They got someone for the four Dakota murders. I missed the name, but the cops are charging a student in Pennsylvania. Glad to hear the cops have a suspect. They have not said what evidence they have to charge this guy. Could be anything, tire tracks from the white car, fingerprints in the murder house, bloodstains that have traceable DNA, or anything. I hope whay ever evidence it is, it sticks.
H Beam Piper wrote “Space Viking” way back in 1963. I reread it the other day; Lucas Trask is the Vice Roy ruling a frontier planet on the edge of the old Terran Federation. The Federation crashed centuries before and many of its planets reverted to a pre industrial medieval state. Trask has decided to make Tanith a base for Space Viking. This means getting native workers to do the heavy lifting clearing wreckage from the long abandoned space port, suppressing banditry, establishing a planetary government and so on.
Somewhat later in the story Trask meets up with planet Marduk. Marduk is fully civilized, it maintained its civilization even as the Federation fell. Anyhow Lucas Trask is discussing problems keeping civilization going with a member of the royal family of Marduk. As the discussion goes on, Marduk’s problems sound distressingly similar to the problem we are having in modern day America. This in a science fiction novel written in 1963, 60 years ago.
Black hawk is a conventional helicopter that has been flying for years and is quite satisfactory. Back in 2014 the army asked for a fly off between the Bell Helicopter V280 tilt rotor design and the Sikorsky-Boeing Defiant a more or less conventional design with a pusher propeller for better speed.
After 8 well paid years of testing and tinkering the Army finally picked the Bell V280 which was faster. The V22 Osprey is the only tilt rotor currently in service. It can do 300-400 knots, but large conventional helicopters have better range and bigger payloads. Osprey has a poor safety record, a lot of crashes, some with troops on board and many deaths. It is not clear to me why the services care about speed. In Viet Nam we arranged for the troop carrying helicopters to arrive all at the same time. We had enough troops in the first wave to overwhelm the enemy, especially with gun ships supporting the infantry.
The Bell 280 is flying, at least the Aviation Week article shows it in the air. There is a juicy $7.3 billion of “startup money” for the V280. Actual production of V280’s will cost $70 billion. Aviation Week did not mention how many V280s that $70 billion will buy.
The Army said very little about the contract award, like why they picked Bell. Sikorsky-Boeing is thinking about suing to reverse the contract award. That ought to suck up another year or two.
Face it girls. Men are bigger than you are. They are taller, heavier, and stronger that you are. If you have a long walk to your car after dark, or to your apartment, you ought to think about carrying a gun. “All people were NOT created equal; Sam Colt made them that way.”
You are thinking about a hand gun that can be concealed in a purse, a pocket, a holster, a car glove compartment, a desk drawer, wherever. Hand guns come in two flavors, revolvers and automatic pistols. I recommend revolvers because they are extremely reliable. Pull the trigger and a revolver always goes bang. Automatic pistols not so much.
Handguns are made to shoot a variety of cartridges (bullets) ranging from target practice rounds that would not kill a flea up thru Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum (“The most powerful handgun on the planet”). You want the most powerful round that you can shoot well. For many people 38 Special is easy to shoot and powerful enough to do the job. The more powerful the round, the worse the recoil and the louder the report. You want the go to a shooting range and actually fire the round you are thinking about and see how hard it is to shoot. While you are at the range see how well the gun fits your hand. I learned to shoot in the Air Force where the issue revolver was a miserable to shoot 38 special. The trigger was too heavy, the grip was not big enough to get all my fingers around it, and the wooden grips had been soaked in gun oil for 20 years and were slippery. The gun twisted in my hand after each shot. Later I acquired an Army .45 and it shot like a dream. Try to shoot a number of different guns, you may find one that shoots better for you than the others.
Two things about shooting. Always wear ear defenders, those bulky plastic earmuffs, ESPECIALLY on an indoor gun range. Without ear defenders the report is so loud that it can scare you into a permanent flinch, where in you squeeze the trigger too fast and too hard and miss the target. The other thing is to shoot a hand gun with BOTH hands. This is the Weaver technique which became standard in the late 1960’s and it improved my shooting a lot.
You need to get out and shoot your gun for practice if you expect to hit anything for real. Squeeze the trigger gently so that it is something of a surprised when the gun actually fires. Line up the front and back sight over the target bulls eye. Take a small breath and they hold it while you line up the sights and squeeze the trigger. When you get home from the range clean your gun, especially the inside of the barrel and cylinder. Wrap your gun in an oily rag when you put it away to prevent rust.
We got 7 inches of fresh snow last night. Nice fluffy powder. That will put the mountain in great shape. And it is still snowing as of 7:30 AM.
They have been talking about a court ordered repeal of Title
42 as another disaster on the southern border.
