More thoughts about Orlando

This horrible event has completely dominated the TV news since Sunday.  They don't talk about anything else. Here are some things that are true but the TV newsies don't talk about it much.
1.  Two senior American Muslim clerics denounced the killings, in strong terms.  That's the first time I have ever heard of that.  It is a good thing.
2.  The dead all bear Hispanic names, yet the newsies talk about the killer bearing a grudge against gays.  From the evidence, the killer might as well have born a grudge against Hispanics. 
3.  There are no objective differences between "assault rifles" and deer rifles.  Objective differences are things you can measure with a ruler.  The anti gun people are calling for an "assault rife" ban  hoping that  all rifles will be declared to be "assault rifles" and thus banned. 
4.  The FBI interviewed the shooter TWICE and decided that they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with a crime.  What should have happened, and did not.  The FBI agents should have evaluated the shooter as a violent nutcase, a homicidal maniac.  They should have been able to initiate proceedings to confine the shooter to a mental hospital, before he flipped completely out and killed 50 people. 
5.  The United States has 5000 miles of land border, much of it running thru roadless wildness. Anyone with a pair of decent hiking boots can just walk across the border.  Plus we have 4000 miles of seacoast, studded with marinas, boat launches, yacht clubs and docks.  Any small boat coming in from the sea is just another yachting or fishing party coming back to port at the end of the day. You can't keep 'em out, you have to find 'em and catch 'em after they get here. 

Pulse nightclub massacre, Orlando. Nobody shot back.

My deepest sympathies to the victims and their families.  Newsies are still not fully up to speed on this one.  Question nobody is asking:  Howcum in a crowded club, several hundred patrons, nobody was carrying?  Just one little pocket pistol might have stopped the bastard before he killed so many. 

Teacher Training

Cover story in the Economist.  Their shtick is teacher training this week.  We can solve all our education problems with radically more effective teacher  training, so says the Economist.  Good teachers are not born, they are trained.  No discussion of phonics vs whole word method of teaching reading.  No discussion of Common Core.  No numbers anywhere.
  Me, I'm not so sure.  To teach public school in the US, you have to suffer thru the education major in college.  Four years of meaningless blather.  Those who survive and go on to teach, either were highly motivated, or totally dull, to put up with the total boredom of the ed major.
   I went thru nine years of public school, three years of a very good prep school and four years of a good college.  In this sixteen year educational odyssey I encountered quite a few teachers, most decent, some extra ordinary, and some worthless.  Then I went into the Air Force, and took a few classes from the Field Training Detachment (FTD in USAF speak).  The instructors in FTD were uniformly excellent, as good as any teacher I'd ever had.  These instructors were just ordinary enlisted men, pulled right off the flight line, no college, on their second hitch in the Air Force.  And they were good.  Their students were all teenage guys, of prime trouble causing age, but they never had any trouble.  And the students learned the stuff.  They paid attention, did the homework, passed the tests.
   What made the FTD instructors so good?  First of all, they knew their subject matter, backwards and forwards, standing on their heads and underwater.  Then the subject matter was interesting, jet engines, machine shop work, hydraulics, aircraft instruments, guided missiles, radar, autopilot, sheet metal work, avionics and more.  For young guys with a day job doing aircraft maintenance, all this stuff was interesting.  It really helps the instructor to be teaching something his students care about.
   And the instructors were motivated.  They knew that the teenagers they were instructing were the future of the Air Force, and they were all career Air Force men, who deeply cared about the Air Force.  They gave their best, and it worked.
  Bottom line, I don't think good teachers are born or trained.  Good teaching happens when the teacher knows his subject thoroughly, and cares about his students.  And it really helps to teach subjects that the students care about. .  

House passes Puerto Rico bill.

The Hill, usually a pretty good source, is fairly clueless on this one.  They give a good discussion of the back and forth tugging to pass it.  Nothing about what's in it.  They give one brief quote from Paul Ryan to the effect that there is no taxpayer money going to Puerto Rico, but that's it.  I hope that's true.   There was talk a few weeks ago, about setting up a special board/commission/bureau in Washington to supervise Puerto Rico's government and it's spending habits.  The Hill didn't say anything about that.
   Such a bill ought to offer Puerto Rico protection for law suits while a bankruptcy court sorts out the island's finances.  Without the customary protection from lawsuits, Puerto Rico and the courts would be swamped as every lender and every supplier, and every union, and every body else sues Puerto Rico for the money they think they are due.  You gotta shut all that off to get any where.
   Was I the bankruptcy judge, with full powers, I would tell the lenders to suck it up.  It's been obvious to anyone for the past 20 years that Puerto Rico had no way, and never would have a way. to repay the loans.  For making dumb loans, the lenders deserve to loose.  I'd  review all the island pensions, and chop them back to barely enough to live on.  I'd  review the government payroll, I understand that a third of the island's residents are on it, and lay off a lot of 'em.  I'd shake up the island's tax collection department and drive them to collect all the taxes owed, by everyone. 

Does it matter if Republican apparatchniks dislike Trump?

TV news this morning is full of serious Republicans saying that they cannot support The Donald.  Well, it's understandable.  The Republican party establishment, elected officials, party workers, pundits, activists, people whose day job is politics, never liked Trump.  They did their best to stop Trump.  But the voters do like Trump, they voted for him, and there are a lot more voters than establishment types. 
   So, does it really matter if the establishment types still don't like Trump and refuse to support him?  Trump communicates with the voters thru TV and Twitter, not endorsements from prominent politicians.  In fact, Trump's voters are mad at the political establishment for the miserable state of the country, and they tune in to Trump's TV appearances.  They don't have any respect for the opinions of politicians, most of whom they call RINO's.

Election Results. Nada

Polls closed in California about 11 hours ago.  So I'm listening to NPR talking about the results on the clock radio this morning.  In an hour, they never mentioned the election results. They had a lot of happy interviews with Hillary people saying how wonderful Hillary's victory was, but never in an hour of NPR talk did I hear any real results, like how many votes cast, how much the winner won by, size of Republican and Democratic turnout.  Just an hour of happy talk.  So I got up, turned on the TV to Fox, and not much better.  I did learn that Hillary beat The Bern by 11% in California, which is solid,  but that's it.
  So I got in the net.  To bad, Fire fox was unable to connect to anything.  So, I trudged down to the basement, found my cable modem and my router.  Unplugged both for the count of ten.  Plugged back in, and voila, internet connectivity was back.  So I decided to post on my blog. Next I'll see if we have any election results on the net. 

Day After D-Day

I know I am a day late.  Success of the D-day landings was crucial to the defeat of Hitler.  It was a humungus enterprise,  thousands of landing craft, all built just in time, a million soldiers, tanks, floating harbors, fuel pipelines laid across the channel, and a zillion other things cranked out by British and American industry.
   It was extremely dangerous.  It might have failed.  It was so chancy that Eisenhower, the supreme commander, and the man with the best information, penned a press release announcing defeat of the invasion.  Fortunately he never had to use it.  With a little more luck, and a better German command structure, Rommel might have been able to throw German armor into the battle on the day of the landings instead of a day later.
   Defeat would have been a disaster.  It took all of 1942  and 1943, and half of 1944 to build up for D-day.  After a defeat on the landing beaches, it would have taken at least another year to build up to a second try.  Hitler would have been able to move all the troops guarding France against invasion to the Russian front and that surely would have slowed the Red army down, perhaps even defeated it.  It would have given Hitler time to bring secret weapons, V1, V2, jet fighters, guppy submarines, even nuclear weapons into action.