Guest Contributor – War Pig – 25JAN2025 – Wheels

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war pig

When I returned from Vietnam I was without wheels. Six of us pooled our cash and bought a military surplus lot of ten Harley scout bikes still in crates. Took us six months to put them together. 1955 panheads, probably leftover from the Korean War. Rubber was dry rotted as was some of the leather. They were OD green with the white star, etc., markings. Those old beasts had 3 sets of points and suicide shifters with the clutch pedal on the left. Throttle on the right handlebar and spark advance on the left. Took a while to get used to. We had enough spare parts from the excess 4 bikes that we sold them and made our money back plus a little. I wish I’d left it in the original colors, but we had to chop them, put long ape hangers on them and all of the rest. Easy Rider was all the rage. I rode mine from Camp Legune to Norfolk. To say my butt was numb would be an understatement. Those old things sure did shake, rattle and roll. Also, no electric start. Kick it over. And if it backfired at the bottom of the stroke it would catapult you about two feet into the air and your knee hurt. But, put a little gal on the back and ride her around for a bit and the vibrations got good to her. Then you were in like Flynn.

Had to sell it and get a 1968 Malibu when I got married. Harley was good, but it couldn’t cook.

Tom’s World – 25JAN2025 – I Get Around

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TomD

That Valiant had a 170 CI slant 6 rated at 101 HP, that was the only motor available, and the 3 speed pushbutton transmission. But the time I got the car, it probably made around 50 HP. But the drive train was close to unkillable.

The tires at the time were definitely killable though. A new set could be worn down in less that 10K miles and I couldn’t afford anything like new tires. When the cord started showing, I would buy one used tire for around $5.

At the time, I was dating a girl (whom I later married) whose family had bought her a new VW. That helped a bunch.

My Dad had a 72 Impala with a 454 police interceptor package. That was something.

Below: my Kawasaki 500. This was followed by a Suzuki 1000 GS and later by a Suzuki 1100. Before I gave my last bike away in the early 2000’s I had around 200,000+ total miles riding experience.

A year or two ago, I was within a gnats whisker of buying a Honda 750 triple. The only thing that stopped me is that model was out of stock and nobody knew when they would have more. My wife was freaking out. Look at the picture below and you can see the appeal.

The last time I was active with motorcycles, I was in my 50’s, now I’m in my mid-70’s. I wonder what’s happened to my balance and reflexes since. I still have a motorcycle endorsement on my license though.

My old Kawasaki 500. This thing was a beast, it had about 25 HP at 5000 RPM and around 70 at 5500, with the front tire pointing at the moon. Talk about a hand full.

scan180

Times that Try Men’s Souls

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One step forward two steps back.  Ah, the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.  Last week the mainframe that I keep my photos and editing software on died a terrible death.  I had hoped at first that maybe the power supply had given out.  I sent it off to the local computer geeks with this dream of a call back the next day about how a wire had come loose or a fuse had blown and all was well.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I received the dreaded news that, “The motherboard is fried and all you can reuse is the case, drives and the fans.”

The horror.

Well, at least my photos didn’t go up the chimney so that’s good.  But this has put a kink in my photo-editing schedule.  For the last week I’ve been scouring my camera memory card for stuff to post and I’m reaching the bottom of the barrel.  I’ll need some more stuff really soon.  Plus, I can’t use my favorite editing software or the big monitors I usually use.  Well maybe I can, but I’d have to fiddle around with the wires and I’m too lazy to do it as a one-off.  But I must be stoic.  As the bard reminds us, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;  They kill us for their sport.”

Or something like that.

But not everything was bad this week.  I decided on a path forward for my story.  If you remember in the last installment, I had my good guys strike back at the vicious President of the United States who had hurled a 10-megaton nuke into their underground retreat.  As a counter attack they undermined the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon and a few other key federal buildings and sent them hurtling hundreds of feet into the underground abyss.  This effectively decapitated the United States federal government.  Specifically, the president, vice president, the congress and the cabinet secretaries are all dead.

What I’ve decided to do is arrange for the only honest man in the FBI to be selected to succeed the president.  And this is the guy who I’ve been using to track down my protagonist and his sponsors.

