Since World War II, the naval aircraft carrier has proven itself to be the supreme surface combat vessel.  Nothing can project America’s power like an aircraft carrier, we know it and other Great Powers know it.  At the top of the heap is the nuclear powered super carrier and only America has these immensely powerful ships.  We’ve put nearly all our eggs in the super aircraft carrier basket and that is dangerous.

The super carrier has two problems in the 21st century: 1. they are incredibly expensive to build and operate, 2. technology has moved on and carriers are increasingly vulnerable to a host of threats.

Threats to Super Aircraft Carriers

Of course even super carriers are vulnerable against old fashioned tactics: if an enemy can attack with enough aircraft, cruise missiles and super sonic anti-ship missiles all in the air at the same time, defenses will get overwhelmed and something is bound to get through.  Remember, even though super carriers are massive and very hard to sink, all an enemy has to do is put the flight deck out of action to render the ship operationally useless.  Not many countries can put together such an attack but two that have the resources are, again, China and Russia.

Submarines are not new, but submarines good enough to slip past our escourt screen are new.  Submarine technology has advanced a lot in the last 20 years, torpedo and sub launched anti-ship missile tech has grown too.  And the numbers of good modern submarines in the hands of our rivals has gone up dramatically.  Numbers count.  We might be able to defend against simultaneous attacks by 3 submarines, but what if they have 5?

Lastly, we have costs.  A super carrier has thousands of highly trained, highly paid, crew onboard.  You have to pay, feed, clothe each one.  Moreover, a carrier cannot operate alone, it needs a battle group, a mini-fleet, of escort vessels to guard it and supply ships are needed to fuel and rearm the smaller escorts.  So for every carrier you have to build, man and maintain a small fleet.  And THEN you have to build some extras for replacing war losses.  There is a real question as to how long America can continue to pay these enormous sums of money just to keep super carriers operational.

The Future: Drones and Submarines

We will slowly see more combat drone aircraft introduced to the US Navy.  First on aircraft carriers for high risk missions, but also on amphibious assault ships that have flight decks.  Drones require fewer people to maintain them so we may see a new class of carrier emerge, one with a few manned fighters for air to air defense and attack drones for bombing missions.

Submarines:  The US has great attack (hunter/killer) submarines.  But again, they are so advanced, so expensive to build that our enemies can afford to out-class us with shear numbers.  We need some cheaper nuclear attack submarines and frankly we need some conventionally powered subs for coastal defense if nothing else.

I’m not sure how to do it but there must be a way to cut costs on building a nuclear attack sub.  Perhaps designing it to do nothing but hunt and kill other submarines and merchant shipping?  We need to come up with a class of these.

Conventional subs:  these are very quiet, very hard to detect when they are lurking.  They are cheap compared to nuclear subs and many surface ships.  They can be very useful in guarding coasts and ports against enemy submarines.  Many other navies have them and it would serve us well to have first hand experience of their strengths and weaknesses.  Germany, Japan and the Netherlands all make really good conventional submarines, we should select something off the self and buy them for defense of port duties.

Don’t think I am anti-carrier or anti navy.  The US Navy, combined with the US Marine Corps remains the most effective way for America to project power world wide.  I’m just trying to identify upcoming trends.

We need more Art Deco.  In general and particularly in architecture.  If you are building a new retail building Art Deco is way better than International Style and Early Cement Block. Just saying.

It seems to me there are several categories of plastics that we use so I thought I would list them.

1. Single use “fast food” plastics: Styrofoam clam shells, cups, wrappers, utensils, straws, bags.  This would also include plastic grocery bags.
2. Processed grocery packaging.  Frozen foods in plastic bags and containers. Plastic film, meat trays, Bottles.  Includes garbage bags.
3. Plastics in clothing.  Particularly “microfiber”.
4. Plastic durable goods: multi use products like toys, furniture, electronics casings, garbage cans made of plastic.
5. Plastics in construction materials: carpets, siding, insulation, etc.

Single use Plastics/Fast food plastics:  This is the low hanging fruit.  This is also the stuff that often is turned to litter and makes it’s way into waterways and eventually lakes and oceans.  We can force change on this rather quickly.  There are alternatives: waxed paper instead of plastic film, paper bags instead of plastic, reusable grocery bags instead of the thin plastic kind.  Plastic utensils might be the hardest to replace but the rest can go fairly quickly if we give clear guidance now so the paper industry can gear up.  We should encourage use of produce other than wood pulp in our paper making: bamboo, sugar cane fiber, industrial hemp if they work.

Processed grocery packaging:  I recommend leaving this for last.  A lot of this packaging has greatly helped with food safety and food sanitation as well as storage.  Some of this gets recycled, bottles in particular.  A lot goes into landfills where, deprived of light and oxygen, at least it is theoretically stable and not entering streams.  Plastic garbage bags hold all this stuff together until it gets to the landfill so they serve a purpose here.  Companies talk about plastic garbage bags that photo-degrade, but that just means they eventually break down to fine plastic particles which gets into the water system - including our drinking water.

