12 Strong 2018

Netflix brought this to me yesterday.   It's a war movie, about a 12 man Special Forces team send to Afghanstan in the very early days after 9-11.  They served as forward observers and brought in smart bomb air strikes that enabled the Northern Alliance to overcome the Taliban in a matter of weeks, after years of loosing to the Taliban.  It's not bad, but not compelling.  I didn't watch it to the end. 
   A lot of internet critics slammed it for political incorrectness, they wanted a movie to trash the US intervention in Afghanistan.  This one portrays the American effort as good, and the special forces guys as heroes.  Which is fine by me.  Lots of action, explosions, fighting, not much dying.  They hired the blackout camera man from Game of Thrones.  He turned the lights out on the sets while filming, yielding the annoying but trendy black on black scenes where you cannot see anything. 
   Acting was only fair.  Despite some name brand actors (Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon) the actors failed to really engage us audience folk.  No really snappy lines of dialog, little background of friends, family, lovers, children.  No good jokes.  I couldn't related to any of the characters very well. 
   Overall a C movie. 

Has anyone seen any Russian hacks on Facebook or Twitter?

For all the talk about Russians and Trump in 2016, I have not seen any examples of things the Russians did, posted, tweeted, or commented upon.  So what did those alleged Russians do?  Can I see it anywhere?  For all the sound and fury, you would think there would be something that shows on the internet somewhere. 

Drug pushing robo callers

Lately I have been getting them.  There is the caller who tells me my shipment of pain killing drugs is ready for pickup.  And the caller who asks if I am over 65 and suffering from arthritis pain. And the caller who offers me any kind of prescription pain killer under the sun, just come down to our friendly pain management clinic.
   I wonder how much of the opioid crisis in New Hampshire is caused by telephone pushers of drugs.
   I don't have caller ID on my land line phone, and the robo callers don't answer my questions about who they are and what their phone number is, so I don't really have anything worth reporting to law enforcement.  

The Great Rift, by Michael E Hobart, Science vs Religion

Book review in Thursday's Wall St Journal.  Interesting writeup.  On the other hand, is the science vs religion topic truly relevant today?   Far back, in ancient times, before the invention of science, religion explained all things as God's will, the weather, disasters like volcano's, earthquakes, and  hurricanes, creation of the world and all that is in it.  Science, newly invented in the Middle Ages,  offered the Copernicus  heliocentric theory sometime in the 16th century.  That was the first  serious head-to-head set to, the Church espoused the older earth centered Ptolemaic system, for reasons that I no longer remember. They made life hot for Copernicus and then they laid onto Galileo even harder.   Darwin in the 19th century caused an even bigger fuss, a lot of people liked the creation story given in Genesis a lot better than they liked evolution and the idea that man was descended from apes. 
   But today, surely this is no longer a real issue.  I know the creation story in Genesis, I even read it aloud to my children.  I also know the creation story from astronomy, cosmology, geology, and evolution.  When I think about it, I realize that the two stories are incompatible with each other.  But,  that's OK by me,  I know and understand both stories (all except Guth's idea of inflation) , my head is big enough to hold them both and  let them be. I have no plans to resolve the issues, I know plenty of better men than I have tried and short of becoming an atheist, unattractive at my age,  there is no resolution.  The incompatibilities just don't bother me that much, I know they are there, I know they will be there for a long long time, and I know there is little I can do about it.  So I don't worry about it.
   
        

Strzok Hearing. Shouting match.

Peter Strzok  is the very senior FBI agent who ran the Russian Collusion hearings and the FISA court warrants to investigate members of the Donald Trump campaign and was on the Muller investigation team.  He was having an affair with Lisa Paige, an FBI legal type, and they exchanged some text messages indicating a super high degree of hatred for Trump, and a desire to tip the election to Hillary.
  Congress has been grilling Agent Strzok on live TV all day.  I would have liked to hear about  what evidence Strzok showed the FISA court to get warrants to surveil Trump campaign workers, what evidence they turned up about Russian collusion, both of which Strzok knows a lot about.  They never did get down to that.  Strzok kept refusing to answer questions claiming the the FBI didn't want him to testify.  Congress should have said, "Answer or you are in contempt of Congress, which is 6 months in slam for each question you refuse to answer."  CongressCritters don''t have that kind of stones any more.  The Democrats spent all their floor time trashing the Trump administration rather than boring in on the Muller investigation and Strzok's part in it.  Lot of shouting, lot of points of order, little real info.  They are still at it as I write this. 

How combat ready is NATO?

I read a couple of web postings saying that the German Air Force only has ten jet fighters operationally ready.  The rest, hundreds of expensive warplanes, are down for maintenance.  With only ten flyable fighters,  German pilots won't be getting enough flight time to stay proficient.  
   That is a ridiculous figure.  When I was squadron level maintenance officer in USAF, we were required to show 70% of out fighters in commission and ready to fly every day.  Our squadrons were 18 aircraft in those days, and 70% came out to 11 aircraft.  And we made that 70% OR rate every day.  In short, a USAF squadron had more OR fighters than the entire Luftwaffe.
  The Germans claim to be spending something like $60 billion on defense, 1.2% of GNP.  Which ain't enough if it leaves nearly all of their fighter planes grounded for maintenance.  
   I think Trump is right to yell at them for not paying enough for defense.  The Russians still have a large army, they have grabbed off big slices of Georgia and Ukraine, and Putin is talking about grabbing more.  Not the right time to have most of your air force grounded for maintenance. 

Captain America, Civil War, 2016, I caught it on the tube last night

It was long.  Ran three hours what with the usual heavy load of commercials.  The camera man turned on the lights of the set BEFORE filming.  Give him points for that.  None of those black on black scenes that Game of Thrones likes so much, and I find totally annoying.  Give them credit for doing a good job rather than being arty.  The sound man was barely adequate, I had to turn up the volume, and boost the treble before I could catch all the dialog.  I had no trouble hearing all the dialog in the commercials, which means the sound man could do a lot better.  
   The movie has Captain Steve (America) Rodgers, Iron Man/ Tony Stark, a new young actor playing Peter Parker/Spiderman.  The Spiderman costume totally covers the face, and so even as Spiderman gets a good share of screentime, it's hard to relate to a superhero with out a face.  And a lot of Marvel Comics characters that are new to me.  I stopped reading comic books a long long time ago so I am not up to date on Marvel Comics Universe. Since nobody ever addresses anybody by name on screen, it is tough to figure out who is who. 
   There was a lot of hand to hand combat, jumping out of tenth story windows and bouncing when hitting the ground, and fantastic but fun to watch moves with that shield.  There wasn't much of a plot, or at least I never did catch on to what Captain America was trying to do to save the world this time.  They split the Avengers into two warring factions which resulted in a lot of hand to hand fist fighting between Steve Rogers and Ironman.  Somehow, no matter how hard Steve Rogers hit, Ironman's iron suit soaked up the blows.  Funny about that
  It was fun to watch, I stayed awake to the bitter end at 11PM.  Far past my usual bedtime.