Social Security. The third rail of American politics. Touch it and die.

   No one with two brain cells is going to reduce social security, no matter what Democrats are claiming on TV. No Republican is that dumb.  There might be a few Democrats who are that dumb but I doubt it.  The current talk on TV about reducing social security is just talk, nobody, Republican or Democrat, is going to do it because the political backlash would be too severe.

Likewise talk on TV about the feds taking money away from social security is just talk from ignorant people.  TV is full of very ignorant people. 

Social security works like this.  Every worker has money taken from his paycheck and given to social security.  In many years, this year for example, social security takes in more money in taxes than it has to pay out in benefits.  The difference is large, billions of dollars.  So what does social security do with the extra money that they will need in a few years?  Answer, they buy US treasury bonds.  They pay modest interest, they are the safest investment on the planet.  America has never ever failed to pay off on its bonds.   And everyone, politicians, economists, business men, who ever,  is against social security investing the money in banks or stocks or anything private, doing such amounts to Uncle Sam investing a lost of money in where ever, which amounts to gaining government control of some private enterprise, at which point it is no longer a private enterprise. And there is no question that US bonds will pay off for social security when social security needs the money. 

 Good Shooting.

This morning's radio claimed that Ukraine shot down 45 out of 50 Russian crew missiles yesterday. Crew missiles are not easy to hit.  They are fast, 600 mph, and fly low which means the radar cannot see them until they a very close.  My radio was tuned to NHPR which is fairly trustworthy and presumably was passing along a Ukraine press release, which might have exaggerated things a little bit.

Attack on Pelosi Home

Paul Pelosi might have saved himself a skull fracture if he had a loaded firearm in a convenient place around his home. Say a bedside table.  I keep an Army .45 automatic in my bedside table.

He might have avoided an attack in his home if democrat district attorneys jailed known criminals instead of turning them loose to roam the streets.  Democrat city officials who defund the police reduce everyone’s safety in their homes.

The Pelosi’s might want to contact an experienced contractor to beef up the security of their home.  A tougher back door for instance.

 Among to zillion law firms advertising for clients in the Camp Lejeune matter we have Kelly Postal.  Their ad says their legal teams are made up of Marines, West Point graduates and Harvard trained lawyers.  I have a lot of respect for Marines, both of my brothers enlisted in the Marines for the Viet Nam war and did combat tours in Viet Nam.  I did the same except I was Air Force.  West Point graduates become US Army officers, for whom I have a good deal of respect.  Then we get down to Harvard lawyers.  They are a turnoff for me.  I wonder how the Camp Lejeune victims feel about them.

Can the US defend Taiwan from invasion by Mainland China?

 Just in the last week, Fox’s military commentator, retired Army general Jack Keane, said that a recent war game on this subject lead to a decisive victory for China and a defeat for us. 

I have to wonder about this.  The Taiwan Strait is 120 miles wide and blue water, deep enough to float aircraft carriers (or any other kind of ship).  China has to get a sizable army across the strait, land the troops on the island of Taiwan, and keep them supplied during the fighting.  Taiwan has an army with a decent supply of up to date American equipment.  China will have to fight hard to gain control of the island. 

   Our best bet to defend Taiwan is to sink the Chinese invasion force as it crosses the strait.  This will start off as an Air Force battle.  China has a lot of airbases on their side of the straight.  We have a dozen aircraft carriers, of which maybe 9 are operationally ready.  The other three are likely in US shipyards for one sort or another of heavy duty work and thus unavailable.  Each carrier has maybe 90 aircraft on board.  The carriers could be stationed on the far side of Taiwan to make it harder for China to strike them. The carrier aircraft can fly right across Taiwan in a matter of minutes.  The Air Force could fly in a lot of planes to Taiwan to fight from Taiwan’s air fields. That ought to give us 800 Navy aircraft and 500-800 Air Force aircraft. 

   China has maybe 1700 combat aircraft.  Maybe half of them are as hot as USAF fighters and the other half is old, slow, and easy meat for USAF F-22s and F35s.  This info comes from pontification at various Internet sites.  These sites tend to denigrate the Chinese Air Force and say nice things about USAF. I don’t know who would win, before a head to head air battle between them.

   The object of such an air battle is for one side or the other to obtain air superiority,  By which I mean to ability to fly low performance (at least by fighter standards) bombers out into the Taiwan strait to sink Chinese ships carrying troops to invade Taiwan.   Other angles, before the air war settles out, US submarines, lurking underwater in the strait of Taiwan torpedoing any surface vessel that needs it.  Chinese aircraft probably cannot sink subs that stay submerged.  No problem for nuclear subs, not impossible for conventional diesel subs.

   So, I can see American air and sea power keeping the Chinese ships under control and off Taiwan landing beaches.  I think this will defeat a Chinese attempt to take over Taiwan.  I don’t know how General Deane’s war game worked and why it showed a Chinese victory.

Codify Roe v Wade.

Biden says he will do it.  Right after the election as opposed to right now when his party controls Congress.  That might change after the election.

