Middle school was getting bad back then

I wrote this for Youngest Son back when he was doing middle school some ten years ago.  I wonder if things in school are still this bad.


1.  Never say the word "gun" (or shoot or fire or kill or bang-bang or...) 
2.  Never take any thing that looks like, sounds like, or might be accused of being, a gun to school.    Same goes for any kind of knife, even a butter knife.  Don't bite your food into gun shapes.  Don't point a finger, or anything else at anyone.  No toy soldiers, no Lego guns, no books about guns or with illustrations of guns, or people carrying guns (cowboy stories, Johnnie Tremain, Last of the Mohigans, anything like that).
3.  Never say anything angry about anyone or anything.  If something or someone angers you don't say anything about it.  Hold it inside yourself until you get home.  Never threaten anything. 
4.  No touching, no hitting, no hugging. Keep your distance.
5.  They are always watching you and listening to you.  Especially on the bus, at recess and on the Internet.

Forget any of these rules and they will throw you out of school, for good.

School was easier to survive when I was a kid. 

The Battle of Britain

Decisive WWII action.  Had the British lost, Hitler would have invaded Britain and that would have changed everything, for the worse.  In the spring of 1940 Hitler looked invincible.  He had conquered and occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, France (a great power) and driven the British (the other great power) into the sea at Dunkirk.  Although the British had managed to rescue most of their soldiers, they abandoned all their tanks, trucks, artillery, tents, rations, and ammunition. Only a few troops retained their rifles.  Had Hitler been able to put a few divisions ashore in England in the summer of 1940, it would have been all over for the Brits.

   Only the Royal Navy stood in the way.  Had the Germans set out for England in their fleet of Rhine River barges, the Brits would have steamed up along side in destroyers and blown the Germans out of the water.  The Brits had better than 100 destroyers backed up by 30 odd cruisers and a dozen battleships. They had sunk Graf Spee and Bismarck.  The actions off Norway had wiped out most of the German destroyers.  Those river barges would have been on their own crossing the channel. 

   The German Luftwaffe might have been able to drive the Royal Navy away and safe guard the crossing.  For this to work, the Luftwaffe had to establish air superiority.  You cannot be attacking RN destroyers with Spitfires on your tail.  This means shooting down RAF fighters in the air and bombing RAF bases out of operation. 

   The Brits knew what was coming.  They had invented and installed the first modern air defense system.  We were still using the idea in USAF in the 1960s.  It consisted of ground radar, linked by telephone to “sector stations” which scrambled the fighters and gave them vectors and altitudes to fly for interception. 

Without the radar Luftwaffe strikes would have surprised the RAF on the ground unless the RAF flew reconnaissance sorties to spot the Germans at a distance.  The number of recon sorties would have huge.  A fighter unit can only put up so many sorties a day.  To waste all those sorties just flying around looking for the enemy would have meant the end for the British.  With the radar, the British fighters could stay on their fields, all fueled and armed, ready to scramble, and count on intercepting the Germans on pretty much every sortie.  No sorties wasted flying recon.

   Had the Germans figured things out, they could have bombed the radar stations.  There were easy to find, being right on the coast and having 300 foot high antennas marking their positions.  And they could have bombed out the sector stations by homing in on their radio transmissions.   But, the Germans never figured out what was going on and let the radars and the sector stations operate undisturbed.  They counted on shooting down the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the air, and bombing their fields.  This didn’t work out because the British planes and pilots were as good as the Luftwaffe planes and pilots, and the British cranked up their aircraft factories and were building more planes than the Germans were shooting down. 

  Why do we care?  England was a Great Power; she had 50 odd million population.  Not too shabby even compared to our 100 odd million back then. And England could count on solid support from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.  India put up many of the troops that beat Rommel in North Africa, and later beat the Japanese at Imphal and drove them out of Burma.  And, England was the base for the air war on Germany and for launching D-Day.  Many of the craft that landed in Normandy were open landing craft.  They could cross the Channel in good weather but they would never survive crossing the North Atlantic even in summer.  In short England was key strategic terrain.  Had the Germans taken it in 1940 it is difficult to imagine how we would ever have been able to beat Hitler.

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.