So, the antagonist I have who has been hunting for the sniper is selected for succession to the presidency.  In part he is selected for the knowledge he’s gained hunting the sniper and the organization supporting him.  But because the head of the FBI had been assassinated earlier, he was also the acting head of the bureau.  Of course, that isn’t technically in the line of succession for the presidency but with all the legitimate successors dead, the military and the supreme court put their heads together and after doing an inventory of who was left and who was willing, they chose my guy.

Now this is an outrageous scenario.  And so, it’s really a lot of fun to poke around with.  And because it’s so outlandish I can do more or less whatever seems like fun with it.  I have the poor schnook summoned to a military base and he’s thinking that he’s about to be blamed for the catastrophic failure of the manhunt for the sniper and instead he’s being asked if he will accept the presidency.  That’s a pretty great scene.  I think I’m going to have him ask if he can work remote from home.  That would be a nice touch.  I think that’s what I would ask for.

So anyway, the story is moving forward.  So that’s good.

Camera Girl laid down the law today and had me put the weatherstripping around the basement door.  She found where I had hidden the supplies and brought them out to me.  So, I grumbled and dragged myself over to the door and did it.  And you know, it really made a big difference.  But I really did a lousy job installing it and I’m planning to redo it and add a sweep to the bottom of the door.  Funny how these home improvement projects can grow on you.

And looking around at the Trump juggernaut I see he’s making headway in all directions.  He’s travelling to North Carolina and Los Angeles to get involved with the hurricane and fire victims.  And tonight, JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  Collins, Murkowski and good old Mitch McConnell were the holdouts that made Vance’s vote necessary.  Well, that’s why we needed the other Senate pickups last November.  But things are looking up everywhere in Trump world.

So that’s my post, a little this and little that.

25JAN2025 – Quote of the Day

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The conflict between Socialism and existing civilisation must be a death-struggle. If the combat is once commenced, one or other of the combatants must perish. It is idle to plead that the schemes of these men are their religion. There are religions so hostile to morality, so poisonous to the life-springs of society, that they are outside the pale of human tolerance.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24JAN2025 – Nuclear Power

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“Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.”
Interesting choice of words.
If only there were a way of capturing all those extra neutrons and making fuel grade Uranium from more common ore. We could call it a “Breeder reactor”.
Nah. It will probably be decades until we could do that.
Like negative 7 decades.

There is no scientific reason not to use nuclear power. As you pointed out, the French have been doing it for 70 years. (They sell power to Germany.)
And if the French can do it….
The roadblocks are 90% political and 10% engineering.
Nuclear waste can be dealt with if we give American engineers a chance to attack the problem. But with no new activity going on, we can’t solve the problems.

Spending billions on a waste storage project in Nevada and then letting a corrupt politician kill the project was clearly the wrong way to go.
BTW, Nevada, I’d like that money back.

The Next Big Thing

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According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.  According to Donald Trump it’s Big AI.  So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project?  Well, neither of those.

Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there.  Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them).  Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede.  I’m all for that.  Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean.  All good clean fun.  But that’s not the Manhattan Project.

And neither is AI.  That’s just more of the same.  That’s management reducing the payroll to a minimum.  Sure, it’s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects.  And it will make a lot of us redundant too.  So, I don’t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity.  At least not as advertised at the moment.  Maybe when we get the AI implants, I’ll change my mind.

No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants.  We have a window of opportunity while the current fossil fuel reserves are still relatively robust to begin systematically designing and optimizing fission plants to make them as close to foolproof as humanly possible.  We have about fifty years to achieve this before we run out of fuel and based on how the French have been using them for about seventy years without a catastrophe I’m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants.  And after that it would be a short time until the only other plants would be hydroelectric and some exotics like solar panels in the desert.

Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.  A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes.  Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study.  Just dumping depleted fuel rods in an underground mine under a mountain in the Nevada desert is a pretty crude plan for the materials produced by the reactor.  Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.

But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology.  Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet.  Neanderthal possessed fire.  Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron.  What’s needed is a push in the right direction.  A pilot project sponsored by the federal government to design a plant that can be tested under the most disastrous set of circumstances imaginable and proven safe.  This will provide the American public with the confidence that their bogeymen from the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl events are long dead and buried.

Right now, it wouldn’t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle.  Use reasonable resources to build the test case.  Tap into the existing designs and the recent innovations that are going on in China and India and then let the big brains at the big engineering firms show what they can do.  Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production.  Surely, he would consider that a worthy project.  And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.