We need to get the country back to work.

We need to get the country back to work.  Every day we all consume food, fuel, clothing, shelter and any one of a zillion different necessities of life.  We are running out of stuff.  We have to get back to work and grow, manufacture, mine, frack, transport raw materials to factories, and transport finished goods to stores.  The whole country has been out of work for eight weeks now.  We are running out of stuff.  You can see it when you go grocery shopping.  Empty shelves, missing product, lack of toilet paper, paper towels, whole milk, beef, pork, and chicken at the butcher’s counter. 

   And most of us need our paychecks.  And business needs workers.  The governor allowed hair salons and barber shops to open this week in New Hampshire.  I made an appointment with Mane St Styles to get my hair cut.   The proprietor greeted me at the door, gave me a new mask to replace the daughter-in-law made one I was wearing, took my temperature with one of those high tech IR gadgets, and greeted me warmly.  All the staff were overjoyed to back to work.  And it did feel good to get my hair off my neck after two months.

   Naturally as soon as we do get back to work, people are going to catch COVID-19.  Staying at home we are fairly safe.  Getting out into the world exposes us to the virus and some of us will catch it.  Some of us will die from it.  And the medics and the media will cry that we are killing people.  Until we have a vaccine, and that is a year away according to the TV, there is some risk involved.  But that risk is the same tomorrow, next week, next month, until we have a vaccine.  Can we keep the country shut down for a year waiting on a vaccine?  I don’t think so.  I am in the high risk group.  But I will risk it just to eat at a restaurant.  I am tired of eating my own cooking.

   And, to get the country back to work we need to protect our businesses from COVID-19 lawsuits.  We cannot allow lawyers to sue every business in sight every time someone comes down with COVID-19.  People come down with COVID-19 because the Chinese released the virus into the world.  If we give the lawyers their head, they will sue all our small businesses clean out of business.  Small businesses don’t have lawyers on staff, they cannot afford lawyers, and just the threat of unending lawsuits will kill them all. 

   By all accounts if you are under 50 and in decent health, your odds are pretty good; say 0.1% chance of dying.  If you are over 70 (like me) and your health is not so good, your odds are a lot worse, say 10% chance of dying.  We should let people make their own choices; we should not force people in fear of their lives to go back to work.  Likewise we should not prevent people who want to get back to work from doing so.  

Canned Catfood. Pate vs Shreds & Glop

I prefer pate. It is less messy to handle.  Cat prefers shreds & glop.  How can I tell?  She doesn't eat much pate, but she will have all the shreds and glop eaten within the hour. 

Barrows

I was watching a U-tube lecture on European archeology.  They excavated a huge barrow in England.  Built back in prehistoric times, before writing, all we know about then comes from archeology.  It was a big structure, half underground, half above ground.  These things are often described as graves.  On this barrow, they excavated and found the bones of forty individuals.  Forty?  Not many for a barrow that big.  The place was big enough to hold a 1000 graves.  Especially when you think how difficult it must have been to build such a place in the stone age.  Few workers, a poor hunter gatherer economy, no metal tools, not even shovels.  It must have required powerful motivations to build those barrows.
   Barrows are traditional described as grave sites.  That U-Tube lecture makes me think that the barrows served other purposes. Tribal gathering places, sacred places where shamans asked the god for good weather, good hunting and good luck.  Places where seers predicted the future.  We cannot know at this remove in time.  I.m thinking those few graves were the graves of a few exceptional individuals, priests, kings, shamans, mighty warriors, buried in the barrow to bring good luck, bring a friendly spirit, and make a sacred place more sacred.  We still do this.  Look at Westminster where the British bury their kings and scientists and soldiers. 

Boeing's Number 1 Problem.