Title 42 was something CDC got passed requiring the Border Patrol to
immediately send back to Mexico
anyone who might be bringing COVID into the US. The talk says repealing Title 42 will swamp
us with yet more undocumented immigrants.
This discussion seems like malarkey to me. Anyone crossing into the United
States lacking proper paperwork should be
immediately returned to where they came.
No Title 42 required. If they
have not gotten proper paperwork from a US
consulate abroad or a US Customs station on the border, out they go. Right
now.
What’s so hard about that?
Start at the top, fire Wray. Fire the next three levels of management. Prosecute them if possible. Cut the FBI appropriation in half. They have too many people. Sell all the FBI's aircraft. When FBI people travel they can fly commercial, like the rest of us do. Repeal the law making lying to the FBI a crime.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel blamed the “red trickle” in the mid term elections on “massive ticket splitting”. Ticket splitting is not a cause for defeat. The cause for Republican defeat is candidates that failed to impress voters.
Do we still need an RNC Chairman who lacks such basic understanding of elections?
Parents want to make sure their children know that street drugs will kill. Fentanyl is cheap and extremely powerful. So powerful that the slightest error in mixing fentanyl with other ingredients leaves a pill with enough fentanyl to kill. A few months ago a survey of street drugs showed that one in six pills bough on the street had enough fentanyl to kill. A later survey a few weeks ago showed things were worse. This survey found that one in a mere three pills bought off the street had enough fentanyl to kill you. The newsies will call it an “overdose”. I call it deliberate poisoning.
Anyhow, you ought to tell your kids that street drugs will kill them. If they just have to get high they ought to stick to alcohol or pot. They are safer than street drugs.
Up until Dec 7 1941 America was controlled by isolationists who believed we should stay out of any foreign wars, no matter what. Isolationists pointed to Versailles Peace Treaty that ended World War 1. Despite serious American participation on the Allied side, we did not get anything much from the Versailles treaty. Mostly this was because the Versailles Treaty mostly concerned divvying up European colonies between the winners. After suppressing the Philippine insurrection before WW1 we had little interest in obtaining more overseas colonies. The Philippines taught us that running a colony is expensive, in lives, in money, and reputation. There was still plenty of unsettled land in the West to settle countless farmers on. Up until Pearl Harbor the United States was solidly against any kind of military action, anywhere. We knew that Japan was doing quite a bit of aggression in the East, gobbling up bit parts of China, Manchuria, and other tasty parts of the Far East. We disapproved. We send Japan a series of diplomatic notes, (nasty grams) letting them know we disapproved. But no way were we gong to go farther than nasty grams.
Things drifted on, and we got more difficult. We finally stopped selling crude oil and
scrap steel to Japan. Many historians said after the war that the
embargoes on oil and steel forced Japan
to do Pearl Harbor.
This is not true. The Dutch
East Indies had (still have) plenty of oil. The Nazis had just invaded and occupied the Netherlands,
which left the Dutch East Indies just hanging in the
wind. Japan
could have sent a fleet of tankers, and some bankers with thick check books to
the Indies and they could have bought all the oil Japan
would need for years. And scrap steel
is easy to buy, in most places it ranks as ugly junk and people are happy to
find someone to haul it away.
Instead Japan
decided to declare war on America
and deal us a heavy blow. The Japanese
government thought that after a solid blow the Americans would sue for
peace. Serious misunderstanding #1. After taking a blow Americans never sue for
peace, they get mad and start breaking things and enemies. Most of Japan’s
government leaders had never been to America,
did not speak English, and had no idea of whom or what they were dealing
with. The one exception was Admiral
Yamamoto. He had done college at
Harvard, served as Japan’s
naval attaché in DC, spoke English, played poker, and traveled throughout America. Too bad few people in Japan
listened to him. When they asked
Yamamoto how the war with America
would turn out he said “for the first six months we shall run wild. But after six months I have no confidence at
all.”
Yamamoto had it right. Within 6 months of Pearl Harbor we met the Japanese navy at Midway and sank four of the Japanese carriers. Japan never recovered from that blow.
Open borders gets us a flood of Mexican and South American immigrants. Do democrats believe these immigrants will vote democrat? Give them a majority somewhere? How long will it take for illegal immigrants to become registered American voters? Five years? Ten years? That’s a long time to wait for new democrat votes. Are democrats that patient? Or do the democrats have some scam to get illegal immigrants registered to vote inside of a year?
Or do democrats think we need a lot of low cost labor? Employers think so, but every illegal immigrant hired puts a real American citizen out of a job. Those losers were the dependable democrat voters. Will they stay democrat voters while on unemployment?
Or is there some other reason to want a flood of illegal immigrants?
