We don't do Declarations of War anymore

Last time we declared war on anybody was back in 1941, right after Pearl Harbor.  Now a days we call it "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" and apparently they last forever.  They give the president authority to spend money, dispatch troops, order air strikes and other military action.  The old fashioned declaration of war became moot when the war was over.  Anyhow Congress just decided to cancel out some  Authorizations to kick ass in the Middle East passed some twenty years ago and still being used today.  Not a bad idea.

   The president can use military force to defend the United States which covers the small stuff but probably does not go as far as doing regime change on disagreeable nations.  As a matter of procedure, and a matter of political survival, the president wants to have Congress and the bulk of the nation behind any serious military operations.  They should remember that we lost the Viet Nam war for lack of domestic political support. 

Excaliber 1981

Released in 1981 making it forty years old this year.  It’s long, two hours and twenty minutes.  It tells the King Arthur story beginning with Uther Pendragon’s visit to Igraine, where with Merlin’s magical help he begets Arthur.  We have a young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, in front of a big crowd and being acclaimed king.  We have Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere.  We have Mordred’s treachery leading to Arthur’s death at the battle of Camlan.  In short all the significant stories from Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur are presented. 

   The movie has a few costume problems.  Everybody wears shining armor, plate armor, all the time.  Makes it hard to tell who is who since they all look alike, and wear helmets that obscure the actor’s faces. Arthur gets marred wearing shining plate armor.  In real life plate armor doesn't breath, making it sweaty as well as heavy.  I am sure armor would have been kept on hooks in the armory and only donned to go into combat, not worn around the house. The other trouble is, in Arthur’s time (late 400’s to early 500’s) armor would have been either old Roman armor or chain mail, or boiled leather.  Plate armor would not be developed for another thousand years. 

   Nigel Terry plays King Arthur, Helen Mirren plays Morgana, and Nicol Williamson plays Merlin.  Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson have bit parts, so small that I never recognized them while watching the movie. 

Choosing the Right Strategy for WWII.

   Right after Pearl Harbor there was incredible political pressure to do something about Japan.  Natural enough.  But Roosevelt wanted to deal with Germany first.  He saw Germany was more dangerous.  She was bigger than Japan, bigger population, far more heavily industrialized, had her own supplies of coal and iron, had plenty of top flight scientists, and occupied a very strategic location, right in the center of Europe.  Europe was the center of the civilized world in those days, where as Japan was way off in the Far East.  The US Joint Chiefs of Staff and most of the American establishment agreed with Roosevelt and supported his views on the matter.  The British were all in favor.  And, Hitler declared war on the United States.  This was purely off the cuff on Hitler’s part, he had no alliance with Japan, no treaties offering support, and he didn’t own the Japanese anything.  Five million German soldiers were locked in deadly combat with the Russians, the British were bombing the snot out of his homeland, last thing Hitler needed was another enemy.  What Hitler did manage was to convince everyone in America that Germany and Japan were in league with each other (the Axis) and so nailing the Germans was as good as nailing the Japanese. 

   Had we followed our first impulse and thrown everything into smashing Japan we might have given the Germans time to develop nuclear weapons.  We certainly would have given them time to get their deadly Type 21 submarines into action.  We would have given Hitler time to beat down the Russians.  Time for Rommel to stiffen the defenses on the Atlantic Wall.  As it was, the Atlantic Wall was almost strong enough to defeat D-Day.  Another year or two of laying more minefields, building more pill boxes, and it might have been strong enough to hold.

Ho Ho Ho. Windows 11 coming for Christmas.

The Wall St Journal ran three pieces on Windows 11 today.  It will start coming preinstalled on desk tops and laptops by Christmas time.  Windows 10 owners will be offered a free update. They say they have not changed the user interface "much" from Windows 10.   Windows 7 and 8 users will NOT get a free update. " Users can choose from Android apps Amazon offers to install on their PC's." to  quote the WSJ piece. I think this means Windows 11 can download and run some, perhaps all, Android apps.  TikTok and Uber ride hailing service were mentioned by  name.  They claim better integration with "the cloud" which is not a feature I care about.  They claim deeper support for Microsoft "Teams".  First I ever heard of "Teams".  I must be loosing touch with the technology since I retired.  They claim 20 million users for "Teams"  a year ago and 145 million users today.  

