It ought to take a solid majority to pass a law.

 A law that does not command a majority of the country, and the Congress, is probably a bad law and we should not pass it.  The Senate requirement for a 60 vote majority to pass most laws is a good idea.  It will prevent a lot of bad laws from getting passed. 

   For instance, most voters in all states like the idea of voter ID, with a picture ID.  Voter ID laws make it harder for out of state shills bussed in just for the election to effect the out come.  The Democrats are trying to override state laws requiring a picture ID with a federal law outlawing voter ID and they want to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate to allow them to pass this controversial and bad law with just 50 senators and the vice president’s vote.  Bad idea in my book. 

Remember the blizzard of '78

The TV is showing a spot of trouble down in Virginia today.  Snowed on I95 and traffic got stuck.  One trucker was saying he was stuck for 5 hours, someone else claimed to be stuck for 14 hours.  But, eventually traffic started to move, and the cars and their passengers made it out.

   The newsies don’t seem to remember the blizzard of ’78 up here in Boston.  It started to snow, and kept on snowing for three days.  Rte 128 has a few modest grades, and they got too slippery for the trucks to get up.  Traffic stopped moving and the snow kept falling.  It got so bad that everybody abandoned their cars on 128 and walked out in the snow storm.  That left 10 miles of 128, solid with abandoned cars with snow up to the roofs.  Only the radio antennas showed.  Best the public works people could do was start at both ends with tow trucks, and tow the cars out, one by one.  It took ‘em a week to get 128 back to being a road. 

We need a better battery.

   Title of a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal Friday.  People have been saying this ever since Alexander Volta demonstrated the first battery back in 1799 (Ben Franklin’s time) Volta’s battery had electrodes of copper and zinc and used salt water as the electrolyte.  It wasn’t very powerful and I don’t remember ever reading about things being powered by Volta’s battery.  It was a piece of laboratory apparatus used to demonstrate “current electricity” as opposed to static electricity which involved rubbing dry things together, creating hundreds of volts and virtually no current flow.  Volta’s battery would make a frog’s leg twitch, but I never heard of it doing any else. 

   Since Volta’s time, invertors have created the lead acid battery (used to start cars), the carbon zinc dry cell (used in flashlights) the alkaline battery (a better flashlight battery), the nickel cadmium battery, the silver zinc battery (only ever used in the F106 fighter plane due to outrageous cost) and finally today’s lithium batteries used in battery cars.  And there was an Edison battery whose chemistry escapes me now.  The letter’s author, an MIT professor who ought to know better, called for yet better batteries. 

   We have been hearing this complaint about batteries for better than 200 years.  

Advanced Technology at work

 It has been snowing lightly all day.  Put down about an inch, enough to make driving tricky.  Clever little weather routine down on my task bar of my Windows 10 machine says  "Cloudy". Well it is cloudy, but the snow is of greater interest to drivers and skiers. Didn't say squat about the snow.

Afghanistan

We have been in Afghanistan, in strength, since 9-11.  That’s 20 years ago.  In that time we should have reformed the madrassahs into schools teaching the three R’s, rather than Jihad.  We should have done land reform, so that the peasants, who worked the land, owned the land.  This would have required dispossessing a lot of land lords, who would have bitched to high heaven, but so what?  We should have insisted on fair elections in each district of Afghanistan to select representatives to an Afghan central government.  We should have insisted that as a first act, the new central government approve a national constitution that we wrote with a lot of help from serious Afghans. 

   I am not sure just what we actually did in the last 20 years in Afghanistan.  Our noble MSM didn’t tell us much.  Apparently we left a lot of Taliban sympathizers alive and in business.  Enough Talibansters to lead to the shameful bugout from Afghanistan back in August. 

 

Recovering from the US Civil War.

 There was plenty of bad feeling to go around in 1865.  Sherman had inflicted lots of pain in Georgia.  John Wilkes Booth had assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  Plenty of white southerners who had enjoyed being superior at law to black slaves were disappointed.  The subdued southern states were occupied by the US Army. The massive casualties of the war, 600,000 men, inflicted great pain on many many American families. 

   But, the Civil War had abolished slavery.  The southern states attempt to pull out of the Union and set up their own country was defeated.  These things stuck. 

   The part that is not told by the history books I have read, and I have read quite a few, is how all the bad feelings were, if not defeated, at least reduced a lot.  By World War I times, say fifty years after the end of the Civil War,  the old south had been converted into as loyal and patriotic part of the United States as any other part, and in fact more loyal and patriotic than many other parts. 

   It is difficult to imagine the course of world history if the Confederacy had survived or reappeared and made good its departure from the Union.  Certainly all the bad feelings from 1865 would have contributed mightily to such an outcome.  The Cold War with the Soviets would be all sorts of difficult for Washington DC had it been required to deal with a not very friendly Confederacy whose territory started at the city limits of DC. 

Stalingrad WWII 1943

The decisive battle between Germany and Russia.  The Russians took horrendous losses but won the battle.  And went on to win all the future battles with the Germans.  Turning point in WWII.  Stalingrad was a medium duty Russia city on the Volga River.  Not the size or importance of Moscow or Leningrad, but a serious city with some serious industry.  Paulus, the German commander completely blew it.  To take a city or a castle you have to encircle it, cut it off from supplies and reinforcements and starve it out.  Paulus didn’t bother, he didn’t cross the Volga river to get on the far side of Stalingrad and surround it.  He called on the Luftwaffe and artillery to blow the place up and ordered his infantry to assault it.  The Russians dug in and shot down the attacking Germans in droves.   
   Georgy Zukov, Stalin’s top general, the man who had clobbered the Japanese in 1939, talked Stalin into fixing the Germans at Stalingrad.  The local commander was told to hang on, help was coming.  Two huge Russian armies of 250,000 men each were launched against the German supply lines and cut them.  Suddenly Paulus found himself cut off in Stalingrad with no rations or ammunition.  The German’s “fireman” Walter Model organized a rescue mission.  Paulus should have ordered all his troops to pull out of Stalingrad and head for a roundez vous with Model.  Paulus failed to do so, partly because Hitler was against the idea, and partly thru who knows what personal failings.   
    The Russians captured or killed all of Paulus’s 250,000 men.  The German army never recovered from this terrible loss.