One of the saddest days in WWII.

 France, a great power, at least before June of 1940, owned a powerful navy.  Not quite as big as the Royal Navy, but far bigger than anything Hitler had at his disposal.   With the French fleet under his control, Operation Sea Lion might have worked.  The Germans possessed a very small fleet, and the British had been making it smaller.  They sank the Graf Spee and at Narvik HMS Warspite had steamed up a fiord, cornered and sunk most of the Germany destroyer fleet.  In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy had better than 100 destroyers, backed up by thirty odd cruisers and half a dozen battleships.

The Germans had practically nothing.  The Royal Navy would have had no trouble sinking anything the Germans had in mid Channel.

On the other hand, if Hitler had laid his hands on the French fleet, he would have had a chance.  The bulk of the French fleet was at Oran in North Africa.  The British send a large fleet to Oran and told the French Admiral Gensoul in command that he had three choices, sail his fleet to British ports, sail to the French West Indies (Martinique) or sail to the United States.  Otherwise be sunk right there at Oran.   The French tried to stall for time.  The British were in no mood to put up with that, they opened fire and sank the entire French fleet right then and there.  You would have thought that after 1000 years of dealing with the British, the French would have understood what they could and could not get away with.  Apparently not.  Needless to say, this ruined Anglo French relations for the rest of WWII, but it did keep the French fleet out of German hands. 

They stopped the world...

 But they won't let me get off.  It must be that nothing is happening, anywhere in the world, except the debate last Thursday and Trump's Corona virus case announced in the early AM Friday.  The TV news and the internet has talked about nothing else. Must mean they stopped everything else, all over the world.  

Or, it means that the newsies prefer writing up opinion pieces and op eds and prognostications which they can do sitting in their offices.  Getting out of the office, talking to people, finding some real stories and writing them up falls into the  newsies's "too hard" basket. 

Best Wishes to Donald and Melania

 I hope Donald and Melania Trump will shake off and survive their Corona virus infection. I wish both of them all the good luck in the world.

Fixing Twitter

 When I tried to log into the twitter web site (www.twitter.com) I was drawing an obscure error message that suggested that the twitter site was down or the internet was broken.  I am using Firefox and the problem is at least partly a Firefox problem.  To fix twitter, get into the Firefox “options” window.  Click on “Tools” on the main Firefox taskbar.  Options is under Tools.  Click on options.  Use the search feature and search for “cache”.  This will find a place/feature/what-do-you-callit named Cookies and Site Data.  And it offers Choices to clear data, manage data, and manage exceptions.  Select manage data.  This will show a list of all the websites that have stored data on your hard drive.  Firefox permits websites to stash megabytes of who knows what.  You need to find twitter and delete all of the twitter data.  I could not find twitter on my first shot so I just started deleting data from every website that seemed worthless to me.  For instance the New York Times had stashed better than a megabyte of stuff.  After some weeding, twitter turned up.  I deleted all the twitter data and bingo, twitter.com worked, I could log in and everything. 

Beaker folk get promoted to Britons

 The Beaker folk have been known to archeology for a long time, 60 years that I know of, and probably longer.  They are known in Britain by the drinking mugs, beakers, in their graves.  These are handsome handleless, pottery mugs, good for 12-14 ounces of beer (modern measure), quite distinctive.  They used to think that the beaker folk were traders, who came to Britain, trading bronze to neolithic natives who were still using flint.  

   The DNA people got to work recently analyzing beaker folk DNA and have declared that all modern Britons are descended from the beaker folk.  The earlier neolithic people who had raised Stonehenge were wiped out by the beaker invaders.  This raises the beaker folk from mere bronze traders to ancestors of all of Britain.  The U-Tube videos putting forth this quite new interpretation are non technical and do not give any of the observations supporting this heady conclusion, but I have not seen any postings of contrary conclusions so they probably have it right. 

What might Amy Coney Barrett do to Obamacare?

 I hear a lot of whining from Democrats about Judge Barrett and Obamacare.  To hear the Democrats tell the story, she will do something (unspecified but awful) to destroy Obamacare.  This should NOT be a judicial issue.  Obamacare, like medicare and medicaid and social security and a lot of other stuff should be acts of Congress, passed by both houses and signed by the President.  If the court rules Obamacare unconstitutional, Congress can fix the law, or do a constitutional amendment to make it constitutional.  But it is up to Congress to pass something, it is not up the the courts.  

   America is a democracy, which means laws are supposed to be made by an elected legislature, whose members have to stand for reelection every few years.  Not by appointed judges with lifetime tenure.  

   Unfortunately pressure groups have been able to talk US courts into approving new laws that would never pass a legislature, and now they expect to be able to repeat that process to pass their next piece of new law.  It is easier to convince 5 Supremes to rule their way on something than to convince 200 odd US representatives to all vote their way.  Judge Barrett says she is against legislating from the bench.  Her judicial rulings bear this out.  And she looks like an honest person whose word is good. 

Everyone ought to go and vote

 It would be good for America if this election was won, decisively by someone.  If we have another one of those cliff hangers, with recounts, never ending court fights over who won, impeachments, and obstructionism. Nothing will get done about getting the economy working again, fixing Corona virus, dealing with the Mid East, China, Russia and all our other foreign policy hot spots.  So everyone ought to get down to the polls on November 3 and vote.  You can save the country a lot of grief if you do.