent office to repeal old patents which do not conform to these new guidelines.

   Much research is conducted by universities, using grant money.  A distressing number of papers published by these scientists fail to duplicate.  In other words when other people attempt to duplicate the reported results they cannot do it.  This is so common that I encountered it myself.  I had searched the literature, found a paper describing a method that we needed.  I spent a week coding it up and debugging it.  It worked, only the performance was only half what the paper had claimed for it.  I finally telephoned the author and asked him what I was doing wrong.  The author, somewhat sheepishly, admitted that he had left out a factor in his computation of efficiency, and the method was only half as effective as claimed in the paper.

    This sort of thing wastes a lot of time and money.  Grantees ought to keep track of research they funded that fails to repeat.  The scientists who publish fails-to-repeat papers should become ineligible for any more grants. 

  Doing just these two things would increase the number of new things invented and developed, a lot. 

 

Dumbo. Disney. 1940.

Rumor got around saying that Disney was going to vanish Dumbo, probably over those scenes with a flock of black crows, speaking in black accents.  I kinda liked Dumbo, having seen it in my childhood.  Timothy the mouse was an attractive character and so was Dumbo.  So I rented it from Netflix before Disney made it disappear.  Actually, looking at it today in 2021, 60 years after it was made, it was still pretty good.  Animation was excellent.  The stork expressman delivering Dumbo to his mom was excellent.  He was so good that he appeared in a couple of other Disney movies.  Actually the most anti black scenes were some short shots of black roustabouts hammering big top tent pegs into the ground in a rain storm.  Although I am pretty sure that circus roustabouts when Dumbo was made were all black.  The scenes with the black crows speaking in black accents seemed pleasant enough to me.  The crows were friendly, they encouraged Dumbo, including giving him the famous magic feather.  

   Anyhow I think the talk of Dumbo as a racist film is malarkey, it is a good fun film that has been around for a long time. 

Corona Virus tests.

 President Biden has called for millions of test kits.  Fox had Robert Redfield of CDC on this morning.  Redfield thinks we need more tests. 

   I have a few questions about all this test talk.  Do we need a lab test to tell if someone is sick?  And, what do we do about cases where the test comes back positive yet the patient is perfectly well?  Is this a real case of Corona virus or is it a false positive from the test?  How was the test verified?  How many subjects were tested by the test?  And how did we verify the test results.  Do we have other tests or procedures?  What might they be?  And how accurate are they.  In short, what makes us think this un-named test really works?  Some numbers would be convincing.  So far the TV news has offered NO numbers.

  And, even if the test works, how is it going to help in the Corona virus pandemic?  We can tell patients who are sick without using lab tests. 

Senator Manchin voted for his constituents.

 

Senator Joe Manchin just announced that he cannot vote for the Build Back Badder bill, a favorite of Joe Biden and leftie democrats that is pure pork and freebies.  Manchin said his constituents were solidly against the Build Back Badder bill and as their representative, he had to vote the way his constituents want, not the way the Democrat party wants.  Naturally the lefty side of the Democrat party was furious, called Manchin names, and acted out in other ways.

   I say more power to a politician who votes his district.  We have four congressional reps here in New Hampshire who don’t vote for what their constituents want; instead they vote for what the Washington Democrat party wants.

Why we don’t want Putin to invade Ukraine.

   We remember that Hitler started WWII by invading Poland in 1939.  We figure that if we forbid the invasion of neighboring countries, we can prevent WWIII.  And we don’t like invasions on humanitarian grounds; the people in the invaded country take it in the neck.  Ask any Pole, they will tell you. 

Ever since WWII America has believed that national borders should be inviolate.  We have even fought wars over this, the Korean War being the clearest example.  North Korea invaded South Korea with out warning.  We raised a huge army, fought a vicious 3 year war, and preserved the original state of South Korea.  As a side effect, today’s South Koreans have a warm spot in their hearts for Americans.  They have industrialized and are now an important power.  They were nowheresville back when the Korean War started.

One other factor in the Ukraine situation.  Today’s Russia is smaller; less populated, and has fewer natural resources than the old Soviet Union had it its disposal.  We would just as soon keep things that way.  The old Soviet Union was a dangerous competitor.  When the Soviet Union broke up in 1989, about a third of it became independent of Russia.  The new Russia, although a powerful state, is not as powerful as the old Soviet Union was.   

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

 Just for the record, I am in Mittersill.  I am close enough to walk to the Peabody slopes chair lift.  I get the same amount of snow as Cannon, at least Cannon base.  Cannon summit often gets a bit more that the base.  I measure the snow fall on my deck with a wooden yardstick.  I am an old Cannon skier, I started skiing Cannon when I was four.  I finally gave up downhill skiing when I turned 70, which was a few years ago.

   It is 9:30 AM and the snow seems to have stopped, although the weather people are talking up a "winter storm warning" lasting until 11 AM.  They forecast 4 to 8 inches.  I got 5 inches.  That is enough to make the skiing really good at Cannon.  

How dangerous is the omicron variant of Corona virus??

How dangerous is the omicron version of the Corona virus? Really?  Guys like Tony Fauci are claiming it is worse than the original.  Some TV news states that NO ONE has died of omicron (yet).  Other TV newsies have said the omicron is very contagious but the symptoms are milder and less likely to kill than the original version of Corona virus.   No one has presented any numbers, so anything might be true.  It would be nice to have one of the few responsible news outlets left to give us some facts.