I wonder what “codify” means.  Passing a new law that makes some things illegal and other things legal?  What things?  Are these things measurable or can any Democrat office holder say what they are?

Whither the mid terms?

 Waves, will we have one in the oncoming midterm election? You could not tell from the TV news coverage. They talk about Senate contests in a single state, or head to head poll results over a single election. No stories indicating where a lot of voters are heading, just onsey twosey stuff. If there are any poll results over a broad area I have not seen them. I hope everyone gets out and votes in the upcoming election.

Farewell Robbie Coltrane

 Robbie's Hagrid was a big part of the Harry Potter movies.  I will miss Robbie.

Environmental, Social, and Governance. (ESG)

 Environmental, Social, and Governance. (ESG)

 The acronym stands for a company management plan to do nice things for the environment, social something or other, and governance, a scheme were company management abandons traditional company goals, and aims for environmental and social goals.

 The American corporation has been fantastically successful over many years.  Corporations produce goods and services, at very good prices and in vast quantities.  Earnings are solid, and are shared between share holders and workers.  Most Americans work for corporations and get their health insurance from the corporation that employs them.  American corporations are an important part of American economy and well being. 

   We should not mess things up with ill considered changes that might throw us out of work and cancel our health care.

 Right now successful corporate managers concentrate on improving the corporate production (automobiles, aircraft, tools, house wares and other stuff) (producing services such as communication (cell phone, TV, newspaper, more economically) or providing transportation (railroads and airlines) more economically.  

 Do we want corporate management to stop this beneficial activity and start tending the environment, the social feelings of just about anybody, and setting up governance that locks the corporation into activities that do not improve the company bottom line?   And instead of divvying up corporate profits between share holders and worker, ESG would grab off a good chunk of corporate revenue to support the Green Nude Eel and deny the money to workers and stock holders. 

 I think we should stick with the corporate governance that has paid us such solid dividends over many years.  Work on getting costs down and quality up. 

Goobledegook for a verdict in Parkland School shooter case

The TV is reading the verdict in the case of Nicolas Cruze, the Parkland School shooter. It is all legal goobledegook. Never is the word "guilty" used. They must have had a lawyer write the lengthy complicated verdict (it took the judge 10 minutes to read the whole thing).

Could this be the problem with the American justice system? That they cannot call an atrocious murderer guilty?

Sports fans versus voters

 I am a casual sports fan.  Living in one of the “Boston States” I root for the Patriots (fall) and the Red Sox (spring and summer).  Should either team make the Super Bowl or the World Series I will watch the games.  There is no way that I will ever root for the New York Yankees. 

   We also have a lot of voters who vote the same way.  They will vote for their party no matter what.  And they would never vote for that other party, no matter what.   

   For sports fans, it doesn’t matter much.  Rooting for one team or the other doesn’t affect anything important.

For voters, this attitude is destructive of our democracy.  We vote in crooks and dimwits, and fail to vote for decent intelligent public spirited candidates. 

   To be a patriotic voter you have to do a little homework, such as who is running and what have they done in the past that is honorable, or dishonorable.  You want to vote for the good guys and vote against the bad guys.  In this day and age of the Internet the home work is easy to do.   Google will tell you who is running, nationally and for state office, and give you the candidate’s history and voting record. 

   There is a crucial midterm election coming up in about three weeks.  The current Democrat administration is a bunch of weak and elderly men and is driving America into the ground.  We need to vote them out.  Vote in some decent people who might be able to pull the country up before all that is left is a smoking crater. 

Meet and Greet for Don Bolduc, Republican candidate for US Senate.

 I went last night.  Decent turnout, the drive way was mostly parked up, call it 50 cars.  Large fine house, full of voters.  Bolduc spoke, without notes, for an hour.  He used real English that made sense, unlike the pabulum speak we hear from so many in the DC swamp.  He definitely will make a better Senator for us in New Hampshire than Maggie Hassan, the Democrat incumbent, who has done little to nothing over the last 6 years, except for just once she voted AGAINT the Keystone XL pipeline.  Which is destructive for New Hampshire.  We all have to heat our houses all winter.  Keystone XL would bring economical crude oil from a friendly neighboring country (Canada) down to US refineries, where it would be refined into gasoline and heating oil. 

  I will vote for Bolduc,  I made a contribution to his campaign last night. 