Trains carry a majority of the freight in America. Manufactured goods, spare parts, fuel oil and gasoline, coal, metal ores, smelted metals, steel, wood, darn near everything. A rail strike would cut off all these things, and all the others I haven’t thought of. All the factories and businesses that depend on stuff will shut down, deepening the recession. Perhaps so deep we cannot pull out of it.
Trains use far less fuel to move cargo than trucks. A truck has a 400 horsepower diesel engine to move one big 57 foot trailer. A 100 car freight train, made up of 100 trailer train cars, flat cars built to move two truck trailers, uses 6000 horsepower to more 200 big trailers. That’s 30 horsepower per trailer, a huge saving of fuel compared to over the road trucking.
Way back when the newspapers would talk about the Taft Hartley act which empowered the government to declare a “cooling off period” in the event of a economy threatening strike. I think the Taft Hartley act is still on the books, and could be used to delay the threatened rail strike. I have not heard a whisper about Taft Hartley and cooling off periods in any of the media. Either the newsies are so poorly educated that they never heard of Taft Hartley, or someone, probably Biden, has demanded the msm not mention it.
So far Biden has let the rail strike get going while he enjoys Thanksgiving on Nantucket. If the rail strike happens it is going to be bad for all of us. If Biden does get into the rail strike at this late date would the unions and management believe anything he might say?
Hood was laid down during World War 1. The original design was to be another battle cruiser like the three that sank at the battle of Jutland. After Jutland the British decided that Hood needed more armor, perhaps 6 inches more of armor plate. When launched a couple of years after the end of World War 1 ( 1920 ) Hood was very big, and very good looking. She became the Royal Navy’s “show off ship”. She visited everywhere during the 1920s and 1930s. Everyone agreed that Hood was very impressive and by extension the Royal Navy was made to seem good and strong.
In 1940 Hood and Prince of Wales were ordered to intercept Bismark in the Denmark Strait in between Greenland and Iceland, far from England. They encountered Bismark in the strait and after a few salvos Bismark landed a hit on Hoods after deck and it went right thru the deck armor and exploded below. The tremendous explosion sank Hood in a few minutes. After Hood sank the Prince of Wales was simply not ready for combat, she still had yard workmen on board working on her guns, and the crew was brand new and green and not prepared to fight Prince of Wales. She got a few shots off, no hits, and Bismark just steamed past her.
After Hood was lost no other Navy built battlecruisers.
Just read a post claiming that students need a course in statistics to major in STEM fields. Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is a good (abet broad) field in college, it is great for finding a job upon graduation. However, the key field, engineering, demands integral calculus. All the engineering fields, electrical, chemical, mechanical, and civil, demand integral calculus. The class lectures, the homework, the exams, and more are all phrased in calculus and if you don't have calculus you simply don't understand what the professor is talking about. Engineering is the best of the STEM courses, you get to do new design work which is the most fun. You need to take integral calculus freshman year. And that means you took trigonometry in high school, cause you need trig for calculus. I never took a course in statistics and never missed it in 40 years of engineering work.
Way back when, well before the First World War, Royal Navy admiral Fisher wanted vessels to find the enemy battle fleet at sea. Battle fleets (maybe a dozen battle ships) had a screen of cruisers to shield them from enemy observation in this age before aircraft. Since the fleet screen was cruisers, Fisher could not use destroyers for searching; the cruiser screen could easily sink any destroyers that caught up with them. If he used cruisers, all that would happen is a bunch to ship-to-ship duels between his cruisers and the enemy cruisers and he would not find the enemy battle fleet.
So Fisher asked for a ship strong enough to break thru the cruiser screen and fast enough to catch the enemy battle fleet. The result was a big as a battleship, carried the guns of a battleship, and the turbine engines that were just coming into service. In fact the battle cruisers had everything a battleship had except armor plate. Their commanders thought they were commanding battleships.
Come World War 1. The British had built four of Fisher’s battle cruisers. They were grouped into a squadron under command of the flamboyant Admiral Beatty. Beatty wasn’t very bright, he wasn’t an experienced old sea dog; he was a member of parliament. But, as luck would have it, Beatty encountered the German battle fleet at sea, getting ready for the battle of Jutland. Beatty failed to get a radio message off giving German position, course, and speed, he failed to order his squadron to turn and run for it. Instead Beatty ordered his squadron of four battle cruisers to engage the Germans. With in a few minutes the German battleships sank three out of Beatty’s four battle cruisers, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” Beatty remarked at the time.
Meantime the British Grand Fleet, under experienced old sea dog Admiral Jellicoe had put to sea. Jellicoe knew the North Sea, the tides, the winds, the shoal waters, and the amount to daylight. Using his knowledge of the sea Jellicoe figured where the Germans were going to go. He got it right, so right that he was able to cross the German’s Tee, a battle winning maneuver in those days. One firing pass by the British inflicted so much damage on the Germans that they used a fancy new turning maneuver and left the area. Jellicoe maneuvered himself and about an hour later managed to cross the German’s Tee a second time, inflicting a lot more damage.
