Conquer the World with Soft Power

We  used to be good at that.  American soft power crumbled the fearsome Soviet Union.  We never had to use our substantial hard power against the Soviets,  in general a good thing.  Instead Hollywood movies, blue jeans, hot rods and drag racing, rock and roll, major league baseball, a booming economy where the streets were paved with gold, Voice of America and the BBC, and democracy, convinced the average Russian-in-the-street that America was way cooler than Russia.   This finally lead to the overthrow of the Soviet government in the late 1980's.  The Russian people, who had stood shoulder to shoulder against the Nazis under Stalin, just lost faith in Communism and wanted a government and economy like the Americans enjoyed. 
  Now we have Islamic terrorism to confront.  If soft power worked against the Soviets, a very tough opponent, it ought to work against the Islamics.  Some of the soft power that stood us in such good stead in the 50's and 60's is looking dated now.  Hollywood has almost forgotten how to make a good flick.  Detroit is bankrupt and the Detroit auto industry is building boring little econoboxes rather than 409 Impalas and GTO's. Pop music lacks any one of the stature of Elvis or the Beatles, short wave radio is mostly gone, replaced by the Internet. 
   We do have some soft power stuff going for us.  Apple and Iphones, Facebook and Google.  The world still sees our streets as paved with gold, that's why so many of them want to move to the US.  But the Islamic terrorists put up a show so strong as to recruit lone wolf terrorists with just Internet contact.  We need to do something about that.  Some movies making fun of them, or some horror flicks starring Islamic crazies in place of the usual monsters.  We could get pop music back on track by returning control of the industry to real music people, like it was in the 1950's, rather the the current crop of clueless suits who persist in featuring wimpy boy bands.   To replace VOA and BBC we could build up a respected international web site centered on real news (if there is  a journalist left alive who could run such a site).  Jim Lehrer hasn't been on air for quite a few years. 

DACA, Lotta talk, few specifics.

   I have a lot of sympathy for people brought into America as children and who have grown up in America.  Far as  I am concerned, we ought to treat them as if they were born in the US.  Make 'em citizens.
   For all the talk from the newsies about DACA, we have few details.   Such as cutoff age for membership.   Clearly children brought into the country at age 6 and under ought to count.  Maybe age 12 and under.  Age 21 and over, clearly should not count, we reckon 21 to be the age of majority.  What about teenagers between 12 and 21?   For all the newsie babbling on the tube, you would think someone would have mentioned an age limit by now.
   Detail.  Is anything else required to gain the privileges of DACA status?  Graduation from an American high school?  Graduation from college?  Good behavior, such as a clean criminal record?  Or perhaps just no felony convictions?   Reasonable English language skills?  Holding a real job in the private sector?  Marriage?  children? 
  Detail.  Just what benefits come from DACA status?  Immediate US citizenship?  a green card?  some kind of path to citizenship?  Eligible to vote?  US driver's licenses?  Permission to stay in the US for say five years?  Or ten years? Or for life?  I have not heard a word about this detail from the  newsies either.
   Detail.  Do we offer DACA status to children arriving in the future? 
   I think we citizens deserve these details.  Clearly the newsies and the Democrats don't think so.
   Bottom line, our country needs more good decent citizens.    We ought to work to keep the DACA cases of good decent people as citizens and throw the book at gang members, drug runners, bus hijackers,  San Francisco shooters, and Islamist terrorists. 

Windows 10 explorer

Window Explorer, not to be confused with Internet Exploder,  used to offer us users a view of the files we had on the hard drive, actually on all the drives, hard, floppy, CD, or thumb.  Now that we are upgraded to Windows 10, we find that Explorer doesn't work right.  The Win 10 version of Explorer shows four copies of all my files.  I keep my files in "My Documents" the traditional Windows location.  Only in Win 10,  Explorer show four versions of "My Documents" one of which just gives error messages when clicked on.  Which one is the real one? Why display the same thing four different times?   Is this to add confusion to us users? 
   And, Windows Explorer has forgotten alphabetical ordering.  Click on your desktop and ask it to sort your icons into alphabetical order.   The icons swirl around, but they do not wind up in alphabetical order. 
   Micro$oft strikes again. 

I wonder how that happens? The midnight pageview spike.

