So I got a bigger monitor

It was a deal, a used 27 inch Sceptre monitor for only $88.  It replaced my 19 inch Dell which was working fine but I'm finding it hard to read the teeny tiny lettering thrown up by my ancient version of Word and Excel.  I ordered the monitor thru Amazon.  They told me if I signed up for Amazon Prime, I would get a $100 gift card that could be applied to the monitor immediately.  That dropped $188 down to $88.  What else Amazon Prime might do for me or cost me is unclear. 

The monitor showed up a few days later.  I plugged it in and it works fine.  No dead pixels.  It's bright, so bright I thought I might turn brightness down a notch.  That does not work.  The monitor has 5 black on black buttons hidden on the back of the screen to control those things we used to have knobs on side of our TV sets to adjust.  Brightness is set to 80 and the setting is grayed out, meaning you can look but not touch.  PITA  And the stand is flimsy.  The entire screen rocks gently back a forth every time you touch it. 

  Anyhow the bigger screen is nice.  My eyes are not what they used to be.  I can read everything now without squinting.  Nice. 

Law enforcement

Our society is composed of law abiding citizens and lawless citizens.  We need police to keep the lawless citizens in line and out of trouble.  Without police the lawless will form gangs and loot and pillage and worse at will.  Defund the police is just a weasel’s way of saying abolish the police.  The cops I know are decent, hardworking, well informed, polite and professional, and brave.  And we need them, on duty.

Needless to say, there are a few things we could do to make law enforcement better and fairer. 

First we ought to forbid no-knock raids.  A no-knock raid simply provokes a gun fight.   Bust down some one’s door at o’dark thirty and that some one will shoot to kill every time.  The no-knock raiding cops are up, dressed, had their coffee, and are juiced for the operation.  They outnumber the victim, and they are usually better shots.  Most of the time the cops shoot the victim dead.  That’s how Breonna Taylor died this year.  Occasionally the victim gets lucky and kills some cops.  Which gets him put on trial for murder. 

   The usual excuse for no-knock raids is to surprise the drug dealers before they can flush the evidence down the toilet.  In real life a lot of no-knock raids are conducted simply to give the SWAT team something to do.  Neither reason is a decent excuse for putting every one to extreme risk of their lives.

Second we need an effective method of purging the few bad apples off the force.  Cops stick up for one another.  A plucking board, or internal affairs unit, manned by cops is not going to discipline fellow cops, and the cop’s union will defend the guiltiest cop to the death.  We need an organization that can take complaints, investigate, prosecute, and press the paper work thru to conclusion to get the few bad apples off the force before they do something awful.  This organization must be made up of responsible civilians, not cops.

Third, cops should wear blue uniforms, not black.  Black uniforms look like the SS in Nazi Germany.  We don’t want cops to look like that in America.  Smokey the Bear hats are good.  Crash helmets should be limited to motor cycle officers.

Fourth we need to purge unneeded laws from the books.  Eric Garner in New York died as a result of cops enforcing a city ordinance against selling single cigarettes (loosies) on the street.  That ordinance should never have existed.  In a free country citizens are free to sell any legal product.  There has got to be a lot more trouble making laws on the books that ought to be removed. 

 

 

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.