Israel Tells Zelensky to Stop Chasing the Ambulance

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“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked to make a solidarity visit in the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel but was told “the time is not right,” Hebrew-language media reports.”

What they’re saying in a polite way is “Save your grandstanding for a time when we’re not still burying our dead and avenging their deaths.

Zelensky must be afraid that the United States might send some money to Israel without him getting his cut.

He truly is a pathetic and grotesque figure on the world stage.

The High Cost of Loving (1958) – A Movie Review

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“The High Cost of Loving” is a mild comedy of errors about the home and workplace tribulations of Jim Fry (Jose Ferrer).  Jim’s a purchasing agent for the Lynden Company which has just been purchased by Associated Industries.  Through a series of accidents and misunderstandings Jim gets the impression that he’s about to be fired.  And naturally this is simultaneous with the news that his wife Ginny is going to have a baby.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

This comedy of errors begins with Jim not getting invited to a lunch where the executive board of Associated will meet the assistant directors (like Jim) who are being considered for promotion in the new corporate environment.  And after this first slight, several incidents provide reinforcement to the idea that the new management intends to terminate Jim.  And of course, this makes him jumpy and increasingly bitter and causes trouble between husband and wife.

In addition, Jim’s work friend Steve has a wife Syd who in addition to being Ginny’s friend is also a blabbermouth who can’t help but say the wrong thing about the events going on at Lynden Company.

Finally, after Jim has come to terms with his worries and resolved to do whatever is necessary to save his job, he reaches his office in time to see a painter scraping his name off the window.  Incensed, he sits down at this desk and writes a scathing letter to the new president of Lynden Company expressing his outrage at what he thinks is the company’s ingratitude toward him.  He stomps over to the president’s office and gives the letter to the secretary there.  Just then the president and his boss from Associated Industries walk in and hurry Jim into the office to inform him that an error occurred keeping Jim off the list of invitees for the lunch with the executive board.  And then they inform him that he’s been promoted to Director of Purchasing.  After some embarrassing moments he retrieves the letter and manages to convince the president that the letter he wrote should be returned unread.  And tranquility is restored on the business front for Jim.

The movie ends with Ginny allowing Jim to regale her with tales of his oratorical prowess at the infamous “lunch” followed by Ginny pulling a prank on him.  She pretends that the letter he reclaimed from the president’s office was not the one he wrote but a magazine subscription form letter that must have been on the president’s desk.  After debunking her joke the movie ends with a romantic scene between husband and wife as their lives settle into a new and happier circumstance.

This movie is a bit of fluff.  A Shakespearian title would be “Much Ado About Nothing.”  It’s such a mild comedy with so little consequence about the plot that you might think it isn’t worth the trouble to watch it.  I’ll disagree.  I don’t suppose that the word charming has much currency today.  But that is the word that comes to mind.  And for once my tastes and Camera Girl’s agreed.  I guess that makes this domestic comedy a good date movie.  The relationship between husband and wife is so attractively drawn that we both found ourselves laughing at the same scenes.  And each of us defended our side of the battle of the sexes when it inevitably emerged.  But we equally agreed that the marriage on display was refreshingly healthy.  Jose Ferrer directed himself in this movie and I believe he also had one of the writing credits.  I give him high marks for the little touches he added to the domestic scenes.  The scenes where husband and wife wake up and stagger through their groggy routine were well scripted and enjoyable.  And finally, the thing I noticed was that the world of 1958 America was a thoroughly pleasant place.  Even the anxiety of losing a job takes place in surroundings that trumpet a peaceful and well-ordered world.  And Jim is worried about losing his job because of competency not diversity, equity and inclusion considerations.  Ah, simpler and better times.

Statics and Dynamics

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Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.  We took an EE (electrical engineering) course and an ME (mechanical engineering) course or two were equivalent to some of ours like thermodynamics and heat transfer (although usually our sections had some additional requirements that were specific to chemically reactive systems.  And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course.  I think the text I used for the CE course was called “Statics and Dynamics.”  Here we talked about stress and strain and the different forces that needed to be calculated in order to specify the required strengths of materials used to design and construct a structure like a bridge or a dam.  And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed.  Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations.  You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor.  And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be.  So, if you’re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn’t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don’t skimp on the materials of construction.  Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.

Now as complicated as a bridge or a nuclear power plant design is imagine designing a global nuclear deterrence system based on mutually assured destruction with something like ten nuclear nation states all of which are in various uneasy states of enmity and competition with each other and three of which possess very large stockpiles of nuclear ICBMs.  The policies needed to maintain this balanced system mostly requires that the major players do not willingly attempt to destabilize the status quo through direct confrontation with each other.  And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states.  A miracle.

And probably the reason it all worked was because, for the most part, the system was a defensive crouch that provided a nuclear tripwire that the Soviets were afraid to cross and at the time we were still too smart to try.  But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay.  And that got us to 2000.  But then 9/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they’ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs.  So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.

Well, here’s the thing.  Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing.  Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal.  In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it’s a powerful destabilizing one

The analogy that is the basis of this whole essay is the difference between the strength of concrete in compression as opposed to against a shearing force.  You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building.  This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for.  But take that same pier and mount it sideways and try to use it as a beam with the same weight cantilevered and it will fail.  That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression.  It will fail catastrophically.  So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.

And that’s what we’re doing.  We’re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon.  It’s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts.  We’re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we’re playing it badly.  We’ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own.  Possibly Hamas is the first of these.  Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border.  And maybe that’s what the neo-cons are hoping for.  But it’s a stupid play.  We did the Middle East invasion game after 9/11.  It was a disaster.  If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster.  The nuclear deterrence won’t deter the conventional wars.  But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen.  Brilliant political malpractice.

So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you’re building something that your life depends on.  In our case don’t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden.  They’ve got collapse written all over them.

New Zealand Comes to Its Senses

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After five years of Jacinda Ardern’s Karen-in-Chief act with the COVID uber-lockdowns as the straw that broke the camel’s back, New Zealanders have come to their senses and voted out Labor and brought back the conservatives.

This horse-faced harpy was constantly on display to the American news watcher as a paragon of the progressive future we could all someday hope to emulate.

But now the NZ conservatives have to deliver on their promises; lower taxes, lower prices on food and fuel, law and order.  Well, that’s what they better do or the voters will put another annoying woman with monstrously large teeth back in charge.  No normal person wants that.