I get a few statistics from Blogger every day.  One them is "page views"  In fact I get a line graph of page views over time.  The funny part is the timing.  Every day, around midnight, I get a burst of 100 page views all packed into a very short time, like less than an hour.  Makes the graph look like a sea of low level grass with a whacking big spike of 100 page views sticking up once a day at midnight.  Why are they all packed in at midnight?  Surely normal people are in bed by midnight?  Is it robo webcrawlers all doing their crawling when the web isn't so busy?  Is it a bug in the Blogger software?  Something else?
   Inquiring minds want to know. 
   Also, how come I get so many page views from Italy?  Like more pageviews from Italy than from the entire US of A.  I don't post in Italian. 

Duck and Cover !!!

Damn.  That false alarm must have scared Hawaiians out of their socks.  As well it should.  If they sprang that up here in NH, I dunno what I would do.  I suppose just get down in my basement, which is masonry (cinder block not poured concrete which is far stronger)  If I survived the initial blast, I have no idea what I would do for food or fuel or electricity after the bomb.  
   And, we need to get serious about Little Rocket Man and his ICBMs.

Dunkirk 2017

It came by Netflix, and I watched it on my Sony flatscreen last night.  Lots of dramatic shots of British soldiers in deep doo-doo, bombs falling, tide going out, few to no boats in sight, struggling in the water. Many pitiful scenes of British soldiers standing in line on the sand, (queuing up the British say) waiting for a vessel to take them home. One group takes a stranded fishing trawler out into the Channel.  They spend most of their time below decks shouting at each other.  I kept wondering why they stayed below, rather than out on deck where they could see where they were going and who was coming after them.  Lots of shots of RAF fighters going out at low level.  RAF pilots looking and sounding cool as cucumbers under fire.
   Although the camera man did things right,  turning on the lights before filming, the sound man bungled badly.  He never muted the score and the sound effects when characters were speaking.  That, combined with modern actor's tendency to mumble their lines, caused a good deal of the dialog get lost.   Fortunately there wasn't much dialog.  I never caught the stage names of any of the characters, mostly because nobody ever addressed any one else by name.  And with the exception of the two teen aged boys aboard the old codger's yacht,  nobody had any connections with friends, family, sweethearts, warbuddies, any other human being.  There was no protagonist for us audience to rally behind and root for. 
    The movie never told us that we were watching a turning point in WWII.  Hitler could have won the war that day.  If der fuhrer had stayed off the telephone and let his best tank general, Heinz Guderian, commander on the scene, do what he wanted to do, the British army (every soldier Britain had) would have been surrounded and taken prisoner of war.  Instead, Hitler feared that Guderian's panzers were too far out in front, they might be counter attacked. He ordered Guderian to stop and wait for the bulk of the German infantry, marching on foot,  to catch up with him.  This delay gave the British time to evacuate.  This fact comes right out of Guderian's after-the-war memoir. 
   Britain nearly gave up the fight that summer.  They had been driven out of Norway, driven out of the Low Countries, driven out of France.  They had sacked their prime minister and installed Winston Churchill that very week.  The entire British establishment, members of parliament, the press, academia, the churches, business men, the entertainment business (we call ours Hollywood, dunno what the Brits called theirs) were against fighting the war.  Many of them had fought in the First World War, and they were not going to do that sort of thing, ever again.  And Germany had more people, more industry, more advanced science, and looked invincible. 
   Hitler was offering the Brits a deal, You Brits let me keep all of continental Europe, and I Hitler will let you keep your overseas empire and your Navy.  A lot of Brits were ready to take this deal.  Not Churchill.  Newly installed as prime minister, Churchill had to rally his country.  The British rank and file were more tough minded than their establishment.  The rank and file didn't want to kowtow to the Nazis, and were willing to fight.  They figured they had whipped the Germans twenty years ago and they could do it again. But in June of 1940 everything was in flux.  If the Germans had taken the BEF prisoners of war that would have been a tremendous downer to all of England.  As it turned out, the Brits got nearly every man, 350,000 or so, off the Dunkirk beaches and safely home.  That did a lot to steady things down and build support for Churchill.  
   If the evacuation had failed, Churchill might have been turned out of office (he had a lot of old enemies going back forty years) and Britain might have signed a deal with Hitler.  Which would have made launching the D-Day invasion from Britain impossible, and deprived USAF of bases from which to bomb Germany. 

Don't talk to cops, they are out to getcha

Advice to President Trump.  Special Council Mueller is out to get you.  He will take anything you say to him and twist it to make you look bad.  Your best bet is not to say anything to him.   I'm sure all your lawyers are telling you this already.  If Mueller wants a private interview with you, tell him to get a  subpoena from a real court.  Not that rubber stamp FISA "court".  If you have things you want to "get on the public record"  tweet them.  Tweets go right out, the way you want them to.  Anything you say to Mueller will get twisted before it becomes public.