Term Limits Desperately Needed

Little did the voters of California realize in 1992 that Dianne Feinstein had been elected Senator for Life.  More than 30 years later, Senator Dianne Feinstein has died.  She was 90.  A couple of months ago, she was participating in an appropriation meeting when one of her aides told her to "just say aye."  Feinstein said, "Aye."  Was the senator the one making the decision or was it the aide?  Or was it some unseen person behind the scenes.  Clearly, Senator Feinstein's mental faculties were not what they had been earlier in her political career.  She should have long since retired.  She is not alone in this.

Senator Mitch McConnell (age 81) has repeatedly frozen midsentence in recent months.  He is more than a decade beyond the traditional retirement age.  Joe Biden (age 80) regularly loses his train of thought, speaks incoherently, and rambles off topic.  The leading candidate for the Republican Party is Donald Trump (age 77) and would finish another term older than Joe Biden is now.  Clearly, term limits are needed.  In the case of the Presidency, we already have that.  However, we may need a maximum age.  Maybe an amendment that you can't run for president after the age of 70.  Heck, that could go for the House and Senate too.

One of the problems with term limits is that they only apply to elective offices.  They should apply to federal service in general.  After all, a bureaucrat who has been working in the system for 30 years is going to walk all over some newbie Senator or Representative.  I have already stated my desire to return to the spoils system, which would allow a full housecleaning every 4 to 8 years, but term limits would be a second best choice.  Say 12 years on the federal payroll and out.  Careerism in government is anathema to limited government.

For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created during the Great Depression to bring the Tennessee Valley into the 20th century.  90 years later, it is still operating.  Why?  Because, as Ronald Reagan often said, "a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life."  The bureaucrats have a disincentive to success; success will reduce funding and perhaps eliminate their jobs.

The current system is an obvious failure.  Time to reboot the system.

The Sea Beast (2022)

Somewhere at sea, a young boy clings to flotsam while a burning ship sinks a short distance away.  As he shivers on the makeshift raft, a giant sea beast swims just below the surface.  The boy is Jacob Holland and he is eventually rescued by the Inevitable, the monster-hunting ship of Captain Crow.

At an orphanage, Maisie Brumble reads a book about the various adventures of the Inevitable.  In the distant past, the sea beasts used to come on land, devour people, and destroy towns.  Now, thanks to the monster-hunting ships, vast areas of the seas were free of monsters and none could remember the land attacks.  Maisie's parents were hunters and they died at sea.  Her dream is to follow in their footsteps.  Well, except for the dying part.  Therefore, she runs away from the orphanage.  

The Inevitable is asea and chasing the Red Bluster (Moby Dick), when they spot another ship in dire straits.  Jacob Holland (Karl Urban), now an adult, argues that they must aid their fellow hunters.  Captain Crow (Jared Harris) reluctantly agrees.  Not only do they rescue the other ship, they kill the monster that was on the brink of sinking her.  Though the carcass earns a fine bounty, the monarchs are unimpressed with the recent achievements of the hunter fleet.  They propose disbanding the hunters and sending the Imperator - a leviathan of a ship - to sweep monsters from the seas.  Infuriated by this proposal, Captain Crow is on the brink of drawing sword against the monarchs when Jacob proposes a contest: if the Inevitable takes the Red Bluster, the hunters remain.  If the Imperator, then the hunters disband.

Once at sea again, the crew discovers that Maisie Brumble has stowed away.  Though Jacob wants to deposit her at the next port, Captain Crow is impressed by her pluck.  "She's all vinegar."  Of course, the Inevitable finds the Red Bluster and a death match ensues.  Jacob and Maisie are swallowed by the Bluster and the Inevitable limps to port for repairs.  Like Jonah, Geppetto, and Pinocchio, Jacob and Maisie survive being swallowed.  In fact, they soon befriend the Red Bluster.  This will complicate things when and if they get back to civilization.

The movie is quite entertaining but the premise needed further development.  As there are plans for a sequel, perhaps the backstory will be explained.  As it is, humans made up the murderousness of the monsters so that they could convince people to hunt them.  But if they were generally harmless, why do you need to exterminate them?  It doesn't work as explained.

Good popcorn fun.

Kearny's March

In 1846, both military forces and civilian wagon trains crossed the Missouri River and set out for the West.  Winston Groom, author of Forest Gump, details the various movements and shows how they formed the American West.