Next morning, the British fleet was back at Scapa Flow and reported to London that it was ready for action again. The German fleet was so shot up that it was not ready to sail again for months. Both sides claimed victory, but by rights the British won this one.
I read that the FBI has been called into that dreadful 4 victim slaying in Moscow Idaho. I wonder if the FBI can still investigate crimes. Does raiding former presidents and other Republicans make good training for finding evidence of crime?
Biden is asking for $37 billion or perhaps $40 billion in military aide to Ukraine. The TV has mentioned both numbers today. Take your pick.
Question: what are we giving Ukraine
that costs $37 or $40 billion dollars?
They could buy a new US
aircraft carrier for $13 and a skosh billion.
They could buy F35 fighters, the most expensive fighter ever made, for
$100 million apiece. A billion gets you
10 F35s. $40 billion gets you 400
F35’s. I don’t know what tanks and
armored personnel carriers cost put I’ll bet $40 billion would buy a lot of
them. I suppose Patriot SAM systems,
missiles, tracked launcher with a radar on board could be pricey, but I don’t
know just how pricey.
Anyhow, I would like a list of what we are giving Ukraine,
and the list price of each item.
American weapons are very expensive what with the services gold plating the specifications, and the Pentagon bureaucrats drowning the contractors in paperwork. I used to work for a defense contractor, Raytheon. They had a big two story building out in Wayland Massachusetts. On the ground floor they had engineering, stockrooms, labs, and shops, all stuff that actually made the product. Upstairs, just as big as downstairs, were all paper pushers who kept the bureaucrats off Raytheon’s case by filing all the paperwork on time.
As expected, Trump declared he is running for President yesterday. A lot of people like Trump and will vote for him. Trump can fill up a sports stadium with supporters for a campaign speech. While president last time Trump got GNP growth up to 3+ % from Obama's miserable 1%. He built the border fence. He got Kim Jong what's-his-face to stop launching missiles. He got the stock markets up.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who detest Trump. Democrats, bureaucrats, newsies, are leading anti Trump voices. I have no idea how Trump's candidacy will worth this time. Certainly DeSantos from Florida looks good.
Political polls, beloved of TV news commentators, were not very useful this time. Most of them showed a 1 or 2 percent difference between candidates. That is a dead heat in my book; either candidate is equally likely to win. Not much prediction to be had here. And, despite a lot of talk about a red wave, the election was pretty even Steven. Which is a pity, Biden gets another two years to drive the country deeper into the ground.
Two things that make telephone polls hard to do and all the polls are telephone polls. Nowadays people won’t talk to pollsters. Ten or fifteen years ago we count do telephone polling before elections. People were sort of flattered that the party cared enough to call them. They were cordial, they would chat. Not anymore. Last time I did telephone calling, they just hung up. Tired of robocallers I guess.
And then we have smart phones. My three children don’t have landline phones, they all use smart phones. They don’t have a phone book for smart phones, so you have trouble dialing voters and not winding up talking to a business receptionist.
When they smear you, have to say something. Otherwise people begin to think the smear is
true. You must say something, say the
smear is false, say there is some other reason, turn the smear around and lay
it on them. Say something.
Republicans need to work on this. During last election Democrats accused
Republicans of wanting to end, (or reduce) social security benefits. Totally untrue. Nobody wants to end or reduce social security
because of the furor it would create. A
huge number of people live on social security and any reduction would cause
them severe hardship. Every Republican
knows this, and would never touch social security. Yet Democrats were able to accuse Republicans
of this, and the Republicans let them get away with it. Republicans never came out and said we have
no intention of reducing social security because we know how much people depend
on it.
Something ought to be done. Maybe the Republican National Committee needs to work up a “Smear of the Week that needs answering” list and pass it out to candidates and state committees.
Yesterday's mid term elections were disappointing. New Hampshire voters decided to keep their worthless congressional delegation. I had hoped New Hampshire voters would have been smartest than that. They were not. With democrat Biden administration running us out of gasoline and fuel oil, I had hoped for a Republican Congress to fix it. They are still counting but it does not look good. Looks like the democrats will be left to finish wrecking the country.
No one with two brain cells is going to reduce social
security, no matter what Democrats are claiming on TV. No Republican is that
dumb. There might be a few Democrats who
are that dumb but I doubt it. The
current talk on TV about reducing social security is just talk, nobody,
Republican or Democrat, is going to do it because the political backlash would
be too severe.
Likewise talk on TV about the feds taking money away from
social security is just talk from ignorant people. TV is full of very ignorant people.