Plastics in clothing and cloth:  Microfiber is the worse culprit here.  You might use microfiber cleaning rags and wash them for reuse thinking this is saving trees because you are not using paper towels, but every time you wash those microfiber rags, small plastic particles break off and go into the sewer system.  They are too small to get filtered out and they don’t break down.  So wildlife ingests them and so do we in our drinking water and all those chemicals work their way into us. It would be great if we started phasing out some of the plastic fibers in clothing and stuck to natural materials as much as possible for as long as possible.  Wool, cotton, linen, hemp, silk and other natural fibers have been used for thousands of years by humans and we should go back to them.

Plastics in durable goods:  I’m not a fan.  All these are out-gassing a chemical soup that we breath in.  But they do have the advantage of lasting years and getting many uses.  Some gets recycled, a lot goes into landfills.  Eliminating this stuff will be hard although many of these products were made of steel back in the 1950’s - 1960’s and we could go back to that.  Eliminating these plastics is a much lower priority that the three categories above.

Plastic building materials: Again, a lot of this stuff, carpets, padding, upholstery, even boats gives off chemical gasses just by sitting there.  Same with exterior products.  But the trade off of exterior products is less painting which saves lots of money, energy and most important air pollution.  These would be the last plastics I would try to eliminate.

I’m old enough to remember, as a kid, paper straws before plastic became the norm.  I have to tell you, I do not miss those old paper straws.

Oh they were okay for normal liquids like soda pop and water, but when you had a nice thick milk shake, malt or root beer float the darn straw would collapse on you in mid draw, collapsing a lung and making your face turn purple.  They just were not durable or liquid proof enough to make it through an entire shake without failing.

I remember very distinctly when restaurants and fast food joints started giving out newfangled plastic straws and the glowing wonder on our faces when we could suck up an ultra thick malt, even with hunks of banana or strawberry in it and not have our cheeks turned inside out by Sudden Straw Collapse Syndrome.  There was much cavorting about better living with plastics.

Little did we know we were creating a creeping doom.

I’ve looked into some alternatives for plastic straws:

Glass: maybe in the home, I’m skeptical they will work with kids.

Stainless Steel: cool.  Washable good at home, I don’t think I would trust a stainless straw washed at a typical restaurant.  I’ve looked at various collapsible types you are supposed to carry with you.  That is a non-starter. I got too much stuff to carry on me now, I’m not adding a wet drippy straw that I have to take home and clean and remember to carry again.

Bamboo stalks: for one use, maybe. I’m dubious on this.

If we go back to paper, I suggest upping the game and make them out of waxed card stock or cardboard so they don’t collapse.  We must not use paper that has a thin plastic film on it, that defeats the whole purpose.

Paper has it’s own environmental problems, but if done right it will be less bad than plastic straws.  And paper does not have to come from trees, you can make paper out of bamboo and industrial hemp, both renewable resources.  Both might be new crops for American farmers looking to diversify.

Whatever we use, we need to get rid of the plastic straws as quickly as possible.

The same holds true for the disposable plastic cups, glasses, swizzle sticks, and those plastic grocery bags too.  Styrofoam has to go.  Plastic utensils might take longer but I’m sure we can figure out something.

Most of this isn’t that hard, there was a time before plastics, we just have to look back at what used to work and bring that up to date.  If the Federal government won’t lead, this is something the States can do.  Let’s start experimenting and get rolling.

My best guess is that it’s either the newly updated Post Kinds plugin or my SEO plugin or maybe the two not playing nice together that is screwing up Titles and stuff on posts to Micro.blog.  This is with SEO plugin deactivated.

Is it manspreading if you are alone?

I’ll be the first to admit I know almost nothing about the EU’s GDPR.  But after adding some remotely hosted tracking analytics it seemed like I should look into it even though I’m not selling anything, not advertising, have no presence in the EU.

I did look into it and the law as written is impossible to comply with. Nobody is really sure they are in or out of compliance, at best they only have some lawyer’s opinion about compliance and lawyer’s are not webmasters or server admins.

I think the EU bureaucrats meant well but the GDPR is so daft I think everybody is going to spend way to much money and time on something that cannot work.

My plan: Step 1 Make it look like i’m complying.  Step 2 try to comply as best I can.  Step 3 if some dink really wants detailed information about opting out, send them to the World’s Longest Privacy Policy Page ™ and make their eyes glaze over in agonizing boredom. Step 4 If all else fails, flares, chaff, zig-zag.

So what is everybody doing to comply with GDPR on your blog or are you going to ignore it?

Not content with plastering the internet with annoying GDPR pop-ups, the European Parliament is pushing forward with further measures to disrupt the Internet. On June 20th a committee of MEPs voted to accept major changes to European copyright law that many critics claim will “End the internet as we know it”. The changes concern two […]

Source: EU votes for “disastrous” copyright bill. Article 11 and Article 13 get approval | OKO

President Donald Trump said he would be signing an executive order later Wednesday that would end the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the U.S. border illegally.

There is probably a longer blog post coming about this, Real Soon Now but here is the flash skinny.