Stephen Watts Kearny was the commander on the western frontier, based in Fort Levenworth.  Father of the American Cavalry, he was ordered by President Polk to march his 300 dragoons, a regiment of mounted Missouri Volunteers, and a battalion of Mormons west and capture Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Once secured, he was to continue on to California and claim it for the United States.  Having captured New Mexico without firing a shot, most likely thanks to bribing the territorial governor, Kearny spent a month in the area to make sure all was well before moving on to California.  At this point, he dispatched the mounted Missouri Volunteers - commanded by Colonel Alexander Doniphan - to make his way south for the planned rendezvous with General Wool and his army at Chihuahua.  Kearny would take his dragoons directly to California while Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke would build a road to California with the Mormon Battalion.  Kearny had hardly begun when he met Kit Carson, who was returning from California.  The state was already conquered!

Kit Carson had set out for California in 1845 with John C. Fremont the Pathfinder.  Fremont had a force of 60 heavily armed men who had been traipsing through California.  Even though he could not have known the war had begun, he aided local American settlers in the Bear Flag Revolt.  With the help of the US Navy, the state was captured in short order.  Fremont had enlisted the California Brigade of 300 men and worked hand in glove with Commodore Stockton.  Fremont had sent Kit Carson with the news.  When Kearny arrived, Fremont - who was part of the army - chose to follow Stockton's orders rather than those of an army general.  This did not end well for him and led to his court martial.

Meanwhile, Doniphan and his Missourians headed down the Rio Grande and, north of El Paso, had a battle with a Mexican Army.  Despite their unkempt appearance and lax discipline, they soundly trounced their opponents.  Doniphan waited in El Paso for news from General Wool, eventually learning that he had been redirected to Saltillo to fortify General Taylor's position.  Though it was never intended that the volunteer regiment would act alone against Chihuahua, Doniphan boldly struck into the desert to capture the city.  At the end of February 1847, Doniphan attacked a much larger Mexican Army, where his ragamuffin army once again trounced the Mexicans.

The Mormons had had a difficult time in the American Midwest.  Bounced from state to state on account of growing discrimination, the Mormons finally fled west with plans of leaving the United States altogether.  They were camped on the banks of the Missouri River.  As chance would have it, President Polk requested that the Mormons raise a battalion from their ranks and join the war.  Brigham Young saw this as an income stream and a way to get many of the Saints beyond the intolerance of the Midwest.  Soon, 500 Mormons were enlisted at Fort Levenworth and marched to New Mexico.  Too slow to keep pace with Kearny, they also had to take an alternative route to accommodate their wagons.  On the way, the Mormon Battalion fought wild bulls and captured Tucson.

Leaving from Independence, MO, the Donner-Reed Party joined a large wagon train on the Oregon Trail.  However, they had California in mind and left the larger train to take the untried Hastings Cutoff which was said to save 300 miles.  Of course, the route was impractical for wagons.  They tried to race through the pass before the snows arrived but instead got trapped when snows arrived before they were through.  With nowhere near enough food to survive winter in the mountains, starvation and cannibalism followed.  In the spring, after the survivors were rescued, General Kearny went through the pass and saw the carnage.

Where most of the books that cover the Mexican-American War focus on the campaigns of Taylor and Scott, this one is almost exclusively concerned with the western theater of the war, though there is a chapter detailing the Battle of Monterrey, which was part of Taylor's Campaign in Northern Mexico.  Here is an outstanding account of the various westward movements that took place in 1846 and 1847, opening the American West to a flood of immigrants.

Highly recommended.

Abolish the FBI

The three remaining defendants in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot have all been found not guilty.  The jury did not believe the government case.

In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Geena Davis played a CIA assassin.  In the action-packed finale, she has to prevent a false flag terrorist attack that has been engineered by the CIA.  The director calls it a 'fundraiser.'  What a crazy idea.  The intelligence agency staging an attack so that the government will increase funding.  Who would believe that?  Sadly, looking at the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot, I would believe that.  Chuck Schumer sure thinks the intelligence community will torpedo elected leaders.  He warned President-elect Trump of just that.

Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

Charles Schumer

January 2017

The very idea that the intelligence community would even consider 'getting back' at a politician demands that that intelligence agency be abolished.  It is said that J. Edgar Hoover had blackmail on many politicians, thus his longevity as head of the FBI.  Is that happening today?  Clearly.  We now know that Hunter Biden's laptop was real, despite the assurance of 51 former senior intelligence officials to that contrary.  The intelligence community knew it was real.  It wasn't Russian disinformation.  Might this have been the intelligence community getting back at Trump?  Looks likely.