Things Democrats have brought us

1. $5 a gallon gasoline.  It has dropped off a bit from $5 but not enough to matter much.
2. Attempts to renew the “assault weapons” ban.  Since there are no real differences between “assault weapons” and deer rifles, this law will ban all rifles.  Which is perfectly OK with the gun control freaks.
3. 9.5 % inflation.  Your dollars are worth 9.5% less in buying power than a year ago.  Democrats do this by printing a lot of money.
4. The Afghanistan debacle.  We pulled out of Afghanistan turning the country over to the Taliban and leaving billions of dollars worth of good American weapons to Islamic terrorists.  And we left a lot of our own people behind. We had Afghani’s clinging to USAF transports and falling to their deaths when the plane took off.
5. Lack of baby formula in store.  For that matter a lot of empty shelves for all sorts of common products like bacon.
6. Kamala Harris for vice president.  If anything happens to Biden, impeachment, heart attack, Covid 19, falling off bicycles, falling down the boarding stairs from Air Force 1, you name it, Kamala becomes president.  By all accounts she is worse than Biden.
7. Opening up the US-Mexican border to anybody who shows up.  Resulting in  floods of fentanyl, Covid 19 cases, and illegal immigrants.
8. Turning the presidency over to Who Runs Biden’s America (WRBA).  They write the executive orders and the speeches on the teleprompter.  Biden signs what is put before him and reads out loud what ever is on the teleprompter.  We have no idea who WRBA is but who ever they are they are running America right into the ground. 
9. Biden pushed a big spending bill thru Congress (The build back badder bill) and will sign it when the Congress approves it.  It will make inflation even worse. 
10. Biden is putting the Armed Forces onto a lefty greenie path, including Critical Race Theory training for the troops and mixed sex bathrooms and mixed sex locker rooms.  There was a scene of this in the movie Starship Troopers.  They are discharging 60,000 regular and National Guard troops who lack Covid 19 vaccination.  The armed services are reporting recruiting shortfalls of as much as 45%. 

 

 

       All real Americans need to vote a straight Republican ticket in the mid term federal elections coming up this November.  Only that will save America from total ruin.

 

Putin and nukes.

Putin has threatened to use nukes on Ukraine.  We do not approve.  The way to prevent Putin from nuking Ukraine is to tell him “If you nuke Ukraine, or anywhere else, we will nuke you back, harder.”  Trouble is, if Biden were to say this who would believe him?  Not I, probably not Putin.  That’s the trouble with electing a weak president.  It weakens the entire country.

We have mid term elections coming up in three-four weeks.  Everybody should get out and vote.  And vote a straight Republican ticket, to prevent more Democrats from serving anywhere.  

Captain America Civil War 2016

It isn’t new, it has been out for six years, but somehow I only saw it last night on a NetFlix DVD.  A meh movie.  The worst soundman ever.  Most of the dialogue was inaudible.  Actors mumbled, turned away from the mike while speaking, and failed to speak up.  Plot was difficult to impossible to understand, all it seemed to produce was a lot of hand to hand fistfights between Tony Stark (Ironman) and Steve Rogers (Captain America).  Since both of them are super powered, neither could get in any solid hits on the other. 

   The movie opens (after some action shots) with a white haired well dressed man from the UN demanding that the Avengers accept UN authority and only beat up UN approved bad guys.  Tony Stark is for it, Steve Rodgers is against it. Neither of them gives reasons for their positions The UN guy lands a 1 inch thick bound book of UN regulations on the table.  Seeing that I though to myself with that much to choose from a lawyer could find paragraphs in there to justify anything he wanted to do.  The movie never gets down to the Avengers taking a vote (or even just a show of hands) as to accepting or rejecting the UN demands.  Instead it moves on to hand to hand combat between Captain America and Ironman.   This goes on and on and on.   I know that both protagonists are super powered and safe from death or injury, the action fails to engage my interest. 

California, the state that says brass castings cause cancer.

 We don't want any California fruitcakes to hold federal offices.

My sincerest sympathy

 To all who have suffered from, and are still suffering from Hurricane Ian.  The images I have seen are horrible.  May God go with you all. 

America needs to produce enough fuel to get Europe thru the coming winter.

 Europe used to get substantial amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal from Russia.  After Russia attacked Ukraine they stopped supplying any sort of fuel to Europe.  At this moment Germany and much of Europe is facing a terribly cold winter, coming up in just a couple of months. 

  We should be shipping fuel to Europe to make up for the lack of Russian fuel.  Back a couple of years ago, in Trump time, we had the necessary fuel production right here in America.  After two years of Biden making nice to the Greenies, we can no longer produce much, if any, fuel for export to our European allies. 

   We need to fix this.  Everyone should get out for the midterm elections this coming November 8 and vote a straight Republican ticket.  A Republican majority in the House and the Senate could restore the oil production that Biden and the Greenies destroyed and save our European allies from a winter without central heat. 

Save our country, vote a straight republican ticket in November

 

Next month, November, is the mid term elections.  All members of the House of Representatives, a third of all US senators, and most state governors and officials are up for election or re election.  This may be the last chance for us voters to pull our country out of its current power dive into the ground.  We don’t get another chance until 2024, and which point to may be too late to save the country. 

   The most important thing us voters can do is get rid of all the Greenies.  Greenies have strong opinions and no common sense.  Greenies want to shut down drilling for oil and gas, fracking, coal mining, and nuclear energy and cattle raising.  They feel (they don’t think but they have a lot of feelz)  that fracking, oil and gas exploration, coal mining, and nuclear power are evil and should be stopped.  None of them have gone thru a New Hampshire winter with no central heat.  Or walked to the store in a snow storm because they don’t have any gas for the car. 