Social security works like this. Every worker has money taken from his paycheck and given to social security. In many years, this year for example, social security takes in more money in taxes than it has to pay out in benefits. The difference is large, billions of dollars. So what does social security do with the extra money that they will need in a few years? Answer, they buy US treasury bonds. They pay modest interest, they are the safest investment on the planet. America has never ever failed to pay off on its bonds. And everyone, politicians, economists, business men, who ever, is against social security investing the money in banks or stocks or anything private, doing such amounts to Uncle Sam investing a lost of money in where ever, which amounts to gaining government control of some private enterprise, at which point it is no longer a private enterprise. And there is no question that US bonds will pay off for social security when social security needs the money.
Good Shooting.
This morning's radio claimed that Ukraine shot down 45 out of 50 Russian crew missiles yesterday. Crew missiles are not easy to hit. They are fast, 600 mph, and fly low which means the radar cannot see them until they a very close. My radio was tuned to NHPR which is fairly trustworthy and presumably was passing along a Ukraine press release, which might have exaggerated things a little bit.
Paul Pelosi might have saved himself a skull fracture if he
had a loaded firearm in a convenient place around his home. Say a bedside
table. I keep an Army .45 automatic in
my bedside table.
He might have avoided an attack in his home if democrat
district attorneys jailed known criminals instead of turning them loose to roam
the streets. Democrat city officials who
defund the police reduce everyone’s safety in their homes.
The Pelosi’s might want to contact an experienced contractor to beef up the security of their home. A tougher back door for instance.
Among to zillion law firms advertising for clients in the Camp Lejeune matter we have Kelly Postal. Their ad says their legal teams are made up of Marines, West Point graduates and Harvard trained lawyers. I have a lot of respect for Marines, both of my brothers enlisted in the Marines for the Viet Nam war and did combat tours in Viet Nam. I did the same except I was Air Force. West Point graduates become US Army officers, for whom I have a good deal of respect. Then we get down to Harvard lawyers. They are a turnoff for me. I wonder how the Camp Lejeune victims feel about them.
Just in the last week, Fox’s military commentator, retired Army general Jack Keane, said that a recent war game on this subject lead to a decisive victory for China and a defeat for us.
I have to wonder about this. The Taiwan Strait is 120 miles wide and blue water, deep enough to float aircraft carriers (or any other kind of ship). China has to get a sizable army across the strait, land the troops on the island of Taiwan, and keep them supplied during the fighting. Taiwan has an army with a decent supply of up to date American equipment. China will have to fight hard to gain control of the island.
Our best bet to defend Taiwan is to sink the Chinese invasion force as it crosses the strait. This will start off as an Air Force battle. China has a lot of airbases on their side of the straight. We have a dozen aircraft carriers, of which maybe 9 are operationally ready. The other three are likely in US shipyards for one sort or another of heavy duty work and thus unavailable. Each carrier has maybe 90 aircraft on board. The carriers could be stationed on the far side of Taiwan to make it harder for China to strike them. The carrier aircraft can fly right across Taiwan in a matter of minutes. The Air Force could fly in a lot of planes to Taiwan to fight from Taiwan’s air fields. That ought to give us 800 Navy aircraft and 500-800 Air Force aircraft.
China has maybe 1700 combat aircraft. Maybe half of them are as hot as USAF fighters and the other half is old, slow, and easy meat for USAF F-22s and F35s. This info comes from pontification at various Internet sites. These sites tend to denigrate the Chinese Air Force and say nice things about USAF. I don’t know who would win, before a head to head air battle between them.
The object of such an air battle is for one side or the other to obtain air superiority, By which I mean to ability to fly low performance (at least by fighter standards) bombers out into the Taiwan strait to sink Chinese ships carrying troops to invade Taiwan. Other angles, before the air war settles out, US submarines, lurking underwater in the strait of Taiwan torpedoing any surface vessel that needs it. Chinese aircraft probably cannot sink subs that stay submerged. No problem for nuclear subs, not impossible for conventional diesel subs.
So, I can see American air and sea power keeping the Chinese ships under control and off Taiwan landing beaches. I think this will defeat a Chinese attempt to take over Taiwan. I don’t know how General Deane’s war game worked and why it showed a Chinese victory.
Biden says he will do it. Right after the election as opposed to right now when his party controls Congress. That might change after the election.
I wonder what “codify” means. Passing a new law that makes some things illegal and other things legal? What things? Are these things measurable or can any Democrat office holder say what they are?
Waves, will we have one in the oncoming midterm election? You could not tell from the TV news coverage. They talk about Senate contests in a single state, or head to head poll results over a single election. No stories indicating where a lot of voters are heading, just onsey twosey stuff. If there are any poll results over a broad area I have not seen them. I hope everyone gets out and votes in the upcoming election.
Robbie's Hagrid was a big part of the Harry Potter movies. I will miss Robbie.
