Thor Ragnarok

It had decent reviews, the proceeding comic book movies with Thor had been amusing, and it's run at the Jax Jr is over today.  So I went to see it last night. OK but not great. 
   Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, and plays him fairly well.  They got Cate Blanchette to play the part of Helle, goddess of death, and general purpose bad guy (bad chick?).  I'm surprised she took the part, 'cause she didn't get much in the way of a speaking role.   No sign of Jane Foster, Thor's earthly girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman, back in the first Thor movie. 
   There isn't much in the way of plot in this movie.  It just drifts from fight to fight.  We have Thor going up against The Incredible Hulk, Thor going up against Helle, assorted armies of guys in armor carrying spears going up against each other, and various minor characters hacking and whacking on each other.  The Thor vs Hulk fight takes place on a distant planet, in a huge arena, packed with screaming fans, presided over by a sadistic, but wimpy looking nameless ruler addressed simply as "The Grand Master".  How the Hulk gets transported from Earth to this mysterious distant planet is not explained.
   Other features unexplained.  Asgard now has a civilian population, under attack by Helle, that Thor manages to save, loading them all onto a giant spacecraft, obtained by mysterious means.  Asgard used to be just the home of the gods, now it has a civilian population in need of evacuation.
   Thor has finally wised up about Loki, and out wits him a couple of times.  Thor used to be a sucker for Loki's treachery, in this flick he keeps one step ahead.  Although there is a lot of swordfighting, Thor and Loki both find automatic firearms convenient for clearing out snake infested areas.  And everybody, even Bruce Banner, can fly the numerous aerospace craft that turn up.
   If you like Marvel's Thor character, go see it.  If you are only lukewarm on comic book movies, you haven't missed anything with this one. 

Do I believe in battery 18 wheelers with 500 mile range?

That's what Elon Musk  claims.  He even has a prototype to show.   Of course he didn't demonstrate the range.  Cruising on the interstates at 70 mph such a truck needs 7-8 hours to travel 500 miles.  Which is a good day's run.  I think there are regulations, honored as much in the breach as on the road, limiting driving shifts to 8 hours.  In short that battery, if it lives up to spec,  will keep the truck moving as long as the driver is supposed to be driving it. 
Nor did Elon mention a price.  Last I heard you could get a conventional diesel tractor, new, for maybe $65K.  Can Elon even come close to that?  Who knows?  How long does it take to recharge? 
   On the other hand, heavy trucks have the room for a massive battery pack.  More weight just gives a tractor more pulling power.  And heavy trucks run a lot more miles in a year than private autos, so a small improvement in operating costs will pay off sooner.

I didn't know that Congress had a slush fund to pay off sexual assault victims.

Not sure just where I stand on this issue, but the fact that Congress kept it secret doesn't speak well of it.  Nor does it speak well of Congressmen. 

How did the Russians win WWII?

First it helps to understand the relative sizes and strengths of the great powers in 1941.  Today, we have just two, maybe three superpowers, powers so much bigger and stronger than ordinary powers that nobody dares mess with them.  Back then, there were more great powers (Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, USA, Japan) and they were closer to each other in strength.  Germany was the strongest and scariest European power, the US lacked the regard that it earned during WWII.  Certainly Hitler didn't think much of America. 
   Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, a bolt out of the blue attack.  Hitler poured in 3-4 million soldiers, 5000 tanks, 10,000 warplanes.  He caught the Russians by surprise, and captured most of western Russia, encircled and destroyed two huge Russian armies, taking 1.2 million prisoners of war.  The Luftwaffe wiped the floor with the Red air force.  That first year the Germans nearly captured Moscow.  Advanced German patrols got as far as the Moscow trolley lines and claimed to have seen the domes of the Kremlin gleaming in the sun.   By the end of the year, the Germans owned the Russian heartland, all Stalin had left were a bunch of remote frontier districts.
   Somehow, I've never read a good description of just how, the Russians hung in there, drafted  another 30 million men into the Red Army, picked up and moved a thousand factories from western Russia to remote Ural Mountain locations, got production of war machines going again from Siberia, and next summer at Stalingrad met the German army head on and beat it in a standup fight. 
   To do this, Stalin's regime had to have political control via the NKVD, and a lot of popular enthusiasm for the Great Patriotic War.  Otherwise, those 30 million draftees might have decided that service in the Red Army was suicide and bolted for the woods.  And just how did the Red Army turn draftees into combat soldiers so quickly?  And trying to get a tank factory which had been dumped by the side of the railroad tracks back into production must taken superhuman effort on the part of the workers.  Suppose the workers had lost heart and just leaned on their shovels? 
   In short, it took a miracle for the Russians to stay in the war, and fight back so effectively, after the tremendous damage the Germans did to them in that first summer. 

