One year ago today: May 30, 2013, my drill press turns 1.
Five years ago today: May 30, 2009, Saturday downtown.
MORNING
What to do today? Can’t take a motorcycle trip with the weather acting up. It’s not like I have nothing to do, just that like most things I have to do, I don’t have to do them unless I feel like it. This is hot dogs and I had to lean out the window to take this photo. Grilled up to perfection, this was the club meeting on Wednesday, where none of the goodies are on my diet. I spent five hours a day since that meetup to investigate the operations of network cards and routers. The cards are the ones in the back of your computer that fit into a slot and you plug your Ethernet wire into the RJ-45 jack.
My traditional annual budget review of May 15 has now become more May-ish when I get around to it. Inflation, it is starting to bite. However, in my instance it remains just a nibble and as I’ve said, the effect is relative. If things get so bad everyone is at the food bank, at least I won’t be riding the bus over there. A small fries and a drink at Five Guys (the only place to eat fries) now runs close to six dollars. While you would have to pay the same for enough fries to fill you up at McD’s, the implication is there may be a time when no smaller orders are available.
What does the budget reveal? This year, I’m still gaining faster than real estate, though I should have bought by now. I may have to await the predicted secondary bust when the government incentives dry up. The trouble is that it won’t dry up as long as the Fed keeps printing the money with so little value you can’t buy fries with a five dollar bill. But remember, by the time I have to count my pennies, millions will have no pennies left to count. And that is hardly my fault. Let them spend cake.
Trivia. The Kalahari is the largest desert in the world with no oases. Satellite photos show there is a complete river drainage system in the area, but it is mummified. Hmmm, I like that, mummified. Great visual on that one, but my theory is that dry as the Kalahari is, every hundred years they get this massive rainy season. So there’s your dry riverbeds explained.
AFTERNOON
What did this very blog warn you about genetically modified food? I also suggested the only current way to avoid it is refusal to purchase. By now you’ve heard of the Monsanto Protection Act. You-know-who and his government backed down and surrendered the public right to sue a private corporation. Odd, because that right belongs to the public and was not his to give away. But, that's politics.
The provision seems to have been slipped through as part of the farm bill because the rest of Congress was busy pretending everyone was hyper-concerned about the biggest, most important national crisis ever to strike the United States in the 238 years of its existence: Gay marriage. And we all know how concerned gay couples are about their children’s natural food supply. Vote only for candidates who will require food GMO food label warnings.
Jerk of the Day award goes to Roy Blunt, who crafted the wording to sound as if the emphasis was on the harvesting of the crop. The reality is, if they go on to sell it and you get a foodborne illness, you cannot sue Monsanto as long as at the time they planted the crop, it was legal. It effectively shields Monsanto from consequences of what they do with the crop. Shown here are “Monty” Blunt and his two aliases. One as a dime-store evangelist playing senator and the other on night shift at the Owensville facility.
Blunt is also the guy behind the law that prevents firearm manufacturers from prosecution if their guns are used in a crime, so he is consistent in his belief that Big Business Rules. Also consistent are the narrow margins by which he gets elected. His wife and son work for corporations in his district, ahem. He is against same-sex marriage and was very aware of how that bandwagon issue obfuscated scrutiny of the farm bill.
EVENING
Long-term readers here know why I read about Dien Bien Phu, but that’s an army. There is an individual that I think typifies the modern climb of incompetence up the military ladder. In previous centuries you had Captain Bligh of the Bounty to screw things up and still get promoted. Not to be outdone by the Brits, we in America can produce our own laughing-stocks. Westmoreland, the general who lost the Viet Nam War. How this guy ever became an officer is baffling to civilians but makes perfect sense to the military mind. He was an artillery captain who got transferred around often enough to gain promotions, but the fact was, this joker mostly commanded from behind a desk.
You won’t get the real story from Wiki on this guy. He’s the general who kept calling for more US troops while denying modern weapons to the South Vietnamese. He knew how to play hero by antics like getting his paratrooper’s badge by completing all 13 jumps in one day. He attained command without ever going through the normal military field experiences to the degree that I compare him to General Paulus. And like Paulus, he presided over his own personal Stalingrad.
Here’s another speculation. The performance of the Israeli army receives great praise over how their small units of reservists defeated masses of conventional forces. The IDF is supposed to be the most efficient military force on Earth, but you know, I have a theory that they copied it from elsewhere. Watching the newsreels, even as a lad, I could pick out that the Israeli officers were distinctly northern Europeans. As such, they would have been exposed to the largely-forgotten ground wars in Scandinavia, with the exception of the Winter War in Finland, which is well known.
If you read the translations of Scandinavian papers, you can easily spot which tactics the future Israelis would mimic. These countries had no large standing armies. The soldiers were lumberjacks and bakers, so they knew precisely when called up what they were expected to do—and the quicker they did it, the sooner they could go back home. The officers were local men often called by nicknames, they fought on familiar territory, and they could not retreat much. I see the shape of all three Scandinavian countries is similar to Israel and vulnerable to an attack across the middle.
True, the Soviets were as badly led as the later Egyptians and the German invasion of Norway was a near fiasco. But that means even civilians would have heard evidence of what works against the big battalions. Make that double wherever the superior force has to pass a narrow chokepoint, such as Mitla Pass. I have little doubt the Israeli officers knew precisely the same battle had been fought at Elverum, Norway, on April 9, 1940. To this day Wiki tells that German paratroops were halted by Norwegian troops. The reality is that elite German paratroopers retreated from “a local rifleman’s club”. To any Jews who later immigrated to Israel, any news that showed that Germany was not invincible was probably not that unwelcome.
Here is a picture of the area in Norway where said riflemen incident took place. No mountains, no fjords. My very first girlfriend girlfriend was from Norway.