    The reason for $5 a gallon gasoline is the Biden administration making nice to Greenies.  They shut down the Keystone XL pipeline their first day in office.  They stopped leasing any federal land for oil drilling, and they told the banks not to lend money to drill for oil, it was too risky.  That deliberately cut US oil and gas production by 1 million barrels a day, creating the shortage that led to $5 gasoline.  We need to get rid of these people, they will starve us all. 

   Greenies don’t have the courage to put them selves on the ballot.  Instead they attach themselves to the Democrats, who are on the ballot.  To get rid of the country wrecking Greenies, get out and vote a straight Republican ticket this November.

Don't give New York State a hand out.

“Infrastructure” actually means use federal money to maintain New York State roads.  If you don’t live in New York, vote against infrastructure bills. 

New York roads are terrible.  Potholes, missing center strip, terrible signage, frost heaves, and worse.  Driving, you immediately notice when you enter New York State, the roads are in terrible shape.  This has occurred because New York State government stopped doing routine road maintenance maybe 30 years ago. 

   All the MSM people, TV or newspaper, live and work in New York.  They know how bad New York roads are.  They think all the roads in the country are as bad as they are in New York.  They figure that calling for “infrastructure” spending they will be fixing roads all over the country.  Not true.  Reasonable states like New Hampshire, the other New England states, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Delaware have been doing routine road maintenance for years, and their roads are in decent shape.  A federal infrastructure bill will use tax money from all over the US to fix up New York roads which have been neglected by the state of New York for many many years. 

Hurrican Fiona is tearing up Atlantic Canada

Somehow Fiona manage to glide by New Hampshire without bringing us even a few clouds.  Granted Fiona was well offshore when passing New Hampshire, but usually a close by hurricane creates a day or two of bad weather. Not this time.  The TV is telling of massive power outages in Canada, and even Maine.

Platforms are back.

    Used to be, each party, and many candidates, would publish a list of things they would do, if elected.  These lists were called platforms, and they had a decent effect upon voters.  For the last couple of elections, neither party bothered to publish a platform.  Probably because politicians think that taking a stand on anything loses you votes.  What ever the issue is, there are voters who are for it and voters that are against it.  Taking a stand, on anything, loses the voters who don’t agree, and fails to gain votes of those who do agree.  Which accounts for the hours and hours of politicians speaking but saying nothing.

   Mirabel Dictu.  The Republicans just published their platform for the coming election.  “Commitment to America” they called it.  The name sounds similar to “Contract with America” which was the name Newt Gengrich used for his platform many years ago.  Newt’s platform was fairly effective.  Let us hope this one works as well. Needless to say, the Democrats have been trashing “Commitment to America” ever since it came out on Friday.

How Bad is the illegal immigration situation?

I just received one of those “Do Not Destroy. Registered Member Documents Enclosed” envelopes in the US Mail.  It was from Judicial Watch (a reasonable political group to whom I have contributed some money in the past) and the first seven questions were about the very large costs of illegal immigration, extra school costs, extra hospital costs, and more,  from illegal immigration.  The costs quoted were high, so high that I would want to check them out before I believed the numbers.  The tone of the rest of the document was “Illegal immigrants are costing us an arm and leg and we should shut them down.” I suppose the states on the Mexican border might be getting hit this hard but I don’t think my state is, yet.

   Where I live, New Hampshire, is a border state, our border is with Canada.  Far as I can tell, Canadians are happy with things in Canada and are staying in Canada, except for shopping.  Prices are lower in the US than they are in Canada, so we see a reasonable number of Canadians down here shopping.  They spend money, which is a good thing.  The Canadians mostly drive back to Canada after a shopping trip to New Hampshire.  The Mexican border is as far away from New Hampshire is it can be for an American State so I don’t think we are getting hit as hard as this questionnaire suggests, yet.

   Personally I am perfectly OK with illegal immigrants who find a job, pay their taxes, stay out of trouble with the law, go to mass on Sunday, and send their kids to school.    I call these good citizens, and our country needs all the good citizens it can get. 

   Immigrants who are MS13 gang members, who smuggle fentanyl, extort money, and engage in crime, are terrible citizens and we should lower the boom on them, good and hard.

   Anyhow I will return the questionnaire to Judicial Watch and maybe even send them a little money.

 

Fog in the Notch

 It is so thick I can barely see the house across the street.  And it is raining.  Fall is coming, today I hear. 

Camp Lejeune water

    You must have heard the lawyers advertising for plaintiffs over the matter of Camp LeJeune’s water back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.  The lawyers are taking up as much airtime as Mike Lindell, the pillow guy.  The lawyers all call the Camp Lejeune water “toxic” and cause of a lot of bad sounding illnesses.  I have not heard just what it was/is in that water.  “Toxic” is just enough word for poisonous.  I’d like to know what they found in the water and how much.  Modern chemistry is good enough to detect small amounts of anything just about anywhere.  Before I get very excited about such detections I want to know just how much was detected and what is the safe limit for what ever it is that got detected.  I have no heard that about the Camp Lejeune situation. 

Newsies don't know Cape Cod very well.