Environmental, Social, and Governance. (ESG)
The acronym stands for a company management plan to do nice things for the environment, social something or other, and governance, a scheme were company management abandons traditional company goals, and aims for environmental and social goals.
The American corporation has been fantastically successful over many years. Corporations produce goods and services, at very good prices and in vast quantities. Earnings are solid, and are shared between share holders and workers. Most Americans work for corporations and get their health insurance from the corporation that employs them. American corporations are an important part of American economy and well being.
We should not mess things up with ill considered changes that might throw us out of work and cancel our health care.
Right now successful corporate managers concentrate on improving the corporate production (automobiles, aircraft, tools, house wares and other stuff) (producing services such as communication (cell phone, TV, newspaper, more economically) or providing transportation (railroads and airlines) more economically.
Do we want corporate management to stop this beneficial activity and start tending the environment, the social feelings of just about anybody, and setting up governance that locks the corporation into activities that do not improve the company bottom line? And instead of divvying up corporate profits between share holders and worker, ESG would grab off a good chunk of corporate revenue to support the Green Nude Eel and deny the money to workers and stock holders.
I think we should stick with the corporate governance that has paid us such solid dividends over many years. Work on getting costs down and quality up.
The TV is reading the verdict in the case of Nicolas Cruze, the Parkland School shooter. It is all legal goobledegook. Never is the word "guilty" used. They must have had a lawyer write the lengthy complicated verdict (it took the judge 10 minutes to read the whole thing).
I am a casual sports fan. Living in one of the “Boston States” I root for the Patriots (fall) and the Red Sox (spring and summer). Should either team make the Super Bowl or the World Series I will watch the games. There is no way that I will ever root for the New York Yankees.
We also have a lot of voters who vote the same way. They will vote for their party no matter what. And they would never vote for that other party, no matter what.
For sports fans, it doesn’t matter much. Rooting for one team or the other doesn’t affect anything important.
For voters, this attitude is destructive of our democracy. We vote in crooks and dimwits, and fail to vote for decent intelligent public spirited candidates.
To be a patriotic voter you have to do a little homework, such as who is running and what have they done in the past that is honorable, or dishonorable. You want to vote for the good guys and vote against the bad guys. In this day and age of the Internet the home work is easy to do. Google will tell you who is running, nationally and for state office, and give you the candidate’s history and voting record.
There is a crucial midterm election coming up in about three weeks. The current Democrat administration is a bunch of weak and elderly men and is driving America into the ground. We need to vote them out. Vote in some decent people who might be able to pull the country up before all that is left is a smoking crater.
I went last night. Decent turnout, the drive way was mostly parked up, call it 50 cars. Large fine house, full of voters. Bolduc spoke, without notes, for an hour. He used real English that made sense, unlike the pabulum speak we hear from so many in the DC swamp. He definitely will make a better Senator for us in New Hampshire than Maggie Hassan, the Democrat incumbent, who has done little to nothing over the last 6 years, except for just once she voted AGAINT the Keystone XL pipeline. Which is destructive for New Hampshire. We all have to heat our houses all winter. Keystone XL would bring economical crude oil from a friendly neighboring country (Canada) down to US refineries, where it would be refined into gasoline and heating oil.
I will vote for Bolduc, I made a contribution to his campaign last night.
All real Americans need to vote a straight Republican ticket in the mid term federal elections coming up this November. Only that will save America from total ruin.
Putin has threatened to use nukes on Ukraine. We do not approve. The way to prevent Putin from nuking Ukraine is to tell him “If you nuke Ukraine, or anywhere else, we will nuke you back, harder.” Trouble is, if Biden were to say this who would believe him? Not I, probably not Putin. That’s the trouble with electing a weak president. It weakens the entire country.
We have mid term elections coming up in three-four weeks. Everybody should get out and vote. And vote a straight Republican ticket, to prevent more Democrats from serving anywhere.
It isn’t new, it has been out for six years, but somehow I only saw it last night on a NetFlix DVD. A meh movie. The worst soundman ever. Most of the dialogue was inaudible. Actors mumbled, turned away from the mike while speaking, and failed to speak up. Plot was difficult to impossible to understand, all it seemed to produce was a lot of hand to hand fistfights between Tony Stark (Ironman) and Steve Rogers (Captain America). Since both of them are super powered, neither could get in any solid hits on the other.
The movie opens (after some action shots) with a white haired well dressed man from the UN demanding that the Avengers accept UN authority and only beat up UN approved bad guys. Tony Stark is for it, Steve Rodgers is against it. Neither of them gives reasons for their positions The UN guy lands a 1 inch thick bound book of UN regulations on the table. Seeing that I though to myself with that much to choose from a lawyer could find paragraphs in there to justify anything he wanted to do. The movie never gets down to the Avengers taking a vote (or even just a show of hands) as to accepting or rejecting the UN demands. Instead it moves on to hand to hand combat between Captain America and Ironman. This goes on and on and on. I know that both protagonists are super powered and safe from death or injury, the action fails to engage my interest.