• Jetpack stats is great to get you started but it is very basic. Need something more.
• I hate Google so I’m avoiding Google Analytics.
• I do not want to install scripts on my server. I want a remotely hosted solution with the data on somebody else’s server.
• I don’t have high traffic and I’m not selling anything or serving ads so I don’t need anything fancy.
• I hate companies that do not say straight up how much their service costs and if they have a free option.  Obfuscation has become way too prevalent in the marketplace. They want you to sign up first then tell you what is available.  Not worth my time.

Many of the old players have gone dark. There are many new players that I’ve never heard of.  We’ll see.

Any suggestions as to who is good any why?

I hope you all realize that the solution to most illegal immigration is fairly simple: pass a law that would send the owner or CEO of a company to prison, and I mean hard time, when their company is caught hiring illegals.  Any hope of work for illegal aliens would dry up overnight.

But those CEO’s are the high rollers that donate money to Republicans and Democrats in Washington, so even if such a law got passed, it would never be enforced against them.  Instead, the owner of the local gyros shop would end up in prison for hiring an illegal cook while the corporate big wigs are ignored.

So instead we go through the charade of ICE roadblocks and are expected to spend tens of billions of our taxpayer dollars on a border wall because the fix is in, in Washington.  And everybody is falling for it.

A few years ago, when the TSA detained, for hours, a preschooler because his name was similar to a name on the secret no-fly list and made the child sit in a chair across the room from his mother, forbidding and touching or contact between the two, I called it “child abuse”.  Criminal child abuse that went on for hours as the child screamed for his mother who was forced to sit across the room, while the TSA tried to figure out if a toddler could be a terrorist.

That was just one child.

Now we have ICE detaining hundreds of small children, babies being ripped from their mother’s arms and held in cages.  That ain’t right.  That is child abuse. Criminal child abuse.  I don’t care about “orders”, procedures, laws and the parents being law breakers, it still ain’t right and no amount of political spin, double talk and bureaucratic double-speak is going to make it right.

I don’t like illegal immigration. I don’t want to see floods of refugees invading America like they have and are invading Europe, but there has to be a morally proper way to handle children and their parents without tearing them apart and locking them up.  America has a right to control it’s own borders, but America also has an obligation to be humane.

I don’t ever want to be lectured about “family values” by any social conservative ever again.

This is so true.  via To stop endless war, raise taxes - Vox

A grassroots movement getting few headlines could yet herald a new American age of change.

During the summer of 1937, Britain was so full of spies that posters were put up in public areas warning people that “Silence is safety, Now more than ever - forget what you hear” and “Be like Dad – keep Mum.”  Although most people were alert, no one expected a group of clean-cut teenage boys to be guilty of spying.

Executive Veggie Order #1: Pork and Beans, Refried Beans, Baked Beans are a vegetable.  They might already be a vegetable but this is to clear up any lingering doubt or guilt.  The science behind this is irrefutable based on New Math and New English.  Beans have for too long been marginalized by Deep State types within the FDA.

Ergo, by Official Executive Order the above named beans are a suitable replacement for green vegetables, especially those I don’t like.

via Roger Stone suddenly admits to meeting with a Russian national to seek dirt on Hillary Clinton - Vox

Internships aren’t all they are cracked up to be.  One of my best life experiences was working retail, although it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Like Link: The “summer job” vs. the “fancy internship” (revisited) « Minding the Workplace

I’ve toyed with this idea for years, and maybe somebody is already doing it, I wanted to start a blog that was just totally made up, bat-shit crazy, conspiracies, but presented straight faced like The Onion.

Stuff like: Obama is buying up all the tomatoes in the world and shipping them to a secret base in Antarctica to feed a colony of UFO Aliens who like tomatoes or Ancient Romans invented fuel injection so efficient that the oil companies are actively suppressing all knowledge of it or Atlantis was located where Lake Michigan is now before the last Ice Age.

The problem is I don’t think I could pull it off.  I don’t have a good enough imagination to post that kind or stuff regularly nor am I a good enough writer to make it sound convincing.

But the other problem is, people would actually believe this stuff today.  I’m hearing about groups that actually believe in conspiracies way weirder than anything I could make up and nobody bats an eye!  Which kinda scares me if I really think about it.

At least 4 scoops on the ice cream index.

All this flower planting is too stressful. I’m going back to paving everything.  #perennials #flowers

If you’ve heard about Linux, then you know about the most popular version for desktop users: Ubuntu. But which flavor of Ubuntu is right for you?

If Democrats want any hope of voting Trump out, they must fix the broken primary system before the next election

Parties lose political legitimacy when they are seen to no longer represent their members.  The Democrats are deep into this and heading deeper.  It will take longer for their support to melt away, because they are the only other choice against Republicans in a rigged two party system, but that day will come.  It’s already happening.

Source: Dear Democratic party: it’s time to stop rigging the primaries | Heather Gautney | Opinion | The Guardian

Liberals want to require a full background check and a three day waiting period for anyone having fun.  Conservatives want to cut off all funding for fun.  Social conservatives want to ban fun because fun and sin both have 3 letters.

Santana - Smooth  | Youtube