Who has $1 million in mortgage interest?

TV news is beginning too, at long last, offer some some specifics and comparison between the House and Senate tax reforms.  The Senate will allow deduction of $1 million mortgage interest.  Wow, that' one helova mortgage if the yearly payments run $1 million.  Jeez, I'll bet that would pay the mortgage on the Empire State building.    The House would only allow a half a million.  Either amounts of mortgage interest will pay a mortgage of $20 million or so.  That's one mighty fine house.  I skim the "Mansions" section of the Journal on Fridays.  They show some very fine houses there, but you can get into one of them for maybe $4 million.  Which gives a mortgage payment like $200K.  I'm thinking the only people paying $1 million mortgage interest are professionals in the real estate business, like president Trump used to be.  In short, this is tax loophole for real estate wheeler dealers.  Me, I would kill the mortgage interest deduction completely. 
   I paid mortgage interest on my house for years.  It was like $10K a year.  That was a nice deduction, until I finally paid off the mortgage, and the extra $12K standard deduction proposed in the tax reform will do me more good than a mortgage deduction, now that I don't have a mortgage anymore. 
   Another strange bit of tax reform information.  Somebody, Congressional Budget Office perhaps, claims that killing the "individual mandate" (tax/fine on individuals who don't have health insurance) will SAVE $380 billion over ten years.  How does killing a tax/fine save money??  Taxes raise money, killing them looses money.  Perhaps "they" think huge numbers of people won't buy taxpayer subsidized health insurance without the tax/fine to encourage them, and thus the taxpayers won't have to pay to subsidize them?  And "they" get their numbers from where?  And we believe them.  Right.

King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword 2017

I love the King Arthur legend.  I've read several books, seen all the movies.  So when this one turned up on Netflix, I went for it. 
  Disappointing is the best I can say for it.  Most of the cast, including Arthur, were unknown to me.  The only two actors I had every heard of, Jude Law and Eric Bana, had mere spear carrier parts.  Other than the sword in the stone, the movie lacks any connection with the well known Arthur legend.  No Launcelot, no Gawaine, no Guinevere, no jousting, no Grail, no Round Table, nothing.  The story picks up with a young (looks to be in his 20's) Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone.  And after that nothing much happens.  Arthur does a lot of bitching, and a good deal of whacking and hacking with the sword (Excalibur).  It's never clear just what the enemy has done to justify killing them, but that doesn't interfere with another mediocre sword fight.  If Arthur has a cause, we never hear of it.  He has no love interest.  He never shows up leading his troops.  The Arthur legend is about a great Christian hero-king saving his people from pagan Saxon invaders.  I expected an Arthur movie to show me some heroism.  I was disappointed. 
   Nobody is ever addressed by name, leaving us confused as to who is who.  There is a cute young chick, who works magic with funny facial expressions, who ought to Morgan Le Fay, but all she is ever called is "The Mage".   There is a Merlin character, played by a black man, but he is never, at least not in my hearing, addressed as Merlin.   And other than showing up, he never does anything interesting.
   Camera work was mediocre.  Too many scenes were poorly lit, and they used the color washout technique entirely too much.  Sound work was only fair, but somewhat better than Game of Thrones.  I could hear and understand most of the lines. 
  According to IMDB they spent $175 million making this thing.  It's been out since May, and it's only earned $40 million. 

We ought to repeal the death tax

The death tax is killing small business.  Gas stations, bodegas, family farms, main street stores, barber shops, restaurants, repair shops, etc, are started by individuals, employ people, and are reasonably profitable.  Eventually the owner dies.  His estate is basically the business, there may be a few thousand dollars in the checking account, but essentially the guy's estate is the business.  And upon the owner's death the government now wants that business to cough up 50% of it's assessed value for estate taxes.  That's a lot of money, which most small businesses simply don't have.  Net result, the small business goes out of business, its workers are laid off, a main street store front gets boarded up and customers have to go elsewhere.  Not good.  We would be better off if the owner could will the going business to his heirs (or anyone for that matter) estate tax free.  This way the business stays in business, the workers stay employed,  the main street storefront stays open for business, and customers keep getting served.   And the going business will pay taxes.  Better to collect a reasonable amount of tax every year, than a whopping big estate tax that drives the small business out of business.