Those 50 immigrants that Texans flew up to plush Martha's Vineyard were relocated to "a Massachusetts National Guard base on Cape Cod".  That was probably Otis Air Force Base, where I did Air Force summer camp back in the early '60s.  I heard or read somewhere lately that Otis AFB has been renamed "Joint Base something-or-other".  I am so glad that we have bureaucrats and paper pushers with nothing better to do than rename Air Force Bases.  We could even save a little taxpayer's money by tracking those bureaucrats down and laying them all off. 

Aviation Week still pushing for green airliners.

There are three ways to go to make an airliner that is better for the climate than what we have flying today.  Airliners use and burn a LOT of fuel.  Just to fuel a single seat, single engine fighter plane for a long flight (Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB Florida) took 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.  This is a full 18 wheeler semi trailer worth of fuel.  That’s just for a little fighter plane.  To fuel a four engine jet liner carrying a couple of hundred passengers across an ocean takes a lot more, probably something like 40,000 gallons, 4 full 18 wheeler semi trailers. 

  Aviation Week keeps mentioning “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF).  What ever it is, Aviation Week claims it burns without CO2 emissions, and to work fine in existing jet engines.  I have no idea what SAF is, how it is made, what it might cost.  Googling turned up one post, which I wrote myself a couple of years ago. 

  Then there is hydrogen.  Burns good and clean, no CO2, just H2O (water).  Has to be cooled way way down so it liquefies, before you can get enough of it into an airliner to do any good.   The airliner needs special hydrogen tanks, fitted in somewhere.  The usual plan for fuel storage, filling up the wings with kerosene, probably won’t work for hydrogen.  The hydrogen keeps boiling off, requiring a cylindrical fuel tank that can take some pressure.  The wings cannot take any sort of pressure. 

  And finally there are batteries.  I am surprised that even theoretically possible batteries have enough power to lift themselves (let along an airliner) off the ground.  I am aware a one experimental battery powered aircraft project.  The aircraft is the size of a Cessna.  They got a lot of development work to grow that up to airliner size.

Butterflies.

 

Monarch butterfly gets caught in abandoned spider web.  I have a couple of very sizable webs hung off my eaves.  After a couple of days of steady rain the spiders, big ones, abandoned the webs, I have not seen the spiders in several days.  But the webs are still up and this big Monarch butterfly got caught in one.  He fluttered and flittered and yanked himself around for a long time.  He must have been successful, I just looked for him and he was gone.  Good luck butterfly.  You are gonna need it this time of year.

Feathers in their bonnets

 The British are doing a great procession bringing Queen Elizabeth's body to Edinburgh Cathedral.  The Scottish honor guard is  wearing feathers in their bonnets.  First time I have ever seen what the old cliche looks like in real life.

Spider Webbery.

A spider spinning a web needs something to anchor the web to.  In nature a tree branch with a fork in it, that yields two branches maybe a foot apart works well.  A lot of other spiders have to make do with less.  I see them jumping off my eaves, trailing a thread of silk.  The lucky ones land on my deck railing, the unlucky ones just get blown away. Even the lucky ones are not that lucky.  It is a good ten feet from my eaves to the deck railing.  I never see the spiders climbing back up to spin a second thread. They need two anchor threads to keep the web spread out.  I don’t think spiders can see from my eaves to my deck railing.  I think they are just casting themselves to the winds, hoping for the best.   

9-11 21 years later.

 I was at work, at Analog Devices, that morning.  Someone came running thru the lab, crying out that New York had been bombed.  So I took the lab TV set; we had one because we were doing video compression work and we needed the TV to se if video looked good after being compressed and then decompressed.  I set the TV up out in the hall, on rabbit ears and it pulled in the major networks who were covering nothing besides 9-11.  Everybody on our floor of Analog Devices gathered around the TV, no one spoke.  We saw the World Trade center get hit and later collapse.  New York’s first responders ran into the stricken building to save people.  Many of them died when the building fell.

   Over the next couple of days everyone put an American flag, on a flag pole, on their cars or pickup trucks.  

Political TV ads get rough.

 The New Hampshire primary is Tuesday (the 13^th) only three days away.  Anyone who has a TV ad is running it now, before the primary.  Ads after the primary are wasted.  I had WMUR on this morning.  It was wall to wall political ads.  Some of them were attack ads, aimed at candidates some one did not like.  Accusations of corruption, ballot box tampering, pay offs, fingers in the till were right out there, front and center.  Tuesday’s results will be interesting. 

I am voting for Chuck Morse for Senate, Chris Sununu for governor, and I don’t know who for US rep.

Condolences on Queen Elizabeth's Death

 Condolences to the royal family, condolences to all the subjects of the queen, condolences to all who loved and admired her world wide.  I am old enough to remember when she ascended to the throne, and the impressive parade the British threw to commemorate the event.  I am extremely sorry to hear of her death. 

