CHAZ out in Seattle

Had a phone conversation with eldest son, who lives out in Tacoma Washington, about the CHAZ situation.  He said the west coast TV isn't giving it all that much coverage and that nobody he knows thinks it is all that big a deal.  He figures it will blow over in a few more days.  He sees it as more street fair and long term demo than gang takeover of a Seattle neighborhood. 

  All I know is what I see on TV here on the east coast.  Eldest son is only 20 miles away, I am 3000 miles away.  His opinions are as good as mine. 

Confronting the Civil War.

  We fought it.  It was the worst war we ever fought.  Casualties in the Civil War were higher than casualties from all our other wars all put together.  It took the South 100 years to recover from the physical and psychic damage of the Civil War.  Down there, south of the Mason Dixon line, they still  called it the War of Northern Aggression when I was going to school.  It was fought for a noble cause, ending slavery.  It succeeded in that.  There were other reasons, but ending slavery, goal of the Abolitionists, was the real driver, without that cause, the North-South differences would not have come to war.  Civil War is a formative event in American history; you cannot understand how America got to where it is today without knowing about the Civil War. 

   It has been over for 150 years since Appomattox, but every single New England town still has a Civil War memorial on the town common listing the names of all the fallen.  If we northerners can do that, I think it is OK for southerners to put up statues to Civil War figures like Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. I do remember visiting the Texas capitol years ago and walking up to the building past a solid line of Confederate statues.  I think we ought to leave them in peace to remind future generations just what happened back in 1860.  I don’t like Nancy Pelosi’s call to remove Confederate statures from the US Capitol.  I think President Trump has it right saying that places like Fort Bragg have their own history and should be left alone.  Once a place gets a name it ought to stick. 

   Somehow we managed to patch over the wounds of the Civil War back in the 1800’s.  By WWI time the old South was as loyal a part of the country as any other.  Naming some US Army bases after Confederate officers had something to do with this.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Let’s leave it that way. 

So what do we do about "CHAZ" out in Seattle?

A what do we call them (a gang? terrorists? rebels?)  has taken over a dozen blocks in downtown Seattle and is thumbing its nose at Seattle city government and the state of Washington.  And they are shaking down businesses in the CHAZ  (acronym for the 12 block area) for protection money. The Seattle police have withdrawn or been driven out of the CHAZ area.  Neither the mayor of Seattle nor governor of Washington wants to tangle with the gang.  They fear attempts to drive them out by force, police or National Guard, could be bloody.  Which would make them look bad.  President Trump is on TV making noises about cleaning the place up using federal troops.  He hasn't actually moved any troops into place and he is probably hoping that some threats and some pressure will cause the CHAZ group to break up and disappear.  Like the mayor and the governor, Trump probably fears that moving in on the CHAZ could  lead to bloody street fighting, lots of people getting hurt, and generating endless unfavorable TV coverage.  Certainly all the TV people are anti Trump and would do their best to paint the whole scene in the mot unfavorable light possible.

  Stay tuned for film at 11.

Speech

When did our ancestors begin speaking?  Myself, I always think in words.  Thinking about how to fix this device, or where is the game lurking or how to exert leadership of a hunting band, or how to chip flint, or how do I fell this tree without dropping on top of my dwelling or how do I get across that river short of swimming it, all these things I think of in words.  Raw emotion, love, fear, hatred, awe, does not need words, but thoughts such as “why is this engine running rough” or “How do a fix this bug” I always do in words.  I assume most other people do too. 

    Thinking is our magic wand.  Looking at the fossil record we see brain size increasing as time goes on.  This was a successful evolutionary strategy that has made homo sapiens master of the planet.  Would increasing brain size do us any good without words to put our thoughts into?  I always think in words.  If I didn’t have words, I could not think.  Does this mean that our earliest ancestors could speak too?  Without speech would our larger brains do us any good? 

This is all pure speculation of course.  I am not aware of any evidence one way or the other.  And I cannot imagine finding speech in the fossil record. 

 

D-Day

D-day was an incredible Allied achievement that hastened victory over Nazi Germany.  American officers were unanimous in their belief that only a huge army, landed as close as possible to the German border, to drive on Berlin, and hang Hitler from a sour apple tree, would bring victory.  Americans, backed by a large and loyal population, endless fertile farmlands, plentiful natural resources, and the world’s largest industrial base, felt that this was possible,  If German resistance was stiffer than anticipated, it could be crushed by sending more troops and tanks and guns, of which America had a goodly supply. 

   The Brits, who put up many of the troops for D-day and much of the airpower and shipping and naval support, had been fighting Hitler for five long years.  They had learned, first hand and to their sorrow, how effective the German army was.  Norway, Dunkirk, Tobruk, and The Blitz were not happy memories for the Brits.  They counseled caution and thought the Americans were reckless in their outlook. 

