The newsies are using this phrase all the time. Makes it sound like the gun did the crime. “Gun violence” on the media is better described as either murder or armed robbery. Both of these crimes are listed in the Ten Commandments.
Use of the “gun violence” phrase suggests the speaker is anti gun and wants to ban all the guns in America.
rather than increasing US oil production. He said as much on the last news conference. "Transistion" he called it.
Trouble is, new battery cars cost $60K as compared to a new econobox for a bit more than $20K. And, cars last ten years nowadays so it would take 10 years to re equip everyone with a $60K battery car. That's assuming people only buy new cars when the car they are driving needs replacement. And the best they have claimed for battery range is 400 miles. And it takes 2-3 hours on the battery charger to charge it up. So a trip more than 400 miles will take 2-3 hours longer while you cool your heels waiting on the battery charger. Whereas my old Buick with a full gas tank will go 500 miles (far enough to reach my daughter's place in Maryland). And the gas tank refills in a couple of minutes. And want to bet the 400 mile claim of battery range is inflated? And nobody is talking about how long the battery lasts, and what a replacement might cost. Ordinary car batteries only last 4 winters up here. I have no idea how long a lithium battery might last. Or what the chances of it bursting into flames are.
Let's elect Republicans who will increase US oil production.
I an horrified by the Texas school shooting. My sincerest sympathies to the bereaved.
The Air Force announced a successful test flight of one just the other day. Since the Chinese had announced they had a hypersonic missile a week or so ago, it sounds like the Air Force has had a hypersonic program going for quite some time. It takes more time than a few weeks to get something like a hypersonic missile to fly. Sounds groovy but... It takes a lot of fuel to get up to mach 5. Wanna bet the range of this missile isn't so great? Existing cruise missiles like Tomahawk fly somewhat below mach 1 and have transcontinental range. You can launch from say England and hit most of Russia, all of the middle east, the northern half of Africa. Tomahawk flies so low that ground radar cannot see it. If the radar cannot see you the fighters cannot find you.
One fine day while I was in the Air Force Air Defense Command we were practicing. We sent a target aircraft (a helpless T-33) up north and then turned him around to come south. The radar guys got to practice tracking, the SAGE center got to practice vectoring fighters and the fighter crews got some flight time. Only this day, the radar guys could not see the target. "Can you come up another thousand feet?" the controller asked the target. No joy, we still could not see it. We had to get the target up to 10,000 feet before he showed up on radar. I am sure that a Tomahawk cruise missile down at 1000 feet will never show on radar. And Tomahawk has the range to go about anywhere.
So, groovy as hypersonic sounds, I am betting on conventional cruise missiles to do the work.
We don't have Chik Fil A up in New Hampshire, not yet at least. They got a lot of press coverage a while back. I cannot remember the issue now. So when I saw one in the shopping center I just had to try it out. Anyhow had lunch, a Chik Wich, Fries, and coffee only $8.69. That's cheaper than McD's. Very good. Most customers stayed in their cars and lined up for the takeout window. I wanted to see a menu so I parked and ate inside.
Water faucets ought to have a marking on them that shows which handle is for hot water and which is for cold water. It need not be much, a red dot for hot and a blue dot for cold works. But new and shiny faucets with no marking it all are annoying.
I, like many, expected the Russians to roll right over Ukraine. I am all kinds of impressed that they have not. I think it is great that the Ukrainians got it together and stopped the Russian army. At least that is what my internet and my TV are telling me. All I know comes from my internet or my TV or the Wall St Journal. I have been out of town for a while and have not seen the Journal. I am at my daughter’s house where the TV only plays kiddy cartoons, so I am down to just the internet.
Could it be that Putin is happy to let the Ukraine fighting die down or die off and drop out of the news? He will have to do some more expensive fighting to get anything out of the Ukrainians now. And maybe he doesn’t want to do any more expensive fighting and see more Western press coverage about how wimpy the Russian army really is?
I have a few suggestions for fair elections.
