For those who don't remember, it was 70 years ago today. A crucial battle in WWII. The Anglo Americans loaded a huge army onto landing craft, motored across the English channel, and seized a defended beachhead and held it against Nazi counter attack. This victory doubled the Nazi military problem. It placed the Anglo American army on Germany's west side while the Red army was pounding on the east side.
D-Day could have failed. Had the weather worsened, had the Germans deployed their forces better, had a number of other things gone wrong, the invasion force might have been thrown back into the sea. Eisenhower was sufficiently worried to pen a press release accepting full responsibility in the event of defeat. He never released it, but it shows he, the supreme commander with the best grasp of the situation, had his doubts.
If D-day had failed, it would have been a year or more before the losses could have been made good and the invasion tried again. If the delay had run on past August 1945, we would have nuked Berlin instead of Hiroshima. Or the Russians would have cracked open the eastern front and invaded Germany pretty much single handed. By this time in the war, Russian industry was up to speed and turning out weapons as good as the German's and in vastly larger quantities. The Russians had a much larger and highly dedicated population to furnish soldiers to the front. Had this happened, the cold war Iron Curtain would have started in Holland, instead of Eastern Germany.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
I've been working on the railroad
All the live long day. Well, not really, at least not in 1:1 scale. You might have noticed the number of train wrecks involving tank cars of crude oil, resulting in massive fires, death, and property damage. How come so many? Well, the crude oil wrecks have been increasing because a lot more crude is going by rail because US and Canadian oil production is ramping up and Obama is sitting on the Keystone XL pipeline.
Some accident are just plain gross negligence. The bad accident in Quebec happened because the single crewman on the train pulled it into a siding and failed to set the hand brakes before going off to a motel to catch some crew rest. It was winter, and nobody ever shuts down a diesel in winter, lest it never start again. So the train, nobody aboard, engine left running, and no brakes set, rolled slowly off the siding, gathered speed on the downgrade, headed into town, derailed and caught fire. I forget how many people got killed in that one. Burned down every building in town that one did.
But a lot of accidents come from old worn track that derails the passing train. Down at White River Junction, on a line used by Amtrak's Montrealer, the wooden ties are so rotten I can pick spikes out of the ties with just my fingers. That bit of track has a slow order (35 mph) on it, but I used to worry as I packed youngest son onto the train for the seven hour crawl down to college in New York City.
Betcha there is plenty more track like that carrying unit trains of crude oil. It's only a matter of time before another one derails.
What to do? The railroad insurance companies ought to bear down on the railroads with higher premiums on every mile of substandard track. That might work, if railroad companies actually depend upon insurance for liability protection. They may not, many railroads are large enough to self insure.
In that case we have work for the million lawyers hanging around suing drug companies and chasing ambulances. They ought to get with it, and organize a suit against the railroad every time a train derails. For plaintiffs you have the union railroad workers endangered in the accident, the landowners endangered by petroleum fires, the fish and game departments enraged by water pollution. It shouldn't be hard to arrange for sympathetic press coverage.
Along these lines, there ought to be nationally recognized written standard for acceptable track. Something a plaintiff's lawyer can wave in front of a jury, and quote chapter and verse about how the track at the accident site did not meet standard. We need something with the kind of authority that Underwriter's Labs carries.
Next time someone cries for more infrastructure spending, suggest that some accident prone track get relaid. Best of all, track maintenance is a private sector job. If the courts make derailments expensive enough, the railroads will get the message and spend the money to replace over age track.
Some accident are just plain gross negligence. The bad accident in Quebec happened because the single crewman on the train pulled it into a siding and failed to set the hand brakes before going off to a motel to catch some crew rest. It was winter, and nobody ever shuts down a diesel in winter, lest it never start again. So the train, nobody aboard, engine left running, and no brakes set, rolled slowly off the siding, gathered speed on the downgrade, headed into town, derailed and caught fire. I forget how many people got killed in that one. Burned down every building in town that one did.
But a lot of accidents come from old worn track that derails the passing train. Down at White River Junction, on a line used by Amtrak's Montrealer, the wooden ties are so rotten I can pick spikes out of the ties with just my fingers. That bit of track has a slow order (35 mph) on it, but I used to worry as I packed youngest son onto the train for the seven hour crawl down to college in New York City.
Betcha there is plenty more track like that carrying unit trains of crude oil. It's only a matter of time before another one derails.
What to do? The railroad insurance companies ought to bear down on the railroads with higher premiums on every mile of substandard track. That might work, if railroad companies actually depend upon insurance for liability protection. They may not, many railroads are large enough to self insure.