We don't want any California fruitcakes to hold federal offices.
To all who have suffered from, and are still suffering from Hurricane Ian. The images I have seen are horrible. May God go with you all.
Europe used to get substantial amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal from Russia. After Russia attacked Ukraine they stopped supplying any sort of fuel to Europe. At this moment Germany and much of Europe is facing a terribly cold winter, coming up in just a couple of months.
We should be shipping fuel to Europe to make up for the lack of Russian fuel. Back a couple of years ago, in Trump time, we had the necessary fuel production right here in America. After two years of Biden making nice to the Greenies, we can no longer produce much, if any, fuel for export to our European allies.
We need to fix this. Everyone should get out for the midterm elections this coming November 8 and vote a straight Republican ticket. A Republican majority in the House and the Senate could restore the oil production that Biden and the Greenies destroyed and save our European allies from a winter without central heat.
Next month, November, is the mid term elections. All members of the House of Representatives, a third of all US senators, and most state governors and officials are up for election or re election. This may be the last chance for us voters to pull our country out of its current power dive into the ground. We don’t get another chance until 2024, and which point to may be too late to save the country.
The most important thing us voters can do is get rid of all the Greenies. Greenies have strong opinions and no common sense. Greenies want to shut down drilling for oil and gas, fracking, coal mining, and nuclear energy and cattle raising. They feel (they don’t think but they have a lot of feelz) that fracking, oil and gas exploration, coal mining, and nuclear power are evil and should be stopped. None of them have gone thru a New Hampshire winter with no central heat. Or walked to the store in a snow storm because they don’t have any gas for the car.
The reason for $5 a gallon gasoline is the Biden administration making nice to Greenies. They shut down the Keystone XL pipeline their first day in office. They stopped leasing any federal land for oil drilling, and they told the banks not to lend money to drill for oil, it was too risky. That deliberately cut US oil and gas production by 1 million barrels a day, creating the shortage that led to $5 gasoline. We need to get rid of these people, they will starve us all.
Greenies don’t have the courage to put them selves on the ballot. Instead they attach themselves to the Democrats, who are on the ballot. To get rid of the country wrecking Greenies, get out and vote a straight Republican ticket this November.
“Infrastructure” actually means use federal money to maintain New York State roads. If you don’t live in New York, vote against infrastructure bills.
New York roads are terrible. Potholes, missing center strip, terrible signage, frost heaves, and worse. Driving, you immediately notice when you enter New York State, the roads are in terrible shape. This has occurred because New York State government stopped doing routine road maintenance maybe 30 years ago.
All the MSM people, TV or newspaper, live and work in New York. They know how bad New York roads are. They think all the roads in the country are as bad as they are in New York. They figure that calling for “infrastructure” spending they will be fixing roads all over the country. Not true. Reasonable states like New Hampshire, the other New England states, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Delaware have been doing routine road maintenance for years, and their roads are in decent shape. A federal infrastructure bill will use tax money from all over the US to fix up New York roads which have been neglected by the state of New York for many many years.
Somehow Fiona manage to glide by New Hampshire without bringing us even a few clouds. Granted Fiona was well offshore when passing New Hampshire, but usually a close by hurricane creates a day or two of bad weather. Not this time. The TV is telling of massive power outages in Canada, and even Maine.
Used to be, each party, and many candidates, would publish a list of things they would do, if elected. These lists were called platforms, and they had a decent effect upon voters. For the last couple of elections, neither party bothered to publish a platform. Probably because politicians think that taking a stand on anything loses you votes. What ever the issue is, there are voters who are for it and voters that are against it. Taking a stand, on anything, loses the voters who don’t agree, and fails to gain votes of those who do agree. Which accounts for the hours and hours of politicians speaking but saying nothing.
Mirabel Dictu. The Republicans just published their platform for the coming election. “Commitment to America” they called it. The name sounds similar to “Contract with America” which was the name Newt Gengrich used for his platform many years ago. Newt’s platform was fairly effective. Let us hope this one works as well. Needless to say, the Democrats have been trashing “Commitment to America” ever since it came out on Friday.
I just received one of those “Do Not Destroy. Registered Member Documents Enclosed” envelopes in the US Mail. It was from Judicial Watch (a reasonable political group to whom I have contributed some money in the past) and the first seven questions were about the very large costs of illegal immigration, extra school costs, extra hospital costs, and more, from illegal immigration. The costs quoted were high, so high that I would want to check them out before I believed the numbers. The tone of the rest of the document was “Illegal immigrants are costing us an arm and leg and we should shut them down.” I suppose the states on the Mexican border might be getting hit this hard but I don’t think my state is, yet.