Or about. Actually the 60th reunion for the class of 1960 should have been 2020. But the Covid panicked the school and so we only get to do the 60th this year. The school is Westtown Friends School in West Chester PA. I took two days to drive down. Leaving Franconia Notch on Thursday morning, not a green leaf to be seen on any trees. Wasn’t til I got over into the Connecticut River valley that I saw any green. By Massachusetts all the trees were in full leaf, looking very lush.
The old school was started way out in PA farm country back in 1799 to preserve Quaker teenagers from the fleshpots of Philadelphia. Back in 1960 it was sill pretty rural. Not any more. The road into West Chester that used to run thru apple orchards, corn fields, and some dairy cows, is now spiffy new single family houses all the way. Suburbia has engulfed Westtown.
Turnout for this first alumni day since Covid started was thin compared to the good old days. Only about a third of my class made it. Friday night was a cookout on the old first association soccer field, renamed Raiford Field to confuse us alumni. Saturday was a lot of standing around and talking. Bertie Bonner from our class threw a fantastic dinner for the class at her place Saturday night. Sunday we did meeting.
Westtown has gone on a door locking frenzy. Every door on the big old main building now has a fancy power lock. If you are out doors when the rain starts you will get pretty wet before you get inside.
And Westtown is going anti-sexist. The signage now reads "East End" and "West End" rather than "Boys End" and "Girls End" I heard a student say Westtown was considering co-ed dorms. Too bad I am too old to enjoy that.
Jackie Fisher was appointed commander in chief of the British Royal Navy in the years before WWI. Aircraft had not been invented yet. Fisher saw his problem as finding the German Navy at sea and engaging it with the larger Royal Navy. The Germans (and everybody else) would have a screen of cruisers around the battle fleet. Cruisers could easily sink contemporary destroyers so having destroyers search for the enemy would just get a lot of destroyers sunk. Fisher demanded a special purpose vessel, the battle cruiser, to go looking for the enemy. The battle cruiser had to be fast, which called for a big ship, and heavily armed so it could blow enemy cruisers out of its way. The result was a fine looking vessel, as big and handsome as a battle ship, but lacking a battleship’s armor. The officers appointed to command the battle cruisers though they had command of a battleship and acted accordingly.
At the climatic WWI battle of Jutland, the British battle cruisers were commanded by flamboyant Admiral Beatty. Beatty took his fleet of four battle cruisers out into the North Sea and located the German battle fleet. At this time, Beatty should have broken off the action, radioed German position course and speed to British Grand Fleet and then run for it.
Instead, Beatty engaged the German battle ship fleet and had three of his four battle cruisers were sunk by German fire. “There seems to be something wrong with our ships today” said Beatty at the time. Beatty didn’t even bother to radio the German’s position, course and speed back to Grand Fleet.
Fortunately for the British, Grand Fleet was commanded by canny old Admiral Jellico. Jellico looked at the weather, the tides, and what Intel he had, and figured out just where the German fleet was going. He got it right, and Grand Fleet was able to find the Germans, and cross the German’s Tee, the decisive maneuver in battle ship actions.
HMS Hood was laid down as a battle cruiser during WWI but was not finished and launched until the war was over. After the destruction of three battle cruisers at Jutland, the British beefed up the armor on Hood. But they treated her as a battle ship even though her armor was only 6 inches instead of the 12 inches considered proper for real battleships. Twenty years later Hood was send out to stop Bismarck. Bismarck scored a single hit on Hood’s deck, the shell went right thru and exploded and Hood sank in minutes. The last of the battle cruisers.
From the looks of things on the TV news (highly reliable source that) there is a good chance that the Supremes will repeal Roe vs Wade, their abortion ruling. Roe vs Wade requires abortion to be legal and available to every woman, over ruling laws in every state that criminalized abortion back then. I think it would be a good thing for New Hampshire to pass a state law on abortion with some fancy language in the bill's header saying this only takes effect after Roe vs Wade is repealed.
For me, I think such a law should declare abortion to be legal and available to all women, especially young women who become pregnant in high school or college and giving birth would prevent them from graduating. I think it should forbid late term abortions, which more and more seem like infanticide. Pregnancy lasts nine months. I would forbid abortion after 6 months (call it 24 weeks). I don't believe that tax payers money should be used to fund abortion. I think the woman, or her family, or a private charity should pick up the bill.
