Not sold in stores

 The TV runs ads for all sorts of pills and plasters.  They will make you sleep, cure bags under your eyes, fill you up with good freeze dried fruits and veggies, cure all sorts of things that I never heard of before.  If you believe the TV ads they can cure anything.   A lot of ads don’t bother to tell us just what the advertised drug is supposed to cure.

   None of these miracle products are sold in stores.  They are all mail order.  That makes me wonder if they really work.  You would think that if they worked they would be on the shelves of drug stores along with the aspirin and Tylenol and nose drops and what ever.   

How long does a recession last?

Depends who you ask.  Ask an economist and he will say the recession is over when GNP and/or the stock market stops going down.  This usually happens 18 months after the recession kicked off. 

   Ask a real person, and they will say the recession does not end until wages, prices, and jobs have recovered to where they were when the recession stuck.

   For instance the last recession, Great Depression 2.0, kicked off in the winter of 2008-2009 after a bunch of really stupid loansby big banks went bad.  Economists said it was over by 2010.   In many ways it is still with us, 13 years later.  Lesson: don’t trust what economists say, they lie a lot.

   It is business men that end recessions.  They work hard and do nearly anything to get their sales back up to where with used to be/ ought to be,

USS Constitution Gets a nice piece on Fox News.

   Fourth of July is when they do the “turn around” cruise.  Constitution gets towed out into Boston harbor and turned around so that the sun gets to dry out the other side of the ship.  This spreads the weathering by sunlight more evenly and presumably helps the ship to last longer.  Fox said some nice things about enemy cannon balls bouncing off her live oak sides, and her 35-0 record in single ship duels over her career. 

   Constitution was bigger, faster, and more heavily armed than Royal Navy frigates.  In those days the biggest warships, line of battle ships, or just “battle ships” had two gun decks and carried a lot of guns.  Nelson’s Victory had 100 guns.  Run of the mill line of battleships carried 74 guns. 

   Any large warship with just a single gun deck was called a frigate.  Constitution fit this definition; anyone could see thru a telescope that she only had one gun deck.  But Constitution carried 44 guns and they were big 24 pounders, battle ship guns.  The usual frigate was smaller and only carried 28 or 32 guns and the guns were 12 or 18 pounders.  In short Constitution had a lot more firepower, and was faster to boot, she could catch anything afloat and out run anything stronger than she was. 

  However Royal Navy captains felt honor bound to engage any American frigate even one much stronger than they were.  The Royal Navy had been very successful in single ship duels for years and years and her skippers in the war of 1812 figured that Royal Navy discipline and seamanship could beat anything.  Well not so much in the case of Constitution.  Her heavier gun battery blew down British masts and slaughtered British crews.  The American crew was all good men with a grudge against the British, usually connected to impressment. They fought with enthusiasm.

   Anyhow, after Constitution’s many victories; the British government was forced to issue orders to their frigate captains to avoid getting into fights with Constitution, or her sister ships, unless they outnumbered the American by three to one. 

  The Brits have a long memory.  In the 1930s the Germans launched Graf Spee, a very large ship armed with 11 inch guns.  By the standards of the day Graf Spee was a cruiser, heavy cruiser to be sure, but a cruiser.  But, the British called Graf Spee a “pocket battleship”, so that British cruiser captains did not feel honor bound to engage.  And this worked.  In 1939 Graf Spee was out in the oceans commerce raiding.  A squadron of three British cruisers, two 6 inch and one 8 inch, located her and engaged.  In the furious gun battle that ensued Graf Spee took enough damage that she took refuge in Montevideo harbor in Ecuador.  Ecuador was a neutral country, and the laws of war limited a hostile warship’s stay in a neutral harbor to a day or so.  So Graf Spee steamed out to meet the British cruisers again; only the German skipper scuttled rather than fighting.  He committed suicide after getting back to shore.  To the British, sinking the Graf Spee counted as sinking a battleship, and they made a big deal out of it.  Only for the memory of the damage “frigate” Constitution had done all those years ago did the Brits succeed in promoting Graf Spee from heavy cruiser to battleship.

Cadillac Lyriq. The new battery powered caddy.

   The reviewer is shown stroking the nicer trim bits in the cockpit, opening the rear hatch and the floor under the hatchback.  I could not see a spare tire down their and the reviewer didn’t mention anything about a spare, like did the car come with one?  It does come with a big black grille.  Not sure why a battery car needs a grille to let fresh air in to cool the radiator.  I don’t think battery cars have radiators.  This review failed to say what kind of range the car would get on a full charge.  Nor did it mention how long it might take to recharge a flat battery on the road.   This reviewer nattered on and on about lovely cockpit trim without ever mentioning how well the car drove, acceleration, braking, cornering, noise at speed, ride, carrying capacity, you know car stuff that us drivers are interested in.  No mention about how many people it had seats for, and whether you could squeeze 4 by 8 sheets of plywood or sheetrock into the car.  It had cute looking flush door handles on the outside.  No way to get your gloved hand into those handles to tug open a frozen door.

   Could be a nice car, but you couldn’t prove it by me from this light weight review.

Airline Flight Cancellations??

How does this happen.  The airlines know how many flyable aircraft they have.  They know how many crews they have.  And lesser things like airport gates.   It should be simple to compute how many flights they can fly before running out of something, aircraft, crews, gates, what ever.  Only schedule the flights you have resources to fly.  Don’t put/leave flights on the timetable if you don’t have the resources to support them. 

  Should be simple to figure and get it right.  I wonder why the airlines don’t bother; they just run out of something, probably aircrews, and cancel flights, hanging the passengers out to dry.

  We need a passenger support agency that lets us know how bad each airline is so we can make reservations on the carriers more likely to fly.

  Delays are another matter.  There is always bad weather or air traffic control to blame the delay on.  But cancellations are pure contempt for passengers.

Why the US has a filibuster?

I’ll skip the colorful history of the filibuster which goes back to the Civil War.  I think we should demand more than just a razor thin majority of votes to pass a law.  Unless most of the legislators think the law is a good one, then it’s probably a bad one and should not pass.  The current Senate rules, which allow any senator to call for a vote of 60-40 to pass a law is a good idea.  If 40 senators think the law should not pass, that says to me that the law in question has some problems.  And the Republic is well served when that law is rejected.

  Democrats are calling to kill the filibuster, so that they can pass a number of very questionable laws that Republicans dislike and have filibustered.  I think that is a selfish and short sighted viewpoint on the part of Democrats. 

Humanity has very strong instincts to have children.

If we didn’t, the human race would die out.   Children provide emotional satisfaction, love, companionship and a feeling of wellbeing to parents.  Failure to have children can be a source of great unhappiness to the childless parents.

Last night Tucker Carlson was saying that the mobs of people out demonstrating against the Supreme Court’s cancellation of Roe vs. Wade; this group of people was largely unhappy with the thought that they would wind up having to raise children rather than just aborting them.  Nasty thought that.  He also said corporations like childless workers (they work hard and child care does not distract them from their company jobs). To this end the corporations are offering to pay for employee’s abortions, and creating “feminism” an ideology that is hostile to the idea of mothering children.

Let’s hope humanity’s strong built in urges to have children overwhelm this claptrap ideology.