   By 1944 the Allies had accomplished two major successes, both of which wee absolutely vital to the success of D-day.  First they had solved the U-boat problem.  In the “happy days” of 1941 and 1942, the U-boats were sinking hundreds of merchantmen every year.  But in the winter of 1943 the Allies got their act together and drove the U-boats out of the Atlantic.  They had allocated just a few B24 bombers, with extra fuel tanks in their bomb bays, to close the Atlantic air gap, the black pit the merchant seamen called it.  The B24’s could supply good air cover to convoys all the way across the Atlantic.  And all the destroyers had been equipped with good radar, Talk-Between-Ships (TBS) radio, and High Frequency Direction Finders (Huff-Duff) which gave a vector pointing right at any U-boat that used its radio.  And two years experience at sea had trained up the escort vessels to a high pitch of effectiveness.  A couple of vicious convoy battles in the winter of 1943 resulted in the Allies sinking more U-boats than the U-boats sank merchant vessels.  For the rest of the war U-boat sinkings remained heavy.   This victory allowed the Americans to build up a huge army on the British Isles.  Had the U-boats sunk half of this traffic on the way across, D-day would have been impossible. 

   The second victory was the extermination of the Luftwaffe.  This was done by the P-51 long range escort fighters that accompanied the bombers all the way to the target and shot down the Luftwaffe fighters that rose to attack the bombers.  There is a scene in “The Longest Day” where a Luftwaffe fighter pilot complains that his was the only sortie flown against the Normandy beaches.  Had the Luftwaffe been strong, the JU-88’s would have been dropping 500 pound bombs into the open landing craft as they approached the beaches, and on the Allied destroyers.  For larger naval targets the Luftwaffe had Fritz-X, an early model smart bomb that had put an American cruiser out of action at Salerno and sunk an Italian battleship in the Mediterranean.  But due to the RAF and USAF actions the Luftwaffe no longer had the planes, or the pilots, or the gasoline to oppose the D-day landings. 

 

Have we arrested any Antifa members? Yet?

The Administration was saying that Antifa was organizing and leading the riots.  Have we arrested any Antifa members connected with any of the riots?  Perhaps someone who attended Antifa meetings and paid Antifa dues?  I am perfectly happy to believe that all the rioting and property destruction is caused be some evil and secret organization.  But how about some proof, some evidence, some Antifa members arrested for doing bad somewhere.  Any one caught carrying an Antifa membership card?  Like the commies were thought to do back in the day? 

  I have no trouble believing that the riots started the old fashioned way.  A lot of people gather somewhere in town.  A bunch of our lawless citizens join the mob.  Shop windows get smashed, stores get looted, fires get set, stuff gets thrown at the cops.  No evil secret organization required. 

   The cops ought to move in and arrest everyone they can catch looting and burning.  And people arrested should be kept in custody until all the paperwork is completed.  That might take a week, or even longer, you know how it is with paperwork.

40 Million Out of work. Probably free to go to a riot.

This week’s riots were probably made worse by 40 million out of work people who need some entertainment after a couple of months on lockdown at home.  That 40 million is out of work because of state government orders closing down their employers. 

Many of our citizens are law abiding.  I don’t have any numbers, I hope that the law abiding are the majority.  A large number of citizens are lawless.  Again, I lack numbers but I sincerely hope we have more law abiding than lawless citizens.  The most lawless have close encounters of the cop kind and wind up in jail.  The medium lawless will take advantage of a riot to pick up a new TV or a new computer, but usually don’t engage in burglary and shop lifting for fear of getting caught.  Only the police and the courts keep the lawless citizens in check.  I am hearing calls from the left to abolish the police.  God help us if that ever happens.  The lawless will over run the country.  We need police and courts to keep the lawless in check.

   The police have a strong sense of comradeship.  They stick together.  It is extremely hard for a police department to lower the boom on misbehaving cops, because the department is made up of cops and all cops feel they need to protect and defend fellow cops from hostile citizens groups.  I’m thinking every department has a few, one or two, maybe more, bad cops who ought to be off the force.  But they don’t get the boot like they should because of the feelings of solidarity with everyone on the force.

  The only fix for this problem is an independent group of non-cops running an agency that finds bad cops and indicts them and pushes the paperwork thru to get them kicked off the force.  Maybe a federal agency like the anti-trust lawyers group at the Justice department. 

  Or we could use the Cambridge solution.  Cambridge MA, better than twenty years ago, had a very offensive Officer De Luca.  He patrolled the public housing projects in Cambridge and was a real pain in the ass to project residents.  One fine day Officer De Luca’s cruiser became stuck in Cambridge traffic.  Suddenly the doors of his cruiser were yanked open, Officer De Luca was pulled out of the cruiser, and the locals beat the stuffing out of him.  It was noticed that Officer De Luca’s behavior in the projects improved greatly after that.