Sean Bean’s best role. Sharpe’s Rifles

The year is something like 1813, the place is Spain.  Sir Arthur Wellesley (later to become the Duke of Wellington) is leading a British army into Spain to drive out Napoleon’s army, and younger brother who has usurped the Spanish crown. Wellesley sets out for his morning exercise, a horse ride, with his dog coming along.  Suddenly troop of French cavalry appear and take after Wellesley.  At the last minute Sergeant Richard Sharpe appears on the scene, rifle in hand.  His first shot takes out the leading French rider, some quick hand-to-hand work rifle to sword takes care of the second, and a very quick reload takes out the last.  For saving his life, Wellesley promotes Sharpe to lieutenant on the spot.   

    Sean Bean is slender (something he lost by Game of Thrones years) in a snappy black rifleman’s uniform, a crack shot, a deadly fist fighter, an irrestible ladies man, just the right touch of a British accent.  It’s a series, 14 separate episodes, each episode an hour long.  Well filmed, excellent sound, all the dialog is understandable.  It’s been out for a while; I got it from the Melrose public library maybe 15 years ago. 

Peace and quiet in Fanconia Notch

 The rural quiet up here is broken by the roar of ride on mowers, gasoline powered leaf blowers, weed wackers, and for good measure, the roar of jet engines from low flying aircraft.  It gets really loud, especially when the land scape people are trying to catch up after two days of rain. 

Raking up old atrocities

 Beat the Press just spent their whole Sunday morning hour discussing some very very unfortunate cases from four years ago.  In both cases young black men were mistreated by white cops, in one case mistreatment so bad that the black victim died in police custody.  Horrible cases both.  I would be happy to let these cases die and move on to something a little more up to date.  Bringing these two cases up on TV just incites the defund the police people, and creates more hard feelings on the subject of race.  The past is past, talking about it on TV today won't change what happened.  And we have so many horrible cases, newer and better known, we don't need any more.  

Avengers Infinity War 2018

It came in from Netflix.  I put the DVD into my player and played it.  Sound track is terrible; I could not understand half the dialog.  Dialog from female characters was harder to understand than dialog from male characters, which is unusual.  Usually the higher pitched female voice is easier to understand.  The flick starts out with an (unnamed) ugly giant beating the stuffing out of Loki and then Thor.  Thor is so beat up I didn’t recognize him until the movie had been running for 10-15 minutes.  In an attempt to deal with the ugly giant they sic the Hulk on him.  The giant is tougher than the Hulk, and knocks the Hulk out, flat on the floor. The movie has Dr Strange, Ironman, an apprentice Spiderman, Bruce Banner, and the Guardians of the Galaxy crew, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and the green girlfriend and a couple of guys whose names I don't remember.  There was no discernible plot, nothing that the good guys were supposed to accomplish.  I finally turned it off after an hour and watched Fox News.   

5000 years of horse breeding and inventing.

I was watching TV where they were showing clips from a racetrack, before the race.  I don’t remember, or perhaps I never did catch the name of the track or the race.  The shots of the horses were impressive.  Big, beautifully groomed, tight barrels, muscular haunches, I could tell these were a lot of good fast race horses. 

   Thinking about it, I realized that I was looking at the end results of at least 5000 years of horse breeding and inventions of tack.  The oldest horse pictures we have come from ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, where the artist shows us a two wheel chariot, a great noble (perhaps even Pharaoh) riding in the chariot, and a two horse team.  At this early date, horses had been domesticated, but they were small animals, too small to bear the weight of a grown man.  Hence the chariot. 

   It won’t be until around 1000 BC that the Medes will breed up a line of horses big enough for riding.  This should have made cavalry cheaper to field.  Surely the riding tack for a single man, and just a single horse was cheaper than a whole chariot, harnesses, two horses, and other stuff needed for chariots. 

   The next improvement was the invention of the stirrup some time in the 700-800 AD time frame.  The stirrup was invented somewhere out East, India perhaps, somewhere out on the steppes perhaps.  Stirrups got the France sometime in the 700s.  By the late 700’s all of Charlemagne’s cavalry was riding with stirrups. We know this from period illustrations. 

   Stirrups improved the effectiveness of cavalry a lot, so much so that the military history of Europe is dominated by cavalry (armored knights) from Charlemagne’s time (800 AD) down to the introduction of muskets for the infantry (1450-1500 AD).  Special large and strong breeds of horses to carry the knight, the armor, and a small armory of edged weapons were developed.  Today we use those breeds of horses to pull the Budweiser beer wagon.  The race horses are all breed from horses the Arabs had.  I don’t know the story of just how or when the Arabs came by the best horses, but they did somehow.  For a long time the Arabs refused to sell their good horses to the Western infidels.  There is a story behind getting Arab horses back the Europe and America, but I don’t know it. 

Tell kids that street drug will kill them.

Street drugs, pills stamped out who knows where, have a lot of fentanyl in them.  The fentanyl is added because it is cheap and has a powerful kick.  The dealers hope that the extra kick will bring the kids back for more drugs.  In actual fact, the kick is so powerful that only the slightest error in mixing the pills creates a street pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it.