You want your house to face south. With big picture windows, facing south, to pick up sunlight. You might need to buy a new house, or do some very heavy duty remodeling if your house faces the wrong way or lacks the necessary picture windows. This works for me, on a sunny winter day my windows pickup enough warmth from sun that my furnace doesn’t run until the sun goes down. While the sun is up it pours enough warmth into my house to keep it pleasantly warm all day. No moving parts, no huge and leaky silicon solar cells, no DC to AC inverters, no battery banks, no deals with the electric company to keep my lights on after sundown.
You also want some big eaves to keep the summer sun out while letting the lower winter sun in. You want your roof in a light color, not black, to ease the load on the air conditioner in the summer. Here in North America the prevailing winds come out of the west, so you want some windows on the west side to open to let in some breeze. And about the same amount of window on the east side that opens, so the breeze can blow right thru the house. Some shade trees to shade the house in the summer are good too.
Builders might keep these ideas in mind. They don’t add much, if anything, to the cost of the house at the time it gets built. They do yield a more comfortable and more energy efficient house.
That's what the United States ought to say to Putin next time he threatens to use his nukes. For that matter, make it "nuke Ukraine or anywhere else". Trouble is, if Biden said this, nobody would believe he meant it. Everybody would expect him to chicken out in the clutch. So we need a better president to make this work.
Children are born with no feelings for or knowledge about sex. Other than the fact that young girls tend to hang with girls and young boys tend to hang with boys, little kids are unconscious of their sex. This persists even though parents cut girls and boys hair differently and dress them differently. It is not until maybe seventh grade, (14 years) that boys and girls begin to dance together, flirt with each other, date each other, and go steady with each other. This change has been known for a long long time and is referred to as puberty.
Talking to kids about sexual matters before puberty is a waste of time; the kids don’t understand the talk. Or misinterpret it to mean odd or harmful things the speaker cannot imagine. After the kids go thru puberty then talks about sexual matters become understandable to them. The kids may not grasp everything said, but at least they have a broad idea of what is being talked about.
Florida just passed a law forbidding schools to talk about sexual matters to kids in third grade and below. That’s a good start, but I would make it kids in sixth grade and below.
Leaving aside the intelligence supplied by the leak (court may dump Roe); the discouraging part is the existence of the leak and the leaker. The leaker abandoned loyalty to the court, one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions, to merely serve the interests of the Democrat Party. If an institution like the court cannot secure the loyalty of its personnel, what organization can? Employees who place the interests of the Democrat party ahead of the interests of their employer, be it the court, the armed services, the police, the lower courts, and more the nation is in deep trouble.
Many of the great things America has done over the years, winning wars, abolition, civil rights, huge engineering works, the moon landings, and more, were done by institutions, often against great opposition. The institutions could not have succeeded if their personnel failed to support their institution, but instead had betrayed their institution to the opposition.
As to the issue at stake, overturning Roe vs. Wade, I am in favor. Even though Roe has been the law of the land for 50 years, which ought to make it settled law, but hasn’t, I think it was a poor decision by a handful of lawyers on a matter that properly should have been decided by an elected legislature, either federal or state.
Liberals having hissy fits over Musk’s buyout of Twitter keep talking about the terrible effects of misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation. I don’t hear any talk about truth versus falsehood. I think the liberals are whining about truth that does not support “the narrative”. And they want those truths suppressed less they waken or even destroy the precious “narrative”.
Which is a lot different from what we expect of the media. We want the facts of the case, not rooting for the Democrats. We think any newsie who slants the news to favor the Democrats ought to be ridden out of town on a rail.
Detroit is hurting. Last couple of car postings, 20 hottest cars of 2022 and the like, were all foreign cars, mostly Japanese or Korean. Except for single mentions of Corvette, nothing made in Detroit. It didn’t used to be that way. Ads and TV shows needing wheels now a days always show a nice Detroit car, usually a convertible, from the 60’s or 70s. Never a Toyota or a Honda.
