The Accidental Superpower. Peter Zeihan

   Thought provoking book.  Zeihan is into geopolitics (influence of geography upon history) and demographics (population growth or shrinkage).  His book explores history in the light of geopolitics and demographics, and then ventures into a bit of future predicting. 

   Zeihan’s geopolitics emphasizes the importance of good land, fertile, well watered, decent climate.  Much of earth’s land is uninhabitable, arctic tundra, deep desert, serious mountains.  Zeihan makes the obvious point that important powers need to control a large stretch of good land.  He also makes the less well known point that North America, in the US Midwest and the Canadian prairies has more good land than any where else on earth.  Compare to Russia, which looks enormous on a Mercator projection map, but much of Russian land is worthless arctic tundra. 

   The second point Zeihan makes is the importance of rivers, especially long and navigable rivers.  Prior to the railroads in the 1830’s, everything moved by water.  Only extremely high value cargo like spices could afford land transport.  Compare a caravan with cargo on pack back.  Maybe 100 pounds of cargo per animal, and speed of twenty miles a day at best.  No wagons or carts.  Wagons and carts need roads which are very expensive.  Only the Romans had the money to put in a good road network.  No one else since the Romans could afford them.   Whereas an ordinary Indian style canoe (ancient water craft design still in mass production) can take a load of 1000 pounds, same as ten pack animals and two guys can paddle it 40 miles a day.   Bigger water craft, with sail and oar, can haul much more.

   In short, you need rivers crossing the land to move anything, foodstuffs, timber, cut stone, troops, metal ores, and textiles.  And, another not so obvious point, the United States has more, longer, navigable rivers than any place else.  The Mississippi- Missouri system allows cities as far inland as St Louis and Pittsburg and Chicago to be seaports.

   Given the geopolitics, and a large and loyal population, it’s no wonder than America became the superpower. 

    Groundwork laid, Zeihan goes on to speculate about the future.  He sees Canada as likely to come unglued, not the Quebecois of the 1990s, but Alberta, oil rich and over taxed wanting out.  He sees Russia needing to control Ukraine and the Baltic states, and needing to do so before demographic disaster makes it impossible to enlist enough young men of fighting age into the Russian army.  Russian birthrate is so low that the Russian population will shrink by HALF by 2040. 

   Zeihan talks a lot about the Bretton Woods system set up by the Americans in 1944, at a summer resort hotel in New Hampshire, only a short drive from my place.  According to conventional history Bretton Woods was a bankers meeting to establish international exchange rates and the role of gold in the post war world.  Zeihan expands this into an American deal.  We Americans, in order to get all you WWII blasted countries back on your feet, offer you tariff free entrance to the American market.  The US Navy will enforce freedom of the seas so your cargoes will get thru.  In return, we Americans don’t want to see any aggression, land grabs, invasions, or “wars of national liberation”.  And we want you on our side in the Cold War, not the Soviet side.  

   Zeihan sees the Bretton Woods system breaking down now that the Soviets are gone and American frackers have made us much less reliant on Middle East oil.  We don’t need the Bretton Woods system as much as we used to, and it’s expensive to keep running it.    

   Zeihan skips a few things, like all of politics, religion, or ideology, the growth of railroads in the 19th century,  importance of coastwise shipping to the original 13 colonies, and others.  But it's interesting and a fine starting point for all sorts of discussions.   He wrote in 2014, so it's pretty up to date. 

Army wants replace Kiowa Warriors with new helicopter.