Where I live, New Hampshire, is a border state, our border is with Canada. Far as I can tell, Canadians are happy with things in Canada and are staying in Canada, except for shopping. Prices are lower in the US than they are in Canada, so we see a reasonable number of Canadians down here shopping. They spend money, which is a good thing. The Canadians mostly drive back to Canada after a shopping trip to New Hampshire. The Mexican border is as far away from New Hampshire is it can be for an American State so I don’t think we are getting hit as hard as this questionnaire suggests, yet.
Personally I am perfectly OK with illegal immigrants who find a job, pay their taxes, stay out of trouble with the law, go to mass on Sunday, and send their kids to school. I call these good citizens, and our country needs all the good citizens it can get.
Immigrants who are MS13 gang members, who smuggle fentanyl, extort money, and engage in crime, are terrible citizens and we should lower the boom on them, good and hard.
Anyhow I will return the questionnaire to Judicial Watch and maybe even send them a little money.
It is so thick I can barely see the house across the street. And it is raining. Fall is coming, today I hear.
You must have heard the lawyers advertising for plaintiffs over the matter of Camp LeJeune’s water back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The lawyers are taking up as much airtime as Mike Lindell, the pillow guy. The lawyers all call the Camp Lejeune water “toxic” and cause of a lot of bad sounding illnesses. I have not heard just what it was/is in that water. “Toxic” is just enough word for poisonous. I’d like to know what they found in the water and how much. Modern chemistry is good enough to detect small amounts of anything just about anywhere. Before I get very excited about such detections I want to know just how much was detected and what is the safe limit for what ever it is that got detected. I have no heard that about the Camp Lejeune situation.
Those 50 immigrants that Texans flew up to plush Martha's Vineyard were relocated to "a Massachusetts National Guard base on Cape Cod". That was probably Otis Air Force Base, where I did Air Force summer camp back in the early '60s. I heard or read somewhere lately that Otis AFB has been renamed "Joint Base something-or-other". I am so glad that we have bureaucrats and paper pushers with nothing better to do than rename Air Force Bases. We could even save a little taxpayer's money by tracking those bureaucrats down and laying them all off.
There are three ways to go to make an airliner that is better for the climate than what we have flying today. Airliners use and burn a LOT of fuel. Just to fuel a single seat, single engine fighter plane for a long flight (Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB Florida) took 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. This is a full 18 wheeler semi trailer worth of fuel. That’s just for a little fighter plane. To fuel a four engine jet liner carrying a couple of hundred passengers across an ocean takes a lot more, probably something like 40,000 gallons, 4 full 18 wheeler semi trailers.
Aviation Week keeps mentioning “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF). What ever it is, Aviation Week claims it burns without CO2 emissions, and to work fine in existing jet engines. I have no idea what SAF is, how it is made, what it might cost. Googling turned up one post, which I wrote myself a couple of years ago.
Then there is hydrogen. Burns good and clean, no CO2, just H2O (water). Has to be cooled way way down so it liquefies, before you can get enough of it into an airliner to do any good. The airliner needs special hydrogen tanks, fitted in somewhere. The usual plan for fuel storage, filling up the wings with kerosene, probably won’t work for hydrogen. The hydrogen keeps boiling off, requiring a cylindrical fuel tank that can take some pressure. The wings cannot take any sort of pressure.
And finally there are batteries. I am surprised that even theoretically possible batteries have enough power to lift themselves (let along an airliner) off the ground. I am aware a one experimental battery powered aircraft project. The aircraft is the size of a Cessna. They got a lot of development work to grow that up to airliner size.
Monarch butterfly gets caught in abandoned spider web. I have a couple of very sizable webs hung off my eaves. After a couple of days of steady rain the spiders, big ones, abandoned the webs, I have not seen the spiders in several days. But the webs are still up and this big Monarch butterfly got caught in one. He fluttered and flittered and yanked himself around for a long time. He must have been successful, I just looked for him and he was gone. Good luck butterfly. You are gonna need it this time of year.
The British are doing a great procession bringing Queen Elizabeth's body to Edinburgh Cathedral. The Scottish honor guard is wearing feathers in their bonnets. First time I have ever seen what the old cliche looks like in real life.
A spider spinning a web needs something to anchor the web to. In nature a tree branch with a fork in it, that yields two branches maybe a foot apart works well. A lot of other spiders have to make do with less. I see them jumping off my eaves, trailing a thread of silk. The lucky ones land on my deck railing, the unlucky ones just get blown away. Even the lucky ones are not that lucky. It is a good ten feet from my eaves to the deck railing. I never see the spiders climbing back up to spin a second thread. They need two anchor threads to keep the web spread out. I don’t think spiders can see from my eaves to my deck railing. I think they are just casting themselves to the winds, hoping for the best.