You would think one of the big three could pull the old tooling out of storage and knock off a few thousand classics from the old days and sell them. AND, cars from the old days did not need semiconductors, except for a handful of simple ones in the car radio.
Far as I can see, Detroit doesn’t make real sedans any more, just little econoboxes. Closest you can come to a real sedan is a “crossover” SUV. Crossovers are built on car chassis, the body extends the roof clear back to the rear bumper. You don’t get a trunk, but you do get some storage space behind the rear seat. Some models allow the rear seat[s] to fold down or come out to allow big stuff like sheets of plywood to fit inside.
The “crossover” name is historical. The early SUV’s, Chevy carryalls and Jeep Wagoneers were built on pickup truck chassis, which yielded a big SUV that rode like a truck. The “crossover” SUV’s built on car chassis are smaller, gas mileage is better and the ride is better.
The Biden administration wants to ban menthol cigarettes. They have not presented any evidence that menthol cigarettes (Kools) are any worse for your health than ordinary cigarettes. The Biden people said that menthol cigarettes were favorites among the black community and outlawing them would encourage/force blacks to give up smoking. Speaking as someone who started smoking in college and smoked two packs a day for 20 years before giving it up, trying to force people to give up smoking is a lost cause. The urge for a smoke can be extremely strong, far too strong to resist. And, smoking tobacco has been legal in the US since Jamestown. Trying to force people to give it up strikes me as tyranny, a specialty of Democrats.
I know, and they know, that smoking (with or without menthol) is bad for you. Over the years a lot of people have given it up, and lot of people had not. I think this country has bigger fish to fry than getting smokers to give up smoking.
The Wall St Journal had two op ed pieces about this. One piece by Daniel Henniger of the Journal and the other piece by Karl Rove, political advisor to George Bush. Both of these guys have been in the business for a long time. They usually get it right. I trust them both.
They both think the democrats are gonna get creamed in November. So do a lot of other political pundits, both the newspaper kind and the TV kind.
I am all in favor. Far as I am concerned Biden is responsible for $4.25 a gallon for gasoline, 8.5% inflation, the disastrous bug out from Afghanistan last August, and shortages and outrageous prices at the grocery store. I hope the voters are sensible enough to vote a straight Republican ticket in November. We need 10% margins in Congress to get anything done. That is 40 house seats and 10 Senate seats.
Every DVD I play still has an image of the FBI’s badge above a copyright warning that threatens to sick the FBI on anyone who duplicates the disk or plays it over the air or some other obscure crimes. Let’s be real, the FBI exists to investigate crimes and enemy spies, and over just the last few years they have been taken up investigating Republicans. Copyright infringement of a DVD is a minor civil offense, which should be investigated at the copyright holder’s expense. The FBI doesn’t have to time or the inclination to go after teenagers who duplicate DVDs.
And, the younger generation feels it is perfectly OK copy anything they like, music, movies, games, Mickey Mouse or whatever. When they get old enough, they will vote against parties and politicians who support copyright law. The Republicans could gain a foothold with the younger generation by supporting sensible copyright reform, such as copy right lasts for only 17 years, for music, movies, and Mickey Mouse. The labels would scream and cry and threaten to hold their breath, but the labels don’t have the vote. The younger generation does have the vote.
At a minimum we could tell the labels that the FBI badge is copyright to the government and it will cost the labels $5 a DVD to use it.
Up til, or perhaps thru WWII artillery was composed of guns and howitzers. Guns had longer barrels and longer range. Howitzers were built the same as guns but had shorter barrels and could elevate them higher than guns. The shorter barrel made them lighter and easier to move. Forty five degrees of elevation gives best possible range for artillery. After WWII, since the pieces were mostly the same, parts would interchange, we stopped making much talk about the differences. The 155mm (6 inch) howitzers we are sending to Ukraine can fire a 95 pound shell a tad more than 7 miles. I am using figures from “Shells and Shooting” by Willy Ley published way back in 1942. I am not aware of any technical improvements since then that would increase range or weight of shell much.