  Best selling 737 Max has been grounded for more than a year.  This is the brand new airliner that suffered two fatal crashes within a few months of each other.  The autopilot in both crashes failed, seized control of the plane and dove it into the ground, killing all on board.  After a year, the cause of the autopilot failure is known, fixes have been made, but the aircraft (and Boeing’s very survival) are still grounded.  The 737 MAX is Boeing’s bread and butter aircraft.  It’s the single aisle jetliner that does most of the flying. They were cranking out 57 a month ($100 mil apiece).  Production of all of Boeing’s other aircraft was only 20 per month. 

   FAA is still paralyzed with fear of another 737 MAX crash which would reflect badly upon them, and so they are slow walking all the paperwork.  The Corona virus epidemic has caused meetings to be replaced by teleconferences slowing matters still more.  Much more of this, and Boeing will have to declare bankruptcy. 

British history via U-tube.

  I watched a couple of decent, lengthy U-Tube presentations by “The Histocrat”.  The first one talks about humans moving into Britain a million years ago.  Over the last million years Britain has suffered several ice ages severe enough to drive all the humans out of Britain, and as many interglacial periods were the forests and the game and the humans came back.  With both the ice ages and the interglacials lasting 10,000 years or more.  Used to be, they only wrote about humans settling in Britain after the last ice age went out 10,000 years ago.  Apparently they have discovered a couple of sites in Britain that are much older since the last book I read was written.  They failed to describe just how these older sites were dated.  Carbon 14 dating only works back 30-40 thousand years.  A million years is too old for carbon 14 dating. 

   They did discuss the seas breaking thru the straits of Dover, creating the English Channel and cutting Britain off from the Continent.  And sinking Doggerland.  They were a little vague on just when this happened, and after it happened how did humans get across the Channel and onto English soil?  No discussion of when early humans, especially Heidelberg man and Neanderthal man might have developed boats.  It doesn’t take much of a boat; the Channel is only twenty miles wide and can be crossed in a birch bark canoe in good weather. 

   The second one, which started up automatically after the first one finished, picks up the story around 8000 BC with the Beaker Folk.  It claimed that DNA evidence shows a turnover in British population with the appearance of Beaker Folk graves.  They fail to describe how this DNA testing works and how many samples of DNA going back before 8000 BC they have.  Some discussion of introduction of copper and bronze into a flint using late Neolithic Britain.  The author clearly knows little about metal work, he describes bronze as “hard”.  It isn’t very hard.  Flint is much harder than bronze.  Bronze is tougher than flint; you can make a bronze sword that works.  You cannot make a flint sword; flint is brittle as glass and would break the first time you struck anything with it.  The author makes a big deal over copper versus bronze.  I don’t see that, bronze is a straight forward alloy of copper with 10% tin which gives a metal much tougher than plain copper.  But other than adding the tin, bronze works the same way as copper does.  You can cast it and sharpen it the same way as copper.  A copper smith doesn’t have to learn much to become a bronze smith.  The author discusses smelting copper from the ore (oxides or sulfides of copper).  Actually copper working got started with native copper.  There used to be nuggets of pure copper just lying around to be picked up.  They are mostly gone by now, but they were important back in the day.  The native copper can be hammered into shape, or melted and cast into shape, much simpler that figuring out how to smelt copper from ores.      

8 1/2 inches of fresh global warming in May

 8 1/2 inches of fresh global warming fell on my deck last night.  May is late in the season for snow like this.  It ought to push back leaf day if the trees have any common sense.

Cops and Courts should handle Campus Sexual Harrassment

Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary , has just released new federal guidance to the nation's colleges and universities.  Hence forth they have to allow accused students a little bit of due process before expelling them.  Good first step.  BUT...
Rape is a serious crime.  Used to be a death penalty offense.  We have backed off on the death penalty, but it is still a serious crime.  I don't like students getting judged by a bunch of college admins for serious offenses like rape.  That's what we have police and courts for.  And American courts are pretty good on due process, far more so than lefty college admins.  When someone complains to the college of campus rape or sexual harassment, the college should offer her (or him) a ride to the police station, and a ride back.