   Did not talk about how much slower and fatter Windows 11 will be compared to Windows 10.  Every new version of Windows going all the way back to 3.1 has demanded more RAM and more disk space and more time.  Only improvements in PC hardware performance over the years has kept Windows sluggishness within limits. 

So what is critical race theory, really

 Far as I can tell, from web surfing, critical race theory says that skin color is your destiny.  If your skin is white you are a nasty oppressor, if your skin is brown or black then every thing that goes wrong for you is whitey's fault.  White kids should feel guilty.  Brown and black kids should not work hard, they should accept failures in life as white oppression.  

   Forget Jefferson "All men are created equal" and Martin Luther King "Judged by the content of their character".  And if you look deeper, critical race theory looks like Communism or Socialism with the capitalist vs worker conflict replaced with white vs black (or brown and black) conflict.  

Not something that does any kid good to be taught.

Uniforms for Richard Sharpe TV dramas

 I have been watching my collection of the Richard Sharpe videos.  Sharpe, played by Sean Bean, is a British Army officer in the Napoleonic wars.  They have some cool shots of the redcoats, in uniform, in line or column, in action.  The red coats are really red, so red that I wonder if they could dye cloth that bright a red back in 1810 or so.  The redcoats and most of the other troops wear white pants which are nice and white and clean in most of the shots.  I gotta wonder if in real life white uniforms could stay looking that presentable after a bit of scrabbling around in the dirt.  But they look cool for the video.  And the officers get to wear gigantic hats.  I am not a real expert on period costumes so I don't know just how real the ones in the videos are, but they look cool.  

How Long Can America Keep Borrowing?

 Title of a Wall St Journal Op=Ed.  The answer is simple.  The US can keep borrowing as long as people are willing to buy T-bills.  Right now T-bills are selling briskly.  They are considered the soundest investment on the planet.  The US has an enviable record, gong back a couple of hundred years,  of never welshing on its debts.  In actual fact, we promise to repay a T-bill, with interest, after a fixed period of time, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, depends upon the specific T-bill.  We repay the T-bill owners with dollar bills, of which we can print as many as we need.  So as long as the financial community thinks US T-bills are a good investment they will keep buying them.  So long as we don't do anything really stupid to shake world wide confidence in US T-bills and US dollars, we can keep on borrowing. 

Wall St Journal discovers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

 TSMC we call them in the industry.  They have been around, and important for 20 years that I know of.  Biggest semiconductor fab in the world.  TSMC doesn't design chips, they accept designs from anybody with money and fabricate them.  They specialize in digital parts, 5 volt or 3.3 volt.  Should TSMC go out of production for some reason (Main land china invades Taiwan for example) there would be a semiconductor shortage world wide much worse than the shortages we are having now.  

Anyhow the Wall St Journal ran a story this week indicating vaguely how important TSMC is to the world economy.  First time the Journal has bothered to notice TSMC. 

Driving Home from Maryland

 When I got as far as Massachusetts all the electric road signs were encouraging all the citizens to get vaccinated.  Probably a better use for those signs than flashing simply "Drive Safely" messages.  I found the scenic route I took on the way down is 620 miles, the ordinary route (NJ Turnpike to Delaware Memorial bridge is 580 miles. Trip back took 12 hours, one hour of which was taken up by lunch in Brattleboro VT.  I got on Main St in Brattleboro looking for a restaurant. no luck. just two pizza and fried chicken places with no where to park.  Wound up at a snappy Japanese place on the way out of town.  I even remembered how to use chop sticks, something I have not done for 50 years.  That was yesterday.  Today I reregistered the car ($123.30, Arrgh) and picked up my cat from my sister in law.  Popped cat into the plastic cat carrier and let her cry until I got home, got the car unloaded, got her litter box cleaned and refilled, ad the doors closed.  I will keep her inside for a day to let her readjust that this place is home and not to wander too far.

More Improvements in Police Work

 We ought to go thru the law books and remove as many laws as we can.  For instance now that pot has been legalized in so many states, we should not be arresting people and putting them in jail just for simple possession of pot.  Waste of law enforcement time, waste of prison space,  and it makes the victim almost un employable.  In New York, Eric Garner died while the cops were arresting him for selling single cigarettes (loosies) on the street. That's a law that should never have been passed.  And it took a man's life. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know criminal law all that well, but I bet a lawyer could point out a bunch of other laws on the books that could be removed. 