For artillery fire to do any good at seven miles you need recon to spot your target, and ideally a forward observer to report where the shells are falling and allowing the artillery to correct its aim. Seven miles is a long way out for recon and a long way to push out forward observers. The 7 mile range of the 155mm howitzers is probably plenty.
The woman’s vote is more important than the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the Asian American vote or any of the other groups. Women are 50% of the population, which is more than all the blacks, all the Hispanics and all the Asians all put together. Last couple of elections the Democrats won the woman’s vote by 10%. That wins the election for Democrats, right there.
As a party we Republicans need to win the woman’s vote if we want to win the midterm elections in November. Despite all the happy talk on the TV about a Republican year, if we don’t get the women to vote Republican, we are stuck with Democrats, including that clueless Biden.
One thing to do, don’t talk about abortion. Some woman are for it and some are against it and no matter what side a Republican takes it will hurt, not help. If there are other issues we Republicans need to address, I don’t know what they might be. There ought to be some pollsters who might know something. We ought to find them and listen to what they have to say.
You can see video from California towns mostly showing streets, parks, vacant land anywhere full of tents. This seems to work out in California where the winters are not too bad. It doesn’t work in New Hampshire where the winter temperature can drop down well below zero and stay there for a week. Nobody can live in a tent, be it unheated or even heated in that kind of weather.
The problem has a number of angles to it.
There is not enough housing, and little new housing is being built, and the existing housing is too expensive for ordinary people to afford. This unfortunate state of affairs is caused by snob zoning. Many many towns don’t want more housing, the residents think the town is too big as is and they don’t want it to grow bigger. So they zone for nothing but single family houses, on quarter acre lots. They zone out apartment houses, trailer parks, and “tiny” houses. The only fix I can think of are state laws restricting the powers of town zoning boards.
There are a lot of
unemployed people. When you are
unemployed, you cannot afford any kind of housing. One part of our unemployment problem comes
for having a lot of citizens who lack any usable skills, who cannot get to
work on time, and who cannot come in to work every day, or have criminal
records, or are drug addicts. In short
they are not employable. This is the result of the failure of the public
schools to teach any thing of value and who waste time on lefty things like
Critical Race Theory. We could try
remedial operations like the CCC camps we used to run back in the Franklin
Roosevelt years. Such a camp would take
in anyone, give them three square meals a day, give them 40 hours a week of
work, and offer medical care for any problems the campers might have. The work might be kinda low end like picking
up trash along public roads, raking leaves, or shoveling snow. It might be things like digging needed
drainage, or clearing land for farming or building.On the other hand CCC campers mostly created the Cannon Mountain ski area back in the 1930s.
And we need to reduce the number of drug addicts. Right now a lot of doctors prescribe opioids to everyone who comes in their door. Some states have opioids prescribed in 75% to 85% of all office visits. That is ridiculous. I have lived a long life, I have gone to the doctor’s numerous times, and just once, after a tooth extraction, did the dentist proscribe Percoset for me. And the patients find the opioids make them feel good. When the prescription runs out they start to buy street drugs, which are a lot cheaper than prescription drugs. We need to clap down on doctor’s proscribing practices. We also need to spread the word that street drugs are souped up with fentanyl. About 20% of street drugs have enough fentanyl in them to kill you.
Good idea. I am surprised that he got the idea past his greenie backers/controllers. Greenies have been against nuclear power, fearing that nuclear reactors can turn into nuclear bombs and kill them all.
Greenies also fear that CO2 in the atmosphere will cause global warming and fry us all. This is not actually a problem; the atmosphere already contains a hundred times as much water vapor a CO2, as strong a greenhouse gas s CO2, so a puny 400 ppm of CO2 is not going to make much of a difference.
Good thing about nuclear power is it is there when we need it, after dark and on windless days.
Right now Congress is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. US Senate is exactly evenly split, 50 Democrats 50 Republicans. US house is close; the democrats have only a 5 vote lead out of a chamber of 400 or so members. Which means, on any controversial bill, neither side will have the votes to pass it.