In that case we have work for the million lawyers hanging around suing drug companies and chasing ambulances. They ought to get with it, and organize a suit against the railroad every time a train derails. For plaintiffs you have the union railroad workers endangered in the accident, the landowners endangered by petroleum fires, the fish and game departments enraged by water pollution. It shouldn't be hard to arrange for sympathetic press coverage.
Along these lines, there ought to be nationally recognized written standard for acceptable track. Something a plaintiff's lawyer can wave in front of a jury, and quote chapter and verse about how the track at the accident site did not meet standard. We need something with the kind of authority that Underwriter's Labs carries.
Next time someone cries for more infrastructure spending, suggest that some accident prone track get relaid. Best of all, track maintenance is a private sector job. If the courts make derailments expensive enough, the railroads will get the message and spend the money to replace over age track.
Dune, Frank Herbert
Probably Frank's best science fiction novel. Came out in 1965. I can remember buying the hardback on a Friday, and settling down to an all day read that weekend. Twenty years later Hollywood did a movie version. This was after Star Wars, I figure the Hollywood suits were thinking there was money in science fiction movies back then. I saw it when it first came out in 1984. There was a slow night last week, and for some reason I decided to replay my Dune DVD.
Back in 1984, Dune the movie got a poor-to-mediocre box office response, despite a hoard of loyal fans of the book. Re watching it in 2014 it was clear why. The book had an intricate background of ecology, future history, and strange technology which was difficult to grasp as a reader, let alone as a movie viewer, and was essential to understanding what was going on. Even though the movie makers added a number of scenes and a good deal of voice over commentary to try and clue the audience in, it wasn't enough. A long dramatic scene where Paul Atreides agonizes over the water of life and finally drinks it, was sorta meaningless unless you knew that the water of life was a deadly poison that was converted into a recreational drug by pure magic. If you knew this, then the scene makes sense, Paul is betting his life that he can work the magic to render the water of life harmless before it kills him. If he succeeds (survives) everyone in the universe will know that he is The Man. If you don't know all this, all you see is a lot of writhing around on screen. I think this flick should serve as a warning to movie makers who assume their audience has read the book.
I'd forgotten that Captain Picard was in the cast. Patrick Steward shows up as a senior Atreides retainer, trim uniform, baldie haircut and all. They had Sting play a bad guy. Dune the book kicked out a lot of ideas that went into Star Wars. The white armored Imperial Stormtroopers are inspired by Herbert's Imperial Sardaukar. The massive creature in the sandpit that nearly eats Harrison Ford is clearly a sandworm from Arrakis. Tatanooie, Luke's homeworld, is a dried out desert planet like Arrakis with Fremen like desert guerrillas.
Anyhow, if you liked the book, this is a worthy movie. You can recognize lines of dialog as word for word quotes from the book. Netflix has it.
Back in 1984, Dune the movie got a poor-to-mediocre box office response, despite a hoard of loyal fans of the book. Re watching it in 2014 it was clear why. The book had an intricate background of ecology, future history, and strange technology which was difficult to grasp as a reader, let alone as a movie viewer, and was essential to understanding what was going on. Even though the movie makers added a number of scenes and a good deal of voice over commentary to try and clue the audience in, it wasn't enough. A long dramatic scene where Paul Atreides agonizes over the water of life and finally drinks it, was sorta meaningless unless you knew that the water of life was a deadly poison that was converted into a recreational drug by pure magic. If you knew this, then the scene makes sense, Paul is betting his life that he can work the magic to render the water of life harmless before it kills him. If he succeeds (survives) everyone in the universe will know that he is The Man. If you don't know all this, all you see is a lot of writhing around on screen. I think this flick should serve as a warning to movie makers who assume their audience has read the book.
I'd forgotten that Captain Picard was in the cast. Patrick Steward shows up as a senior Atreides retainer, trim uniform, baldie haircut and all. They had Sting play a bad guy. Dune the book kicked out a lot of ideas that went into Star Wars. The white armored Imperial Stormtroopers are inspired by Herbert's Imperial Sardaukar. The massive creature in the sandpit that nearly eats Harrison Ford is clearly a sandworm from Arrakis. Tatanooie, Luke's homeworld, is a dried out desert planet like Arrakis with Fremen like desert guerrillas.
Anyhow, if you liked the book, this is a worthy movie. You can recognize lines of dialog as word for word quotes from the book. Netflix has it.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
How to become, or remain, a Superpower.