Reframe Your Brain

Scott Adams holds that your brain is just a moist computer and, just like a computer, it can be programmed.  This book provides the code to reprogram your brain.  If your thoughts guide your actions, then changing your thoughts will lead to a change in your actions.  Often times, the code doesn't need to make sense.  One of his more effective ways of cutting down on drinking was to say to himself that 'alcohol is poison.'  Though not literally true, his brain soon accepted this reframe and he very rarely drinks.  Really, who wants to drink poison.  Some have used this same reframe except for sugar.  'Sugar is poison' might be a good way to lose weight.  The idea is to have a particular thought appear when you are tempted.

You: Gee, that candy bar looks tasty.

Your brain: Sugar is poison.

You: Better not.

The point is to get the reframe stuck in your head.  Many of his reframes are just looking at things from a different perspective.  He suggests replacing 'be yourself' with 'become a better version of yourself.'

The book is packed with reframes to implement.  There are reframes for success, mental health, social life, physical fitness, and even reality.  Many appeared silly, but a reframe does not need to make sense to be effective.  If you view the world as a computer simulation and yourself as just a player, that might be an effective way to motivate yourself.  Won't work for everyone, but you just need to find the reframes that work for you.

As a regular viewer of his podcast, Coffee with Scott Adams, I had been exposed to his reframes already.  This is a great resource for upgrading the software in your brain.  Recommended.

Bite the Bullet (1975)

In 1908, newspaperman J. B. Parker is hosting an endurance race through the Southwest United States.  Of course, he expects his horse to win the race.  There are fewer than 10 competitors.  There is the mostly anonymous rider of Parker's thoroughbred, a Civil War veteran (Ben Johnson), Miss Jones (Candace Bergen), an Englishmen (Ian Bannen), a young firebrand (Jan-Michael Vincent), a Mexican (Mario Arteaga), and a pair of Rough Riders: Luke Matthews (James Coburn) and Sam Clayton (Gene Hackman).  The race will take place over a week and see the riders cross 700 miles of grueling territory.  Along the way, the riders must face a variety of hazards, both minor (toothache) and major (bandits).  Speaking of the toothache, in order to treat it, an old remedy was to take a bullet casing and use it as a makeshift crown, thus biting the bullet.  Interesting, but did that event deserve to be titular?

Despite being the central theme of the movie, the workings of the race were inexplicable.  Since they stop each day, one expects that each is trying to get the best time for the day.  Nope.  Whenever two riders are close to each other, both kick to a gallop so as to get into the lead.  Huh?  They don't leave all at the same time and rarely arrive at the same time.  By the end, it looks like it was just a matter of surviving.  The only leg that really mattered was the last one, and the first one through the gate won.  Really?

These people don't know horses.  Horses do not gallop or even trot for extended periods.  Horses mostly walk.  Thanks to their size, a horse at a walk is a lot faster than a human at a walk.  Also, it is less tiring for the human.  This movie gave the impression these horses galloped 700 miles.  No.  Not how this works.  This misconception was so distracting as to ruin the film.

During the side quest to recapture their horses from escaped prisoners, the prisoners actions made no sense.  You are all armed and you outnumber your pursuers.  Why are you riding away.  Stop and shoot them.  Heck, the very people pursuing you could have just killed when you stole their horses.  It was just ludicrous.  Though this entire disaster was engineered by Miss Jones to rescue her imprisoned husband, she had a sudden change of heart and let the Rough Riders shoot him.  Of course, she just rides away without consequences.  Sigh.

For a movie that is jampacked with great actors, the results are subpar.  Why did Sam rant about how wrong it was to push a horse near to death in an endurance race only to then join the race and push his horse near to death?  Really?

Skip.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) have been captured by Nazis at the end of World War II.  They were in search of the Spear of Destiny, which proved to be a fake.  Instead, they stumbled upon the Antikythera Mechanism in the possession of Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen).  The pair - mostly Indy - fight their way through a Nazi train and miraculously survive.