The country is divided between makers, who have jobs and pay taxes, and takers who are unemployed and drawing welfare. Half the population pays no federal income tax. They don’t make much, or any, money, and generous allowances in the Federal income tax for children, home mortgages, and other stuff reduces their federal tax to zip. This isn’t right; all citizens should pay something, just to teach them that taxes hurt and should not be raised. The poor don’t need to pay much, but they ought to pay something, just to give them the idea that taxes are bad.
Right now the Democrats are better known as the party of more free stuff and more taxes to pay for all the free stuff. The Republicans are the party of the makers, they want to support business, which employs most of them, pays most people’s medical insurance, and produces the river of goods and services that make America the richest country in the world.
We have an election coming up in six months. We have seen how bad a Democrat administration can be. Every real American ought to vote Republican in November. Give the proper party a sizable majority in Congress so we can get something done.
Meh. A 12 foot tall bad guy with purple skin and a lot of muscles, Thanos I believe he is called, spends the 2 and a half hour movie beating the tar out of Ironman, Spider Man, Thor, Rocket Raccoon , Groot, and a bunch of other super heroes whose names I missed. It took me three tries on my DVD player to get to the end of this movie before falling asleep. Most of the cast names meant nothing to me except for Robert Downey Jr doing Ironman and Chris Hemsworth doing Thor.
Thanos is ridiculously tough. The space going super heroes guide an asteroid, solid rock, a thousand feet across and a mile long onto Thanos’ head. For a minute we think maybe they got him. Nah, Thanos shakes off all the rock a minute later and continues beating the tar out of the super heroes.
They do a bit about an army in Wakanda fighting off an army of bad guys. In other movies Wakanda shows up as a black inhabited and operated country in deepest Africa, industrialized, and equipped with advanced stuff like anti gravity stretchers and advanced aircraft/spacecraft like they have in Star Wars. In this movie the Wakanda army, numerous and mostly infantry, is carrying short spears. The few Avengers helping them out are carrying nothing heavier than shoulder fired assault rifles, which make a feeble “pop pop” noise when fired. And in fact, the bad guys keep right on coming after even a lot of pop pops. You would think that real Avengers would be carrying something that fired 50 cal Browning Machine Gun (BMG) rounds with a blam blam loud enough to damage the speakers in my TV set. No such luck.
The unit goes back to James Watt, who needed to sell his steam engines. Watt was trying to tell customers than just one of his steam engines could replace so many expensive and hungry horses at their mines or mills. We can assume that Watt chose a small and weakly horse for the comparison to make his engines look their best.
Many many years later, Detroit used the idea, and the unit to advertise the power of car engines. Everyone knew that more power gave a livelier car. They started out measuring the power of an engine removed from the car and mounted on an engine dynamometer. The engine was tested “bare”, no generator/alternator, no power steering pump, no air cleaner on the carburetor, no exhaust manifold or mufflers. All of these things took engine power to run, said engine power subtracted from the power shown on the dyno.
About 1971 the big three in Detroit got together and agreed upon a new test procedure, engine was to be equipped with all power robbing accessories, an exhaust manifold, a muffler, air cleaner, the works. The idea was to give car buyers a more accurate idea of how much usable power their new car might have. The other effect was to reduce the advertised horsepower of all cars by about 15%. Although car salesmen groused about the reduced horsepower claims, all makes suffered about the same amount, so things came out more of less even.
Things trundled along for many years. Until in very recent years, some imported cars began advertising huge horsepower out of very tiny engines. One of them was claiming 200 horsepower out of a 120 cubic inch engine. For comparison a Chevy 283 cubic inch two barrel carburetor V8 only claimed 180 horsepower when it came out back in 1956. And that was under the more generous rating system in use up until 1971.
The long and the short of it is, I don’t believe the incredible horsepower claims from some tiny engines. As a rule of thumb, an engine can produce about one horsepower per cubic inch of engine displacement. So 180 horse power from a 283 cubic inch Chevy V8 is believable. 200 horsepower from a 120 cubic inch engine is not believable.