   Sampling some street drugs showed that 1 out of 6 pills purchased on the street contained a lethal dose of fentanyl.  In short, take a pill from a street dealer and you have a 1 out of 6 chance of dropping dead.  Many of the “over dose” deaths are really deliberate poisonings by the street drug dealers. 

   The MSM has not made this distressing fact clear to anyone.  It is up to parents to make sure their kids know that street drugs will kill them, if not right now, sooner or later.  Kids should stick with alcohol if they just have to get high. 

   Right now I don’t think kids get this message, at all.

Bissel Sucks good

 Years ago, maybe 15, the last of my old Hoovers, handed down from my mother, bit the dust.  I had been vacuuming down in the cellar and the old Hoover sucked up something big and hard.  There was tinkle and a clatter of all the metal impeller blades breaking off and falling on the floor.  So some time later I set off for Wally mart with youngest son.  I came home with a new all plastic Hoover that worked well for 15 years. 

   Youngest son last month decided to do something to spiff up Dad’s housekeeping.  He brought me a very fancy Bissel vacuum, lots of plastic, much of it transparent so you can see how well it works.  Bissel has an all clear plastic dirt chamber; I can see how much stuff it sucked up.  There is a lot of it, either fluff from the rugs or shed from the cat.  I wish I knew which, short of feeling the stuff (yuck) when I empty the Bissel.  This is a step backward.  Way back when all vacuums sucked into a cloth bag that had to taken out of doors to empty.  Mother always delegated that chore to me or one of my brothers.  Years later the vacuum industry went with paper dirt bags that you just threw in the trash.  The Bissel is back to the shake the dirt container out of doors like it was years ago.  I cheat a little bit, I put the plastic dirt contain inside a plastic grocery bag, shake it out, retrieve plastic container, and throw the grocery bag into the trash.

What does an EV battery cost and how long does it last?

 All I really know comes from years of experience with lead acid car batteries, the ones that crank your engine to get you started.  Those last four winters and cost $60 to replace.   The lithium batteries in EV's cost a lot more.  Maybe a quarter of the cost of the car when new?  Maybe worse, like one half the cost of the new car?  New EV's are like $60,000 so a battery replacement is a big deal.  Might be cheaper to just buy a new EV.  And that ain't cheap.  I have never seen anything on lithium battery life, might be anything, from a year or two up to 10 or 20 years.  I have no idea what the real answer might be.  It would be nice to know before you buy a battery car.   

Shelling a nuclear reactor is crazy

I keep seeing pieces about a big nuclear power plant in Ukraine getting shelled, presumably by the Russians.  This will lead to a Chernobyl style nuclear accident.  Reactors need electricity for instruments and lights and control rod positioning.  They also need cooling water and pumps that work.  One unlucky shell hit can knock any of this stuff out, or other essential stuff, and boom, radioactive reactor accident.  Last one (Chernobyl) was so bad they still cannot allow anyone within miles of the reactor site lest the radiation poison them. 

  Here in North America the prevailing winds are out of the west.  So any cloud of radioactive stuff gets blown east.  If prevailing winds work the same way in middle Europe then the cloud of radioactivity gets blown to the east, right into Russia.  Surely they don’t want that.  Even if the radiation stays in Ukraine, the Russians started the war to take over Ukraine.  Do they want to take it over after making a big patch of it radioactive?  How crazy are the Russians?

The US needs to totally revise teacher training.

Today to get teacher certification you have to have taken the Education major in college.  No other major need apply.  If you have not majored in Education you don’t know how to teach.  Thus saith the Ed majors who run the teacher certification process.

Trouble, they are wrong.  There is no magic knowledge in teaching.  Successful teaching calls for the teacher to establish a trusting relationship with the student, in fact all the students in the class, and know the subject they are teaching.  The education major does not teach this. 

 My college roommate wanted to teach school so he took the education major.  He told me it was the most useless and boring stuff he had ever suffered thru.  And my roommate was a sharp guy, if there were anything worth learning in the Education major he would have found it.  Essentially there is no real content in the education major, and they rehashed nothing, over and over again.  Junior and senior year, education courses met twice a day. 

  I have had a lot of teachers over the years.  Mostly good, many very good, a couple of dud’s (Miss Coyne and Mrs. Waters) but in general a pretty good bunch.  The absolute best teachers I ever had were in the US Air Force.  These guys were just enlisted men, pulled right off the flight line and set to teaching in the Field Training Detachment.  They were extremely good; they knew their subject matter backward and forward.  They maintained order in class rooms full if 18 and 19 year olds, the prime age for making trouble.   None of them had gone to college, let alone taken the education major.  My takeaway from this experience is successful teachers know their stuff and develop rapport with their students. 

  For US education I would first abolish certification of teachers.  Let the principal and the faculty at the school look at resumes and interview candidates and hire the ones that seem good.  Allow them to lay off new teachers that are not working out without doing a bunch of paperwork.   Look for college majors in subjects that they will be teaching, English, mathematics, US history, French, Spanish, physics, chemistry, and not wasting time on the Education major that has nothing to teach anyone.  