First off, it helps to be large, have a large and loyal population willing to pay taxes, serve in the armed forces, and work the industries. To be large requires political skill to avoid separatism, secession, and break up forces. The United States sorted this out back in the 1860's, and was able to bring the secessionist south back into the Union and keep them there. The Russians still haven't solved this problem, they had a third of the old Soviet Union bug out in 1989. They are still trying to drag it back together. Sorry about that Ukraine. If you are small, the big boys will shoulder you aside. Witness Britain, the mistress of the world thru out the nineteenth century, superseded by the Americans in the twentieth century. Britain, with a population of maybe 40 million on a smallish island was dwarfed by a continental power with triple their population.
Superpowers get to stay that way by becoming desirable places to live or move to (America where the streets are paved with gold). Superpowers dominate in things like fashion, popular music, film making, world wide broadcast networks, the internet, inventions and technology, space travel, art and architecture.
Good money is a powerful force. The Yankee dollar is accepted everywhere because everyone knows that with dollars you can always buy what you need from the Americans and anyone else for that matter. We have stuff to sell, good stuff too, and plenty of it. And we control the dollar, we can print as many as we need. That's how we financed World War II.
To print good money, you need a large and strong economy that can produce all the goods that the money wants to buy. And keeps the large and loyal population loyal by giving them good jobs. With a powerful economy, in good running order, the need for standing armed forces is less. Everyone knows that a big strong economy can create an overwhelming armed force in short order, so it is less necessary to keep a big force under arms in peacetime. You need enough force to slap down the likes of Saddam Hussein, but we don't need a force big enough to fight WWIII against the Russians, at least not right now.
Superpowers get to stay that way by becoming desirable places to live or move to (America where the streets are paved with gold). Superpowers dominate in things like fashion, popular music, film making, world wide broadcast networks, the internet, inventions and technology, space travel, art and architecture.
Good money is a powerful force. The Yankee dollar is accepted everywhere because everyone knows that with dollars you can always buy what you need from the Americans and anyone else for that matter. We have stuff to sell, good stuff too, and plenty of it. And we control the dollar, we can print as many as we need. That's how we financed World War II.
To print good money, you need a large and strong economy that can produce all the goods that the money wants to buy. And keeps the large and loyal population loyal by giving them good jobs. With a powerful economy, in good running order, the need for standing armed forces is less. Everyone knows that a big strong economy can create an overwhelming armed force in short order, so it is less necessary to keep a big force under arms in peacetime. You need enough force to slap down the likes of Saddam Hussein, but we don't need a force big enough to fight WWIII against the Russians, at least not right now.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Mental Health
When everyone concerned in a case, parents, spouse, police, know the subject needs serious mental health care, right now, there ought to somewhere to send them.
There isn't. We have cases of subjects spending the weekend handcuffed to a bed in the emergency room. Until the subject actually does something bad, law enforcement cannot do anything, even in those unfortunate cases where everyone agrees that the subject is going to do something really bad in the immediate future.
We ought to have one mental health facility (aka the booby hatch) centrally located (Concord) open 24-7 with a few open beds. The 24-7 is important, the mentally ill seldom blow their tops during normal business hours.
This won't deal with all cases, but doing something about the worst cases has got to be helpful.
There isn't. We have cases of subjects spending the weekend handcuffed to a bed in the emergency room. Until the subject actually does something bad, law enforcement cannot do anything, even in those unfortunate cases where everyone agrees that the subject is going to do something really bad in the immediate future.
We ought to have one mental health facility (aka the booby hatch) centrally located (Concord) open 24-7 with a few open beds. The 24-7 is important, the mentally ill seldom blow their tops during normal business hours.
This won't deal with all cases, but doing something about the worst cases has got to be helpful.
Bergdahl
Funny, I don't remember ever hearing about this guy until this weekend. Mixed emotions. I am always glad to get an American POW back. The price (five ugly Talibans turned loose) was high, but the Israeli's (some of the toughest minded people around) have paid even higher prices. I think they released a hundred prisoners to bring a single Israeli POW home.
The ugly questions about how Sgt Bergdahl came to be a POW, some of his statements, some opinions from fellow soldiers, and questions about the legality of the POW trade, are upsetting. I don't like what I am hearing on the TV, but I don't know what really happened, and I'm not sure the TV newsies get anything right.
This affair has pretty much pushed the VA hospital scandal off the TV.
The ugly questions about how Sgt Bergdahl came to be a POW, some of his statements, some opinions from fellow soldiers, and questions about the legality of the POW trade, are upsetting. I don't like what I am hearing on the TV, but I don't know what really happened, and I'm not sure the TV newsies get anything right.
This affair has pretty much pushed the VA hospital scandal off the TV.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Today I hung the wash out on the line
For the first time this year. Up til now it's been too cold, too rainy, too snowy for the clothesline to do any good. Lets see, it's the 2nd of June. So much for global warming.
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