In 1969, Indy awoke to loud music from a young neighbor.  After getting dressed, he heads to Hunter College, where he teaches.  The students are mostly disinterested though one offers all the answers to any question he poses.  Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was not a student, but rather the daughter of Basil Shaw.  She declares her interest in the Antikythera Mechanism and proposes that they go hunting for it.  As luck would have it, it is in a storage vault at Hunter College.  No sooner does she lay hands on it than murderous CIA agents arrive.  Helena flees, leaving Indy to deal with the CIA.  The CIA is in league with Dr. Voller, who became part of the US Space Program since the war.  Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who moved to New York after the war to become a cab driver, provides Indy with his adventure gear and passport so he can chase after Helena.  He finds her in Morrocco, attempting to sell the Antikythera.  Instead, Voller arrives and absconds with it.  Now Indy, Helena, and Teddy (Ethann Isidore) must find the other part of the Antikythera before Voller does.

The movie is better than I expected, but not good.  Though spry for his age, Harrison Ford is no longer suited for this kind of role.  Helena is an inexplicable character.  Here she steals from Indy and has no concern that she has left him at the mercy of murders.  Despite being the daughter of a committed academic, she likes to sell antiquities to the highest bidder.  Then she is chased by her former fiance who intends to lop off her head.  Talk about a toxic relationship.  When half of her allies are murdered by Voller's goons, she is more thrilled about how she, Indy, and Teddy escaped.  It is hard to determine what her motivations are.  Teddy could have been eliminated altogether.  The idea that he learned to fly from a drunken pilot based on cardboard cutouts is ludicrous.  However, to have the epic motorcycle chasing plane scene, they needed a third character to fly the rescue plane.  Ugh.

Time travel?  Why'd it have to be time travel?  I hate time travel.  Yes, it turns out that Archimedes invented a time travel device, but it only allows roundtrips from current time to the Siege of Syracuse (216 BC) and back.  How in the hell did the Nazis manage to get their plane shot down by Roman siege weapons?  Seriously, why don't you gain some altitude?  No, we're going to skim back and forth 40 yards above the Roman ships until they shoot us down.  Behold the stupidity.

The special effects were disappointing.  Sometimes, the de-aging of Harrison Ford was great.  Most of the time, it looked off.  The chased through the tickertape parade looked particularly bad.  Doubtless it is much cheaper to computer animate a parade through New York City, but this is really a scene that should have been filmed via practical effects.  Heck, a lot of it should have been.  The boat full of eels was likewise unconvincing.  Too much green screen and not enough stuntmen.

The marital issues with Indy and Marion over Mutt's death in Vietnam was unnecessary background.  It just made for a depressing Indy.  Look, Indy is old, his son is dead, his wife has filed for divorce, his students are not interested in his class, his career is over with his retirement after class, he hands his retirement gift to a random guy on the street, and his god daughter is stealing from him.  It's no wonder that Indy wanted to get left behind to die with Archimedes at the end of the movie.  What have they done to Indiana Jones?

Mostly disappointing.  Watch one of the original three instead.

A Perfect Gibraltar

After the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de La Palma, the US Army secured all the towns along the Rio Grande unopposed.  As Taylor's forces marched inland, more towns surrendered without a fight.  Many believed that the city of Monterrey would likewise surrender, giving the Americans the largest city in the north with little cost.  Such was not the case.  General Ampudia had resumed control of the Army of the North and intended to hold the city.  Defenses were erected, soldiers posted, and canons placed.  Upon arriving at the outskirts of the city, Taylor paused.  Where his usual strategy was to rush headlong into a battle, here he looked for a weak spot.  He sent General William Jenkins Worth with a division of men to the western side of the city.  While Taylor's troops attacked the east side as a diversion, Worth captured several forts and the all-important road to Saltillo.  Unfortunately for Taylor's troops, the diversion turned into a full force attack that suffered massive casualties from the well-designed Mexican defensive works.

The book details all the action over the 3-day engagement.  Sam Walker and Jack Hays leading Texas Rangers on the western side while Jefferson Davis led his Mississippi Rifles on the eastern side.  Ulysses Grant rode under fire from the lines and Braxton Bragg found his flying artillery was nearly useless in an urban fight.  After the battle was won, Dishman followed the notable veterans through the remainder of the war.  Many went on to join Scott's campaign to Mexico City.  General Worth, who felt his success at Monterrey would give him an elevated position in Scott's army, instead found himself sidelined.  His record during the Mexico City campaign was disappointing.

A readable, informative, and well-researched account of the Battle of Monterrey.  Recommended.