 

 

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Trump’s lawyers are talking lawsuit against DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid.  I think they have a case.  No one is secure if DOJ can send 30 FBI agents to paw thru everything in the house.  I hear that the language used to describe things to be seized was so broad as to cover everything in the house, the garage, the pool, and the women’s bedrooms.

Alec Baldwin and shooting his camera woman.

 I assume it was an accident.  I don’t know any of the principles personally but I don’t think they are the kind of people who would commit murder. 

The TV news has talked and talked about the shooting that resulted in the death of the camera woman.  What really happened is Alec didn’t know, or didn’t bother with, the first and simplest rule of firearms safety.  Namely ALWAYS check that the gun is NOT loaded when you pick it up.  Open the action, remove the magazine and look in the chamber to make sure no live round is lurking therein.  The gun in question I believe was an 1873 Colt .45 single action Army revolver, the kind that loads the cylinder one round at a time thru a loading gate.  This means when Alec picked up this gun, he had to check all six positions of the cylinder, one by one for being empty.  A little tedious.  In this case, the check was not made either because Alec was ignorant of gun safety rules, or he found the check too tedious to bother with.

   This makes the shooting of his camera woman an accident, but it is Alec Baldwin’s accident.  

How to Teach Children to read.

 The Phonics method works.  We teach the children the sounds of each letter.  This is not hard after the children learn to sing the Alphabet Song in kindergarten.  And learn the rules about long and short vowels.  And learn the more common digraphs like “th”.  Teach them that long words can be broken down into syllables. Each syllable starts with a consonant, has a vowel in the middle and a consonant on the end.  Sound out the syllables, one by one, and then say them in order and you have the word.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, that and the other stuff is probably less than 50 things the child has to learn by heart.  And with them, the child is equipped to handle new words, something that happens a lot when the child is just learning to read.

 

The Whole Word method is popular with Ed majors, but it does not work.  It cannot be taught.  The child is taught to look at the whole word.  If he/she is lucky, the mind will recognize the word and the child will know how to pronounce the word, what it means, connotations and denotations.  If the mind fails to recognize the whole word, the child is out of luck, the word is meaningless.  Whole word requires the child to learn by heart a lot more than just 26 letters and some other stuff.  The King James Bible is noted for restricting itself to a vocabulary of only 850 words.  Whole word requires memorizing at least 850 words and probably a lot more.  That is a lot harder for a child to do than Phonics. 

 

   Whole Word is what skilled readers do.  I picked it up by fourth grade.  It just came to me after doing some reading.  Some people, like my best friend, don’t have it by high school.  Best friend was plenty smart, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and went to work computing the intensity of the sound fields around the Saturn V engines.  NASA wanted to know if the sound from 27 rocket engines, all firing at once, would be enough to crack the concrete on the launching site.  Senior year in high school, best friend went out for tutoring in reading, and came back able to read Whole Word method.  He was lucky, and bright, and supported by loving parents, and attending a top notch private high school with me. 

The big Tent Sale, Littleton NH.

Word got around.  The tent was supposed to open at 9 AM this Saturday.  I got there a few minutes after nine.  The place was already packed with people who got there before nine.  The stuff was mostly house wares, rugs, books, sports equipment like ice skates and golf clubs.  I didn’t see any tools.   There was a nice brass set of fireplace tools.  I have a fireplace.  I though long and hard about buying them.  On the down side, my hearth is small and mostly full of firewood.  The nice brass tools would probably get knocked off the hearth, onto the living room rug.  On the other hand they would look cool.  I sat in a chair to rest my feet and contemplate the fire tools.  After some agonizing I decided not to buy them.  I did get away with a Donald Hamilton paperback,  a Wallace and Grommit VHS tape, a couple of whisky drinking glasses, and two nice woven scrap baskets that will replace my existing ones which are 60 years old and falling to pieces.  Much nicer than the extruded plastic scrap baskets down at Wally Mart.  After an hour the crowd thinned out.  Word to the wise, if you want to get anything nice as a yard sale, best to get there early.

 

Wall St Journal reports Chinese students in US colleges down 50%

 This is too bad.  American college is fun to do, girls, parties, sports, dorm bull sessions, and more.  Any Chinese exchange student will leave for home with a nice warm feeling about America after doing four years of college here.  And, it is a good bet that any Chinese who can swing an American college deal will in later life become an important official in China.  Which has gotta be a good thing for us.  Plus the Chinese students bring money; say $100,000 for a four year college. 

I will pay a bit more for a product marked "Made in USA"

 Used to be, nearly every thing in stores was marked "Made in USA".  Not any more.  Take a walk thru Walmart and everything is marked "Made in China" or unmarked which I figure means the same thing. Japan and Korea are selling as many cars as Detroit.  Me, I still drive a Made in USA Buick and would buy Made in USA product even if it cost a bit more.

Either I'm getting faster or the flies are getting slower

 I managed to hand swat about a dozen of 'em today.  You know the drill, you move your hand very slowly towards the fly and when within maybe 1-2 inches, you swat.  That close and the fly isn't fast enough to avoid your hand.  I usually don't do that well, but today was good for me, bad for flies.