5000 years of horse breeding and inventing.

I was watching TV where they were showing clips from a racetrack, before the race.  I don’t remember, or perhaps I never did catch the name of the track or the race.  The shots of the horses were impressive.  Big, beautifully groomed, tight barrels, muscular haunches, I could tell these were a lot of good fast race horses. 

   Thinking about it, I realized that I was looking at the end results of at least 5000 years of horse breeding and inventions of tack.  The oldest horse pictures we have come from ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, where the artist shows us a two wheel chariot, a great noble (perhaps even Pharaoh) riding in the chariot, and a two horse team.  At this early date, horses had been domesticated, but they were small animals, too small to bear the weight of a grown man.  Hence the chariot. 

   It won’t be until around 1000 BC that the Medes will breed up a line of horses big enough for riding.  This should have made cavalry cheaper to field.  Surely the riding tack for a single man, and just a single horse was cheaper than a whole chariot, harnesses, two horses, and other stuff needed for chariots. 

   The next improvement was the invention of the stirrup some time in the 700-800 AD time frame.  The stirrup was invented somewhere out East, India perhaps, somewhere out on the steppes perhaps.  Stirrups got the France sometime in the 700s.  By the late 700’s all of Charlemagne’s cavalry was riding with stirrups. We know this from period illustrations. 

   Stirrups improved the effectiveness of cavalry a lot, so much so that the military history of Europe is dominated by cavalry (armored knights) from Charlemagne’s time (800 AD) down to the introduction of muskets for the infantry (1450-1500 AD).  Special large and strong breeds of horses to carry the knight, the armor, and a small armory of edged weapons were developed.  Today we use those breeds of horses to pull the Budweiser beer wagon.  The race horses are all breed from horses the Arabs had.  I don’t know the story of just how or when the Arabs came by the best horses, but they did somehow.  For a long time the Arabs refused to sell their good horses to the Western infidels.  There is a story behind getting Arab horses back the Europe and America, but I don’t know it. 

Tell kids that street drug will kill them.

Street drugs, pills stamped out who knows where, have a lot of fentanyl in them.  The fentanyl is added because it is cheap and has a powerful kick.  The dealers hope that the extra kick will bring the kids back for more drugs.  In actual fact, the kick is so powerful that only the slightest error in mixing the pills creates a street pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it.

   Sampling some street drugs showed that 1 out of 6 pills purchased on the street contained a lethal dose of fentanyl.  In short, take a pill from a street dealer and you have a 1 out of 6 chance of dropping dead.  Many of the “over dose” deaths are really deliberate poisonings by the street drug dealers. 

   The MSM has not made this distressing fact clear to anyone.  It is up to parents to make sure their kids know that street drugs will kill them, if not right now, sooner or later.  Kids should stick with alcohol if they just have to get high. 

   Right now I don’t think kids get this message, at all.

Bissel Sucks good

 Years ago, maybe 15, the last of my old Hoovers, handed down from my mother, bit the dust.  I had been vacuuming down in the cellar and the old Hoover sucked up something big and hard.  There was tinkle and a clatter of all the metal impeller blades breaking off and falling on the floor.  So some time later I set off for Wally mart with youngest son.  I came home with a new all plastic Hoover that worked well for 15 years. 

   Youngest son last month decided to do something to spiff up Dad’s housekeeping.  He brought me a very fancy Bissel vacuum, lots of plastic, much of it transparent so you can see how well it works.  Bissel has an all clear plastic dirt chamber; I can see how much stuff it sucked up.  There is a lot of it, either fluff from the rugs or shed from the cat.  I wish I knew which, short of feeling the stuff (yuck) when I empty the Bissel.  This is a step backward.  Way back when all vacuums sucked into a cloth bag that had to taken out of doors to empty.  Mother always delegated that chore to me or one of my brothers.  Years later the vacuum industry went with paper dirt bags that you just threw in the trash.  The Bissel is back to the shake the dirt container out of doors like it was years ago.  I cheat a little bit, I put the plastic dirt contain inside a plastic grocery bag, shake it out, retrieve plastic container, and throw the grocery bag into the trash.

What does an EV battery cost and how long does it last?

 All I really know comes from years of experience with lead acid car batteries, the ones that crank your engine to get you started.  Those last four winters and cost $60 to replace.   The lithium batteries in EV's cost a lot more.  Maybe a quarter of the cost of the car when new?  Maybe worse, like one half the cost of the new car?  New EV's are like $60,000 so a battery replacement is a big deal.  Might be cheaper to just buy a new EV.  And that ain't cheap.  I have never seen anything on lithium battery life, might be anything, from a year or two up to 10 or 20 years.  I have no idea what the real answer might be.  It would be nice to know before you buy a battery car.   

Shelling a nuclear reactor is crazy

I keep seeing pieces about a big nuclear power plant in Ukraine getting shelled, presumably by the Russians.  This will lead to a Chernobyl style nuclear accident.  Reactors need electricity for instruments and lights and control rod positioning.  They also need cooling water and pumps that work.  One unlucky shell hit can knock any of this stuff out, or other essential stuff, and boom, radioactive reactor accident.  Last one (Chernobyl) was so bad they still cannot allow anyone within miles of the reactor site lest the radiation poison them. 

  Here in North America the prevailing winds are out of the west.  So any cloud of radioactive stuff gets blown east.  If prevailing winds work the same way in middle Europe then the cloud of radioactivity gets blown to the east, right into Russia.  Surely they don’t want that.  Even if the radiation stays in Ukraine, the Russians started the war to take over Ukraine.  Do they want to take it over after making a big patch of it radioactive?  How crazy are the Russians?

The US needs to totally revise teacher training.

Today to get teacher certification you have to have taken the Education major in college.  No other major need apply.  If you have not majored in Education you don’t know how to teach.  Thus saith the Ed majors who run the teacher certification process.

Trouble, they are wrong.  There is no magic knowledge in teaching.  Successful teaching calls for the teacher to establish a trusting relationship with the student, in fact all the students in the class, and know the subject they are teaching.  The education major does not teach this. 

 My college roommate wanted to teach school so he took the education major.  He told me it was the most useless and boring stuff he had ever suffered thru.  And my roommate was a sharp guy, if there were anything worth learning in the Education major he would have found it.  Essentially there is no real content in the education major, and they rehashed nothing, over and over again.  Junior and senior year, education courses met twice a day. 

  I have had a lot of teachers over the years.  Mostly good, many very good, a couple of dud’s (Miss Coyne and Mrs. Waters) but in general a pretty good bunch.  The absolute best teachers I ever had were in the US Air Force.  These guys were just enlisted men, pulled right off the flight line and set to teaching in the Field Training Detachment.  They were extremely good; they knew their subject matter backward and forward.  They maintained order in class rooms full if 18 and 19 year olds, the prime age for making trouble.   None of them had gone to college, let alone taken the education major.  My takeaway from this experience is successful teachers know their stuff and develop rapport with their students. 

  For US education I would first abolish certification of teachers.  Let the principal and the faculty at the school look at resumes and interview candidates and hire the ones that seem good.  Allow them to lay off new teachers that are not working out without doing a bunch of paperwork.   Look for college majors in subjects that they will be teaching, English, mathematics, US history, French, Spanish, physics, chemistry, and not wasting time on the Education major that has nothing to teach anyone.  

 

 

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Trump’s lawyers are talking lawsuit against DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid.  I think they have a case.  No one is secure if DOJ can send 30 FBI agents to paw thru everything in the house.  I hear that the language used to describe things to be seized was so broad as to cover everything in the house, the garage, the pool, and the women’s bedrooms.