Heavy Truck Traffic

 Drove down to Maryland to visit my daughter yesterday.  Trucks every where.  Big 18 wheelers pulling big 57 foot trailers.  It was like diving along side a freight train.  I figure a lot of 'em are delivering something, others are empties going out to pick up something.  Either way it looks like business is getting better.  

   I did not see many Detroit passenger vehicles. Lotta Toyota, lotta Honda, lotta Kia, not much from Detroit.  The pickup trucks mostly looked like company trucks or work vehicles.

Trip took me 12 hours, it usually only takes 11 hours.  I ran into a terrific thunderstorm near Philly, just poured down rain.  I had to ack off from my carefree 70 mph to like 40 mph cause the rain was so heavy that I had trouble seeing the road.  And I took the scenic route thru Pennsylvania instead of the faster but boring NJ turnpike route.  Tappan Zee bridge is gone.  It is now calling itself the Governor Mario Coumo bridge.  Ego trip much for New York's Granny Killer? It is the new bridge.  They have got the old bridge down and scrapped.  Not bad looking, pretty cable stayed design. 

Dr Seuss is STILL the best seller

 Wall St Journal,  listing for hard back fiction.  Oh The Places You will Go.  This is three weeks in a row for the good doctor as Number 1 best seller. 

Terro Ant Traps. They work good.

 Been having an ant problem at the house.  Hordes of them scuttling every where.  Upon prodding from Youngest Son, I bought a pack (four) of Terro Ant Traps and put them out.  They are working. I have hardly seen a single ant where I used to have hordes of them.  Dunno just how they work.  I don't see any dead ants in the traps, which are clear plastic with a clear liquid inside them.  Maybe they poison the ants so they scurry home and die in their nest?  Maybe they emit an smell that drives the ants away?  Beats me.  I am happy just to not see hordes of ants cruising my kitchen.

TV is still talking about UFO's

 Flying saucers or UFO's are not new.  They first made the newspapers back in 1947.  A private pilot flying a light plane out west somewhere, Oregon perhaps, reported seeing one (or maybe more, I don't remember) and the papers printed his story.  It caused a nation wide sensation, and sure enough a lot more were seen and reported in the following years.  I saw one about 60 years ago.  It was 50 years ago that Duluth scrambled fighters after one.  So they are not new, they have been flying around, doing their thing, what ever it is, for a long time.  

  The TV has shown some gunsite pictures of UFOs that are hard to explain.  I will leave it to others to attempt explanations. 

They ought to be able to keep the business running without computers

 The recent hacks of Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat packing shut down production after ransomware attackers encrypted all the files on the company's computers so that they could not be read or written.  I think that the pipeline should have been able to keep pumping and the meat continue to be cut and packed even though workers could not access computer files.  

  Company suits need to understand that computer security needs to be taken seriously and needs some money spent on it.  Both Colonial and JBS have lost barrels of money by shutting down.  I say the basic operations of any company should be able to keep running while the company computers are knocked off line.  Management should investigate and see why this cannot be.  I will bet that a lot of the stuff done by computer could be done by hand or with pencil and paper and training the crew to do so is not all that hard to do.

In the case where computers are essential to some process (CAD/CAM for instance) they need to designate the computer as "critical" which means take extra care to keep it backed up, keep it off the public internet and keep it in a locked room.  Have IT hand deliver Micro$oft patches on a DVD rather than allow the computer to download them over the internet. 

Greenies want to burn more fuel.

 

The greenies are pushing to remove natural gas from buildings and homes.  They think the all electric home produces less carbon dioxide emissions.  This story was front page on yesterday’s Wall St Journal.  This idea is a looser in the real world.

   The electricity has to be generated by real power plants.  Fake power plants (wind and solar) cannot be depended upon to produce electricity when needed, leading to blackouts like they had in Texas last winter.  Real power plants burn something (natural gas, coal, wood chips, anything) to make steam to drive steam turbines which drive the generators.  Due to unbreakable laws of thermodynamics, only 40% of the heat energy gets turned into electricity.  The other 60% is carried off by the plant’s cooling system.  And the same 60% loss occurs in gas turbine plants. 

   Whereas a gas stove or water heater puts almost 100% of the heat energy into heating pots on the stove or water in the water heater.  Natural gas burning appliances will save 60% of fuel compared to electric appliances.  And gas stoves are better than electric stoves, they will boil water faster and when you turn down the heat, it goes down right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and it takes a while before the pot cools off, leading to burned food or boil overs.