Kiowa Warrior is a two place helicopter  going back to Viet Nam war days.  The Army wants to replace them with a new model, which is not unreasonable given the age of the in service Kiowa Warriors.  The mission is described as reconnaissance and light attack.  Not troop lift.
   Was it me, I'd want to procure a small fixed wing aircraft, something like the old OV-10 Bronco.  Helicopters require ten time the power of a fixed wing aircraft to fly.  You can get a two place airplane into the air with 60 horsepower.  A two place helicopter needs 600 horse.  Helicopters are vastly more accident prone than fixed wing.  One year, back when I was in the old Military Airlift Command, I was reading in the TIG brief about the accident record for the year.  It was all helicopter accidents (like a dozen) and just one fixed wing accident (They landed a C-133 gear up).  And MAC in those days was flying ten big fixed wing transports for every helicopter.  For flying maybe 10% of MAC's flying hours, the helicopters had ten times as many accidents.
   The reason the Army uses helicopters for missions better accomplished with fixed wing, goes back to the Key West agreement of 1947, back when they created the Air Force.  It was a turf battle, out of which the Air Force got control of all fixed wing aircraft, except for the Piper Cubs used for liaison, and the Army was only allowed helicopters.
   We could save money and lives by allowing the Army to do reconnaissance and light attack with a fixed wing aircraft. 

Fake News takes over the 24 hour news cycle

A democratic newspaper that hates Donald Trump, printed an unlikely story, based on anonymous sources.  Senior administration officials, speaking on camera, and giving their names, called the story false.  Monday TV news talked about nothing else, all day.  The gist of the Wash Post story was that Trump gave classified intel to the Russians at last week's meeting with the Russian ambassador. 
   While this bit of fake news completely blanketed the TV news, serious issues, the economy, tax reform, Obamacare reform or repeal, tariffs,  budget, the Wall,  Dodd Frank repeal or reform, military spending, the NORKs,  Syria, ISIS, get no coverage at all.  Way to go national news media. 
    It's so bad that I heard a Fox News talking head say "The daily press briefing is our opportunity to hold the administration to account".  Wrong Fox newsie.  The daily press briefing is the Administration's opportunity to  present stories that put the administration in a good light.  Your job is to pass along the stories you judge true or useful, and silently give no mention to stories you judge false.  You newsies are supposed to be investigators, not avengers. 

NORK missiles are mostly liquid fuel. Wall St Journal.

The Journal ran a piece on the NORK missile program today.  They showed sketches of three NORK missiles, all liquid fuel.  Later on in the article they mentioned that the NORKs were working on, and had test fired at least one solid fuel missile.  But the missiles in the sketches were all liquid fuel. 
   Why do we care?  Liquid fuel is half liquid oxygen (LOX) and the other half is something like kerosene, or alcohol, or perhaps even hydrogen.  As soon as the missile is fueled with LOX, the LOX starts boiling off.  The boiling point of LOX is minus 183 degrees Centigrade.  Putting LOX inside an aluminum missile fuel tank in ordinary air (plus 20 C) and the LOX starts to boil off into oxygen gas.  The fuel tank pressure relief valve lets the gas vent outside to keep the tank pressure down.  Not a problem if you launch right after fueling, but you cannot keep a liquid fueled missile fueled for more than tens of hours.  Give it ten or twenty hours and all the LOX is gone, boiled away.  You cannot keep a fleet of liquid fueled missiles fueled and ready to launch at a moment's notice.  After the order to launch is given, figure an hour or two for fueling before main stage ignition. 
   Far better as a weapon is a solid fueled missile.  The earliest solid fuel was plain old black gunpowder, and 4th of July skyrockets still use gunpowder.  Far better solid fuels can be made but the chemistry is complicated.  Modern solid fuel has a lot of plastic explosive in it, usually some powdered aluminum for extra hot burning, and a lot of magic chemicals to slow the burn rate down so it doesn't just explode and blow the missile to bits.  Just what the magic chemicals are is secret, and tricky.  We didn't get it figured out until the first submarine launched Polaris missiles in the 1960's.  It will take the NORKs a while to come up to speed on making solid fuel missiles. 
   With solid fuel missiles, you can launch within a minute or two after the red phone rings with a launch order.  Which makes a much more reliable weapon than liquid fuel missiles. 

Patch for the Wanna Cry virus on Windows XP

You can find it by googling for Wanna Cry patch on Windows XP.  And you can download the patch using any browser, you don't have to use Internet Exploder.  The patch file has the longest filename I ever saw, just to make things hard for us users.  Thanks M$.  windowsxp-kb4012598-x86-custom-enu_eceb7d5023bbb23c0dc633e469c2f14fa6ee9dd.exe.   Don't try to google for that, it's too long to type correctly.  Google for "Wanna Cry patch windows XP".   
   M$ decided that Wanna Cry was so bad that they released a patch for XP, which they have declared obsolete, dead as a doornail, and windows update no longer works on XP.   Too bad.  Of the various flavors of windows, XP is the fastest, the smallest, and can do everything the newer flavors of Windows can do, and do it faster.   A lot of us still run XP, cause the newer and fatter versions won't run on our elder but still very capable computers. 
   If you are running one of the newer, slower, and fatter versions there are special versions of the patch for use on them.  M$ brags that windows update will have automatically patched the newer versions.  You can believe as much of that as you want to. 
   Now, to see if the patch actually works.  It doesn't seem to a broken anything.  Only time will tell if it stops the Wanna Cry virus. 
   The Wall St Journal says law enforcement world wide is looking for the Wanna Cry perps.  If the cops catch them, I can think of some cruel and unusual punishments that would fit the crime. 
      

Does your Windows machine run slow?

Not that any flavor of Windows is speedy, but if you notice your machine running slower than usual, it might be the wuauclt bug in Windows.  How to tell?
   Run task manager and look at the processes.  If you see process SVChost.exe using 99% of your CPU time, you have the problem.  You are looking at service wuauclt.exe locked up in a loop.  Microsoft does something unneeded and unusual here, they run one program (wuauclt) but make task manager display the name svchost, rather than the program's true name of wuauclt.  This is pure obstructionism on Micro$oft's part.
   You can regain control of your machine by using task manager to kill process svchost.exe.  You can ignore the scary warning task manager displays when you do.  Nothing bad will happen.  Go ahead and kill it.
    Various internet postings tell me that wuauclt is part of windows update.  Windows update is supposed to go thru the list of patches for various things, and sort thru the patches that are new, and the patches that have been already applied, and just apply the new patches.  M$ programmers bungled this bit of code, and as the patch lists get longer and longer, wuauclt gets into a loop and hogs 100% CPU time for as long as a hour.
   If like me, you are running trusty old XP,  you might as well turn windows update off, M$ isn't issuing patches for XP anymore.  You can do this  with services.msc, which you can start from the run box.  Find "automatic updates".  Stop it.  Then click properties and set the startup mode to disabled.
   According to a couple of internet postings, the wuauclt runaway is caused by or aggravated by  missing patches in Internet Exploder.  There are multiple versions of IE out in the wild, V6, V7, and V8.  You ought to update to at least V8.  And then run  Windows Update (if functional)  from within IE to apply all the outstanding IE patches.   I did that, haven't run long enough to say if it works.  But it's a good thing to do in any case.  Better is to use another browser, any other browser is faster and safer than IE.  I only keep IE on my machine to run Windows Update, I do all my web cruising with Firefox.
   Good luck.   

Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2

I went to see it at Littleton's Jax Jr. yesterday afternoon.  It wasn't as good as the first one.  Huge amount of special effects/CGI.  We had explosions, fires, spaceship chases, gun fights, sword fights, fist fights, and weird monsters with lots of tentacles.  We have the original cast, with the exception of Groot.  Groot was in the movie, but he is now only 12 inches tall, as compared with the 10 foot tall tree person in the first movie. Lotta sight gags, lotta lines making fun of other Hollywood movies.
   If the movie had a plot, I never caught on to it.  If it had a protagonist I would vote for Rocket Racoon who had most of the best lines.  Peter what's-his-face  and his green skinned girl friend were present for duty, but didn't do much.  We had a new villain, who called himself Peter's father,  who tries to bend Peter to the dark side, which results in a lot of hand to hand fighting. 
   All in all, a less than distinguished movie.